Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, one of his best albums, was also the first double album in the history of rock ’n’ roll. The release followed a six-month period during which Dylan had toured the United States and even begun a world tour in February 1966. Recording sessions began in New York City in October 1965 and were completed in Nashville, in March 1966. Far from the noise and fury of touring and the New York media, Dylan and his brilliant and loyal musicians unleashed their creativity to attain the sound they had dreamed of but only partially obtained in their two previous albums. This was the famous “mercury sound,” to quote the songwriter, like “bright gold” as he defined it to Ron Rosenbaum in 1978: “It’s that thin, wild mercury sound. It’s metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up. That’s my particular sound.”20
The album’s title remains an enigma. What is the connection between Dylan’s quest for a new sound and “blonde on blonde”? Dylan has never really explained how he came up with the name. In 1969, he gave an evasive answer during an interview with Jann Wenner: “Well, I don’t even recall how exactly it came up, but I do know it was all in good faith. It has to do with just the word. I don’t know who thought of that. I certainly didn’t.”20
They are several hypotheses. Perhaps it could refer to the connection between Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Dylan’s friend, and the actress and model Anita Pallenberg, both blond. Perhaps the name of the album is a riff on Brecht on Brecht, a play by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht performed in the United States at the time. Dylan’s girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, had acted in the play and it had had an influence on Dylan. The album’s title may also have been inspired by Edie Sedgwick, a blonde with whom Dylan had had a brief affair. Finally and more simply, Blonde on Blonde may just stand for Dylan’s first name, Bob. Speculation continues.
In August 1965, Mary Martin, secretary to Albert Grossman in Toronto, convinced Dylan to see a quintet performing in one of the clubs in Toronto. The band had started out backing Ronnie Hawkins before moving on alone as Levon and the Hawks, then just as the Hawks. The Hawks included Robbie Robertson (guitar), Garth Hudson (organ), Richard Manuel (piano), Rick Danko (bass), and Levon Helm (drums). Impressed by their performance, Dylan asked Robertson and Helm to accompany him at a concert on September 3 at the Hollywood Bowl, with Al Kooper on organ and Harvey Brooks on bass. Then the entire band made their debut at Dylan’s side on September 24 in Austin, Texas, and played again on December 4 in Berkeley, California.
Strong bonds were formed during this series of concerts in the United States. Dylan asked the Hawks to participate in the recording of “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” on November 30, 1965, in New York City and to back him during his world tour in 1966. The US tour began in Louisville, Kentucky (February 4), continued via the Southern states and California to Honolulu, Hawaii (April 9), and later moved on to Canada. They continued the tour in Australia between April 13 and 23 (Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth), and then toured Europe from April 29 to May 27. They performed in Scandinavia, Ireland, Great Britain, and France before returning to London for two final concerts on May 26 and 27.
In Europe, the public reaction was similar to the American “traditionalists” during the Newport Folk Festival the previous year. Dylan was booed, insulted, and even called “Judas” when he gave up his acoustic guitar to play an electric Fender. The press was no exception. After the show on May 5, 1966, in Dublin, the Melody Maker newspaper regretted that Dylan “tries to imitate Mick Jagger,” while a publication in Bristol accused him of having sacrificed “lyric and melody to the God of big beat.” Dylan and some of his backup musicians were thrown by the audience’s aggressiveness.
After his last concert on May 27 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, Bob Dylan returned to the United States totally exhausted. The release of his double album Blonde on Blonde, available in stores since May 16, 1966, was his only comfort.
If the album’s title gives rise to speculation, the cover, identifying neither the title nor the artists, is also unusual. A single photo, slightly blurred, is used for both the front and back cover of the album. It shows Bob Dylan in front of a brick building, wearing a suede jacket and a scarf. This photograph is the work of Jerry Schatzberg, who was introduced to Dylan through Sara Lownds and Nico. After a series of shots, most of which have remained unpublished, Bob asked him to work on Blonde on Blonde’s album cover. “I wanted to find an interesting location outside of the studio. We went to the west side, where the Chelsea art galleries are now. At the time it was the meat packing district of New York and I liked the look of it. It was freezing and we were very cold. The frame he chose for the cover is blurred and out of focus. Of course everyone was trying to interpret the meaning, saying it must represent getting high on an LSD trip. It was none of the above; we were just cold and the two of us were shivering.”59
The original inside gatefold featured photographs by Schatzberg, selected by Dylan himself. The nine shots selected include Dylan with Albert Grossman’s back, a self-portrait of Schatzberg, and an unidentified fan who was whispering in the ear of the songwriter.
A portrait of the actress Claudia Cardinale was also featured on the original gatefold, but was withdrawn from the American copies because it was used without Cardinale’s permission. In September 2014, she told Jean-Michel Guesdon, “I love Bob Dylan and I was very flattered to find myself on the cover of Blonde on Blonde. But my agent decided to withdraw my picture for rights issues.” Jerry Schatzberg also worked on the artwork for Bob Dylan Live in 1966.
After the recording of the album Highway 61 Revisited, producer Bob Johnston suggested that Dylan, exhausted by many concerts and recordings, record at the Nashville studios to find new energy. Bill Gallagher, vice president of marketing at Columbia, and Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman did not like the suggestion. The production process in place at Columbia in New York worked perfectly well in their eyes, and they were comfortable with it and wanted to stick with it. Johnston claims they reacted quickly: “‘If you ever mention Nashville to Bob Dylan again, you’re fired.’ When I said, ‘Why?’ I was told, ‘Because we don’t want him working with a bunch of… stupid people down there. You’ve got him going good here, and it looks like we’re going to have a great record.’… I said, ‘Yes, sir, you’re the boss.’”48
On October 5, 1965, Dylan began the first recording session for the double album Blonde on Blonde at Columbia’s Studio A in New York, but by late January 1966 Dylan was unhappy with the recording. Apart from the single “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” (November 30, 1965), Dylan was satisfied with only one title from the four long sessions beginning on October 5: “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later).” Depressed, he had doubts about himself. He later confessed that the group did not function well together, something that he was not willing to admit at the time. He confided to Robert Shelton, “Oh, I was really down. I mean, in ten recording sessions, man, we didn’t get one song… It was the band. But you see, I didn’t know that. I didn’t want to think that.”5 Johnston took the opportunity to talk about Nashville again.
Despite beginning his new international tour on February 4, 1966, Dylan had a few days off between February 14 and 17. Johnston took the opportunity to again suggest moving the sessions to Nashville. Because Dylan was disillusioned with the sessions and New York and his band, he agreed to finish the album in Nashville. Based on the recording sheets, there were two blocks of sessions at Columbia’s Studio A in Nashville. Most Dylan scholars agree that the first bloc was between February 14 and February 16, and the second from March 8 to March 10. However, Kooper disagrees about the existence of two blocks of recording sessions. “It was Bob Johnston’s decision to record it in Nashville. I gotta give him credit for that. Bob was a little reticent, but he thought it might be an interesting idea, so he took Robbie and I along to increase his comfort level.”24 Johnston asked Charlie McCoy to contact musicians on the list he had compiled. He recruited the best sidemen in the region: Kenneth Buttrey on drums, Wayne Moss on electric guitar, Joe South on bass and second guitar, Hargus “Pig” Robbins on piano, and Henry Strzelecki on bass. McCoy himself played bass, guitar, trumpet, and harmonica. Other musicians participated in the recording of the album: Bill Atkins on keyboard, Wayne Butler on trombone (uncredited on the album cover), Jerry Kennedy (mentioned on the cover but in an unknown role), and Mac Gayden on guitar (uncredited on the album cover but probably present). All these musicians were used to moving from one session to another with impressive speed and efficiency, but at the first session on February 14 they quickly understood that the rules had changed. After the usual introductions, McCoy told them that Dylan needed some time to complete his lyrics and that they would have to wait in the studio. “Take a break,” said the songwriter on his way to the piano with a notebook and a Bible in hand. After several hours, Bob finally had finished his text and was ready to start the session. The musicians, who had worked with Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, among others, were not initially inspired. Each session followed a similar pattern. Eventually, the musicians adopted a rhythm of work in response to Dylan’s lead. Robertson: “We hadn’t really rehearsed the songs before we got to Nashville. Sometimes Bob would be working out the ideas, and I’d play along and see if I could think of any ideas. The songs were just going by—once we had a setup organized in the studio, Bob had a lot of material he wanted to experiment with, so they were just going by every quickly. Making a record, a lot of times you go in and record a song a day, laying down the tracks and overdubbing on them, but on this one we were just slamming through the songs.”24
Blonde on Blonde is thus the result of a fusion between musicians, engineers, and producers, made possible by a simple, warm, and relaxed atmosphere. Al Kooper attributed the success of the album to the excellence of each player and the exceptional quality of the songs. The mono mix, the standard at the time, was prepared in Nashville under Dylan’s direct supervision, and then the stereo mix was created in Los Angeles in early April. Bob Dylan’s seventh album was released on May 16, although there is some speculation about the exact date. After Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde is the third panel in the American songwriter’s rock triptych. With this album, Dylan elevated himself as the new icon that the American public had been waiting for since Elvis Presley, but also and primarily as a songwriter who moved in a kind of psychedelic maelstrom that mixed Rimbaud and Ginsberg, Robert Johnson and Little Richard. This was “the new tone,” defined by the critic Greil Marcus as “the sound of a man trying to stand up in a drunken boat, and, for the moment, succeeding. His tone was sardonic, scared, threatening, as if he’d awakened after paying all his debts to find that nothing was settled.”60
Since its release the album has reached number 9 on Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time,” number 8 in the British newspaper Mojo, and number 2 for NME (another British newspaper).
“One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)” is the only title on the album that was recorded in New York, using a four-track tape recorder like the previous album. It has often been argued that the other songs were recorded on eight tracks in Nashville. Bob Johnston confirmed this in Mix magazine in 1983, but Michael Krogsgaard, who has referenced and identified almost all of Bob Dylan’s recording sessions and who has worked on the archives of Blonde on Blonde, found that all these tapes are in four tracks. What to believe? If this is indeed a four-track, this restriction, which now seems like a technical handicap, proves that mythical works like Blonde on Blonde or the Beatles’ 1967 masterpiece Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band were not affected in any way by technological limitations. Doubt still persists.
Beginning with Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Johnston recorded Dylan with three microphones so that he could capture Dylan’s vocals without losing any segment. In Nashville he had to wrestle with Studio A’s homemade recording console. As he explains: “There was a custom console with EQ that could be switched between ‘pop’ and ‘country.’”61 Since the monitor speakers did not face the control room window, he had to turn his head to listen. In addition, three assistants relayed the order to start the tape recorder, which was located in another room. Johnston soon moved the machine into the control room and positioned the two speakers facing him. He also removed many acoustic baffles to allow musicians to stay in visual contact in the huge studio. Dylan stood in the middle of the room and was the only one with an acoustic baffle. “Then, in the center of the room, I had this glass booth built for Dylan, and he was in there with a table and chair—it was like his study.”61 He created an interaction between all the musicians and explained that overdubs were not on the agenda. “I just told everyone not to play anything that they didn’t want to be heard, because I wouldn’t be allowing them to come back in for overdubs and screw up the record. We were only gonna use what they did during the actual take.”61 The final result proved him right. The seventh Dylan album is a major success, both in content and in terms of execution. None of the sound engineers in Nashville are identified.
There is no information on the guitars used by Bob Dylan during the sessions for Blonde on Blonde, and there are no photos of the sessions. Bob had lost his 1965 Stratocaster Sunburst and he played a Fender Telecaster in concerts at this time, a sunburst yellow color and another one in black. Were they used for the recordings? While he played acoustics on his Gibson Nick Lucas Special, he probably also borrowed instruments of other musicians in the studio. He played harmonica for each title, with the exception of “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” and “Obviously 5 Believers.” In this latter song, Charlie McCoy played harmonica. The tones are in C, D, E, F, A, and B-flat.