Friday, January 9, 2009

Sick and tired of Maggies Farm

An unusual song when we're talking Bob Dylan is Placebo's "Slave To The Wage". The lyric "Sick and tired of Maggies Farm" suddenly appears. A very obvious reference to the Bob Dylan song Maggies Farm.
It's a very simple song. It's about saying goodbye to the boredom of leading a normal life. It's about escaping from work, habit and the shackles of society. The songs says that "all it takes is lots of guts and little vision" to wave those worries goodbye.

Maggies Farm by Bob Dylan more or less is about the same thing, only Dylan succeeds in writing a somewhat more complicated song than Placebo. When Bob Dylan sings "I ain't gonna work on Maggies Farm no more" he also implies that he's sick of the routine of working for somebody else.
As a song, Maggies Farm is by far Dylan's best song but the songs gets a whole new meaning when you know the history about it.
Originally the song was written for his 1965 album Bringing it all back home. Until then, Bob Dylan was a folk singer who performed solo acoustic songs.
When he hit the stage of the Newport Folk Festival in the summer of 1965 he burst out this song with a full electric band. The crowd was shocked and booood at him, but Bob Dylan continued to play electric and changed the way people thought about music forever.

Below, you see the video of Slave to the wage. The lyric about Maggies Farm comes at 1:47.



And next you find the 1965 performance of Maggies Farm at the Newport Folk Festival by Bob Dylan.

2 comments:

  1. listen to barry ford maggie farm with members of the specials feat rico

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  2. Isn't it also a reference to Margaret Thatcher?

    ReplyDelete