B-side "On the Road Again" Format 7" Length 3:51 | Released June 1965 (1965-06) Genre Blues rock
folk rock | |
Recorded January 15, 1965
Columbia Recording Studios, New York City | ||
"Maggie's Farm" is a song written by Bob Dylan, recorded on January 15, 1965, and released on the album Bringing It All Back Home on March 22 of that year. Like many other Dylan songs of the 1965–66 period, "Maggie's Farm" is based in electric blues. It was released as a single in the United Kingdom on June 4, 1965, and peaked at #22 on the chart.
Contents
Lyrics
The lyrics of the song follow a straightforward blues structure, with the opening line of each verse ("I ain't gonna work...") sung twice, then repeated at the end of the verse. The third to fifth lines of each verse elaborate on and explain the sentiment expressed in the verse's opening/closing lines.
The song, essentially a protest song against protest folk, represents Dylan's transition from a folk singer who sought authenticity in traditional song-forms and activist politics to an innovative stylist whose self-exploration made him a cultural muse for a generation. (See "Like a Rolling Stone" and influence on The Beatles, etc.)
On the other hand, this biographical context provides only one of many lenses through which to interpret the text. While some may see "Maggie's Farm" as a repudiation of the protest-song tradition associated with folk music, it can also (ironically) be seen as itself a deeply political protest song. We are told, for example, that the "National Guard" stands around the farm door, and that Maggie's mother talks of "Man and God and Law." The "farm" that Dylan sings of can in this case easily represent racism, state oppression and capitalist exploitation.
In fact this theme of capitalist exploitation came to be seen by some as the major theme of the song. In this interpretation, Maggie's Farm is the military industrial complex, and Dylan is singing for the youth of his time, urging them to reject society.
Critical responses
Critical responses are ambivalent. The common thread is that Dylan is pointing the finger of refusal and declaring his self-possession.
"Maggie's Farm" is described by critic Bill Wyman in Salon.com as "a loping, laconic look at the service industry." Music critic Tim Riley described it as the "counterculture's war cry," but he also notes that the song has been interpreted as "a rock star's gripe to his record company, a songwriter's gripe to his publisher, and a singer-as-commodity's gripe to his audience-as-market." However, Allmusic's William Ruhlmann also notes that "in between the absurdities, the songwriter describes what sound like real problems. 'I got a head full of ideas/That are drivin' me insane,' he sings in the first verse, and given Dylan's prolific writing at the time, that's not hard to believe. In the last verse, he sings, 'I try my best/To be just like I am/But everybody wants you/To be just like them,' another comment that sounds sincere." One of the critical responses to the song, favored by many contemporary fans, is that of film director Todd Haynes. In his Dylan biopic I'm Not There, the song debuts at the Newport Folk Festival, with Dylan and his band firing machine guns at the crowd. At the conclusion of the performance, Haynes' Dylan declares to a cartoonish folk-protest audience: "I'm sorry for everything I've done, and I hope to remedy it soon."
Newport Folk Festival 1965
"Maggie's Farm" is well known for being at the center of the fervor that surrounded Dylan after his electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival; it was that set's performance of "Maggie's Farm," much faster and more aggressive than on the Bringing It All Back Home recording and featuring prominent lead electric guitar by Mike Bloomfield, that caused the most controversy. The festival's production manager Joe Boyd claimed that "that first note of 'Maggie's Farm' was the loudest thing anybody had ever heard." It is still unknown what exactly was the biggest source of the controversy, with accounts of the event differing from individual to individual. Though Dylan's move from acoustic folk to electric rock had been extremely controversial, many accounts suggest the problem was largely due to poor sound. Pete Seeger, who is often cited as one of the main opponents to Dylan at Newport 1965, claimed in 2005:
There are reports of me being anti-him going electric at the '65 Newport Folk festival, but that's wrong. I was the MC that night. He was singing 'Maggie's Farm' and you couldn't understand a word because the mic was distorting his voice. I ran to the mixing desk and said, 'Fix the sound, it's terrible!' The guy said 'No, this is what the young people want.' And I did say that if I had an axe I'd cut the cable! But I wanted to hear the words. I didn't mind him going electric.
Singer Eric Von Schmidt has a similar recollection of the event: "Whoever was controlling the mics messed it up. You couldn't hear Dylan. It looked like he was singing with the volume off."
Also, Al Kooper, Dylan's organist at the concert, claims:
The reason they booed is because he only played for 15 minutes and everybody else played for 45 minutes to an hour, and he was the headliner of the festival. [...] The fact that he was playing electric...I don't know. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band (who had played earlier) had played electric and the crowd didn't seem too incensed.
However, the style of the music features heavily in several accounts such as that of Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman: "Backstage, Alan Lomax was bellowing that this was a folk festival, you just didn't have amplified instruments."
The "Maggie's Farm" performance from Newport was featured and discussed extensively in the 2005 Martin Scorsese documentary No Direction Home and released on its accompanying album, The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack. Media reviews of the soundtrack were overwhelmingly positive towards the "Maggie's Farm" performance, yielding such descriptions as "blistering" and "remarkably tight, and downright spine-tingling. You can sense Dylan and the band feeding off their collective nervous energy." The Newport performance was also included in Murray Lerner's film The Other Side of the Mirror.
Cover versions
"Maggie's Farm," like many Dylan songs, has been widely covered. One of the first versions was by Solomon Burke, "one of the first black singers to record a Bob Dylan song", who released it in 1965 just prior to Dylan's own single release, as the flip side of his "Tonight's the Night" (Atlantic 2288). Burke's version peaked at #2 on the R&B charts, and #28 on the Pop Charts.
In 1968, Richie Havens covered the song on his album Something Else Again.
In 1971, The Residents recorded a version for their Warner Bros. Album, however, it was not released at the time.
In 1980, The Blues Band recorded a version as a commentary on Margaret Thatcher's government [1]. The line, "The National Guard stands around the door" being replaced with a line about the Special Patrol Group (SPG), the controversial unit of the London Metropolitan Police then being used to quell protests. The 2-Tone ska band The Specials also recorded a version, again relating to then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, replacing the words "National Guard" with "National Front."
At various times the song has also been a live favorite of Uncle Tupelo (1988–89 tours), U2 (1986–87), The Specials, Richie Havens and Tin Machine, among others. Recently there have been some reggae versions including one by Toots Hibbert off of the Is It Rolling Bob? tribute album.
The Grateful Dead played the song 43 times from 1987 to 1995. It was picked up during their tour with Dylan in 1987.
Flatt & Scruggs also covered this song on their album Hard Travelin'/Final Fling.
Mike Seeger (with David Grisman and John Hartford) covered the song on Retrograss, released in 1999.
A much heavier version is Rage Against the Machine's interpretation appearing on their 2000 covers album, Renegades. In this version the line "She's 68 but she says she's 54" has been changed to "She's 68 but she says she's 24". This is actually a change Dylan made for the electric version of "Maggie's Farm" he performed at the 1965 Newport Festival. Rage Against The Machine's version of the song was featured during the end credits of the 2010 buddy cop film The Other Guys.
U2 performed the song at the Dublin-based benefit concert Self Aid.
The song is performed by Stephen Malkmus and The Million Dollar Bashers – a supergroup, which includes members of Sonic Youth and Television – on the soundtrack of the 2007 Dylan biopic I'm Not There.
Muse often perform a variation of the main riff from the Rage Against the Machine cover of the song as an outro to "Map of the Problematique".
The Catalan band Mazoni performed a version of "Maggie's Farm" translated into the Catalan language, "La granja de la Paula", on their album Si els dits fossin xilòfons (Bankrobber, 2007). The translated lyrics follow the English version, but the name "Maggie" is changed to "Paula".
In 2006 Silvertide covered the song for the film Lady in the Water.
The song is covered by Hot Tuna on their 1992 Live at Sweetwater album.