Happy 55th Anniversary to Bob Dylan’s seventh studio album Blonde on Blonde, originally released June 20, 1966.
The type of run Bob Dylan went on in a little more than a year is nothing less than astounding. Over the space of 13 months, he released three of the greatest albums of all time. The first, Bringing It All Back Home (1965) was the genesis of the folk-rock genre. The second, Highway 61 Revisited (1965), released just five months later, set the tone for cultural revolution in the United States and changed songwriting forever.
The third, Blonde on Blonde, released 55 years ago, may not have shifted the landscape like the other two albums, but it is probably the most universally beloved of the three. It’s an ambitious double album that Dylan used to channel his personality and vision, charged with his unique, signature energy.
It’s fair to consider Blonde on Blonde the Dylan album that’s “truest” to his own spirit. In a 1969 Rolling Stone interview, Dylan said of his seventh album, “The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up."
The story of Blonde on Blonde’s recording process is almost as well known for its stumbles as it is for its successes. In late 1965, Dylan first went into Columbia Records’ studio in New York City after touring parts of the country and the globe. He was backed by The Hawks, a band made up of Levon Helm and four Canadian musicians, including Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson. They, of course, would go on to become The Band. Dylan had played a pair of shows with the Hawks as his backing band and signed them up to play with him on tour over the next year. He figured they’d be as successful of a pairing in the studio as they were on the road.
However, once in the studio, nothing seemed to come together like Dylan had hoped. Over reportedly ten studio sessions, from October 1965 to January 1966, Dylan and The Hawks generated very little usable material. The musicians struggled to complete takes and everyone grew increasingly frustrated. Dylan eventually decided that The Hawks as a unit weren’t working out, so he began to record with a mix of members of that group and other studio musicians.
Only two completed recordings resulted from their New York studio work. The first was a new version of “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?,” which Dylan had first attempted during the Highway 61 sessions; it was released as a modestly successful single. The only song recorded during these sessions that made Blonde on Blonde was “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later).” It took twenty-four takes before Dylan was satisfied.
At some point, Dylan’s longtime producer Bob Johnston suggested Dylan move operations to Nashville. Johnston lived in the city and had connections to many of the local session musicians. Against manager Albert Grossman’s wishes, Dylan took Johnston up on his offer, deciding to restart the recording process in Nashville. Dylan brought with him Robertson and Al Kooper, a keyboard player and frequent collaborator. The rest of the players on the album were a bunch of guys used to recording three-minute country sides, unaccustomed to Dylan’s unorthodox approach to recording and his lengthy musical undertakings.
The move to Memphis proved to be the breakthrough. Dylan finished recording the album during two separate three-day recording sessions, the first in mid-February, the second in early March. Songs that he’d struggled to record in New York were knocked out in a single take in Memphis. Many other tracks that had been sketches just months before quickly coalesced in the new environment. What was even more striking is that the two recording sessions took place in the midst of a tour of sorts, where Dylan and The Hawks would perform in Canada and along the US East Coast.
As mentioned above, Dylan’s process in the studio was also a bit peculiar. He’d arrive in the early evening and write a song while the session musicians would play cards, shoot the shit, and even sleep. Often, they wouldn’t actually start recording until the wee small hours of the night, when most people would be beyond coherence to be any kind of productive. Six of the songs that made the album were apparently recorded during a marathon all-nighter during his second visit to Nashville.
Out of all of this emerged one of Dylan’s best albums. From a process that appeared disjointed and rife with exasperation emerged a lengthy and cohesive double album that features some of the best songs that Dylan ever recorded. At the time, it was considered the best rock double album ever released, and, at least to me, it hasn’t been dethroned (all due respect to Electric Ladyland, London Calling, The River, and Physical Graffiti).
All of the different versions of takes of everything Dylan recorded for Blonde on Blonde is now available to his audience. There’s an 18-disc version of Dylan’s Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965-1966, which focuses on Dylan’s material during that magical 13-month period, including every take from both the New York and Nashville sessions. I have never dived into the expanded collection, but I’ve heard that it’s hard to discern what it was Dylan didn’t like about those New York recordings. Regardless, there’s no denying the quality of the finished product, which still resonates like few of his other releases.
For a seminal mid-1960s rock album, Dylan sure chose a strange way to kick things off. More than five decades later, “Rainy Day Women #12 and #35” is still an oddity—a swinging, goofy, double-entendre laden dedication to persecution and getting high. Dylan warbles as a drunken version of a Salvation Army Band blares in the background, accompanied by an organ and harmonica. The song was the album’s second single and seems to bear its weird title because no radio station in 1966 would play a song called “Everybody Must Get Stoned.”
“Visions of Johanna” is one the best entries in Dylan’s massive discography, and one of his most beloved recordings. It’s one of the most beautifully crafted songs Dylan ever recorded and features an immaculate musical arrangement and flawless lyrical construction. Like all of Dylan’s best material, its unconventional in approach and difficult to decipher, though it seems to be at least loosely about being haunted by past loves. Robertson’s guitar and Kooper’s piano-playing are intricate in execution and just subdued enough so as not to over-power Dylan’s voice. It’s the most “New York” song on the album, presenting detailed descriptions of ghostly, nearly abandoned lots and deserted subway stations.
The lyrics go from descriptive to surreal as the song progresses, and Dylan tells of trials of abstract ideas and the background lives of paintings. “See the primitive wallflower freeze,” he sings. “When the jelly-faced women all sneeze / Hear the one with the mustache say, ‘Jeez, I can’t find my knees.’”
Blonde on Blonde features Dylan’s two best love songs. “I Want You,” the album’s first single, is his riff on mid 1960s R&B music, likely influenced by Smokey Robinson, one of Dylan’s favorite singers at the time. It a peppy jaunt that sounds almost joyous. “Just Like a Woman” is another Dylan masterwork, supposedly inspired by his relationship with Edie Sedgwick, an actress and fashion model who was a fixture at Andy Warhol’s Factory. More than a touch of bitterness permeates the lyrics, as Dylan sings, “But when we meet again, introduced as friends / Please don't let on that you knew me when / I was hungry and it was your world.”
“Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” is a lengthy psychedelic country track with more R&B influences. Dylan creates even more arresting and fantastical imagery, which includes a rainman offering up “Texas medicine” and “railroad gin,” as well as a senile grandfather shooting a bonfire full of holes. He again pays tribute to the words of Smokey Robinson, with the object of Dylan’s affection stating, “Your debutante just knows what you need / But I know what you want.”
There are little to no semblances of folk music on Blonde on Blonde, as Dylan embraces the rock aesthetic whole-heartedly throughout most of the album. However, he continues his explorations into the many strains of Blues music throughout the long player, trying all different types of approaches.
“Pledging My Time” is a traditional eight-bar blues number, which sounds like it could have been easily recorded in a dark and smoky Chicago club. “Temporary Like Achilles” is slower, the yearning in Dylan’s voice palpable, as he patiently tries to woo a woman playing hard to get. Dylan and Robertson shine on “Obviously 5 Believers,” probably the most underappreciated track on Blonde on Blonde, an up-tempo Blues meditation on loneliness and love lost.
Robertson executes his best guitar work on “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” another blues-influenced song. It’s one of Dylan’s suitably esoteric songs, with the lyrics pretty difficult to decipher, as he expresses his acerbity towards a woman that’s left him for another man (possibly her psychologist). Some have speculated that this song is also inspired Sedgwick. Robertson’s work on lead guitar is incendiary, first complementing Dylan’s vocals, and later cutting loose for a pair of blistering solos.
Blonde on Blonde’s third fourth is often considered the album’s weakest passage. However, much like Dylan’s “funny” songs on his early ’60s releases, I’ll personally stick up for the double-album’s third side. It’s only because so many songs on the album’s first half rank among his best that others look slightly less potent in comparison.
Besides the aforementioned “Obviously…” and “Temporary Like…,” the second half of Blonde on Blonde begins with “Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine,” a busy blues number notable for the prominent trumpet accompaniment. Lyrically, the song is pretty straightforward, as Dylan ends a relationship that’s been on the downslope for a while now, telling the woman in question, “Sometimes it gets so hard to care / It can’t be this way everywhere.”
Side 3 also features “4th Time Around,” Dylan’s reported parody of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood.” The Beatles song had appeared on Rubber Soul, released near the previous year, and had stood out due to the Dylan-esque imagery that Lennon and McCartney created with the lyrics. Musically, there are some similarities between the two songs, but “4th Time Around” is enjoyable enough on its own, divorced from any possible Lennon-lampooning.
Blonde on Blonde ends with “Sad Eyed-Lady of the Lowlands,” one of his earliest great epics. At the time, it was the lengthiest song he’d ever released by a hair, only a couple of seconds longer than “Desolation Row” from Highway 61 Revisited. But it still feels absolutely grand in scope, taking up the entirety of the last side of the original release.
“Lowlands” is ostensibly about Dylan’s first wife, Sara Lownds; he said as much on “Sara” (also clearly about Lownds) on his album Desire (1975). Dylan married Lownds in secret in November 1965, and she gave birth to their first son in January 1966, and “Lowlands” is considered Dylan’s “wedding song” for her.
Dylan admitted later he got carried away while writing the song, writing verse after verse until he got lost. The session musicians themselves confessed they were astonished that the song was as long as it was. You can indeed hear the backing band peaking at around five-and-a-half to six minutes into the song, ready to take it home. Instead, Dylan was really just a little past the halfway point, adding more verses and another harmonica solo.
Blonde on Blonde was a critical and commercial hit, but Dylan didn’t really get a chance to bask in its success. A little over a month after the album was released, Dylan was involved in a still mysterious motorcycle accident, the cause of which and the extent of his injury are still largely unknown. Dylan laid low for much of the late 1960s, releasing John Wesley Harding (1967) about a year-and-a-half later, and didn’t resurface until again the release of Nashville Skyline (1969). Dylan spent much of the revolution he helped inspire out of the public eye.
Dylan has recorded all manner of music in the 55 years since Blonde on Blonde was released, but he rarely sounded as confident and self-assured as he did on that album. It might not have been the easiest spark to ignite, but once it got burning, it was impossible to extinguish. More than a half of a century later, it’s still burning bright.
LISTEN: