Bob Dylan wrote "Mr. Tambourine Man," which was originally released on his fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home, on March 22, 1965. His version wasn't released as a single, but when The Byrds released their cover on April 12, 1965, it was a transatlantic hit, topping the charts in both the US (on June 26) and UK (on July 22). It's the only song Dylan ever wrote that went to #1 in America (in the UK, Manfred Mann's cover of "Quinn The Eskimo" also went to #1).
Dylan claims that despite popular belief, this song is not about drugs. In the liner notes to his 1985 compilation Biograph, he wrote: "Drugs never played a part in that song... 'disappearing through the smoke rings in my mind,' that's not drugs; drugs were never that big a thing with me. I could take 'em or leave 'em, never hung me up."
This was inspired by a folk guitarist named Bruce Langhorne. As Dylan explained: "Bruce was playing with me on a bunch of early records. On one session, [producer] Tom Wilson had asked him to play tambourine. And he had this gigantic tambourine. It was, like, really big. It was as big as a wagon wheel. He was playing and this vision of him playing just stuck in my mind." Dylan never told Langhorne about it (Bruce had to read about it in the Biograph album liner notes, like the rest of us). He wrote the song and recorded a version with Ramblin' Jack Elliott that got to The Byrds (known as the Jet Set at the time) before it was ever put on a record.
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