Influence
Listed by Rolling Stone magazine as the 332nd "Greatest Song of All Time", "Subterranean Homesick Blues" has had a wide influence, resulting in iconic references by artists and non-artists alike. Most famously, its lyric "you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows" was the inspiration for the name of the American radical left group the Weathermen, a breakaway from the Students for a Democratic Society. In a 2007 study of legal opinions and briefs that found Bob Dylan was quoted by judges and lawyer more than any other songwriter, "you don't need a weatherman..." was distinguished as the line most often cited.
John Lennon was reported to find the song so captivating that he didn't know how he'd be able to write a song that could compete with it. The group Firehose (former Minutemen members) took its name from another of the song's enigmatic warnings: "Better stay away from those that carry around a fire hose..." In addition, the opening of the last verse, "Ah get born, keep warm", provided the Australian garage rock band Jet with the title of their debut album Get Born.
In the same way that Dylan paid homage to Jack Kerouac's novel, The Subterraneans, "Subterranean Homesick Blues" has been referenced in the titles of various songs, for example, Radiohead's "Subterranean Homesick Alien" from 1997's OK Computer, the ska punk band Mustard Plug's "Suburban Homesick Blues" from 1997's Evildoers Beware,"300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues" by The White Stripes and the Memphis indie band The Grifters' "Subterranean Death Ride Blues", the B-side of a 1996 single. In Candice Bergan's 1980s sitcom Murphy Brown, a flashback sequence shows Murphy (Bergan) and her future head writer Joe Regalbuto meeting for the first time in a bar. In order to prove to one another their genuine "Left Wing/Protest Culture" credentials from the mid-1960s, they join in a "challenge duet" pounding on the table for affectation, of the "Subterranean Homesick Blues" first verse, "Johnnie's in the basement/mixin up the medicine... all the way to "Maggie says they must bust/orders from the D.A." Following this "challenge," they form a reassured friendship, by habit even glancing over their shoulders to spot "The Man" spying on their subversive singing. It was also the basis for the title of the second episode of Law & Order's premiere season, "Subterranean Homeboy Blues".
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Famous quotes containing the word influence:
“What arouses the indignation of the honest satirist is not, unless the man is a prig, the fact that people in positions of power or influence behave idiotically, or even that they behave wickedly. It is that they conspire successfully to impose upon the public a picture of themselves as so very sagacious, honest and well-intentioned.”
—Claud Cockburn (1904–1981)
“The purifying, healing influence of literature, the dissipating of passions by knowledge and the written word, literature as the path to understanding, forgiveness and love, the redeeming might of the word, the literary spirit as the noblest manifestation of the spirit of man, the writer as perfected type, as saint.”
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“I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my country’s God. Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)