Maggie's Farm

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“Maggie's Farm”

Single by Bob Dylan from the album Bringing It All Back Home
Released	1965
Format	7"
Recorded	January 15, 1965
Genre	Blues
Label	Columbia
Writer(s)	Bob Dylan

"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. 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 best read as Dylan's declaration of independence from the protest folk movement^[1]. Punning on Silas McGee's Farm, where he had performed "Only a Pawn in Their Game" at a civil rights protest in 1963 (featured in the film Don't Look Back), Maggie's Farm recasts Dylan as the pawn and the folk music scene as the oppressor. The middle stanzas ridicule various types in the folk scene, the promoter who tries to control your art (fining you when you slam the door), the paranoid militant (whose window is bricked over), and the condescending activist who is more uptight than she claims ("she's 68 but she says she's 54"). The first and last stanzas detail how Dylan feels strait-jacketed by the expectations of the folk scene ("It's a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor" and "they say sing while you slave"), needing room to express his "head full of ideas," and to be "just like I am" rather than "just like them."

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.)

[edit] Critical responses

The critical responses are quite confused and contradictory. The common thread is that Dylan is pointing the finger of refusal and declaring his self-possession. Combined with the difficulties critics and fans have in decoding metaphor and allusion, this message has allowed all sorts of fantastical projections of meaning onto what is a very straightforward poetic expression.

For example, "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]

However, perhaps the most true and evocative critical response to the song is Todd Haynes'. In his Dylan biopic "I'm Not There," Dylan depicts the song's debut at the Newport Folk Festival as Dylan and his band firing machine guns at the crowd. At the conclusion of the performance, Dylan declares to the stalwart folk-protest audience: "I'm sorry for everything I've done, and I hope to remedy it soon."

[edit] Newport Folk Festival 1965

"Maggie's Farm" is well-known for being at the center 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^{[citation needed]}:

“

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^{[citation needed]}:

“

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^{[citation needed]}:

“

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. In 2000 Rage Against The Machine Recorded a song entitled "Maggie's Farm" which is the full cover of Dylan's original In 1971, The Residents recorded a version that opens 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[4]. The line,

The National Guard stands around the door

being replaced with a line about the SPG, the Special Patrol Group, 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.

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, Richie Havens and Tin Machine, among others.

A much harder version is Rage Against the Machine's interpretation appearing on their 2000 covers album, Renegades. Muse have appropriated the principle riff from the Rage Against the Machine version of the song as a coda to many of their live performances of Map of the Problematique.

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.

The Catalonian 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.

[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." [5]
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 your worries, and cares, goodbye". The radio edit contains the word "witch" instead of "bitch".
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", a lyric from Maggie's Farm.
On Peter Mulvey's 1995 release, Rapture, the title track contains the lyrics: "Guess we're all gonna work on Maggie's farm for a little while longer now, Not tell anyone what we have inside to give."
"Looking for a Rainbow" by Chris Rea features the lyrics: "Yeh we're Maggie's little children; And we're looking for Maggie's farm."
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. [http://www.dire-straits.org/Lyrics_Wye_aye_man.html
- 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.
In the 2006 movie Lady In the Water, the rock band, Silvertide, that starts to play during the party at The Cove (as a setup for Story's departure), begins playing their own, harder-rock style version of Maggie's Farm.