(1966) Blonde on Blonde

Bob Dylan

ReleasedJune 20, 1966

LabelColumbia Records

RecordedJanuary 25 – March 10, 1966

ProducerBob Johnston

StudioColumbia Studio A, Nashville (and New York City)

Genres

Primary

Folk rockSinger-songwriter

Secondary

Blues rock

Scene

Greenwich Village

ListenRYM·Apple Music·Spotify

Tracks1:12:57

Side one20:53

1	Rainy Day Women #12 & 35	4:36
2	Pledging My Time	3:50
3	Visions of Johanna	7:33
4	One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)	4:54

Side two19:02

1	I Want You	3:07
2	Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again	7:05
3	Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat	3:58
4	Just Like a Woman	4:52

Side three21:39

1	Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)	3:30
2	Temporary Like Achilles	5:02
3	Absolutely Sweet Marie	4:57
4	4th Time Around	4:35
5	Obviously 5 Believers	3:35

Side four11:23

Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands

11:23

The sound is the first thing you notice and the last thing that leaves: thin and bright and faintly drunk, a band playing a hair behind the beat and perfectly together. Dylan had a name for it. He called it “that thin, that wild mercury sound,” metallic and bright gold, and said it was the closest he ever got to the music he heard in his head.¹ He found it in Nashville, which nobody saw coming. Blonde on Blonde is the last of the three records Dylan made in fourteen months that remade rock, the sprawling double album that closes the electric trilogy behind Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. Those two were cut hot in New York; this one was built in the small hours of Music Row by session men who had never heard anything like him, and it is the warmest and most assured of the three.

From New York to Nashville

The record almost didn’t get made. Through the fall and winter of 1965 Dylan booked session after session in New York with the Hawks, the ferocious bar band, soon to be the Band, that backed him on the road, and got almost nothing he could use: ten sessions, by his own rueful count, for one finished song, “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)”, and that one took twenty-four takes.² His producer, Bob Johnston, had an idea Dylan’s manager hated: take him to Nashville. Albert Grossman is said to have warned Johnston that if he so much as said the word “Nashville” to Dylan again he was finished.³ Dylan went anyway.

In February and March 1966 he cut the rest of the album at Columbia’s studio on Music Row with the cream of Nashville’s session players — Charlie McCoy, drummer Kenny Buttrey, pianist Hargus “Pig” Robbins — plus Al Kooper on organ and Robbie Robertson, the one Hawk who made the trip, on lead guitar.⁴ Johnston stripped the baffles out of the room so the players sat close enough to breathe on one another, and the band settled into the loose, unhurried groove that is the album’s signature.⁵ These were men who read a chart and cut three songs before lunch, and nothing in that world had readied them for a writer who arrived with no charts, no finished words, and songs that ran twice the length of a radio single. The pairing looked improbable and proved ideal. Dylan handed them seven-minute songs with no fixed shape and made them wait. He wrote in the studio, for hours, while the musicians played cards and ping-pong and dozed; the side-long “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” was finally taped in a single pass at four in the morning, after the band had waited out most of the night for the words to come.⁶

The songs

What the band serves is the richest writing Dylan had done. The album’s center is “Visions of Johanna”: seven minutes of nocturne, a man awake all night in a room with one woman while a second, absent one haunts everything, the whole thing floated on a throbbing bass and a voice pitched between exhaustion and wonder. Nothing in it resolves; the song just deepens, image by image, into the small hours. The British poet Andrew Motion would later call its words the greatest song lyric ever written.⁷ Spread around it are the blues — the slow, humid “Pledging My Time”, the leering twelve-bar “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” that most listeners hear as a swipe at Edie Sedgwick, the after-hours “Absolutely Sweet Marie” riding Kooper’s organ and a famous epigram about honesty and the law.⁸

The record can also turn bright and plain-spoken. “I Want You” is pure jangling pop wrapped around the simplest title on the album, and “Just Like a Woman” is a lilting ballad sung with such open tenderness that critics have argued for fifty years over whether its sympathy curdles into condescension.⁹ It can also be funny and mean. The whole thing kicks off with “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”, a deliberately shambolic brass-band stomp — McCoy switched to trumpet, a bass drum was whacked with mallets — whose chant about getting stoned read as drug talk and got it pulled from radio on both sides of the Atlantic, though it still climbed to number two.¹⁰ “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)” slams a relationship shut over a swaggering horn line, and “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” runs nine verses of trapped, surreal comedy without ever finding the exit.

For all the comedy and blare, the album keeps circling one subject. Nearly every song here is sung to a woman — adored, mocked, pleaded with, or left — and the record plays as a gallery of them, from the unreachable Johanna to the vain socialite in the pill-box hat to the wife in the closing hymn. Even the lone survivor of the failed New York sessions, “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),” is an apology to one of them, its regret carried on Paul Griffin’s piano and Kooper’s organ.

Two songs stand apart. “4th Time Around” is a wry waltz that shadows the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” — itself written under Dylan’s spell — so closely that Lennon first heard it as a taunt before he came to love it, a small hall of mirrors between the two biggest acts in music.¹¹ And then there is the close. “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” fills the entire fourth side, eleven minutes of slow waltz built from one long catalog of questions about a woman who is plainly Dylan’s new wife, Sara Lownds, whose name is folded into the title.¹² It ends the most crowded, restless record of his career on something close to stillness.

The title and the cover

No one has ever pinned down what the title means. The guesses run from the initials that spell Dylan’s own name to a doubled image to one of the blondes around Warhol, and Dylan only ever shrugged at it, saying he had no idea who thought of it, that it came up in good faith and stuck.¹³ The cover is as slippery as the name. Jerry Schatzberg’s photograph catches Dylan on a freezing West Village street in a suede jacket and a checkered scarf, slightly out of focus — not, Schatzberg insisted, for any chemical reason, but because the two of them were shivering and Dylan chose the blurred frame himself.¹⁴ The gatefold opened onto a spread of black-and-white shots Dylan had picked, one of them a photograph of the actress Claudia Cardinale that had to be pulled after her representatives threatened to sue.¹⁵

What it completes

What Nashville gave the songs was room. Highway 61 Revisited had been all New York wire and glare; Blonde on Blonde lays the same surreal writing on a bed of brushed drums, tack piano, and breathing organ, and the music opens up under it.¹⁶ The subjects had moved inward, too. The public scorn of the protest years and the carnival of Highway 61 give way to a private weather of love and jealousy and exhaustion — a whole double album mapping the inside of one life at the moment it was changing for good. Dylan had married weeks before the sessions began and was running on the fumes of a tour that was grinding him down, and the record holds the new marriage and the wear in the same grain. It is the sound of an artist with nothing left to prove, settling at last into the groove.

Reception

The notices were strong from the first. Robert Christgau later distilled the record as Dylan at his most “involuted, neurotic, pop and exhilarating,” and the young critics at Crawdaddy! treated it as a landmark.¹⁷ It reached number nine in America and number three in Britain and has gone double platinum since.¹⁸ It is often called rock’s first double album, which is not quite right — the Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out! reached shops about a week later, and double LPs predated both — yet no one before had filled the form with writing this dense.¹⁹ The lead single, “Rainy Day Women,” went to number two; the rest of the record asks to be lived with.

The end of the run

Blonde on Blonde turned out to be the end of something. Through the spring of 1966 Dylan dragged the electric show across Europe with the Hawks, half the house cheering and half enraged; at Manchester a heckler famously shouted “Judas,” and Dylan, before tearing into “Like a Rolling Stone”, told the band to play loud.²⁰ Weeks after the album appeared, on July 29, 1966, he wrecked his motorcycle near Woodstock and disappeared — no touring for eight years, the headlong pace of three masterpieces in fourteen months stopped dead.²¹

The record stands as the peak and the close of that run. Rolling Stone has kept it in the top tier of its greatest-albums lists, and the phrase Dylan coined for its sound, the wild mercury sound, became the title of a whole book about how it was made.²² More than the other two, it is the one people fall in love with: the warm, nocturnal, inexhaustible double album where the loudest writer of the decade turned the volume down and let the band play.

MAP

Explorer

Blonde on Blonde

From New York to Nashville

The songs

The title and the cover

What it completes

Reception

The end of the run

See also

MAP

Explorer

Blonde on Blonde

From New York to Nashville

The songs

The title and the cover

What it completes

Reception

The end of the run

See also

Footnotes