Subterranean Homesick Blues
by Bob Dylan
- 172
- BPM
- E minor
- Key
- 9A
- Camelot
- 58
- Danceability
- 70
- Acousticness
On January 14, 1965, Bob Dylan recorded "Subterranean Homesick Blues", one of his first electric recordings. Columbia released it as a single in the United States on March 8, and the UK followed on April 23. The album Bringing It All Back Home, which opens with it, came out about two weeks after the American single. An acoustic take recorded the day before appeared decades later on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1 to 3. The single went to number 39 on the Billboard Hot 100, his first Top 40 hit there, and into the Top 10 in the UK.
Dylan said he fell under the influence of the Beats at the University of Minnesota in 1959, and Kerouac's novel The Subterraneans has been suggested as a source for the title. In 2004 he said the song came from Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business" and the scat songs of the 1940s. Its first line refers to codeine distillation and the government. Another line mentions a fire hose, a nod to the civil rights marches.
A video of Dylan holding cue cards first appeared in D. A. Pennebaker's documentary Dont Look Back. The line about not needing a weatherman gave the Weather Underground its name. It is the Dylan lyric judges and lawyers have cited most often.
Subterranean Homesick Blues runs at 172 BPM, the tempo of drum and bass and jungle. In classical terms it sits in vivace territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.4 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 349 ms. It is in E minor, Camelot 9A, which shares its notes with G major and mixes cleanly with A minor and B minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.