Maggie's Farm

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"Maggie's Farm" is a song by Bob Dylan. Recorded on January 15, 1965, and released on the album Bringing It All Back Home on March 22 of that year, it is one of Dylan's most well-known tracks. Like many other Dylan songs of the 1965-66 period, "Maggie's Farm" is based in electric blues.

1 Lyrics
2 Critical responses
3 Newport Folk Festival 1965
4 Cover versions
5 Popular culture
6 References

[edit] 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 reiterated 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.

Maggie's Farm is Dylan's declaration of independence from the protest folk movement. Punning on Magee's Farm, where he had performed at a civil rights protest in 1963, the song recasts the folk music scene as an oppressive overseer. The middle stanzas ridicule various types in the folk scene, the promoter who tries to control your art, the paranoid and self-important activist, and the condescending benefactice who tries to be hip. The first and last stanzas detail how Dylan feels straightjacketed, needing room to express his "head full of ideas," and to be "just like I am."

Like "Chimes Of Freedom" and "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," "Maggie's Farm" works as a transitional song between Dylan's early folk-based "protest song" style and his later rock-based surrealist material. Though it is effectively a protest song (against protest songs) it doesn't name its targets explicitly as prior songs like "The Times They Are a-Changin" had, being much more subtle and stylized. It also makes heavy use of the absurd satirical humor that would be very prominent on Dylan's next album, Highway 61 Revisited. It represents Dylan's transition from protest singer to hipster and cultural muse for a generation.

[edit] Critical responses

"Maggie's Farm" is described by Salon.com critic Bill Wyman as "a loping, laconic look at the service industry." National Public Radio's 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, the All Music Guide'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." [1]

[edit] Newport Folk Festival 1965

"Maggie's Farm" is well-known for being at the epicenter of the furor 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, that's how they want it.' 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" [2] and "remarkably tight, and downright spine-tingling. You can sense Dylan and the band feeding off their collective nervous energy." [3] However, Al Kooper has claimed to be very unsatisfied with the performance:

In 'Maggie's Farm,' the beat got turned around, so instead of playing and two and four, (drummer) Sam Lay was playing on one and three. That's an accident that can happen, and it did, so it was sort of a disaster.

[edit] Cover versions

"Maggie's Farm," like many Dylan songs, has been widely covered. The most well-known instance is Rage Against The Machine's interpretation on their 2000 covers album, Renegades, though at various times the song has also been a live favorite of Uncle Tupelo (1988-89 tours), U2 (1986-87), the Grateful Dead, the Specials, Muse, Richie Havens and Tin Machine, among others.

[edit] Popular culture

The Beastie Boys' song "Johnny Ryall" contains the lyrics: "Washing windows on the Bowery at a quarter to four, 'Cause he ain't gonna' work on Maggie's farm no more." [4]
The Placebo song "Slave to the Wage" contains the lyrics: "Sick and tired of Maggie's farm, She's a bitch, with broken arms to wave"
The !!! song Shit Schiesse Merde, Pt. 1 contains the lyric: "I try my very best, to be just like I am, but everybody wants me to be just like them."
In the 1980s, "Maggie's Farm" was widely adopted as an anthem by opponents to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The many instances of the song being referenced in anti-Thatcher art or literature include:
- the Mark Knopfler song Wye Aye Man, from the album The Ragpicker's Dream, which contains the lyric "...nae more work on Maggie's Farm." The song is about redundant British laborers having to seek work in Germany, allegedly as a result of Thatcher's economic program. [5]
- Cartoonist Steve Bell's comic strip "Maggie's Farm," which appeared in the London listings magazines Time Out from 1979 and later in City Limits.