Songfacts®:

• "Obviously 5 Believers" (also known as "Obviously Five Believers") is a 12-bar electric blues number about loneliness, romantic separation, and the peculiar things that happen when Bob Dylan is left alone with his thoughts. He calls for his lover to come home "early in the morning," insisting he could probably manage without her if he "just didn't feel so all alone." It is not a complicated emotional argument, but Dylan has never been one to let a simple feeling stay simple for long.
• Like much of the electric blues material on Blonde on Blonde, the song is driven more by mood and attitude than by a carefully plotted narrative. Dylan recycles familiar blues phrases such as "early in the mornin'" while throwing in a procession of surreal images, including "15 jugglers, five believers, all dressed like men." It is the sort of lyric that makes perfect sense until you stop to think about it, at which point it becomes apparent that you have wandered into a Dylan song and should probably stop asking for a map.
• Black dog barkin'
  Yes, he is now
  Yes, he is
  Outside my yard
  
  The black dog has a long history as a metaphor for depression and oppressive moods, most famously associated in modern times with Winston Churchill's descriptions of his own depressive episodes. Dylan leaves the meaning deliberately loose. He even sings that he could tell you what the black dog means "if I just didn't have to try so hard," effectively acknowledging that sometimes the effort required to explain a feeling is greater than the feeling itself. The dog may be real, symbolic or simply a dog with unusually good timing.
• "Obviously 5 Believers" closes Side 3 of Blonde on Blonde. A straight ahead electric blues cut, its main job is to keep the back half of the album cooking, rather than to break new lyrical ground.
• The song was produced by Bob Johnston and recorded at Columbia's Music Row studio in Nashville. Four takes were attempted, with the first two incomplete. Dylan was on vocals and guitar, backed by:
  
  Charlie McCoy: harmonica
  Robbie Robertson: electric guitar
  Wayne Moss: electric guitar
  Jerry Kennedy: guitar
  Henry Strzelecki: electric bass
  Kenneth Buttrey: drums
  Hargus "Pig" Robbins: piano
  Al Kooper: organ
• Dylan and the band cut "Obviously 5 Believers" and "Rainy Day Women #12 And #35" during the same final Nashville session in the early hours of March 10, 1966, a night multi-instrumentalist Charlie McCoy remembered as "the most fun night" of the Blonde on Blonde dates.
• Dylan contributed most of the harmonica on Blonde on Blonde, but Charlie McCoy took over on this song. "I played the harmonica on 'Obviously 5 Believers,' because it had fills that went right in close to the lyrics, Dylan couldn't play the part and sing at the same time," McCoy told Uncut magazine. "Also, I don't know if it was Dylan's decision, but they wanted this riff to be a little more of a straight-out bluesy thing, which was right in my wheelhouse."
• The song's unusual title reportedly emerged from a joke in the studio. According to The Bob Dylan Commentaries, Dylan suggested "Five Believers" as a working title and, after the band had completed the take, asked what they should call it. Robbie Robertson apparently replied, "Obviously, Five Believers." Dylan liked it and decided that was the title.
• "Obviously 5 Believers" was later released as the B-side of "Just Like A Woman" in the US and some other markets. It has also appeared on subsequent reissues and retrospective collections and has been revisited in live tribute performances, including Old Crow Medicine Show's celebrations of the 50th anniversary of Blonde on Blonde.