Jack Kerouac, the Guthrie/Pete Seeger song "Taking It Easy" ('mom was in the kitchen preparing to eat/sis was in the pantry looking for some yeast') and the riffed-up rock'n'roll poetry of [Chuck] Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business". While Dylan was not a member of the original Beat circles of the 1950s, Kerouac's , a novel published in 1958 about the Beats, has been cited as a possible inspiration for the song's title. [2] [3] Stretching further back, the title alludes to , a novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whose works were popular with Beat writers such as Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
The song's first line is a reference to the production of LSD and the politics of the era: "Johnny's in the basement mixing up the medicine / I'm on the pavement thinkin' about the Government". The song also depicts some of the growing conflicts between "straight" or "square" (40 hour workers) and the emerging 1960s counterculture. The widespread use of recreational drugs, and turmoil surrounding the Vietnam War were both starting to take hold of the nation, and Dylan's hyperkinetic lyrics were dense with up-to-the-minute allusions to important emerging elements in the 1960s youth culture.
The song throws up a number of references to the struggles surrounding the American civil rights movement ("Better stay away from those / That carry around a firehose"). Despite the political nature of the lyrics, the song went on to become the first top 40 hit for Dylan in the United States [4]. magazine as the 332nd "Greatest Song of All Time" [5], "Subterranean Homesick Blues" has influenced many groups and individuals.
Most famously, the song's lyrics were cited as inspiration by the American Maoist group the Weathermen, (a breakaway from the Students for a Democratic Society); the group took its name from the line "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows". Alanis Morissette performed this song, as well as Blowin' in the Wind for a Bob Dylan tribute at The UK Hall of Fame in 2005.[7] The song was parodied by Simon and Garfunkel in "A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Lyndon Johnsoned Into Submission).
" Jack Kerouac, the Guthrie/Pete Seeger song "Taking It Easy" ('mom was in the kitchen preparing to eat/sis was in the pantry looking for some yeast') and the riffed-up rock'n'roll poetry of [Chuck] Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business".
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