The artwork that uncovers Bob Dylan’s state of mind
Bob Dylan: Bringing It All Back Home (1965)
Bob Dylan is an artist who seems to delight in inscrutability, and the great singer-songwriter certainly has a baffling approach to album covers. At least half a dozen of his 38 studio albums feature out-of-focus cover shots. Others boast amateurish paintings by his own hand (notably
Self Portrait in 1970 and Planet Waves in 1974), trashy pulp art (Shot of Love in 1981, Knocked Out Loaded,
1986) and some of the least flattering portraits in rock history (has a major artist ever looked so monumentally disinterested as Dylan on Good as I
Been to You, 1992?). And yet, given his towering status in pop culture, Dylan’s covers are among the most iconic and minutely examined. One groundbreaking album in particular has been debated with forensic zeal.
What is it?
Bob Dylan’s fifth album Bringing It
All Back Home from 1965 marked the moment the folk bard chose to go electric. The cover is a teasing cornucopia of clues as to the state of his mind. It is formally posed, reminiscent of the portraiture of Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, but also a pastiche of a celebrity lifestyle magazine. Dylan has swapped his rustic attire for a hipster shirt and black jacket. He stares with deadly intent at the camera, a Persian cat in his lap, while a glamorous woman reclines on a chaise longue. The setting is an affluent home with an ornate fireplace, yet it is crowded with books, records, magazines and other artefacts, all within a swirl of circular, druggy movement. Fans became so fixated on deciphering it that a rumour took hold that the woman was Dylan in drag, representing the feminine side of his psyche.
The story behind the cover
The cover model is actually Sally Grossman, wife of Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman. The picture was taken in their home in Bearsville, New York, close to Woodstock, where Dylan and the Band would later settle to record The Basement Tapes. The image was conceived by photographer Daniel Kramer, who had come up with a technique to capture a focused portrait with objects on the periphery blurred.
“I wanted Bob to be the nucleus,” explained Kramer, with “the universe of music turning around him.” Dylan spent hours selecting props. The meaning of some seems selfexplanatory – a nuclear fallout shelter sign, for example. The albums splayed out on the couch include the delta blues of Robert Johnson and Lotte Lenya singing Brecht and Weill, both profound influences on Dylan. His last release, Another Side of Bob Dylan, mischievously pokes out behind Sally Grossman. But there are other curious inclusions: a portrait of an unknown 19th-century gentleman, a collage of a clown made by Dylan from cut glass, a pamphlet about arcane gods and a copy of Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. Even Dylan’s pink cufflinks have hidden meaning: they were a gift from his secret lover, Joan Baez.
Kramer shot on a large 4x5-format camera, creating a double exposure by spinning the film holder on the back of the camera in a circle. He only took 10 shots and knew he had the right one when the Grossmans’ cat Lord Growing stared right down the lens. “Cats don’t take direction as well as human subjects,” Kramer noted.
So what is the music like?
It is not quite the bold leap forward the cover implies. Dylan’s next album, Highway 61 Revisited, is the one really fired up by electricity. Bringing It All Back Home is a stepping stone, yet a work of genius. Dylan experiments with rock arrangements on side one, with songs such as Maggie’s Farm, She Belongs to Me and the coruscating Subterranean Homesick Blues. But side two is solo acoustic, with a quartet of masterpieces including Mr Tambourine Man, Gates of Eden and his most nihilistic song, It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding). In its beauty and strangeness, it was an album that signalled a generational change.
And what is its legacy?
The cover presaged The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper and many other carefully conceived images that listeners could scour for insights into the music.
“I wanted to do something utterly different and break with tradition, not just for Dylan, but for album sleeve design in general,” Kramer has explained. “I wanted Dylan still and motionless in the midst of swirling chaos, to reflect how perceptive he was. As the world changed, he could not only see it but understand it, too. To the rest of us, it was just a blur.”