“Subterranean Homesick Blues” by Bob Dylan is a song so good that it made John Lennonquestion his own abilities as a songwriter.
In 1980, in one of Lennon’s last interviews before his death, he admitted that listening to “Subterranean Homesick Blues” made him worry that he would never be as good a songwriter as Dylan.
“Listen, there’s nothing wrong with following examples,” Lennon later said, per Far Out Magazine, referring to this song. “We can have figureheads and people we admire, but we don’t need leaders. ‘Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters.’”
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The track was released as a single in America on March 8, 1985, and is the first song on the album Bringing It All Back Home, released some two weeks later. Despite its enduring legacy, the song only peaked at number 39 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Lennon would later team up with Harry Nilsson to cover “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. A cover of the song was released in 1974 as the second single from Harry Nilsson’s album Pussy Cats and was produced by John Lennon.
The song is one of Dylan’s most Beat-influenced lyrics, likely drawing inspiration from Jack Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans. The lyrics are full of outsider, anti-establishment themes along with drug references.
Lennon may have been jealous of Dylan’s writing, but “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was actually inspired by a Chuck Berry track. When Bob Dylan Comentaries compared the two lyrics, they could easily make a link between the two.
“It’s from Chuck Berry, a bit of “Too Much Monkey Business” and some of the scat songs of the ’40s,” Dylan explained to the LA Times. “Buddy Holly’s songs were much more simplified, but what I got out of Buddy was that you can take influences from anywhere. Like his ‘That’ll Be the Day.’ I read somewhere that it was a line he heard in a movie, and I started realizing you can take things from everyday life that you hear people say.
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