The Ragged Clown at the Gates of Eden Quiz

Answer: Newport Folk Festival

Dylan's decision to use electric instruments was said to have been a spur-of-the-moment thing on Saturday, July 24. With just a little practice before Dylan's Sunday time slot, Dylan and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band played "Maggie's Farm", "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Phantom Engineer" which would show up on the "Highway 61 Revisited" album as "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry". Besides applause there was considerable booing from the audience; the last 50-plus years have been spent speculating precisely why.

Most of the songs Dylan played that day were on the "Bringing It All Back Home" album which had been released in March of that year, encountering only mild complaints for the use of electric instruments. Perhaps when 11,000 people got together in Newport, the dissatisfaction was amplified (sorry). As one music critic noted: "Dylan electrified one half of his audience, and electrocuted the other".

Answer: Mr. Tambourine Man

After performing an electric set with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Dylan returned to the stage with an acoustic guitar and played "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" and "Mr. Tambourine Man". Looking back at all his songs that day, they had a similar theme: unhappiness and a desire to leave, and with those songs Dylan said goodbye to traditional folk music.

Answer: Subterranean Homesick Blues

The mid-1960s were a time of change and new thought. As beatnik poet Allen Ginsburg wrote (in the liner notes to Dylan's 1976 album "Desire"), "Each generation-decade flowers in the middle". Folk music had just recently shoehorned itself into the modern music scene and now Bob Dylan, the man largely responsible for bringing it there, turned it on its ear. Still echoing social protest, "Subterranean Homesick Blues" did it in a less direct way, requiring the listener to sort through Dylan's surrealistic images - and some Chuck Berry rhythms.

A short movie, which we would now call a music video, was made in London showing Dylan in an alley, holding up and then discarding cue cards with the lyrics of the song on them, while two men (one of whom was Allen Ginsberg) conversed in the background. The song became Dylan's first Top 40 hit. It was the lead song on the "Bringing It All Back Home" album which was released a couple of weeks after the single.

Answer: Mayflower

The song was another of Dylan's surrealistic outpourings; this one has been said to be about either the discovery of America or a trip around New York City in a converted Mayflower Moving Company van, after imbibing...something. The song examines and pokes fun at various American cultural icons and ends with the sailor leaving the bay, meeting Christopher Columbus, who was on his way in, and wishing him "Good Luck!"

Answer: Gates of Eden

What if you got to the Pearly Gates and Saint Peter said "We don't like your kind", or there was no one there at all. That's the gist of "Gates of Eden". In that song, Dylan imagined finding out that what was long-wished for might not be what we expected when we finally arrived.

Answer: It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

"Baby Blue" was the final song on the "Bringing It All Back Home" album. Though there was some question about what the song really meant (Isn't there usually, with a Dylan song?) it is definitely a 'goodbye' song and fits with the general tone of discontent apparent in the album.

Answer: Like a Rolling Stone

A song that asks many deep moral questions, "Like a Rolling Stone" provides no answers. This song, using the character Miss Lonely, a young woman who found her pampered life totally upended, gave the surrealists and existentialists their chance to debate the lyrics - but that's above the purview of this quiz; suffice it to say that Dylan opined that our material comforts also trick and enslave us. "Like a Rolling Stone" has become a cultural icon although relatively few have tried recording a cover version of it.

Dylan chipped away at anything and anyone in the album. His long-time fans got another dose of it when he sang, in "Tombstone Blues" that "The National Bank at a profit, sells road maps for the soul, to the old folks home in the college".

Answer: Desolation Row

Another of Dylan's absurd, stream-of-consciousness songs, "Desolation Row" combines the real with the fantastic in a story which may (or may not) have been based on one of New York City's sketchier neighborhoods. Some critics have proclaimed it Dylan's finest piece of poetry.

Answer: Rainy Day Women #12 & 35

It may be about marijuana cigarettes or it may relate to the practice of stoning people to death. Dylan has denied it being a drug song but was otherwise his normal, evasive self when it came to explaining it. As for the title, the way the story is told now, he knew naming it "Everybody Must Get Stoned" would preclude radio airplay so he used a reference from the Biblical Book of Proverbs comparing a rainy day to a contentious woman. (I just report this stuff, folks.) The single version was shorter than the album version and reached number two on the "Billboard Hot 100" and number seven on the "UK Singles Chart".

Answer: Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands

Not only did it finish the album, "Sad Eyed Lady", all 11 minutes and 23 seconds of it, took up all of side four of "Blonde on Blonde", a double-record album. Dylan spent eight hours during a recording session writing the song about his wife of three months. She would later be the subject of another love song, "Sara", the final song on Dylan's 1976 "Desire" album.

"Blonde on Blonde" was released on May 16, 1966. On July 29th of that year Dylan was involved in a serious motorcycle accident which broke a vertebra in his neck. Though he continued to write, record and make an occasional live appearance, it would be eight years before he would do long tours again. He said the hiatus gave him time to enjoy his family and reflect upon the world around him.