Bob Dylan’s transformation from acoustic folk singer to electric folk-rocker dismayed his hardcore folk fans in 1965. But one folkie who never cared for Dylan’s music suddenly took notice of what he was he was doing. And he liked it.
Jerry Garcia was a folkie in the early 1960s, but his preference was for traditional bluegrass, not the topical folk that was Dylan’s standard in his early years.
Ironically, it was when Dylan went electric that Garcia and his Grateful Dead bandmates — then performing as the Warlocks — took notice of him. The album that made them a convert was Dylan’s 1965 release Bringing It All Back Home.
“Before that, I was too much of a folkie to really like what he did,” Garcia reveals in a video interview recently uploaded to the Grateful Dead’s YouTube channel. “I was not that much into his topical songs. I didn’t really like the sound of his voice that much.
“But Bringing It All Back Home had some moments of real amazing poetic beauty and just the sound of the instruments on it and on some of the tracks was just gorgeous.
“I thought ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ was one of the prettiest things I’d ever heard, and as soon as I heard it I immediately wanted to perform the song. That was when his songs started speaking to what the freak on the street was experiencing.”
Garcia would go on to praise Dylan’s early electric albums, include 1966’s Blonde on Blonde, as his “heavily melodic renaissance,” thanks in part to the contributions of guitarist Robbie Robertson.
“All those passing chords … the relative minor substitutions that sort of characterize those songs, the moving second lines that happen in them. All those things are signatures of that era of Dylan’s writing,” Garcia told David Gans, “the kind of melody which you hear but he doesn’t sing.”
As for “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” Garcia went on to play the tune many times with the Grateful Dead. Dylan and the Dead would tour together in 1987, during which time they performed the song live.
As the former Grateful Dead leader noted, Bringing It All Back Home saw Dylan abandon the protest music of his earlier period and begin to write more personal and even confessional songs, often using surreal and opaque lines and references, which became a staple of the emerging psychedelic rock genre. Among its most famous electric songs are three that open the album: “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “She Belongs to Me” and “Maggie’s Farm.” Like the other cuts on side one, they feature
But it’s on side two that Dylan returns to his acoustic roots with “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Gates of Eden,” “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Although recorded on the same day as the other three songs, January 15, 1965, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” was a fairly new song written earlier that month, and Dylan wanted to get it recorded while it was still fresh.
As he explained, it was inspired by Gene Vincent’s “Baby Blue,” recorded for his 1958 album A Gene Vincent Record Date.
"I had carried that song around in my head for a long time and I remember that when I was writing it, I'd remembered a Gene Vincent song,” Dylan said in the sleeve notes to Biograph. “It had always been one of my favorites, ‘Baby Blue’… It was one of the songs I used to sing back in high school. Of course, I was singing about a different Baby Blue.”
He most certainly was. “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” is considered one of the greatest kiss-off songs ever written, a parting of the ways with no chance of reconciliation. The identity of Baby Blue has never been revealed, but Dylan performed it as his final song at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival after his electric set was booed, making it an apt, if bitter, farewell to the folk scene.
