In January 1986, Tony Creswell interviewed Bob Dylan during the recording of Knocked Out Loaded. Dylan claimed to be pleased with the result: “I think the next record is going to sound even better [than Empire Burlesque].”20 His collaboration with British musician Dave A. Stewart, best known for his work with the Eurythmics, gave him confidence. “[T]he stuff we’re doing has been happening a lot easier, quicker, so I think it’s going to sound a lot more together than the last record.”20 Nevertheless, Knocked Out Loaded occupies a special place in Dylan’s discography. This is not a “concept” record, one might say, but rather a collection of songs recorded over several months in a number of different studios with different teams of musicians from very different backgrounds. In addition, many of these songs are adaptations, not original compositions (“You Wanna Ramble,” They Killed Him,” “Precious Memories”), while others resulted from collaborations with Sam Shepard (“Brownsville Girl”), Tom Petty (“Got My Mind Made Up”), and Carole Bayer Sager (“Under Your Spell”).
That it appeared to be a musical melting pot hardly helped the album upon its release on July 14, 1986. Knocked Out Loaded lacks clear direction, even if the name of Sundog Productions (Dylan himself?) appears in the credits of the record. The allusive poetry of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and the searing surreal images and blues-rock sound of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde cannot be found here. This is not a record about breakups, the dominant theme of Blood on the Tracks, nor is it a continuation of the Christian trilogy. In reality, however, this is perhaps what makes Knocked Out Loaded interesting: it is Bob Dylan’s twenty-fourth studio album, and it includes traces of all these elements.
“They Killed Him,” written by Kris Kristofferson, can be regarded as a folk song, at least in its message denouncing violence and those responsible for the deaths of Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and the Kennedy brothers. “Precious Memories” evokes Dylan’s childhood in Minnesota. “Maybe Someday” borrows the accusatory tone of “Like a Rolling Stone,” while “Got My Mind Made Up” and “Under Your Spell” concern romantic disillusionment. Finally, as always with Dylan (even on his “minor” albums), there is a gem. In this case it is “Brownsville Girl,” co-written with the playwright Sam Shepard. The text is beautiful: a love story that recalls the dramaturgy of one of the great Hollywood Westerns, presumably the 1950 film The Gunfighter, directed by Henry King, or perhaps Duel in the Sun from 1946, directed by King Vidor and starring Gregory Peck.
However, the album was poorly received, and the tune “Brownsville Girl” could not by itself save Knocked Out Loaded. The album was attacked for its lack of artistic integrity—“a depressing affair,” wrote Anthony DeCurtis in Rolling Stone, while Robert Christgau called it “one of the greatest and most ridiculous of [Dylan’s] great ridiculous epics.” Few rushed to buy it, and it only reached a disappointing number 53 and 35, respectively, on the US and the UK charts. It was not ranked in the other countries.
The cover of Knocked Out Loaded (front and back sleeve) is a replica of the cover of a pulp magazine, Spicy Adventure Stories, first published in 1939 in the United States. A young brunette holds a clay jug and is about to clobber a bandito who is strangling another man.
The magazine issue in question is “Daughters of Doom,” and the illustrator is Harry Lemon Pankhurst. Charles Sappington created the design for Dylan’s record. Sappington was interviewed by the Houston Chronicle in 2009: “They originally had a photographer shoot some photos of Dylan and Tom Petty. I heard Dylan took a look and threw them all in the trash. The only thing he liked from the shoot was a Polaroid test shot, which is the first thing they gave me. I fiddled with that, but they didn’t care for it, and we went in a different direction. That’s the part I can’t talk about. But on the inside there were the thank-yous…” The entire design evokes Duel in the Sun.
The first chapter of the story of Knocked Out Loaded was written on July 26, 1984, at the Delta Recording Studio in New York City during the first session for Empire Burlesque. That day, Dylan, accompanied by Ron Wood on guitar, recorded the base rhythm track of “Driftin’ Too Far from Shore.” Dylan resumed the sessions in December, this time at Cherokee Studios in Hollywood, and “New Danville Girl,” the working title of “Brownsville Girl,” emerged. Only eleven months later, between November 20 and November 23, 1985 (November 19 to 22, according to Clinton Heylin), Dylan arrived at the famous Church Studios in London, owned by Dave A. Stewart. In the end, this collaboration only resulted in a single song, “Under Your Spell.”
Several months passed before Dylan headed back to the studio in spring 1986, between the last concert of the True Confessions Tour in Japan (March 10, 1986) and the first concert of the tour of the United States (San Diego, June 9). Between April 28 and May 23, nearly twenty sessions were held at Topanga Skyline Studio in Topanga, California, and two additional sessions at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California, on May 19 and June 19. In total, nearly thirty sessions at different studios took place between July 1984 and June 1986. This dispersion was not promising, especially since Dylan booked no less than thirty musicians, seven vocalists, and a chorus of fifteen children. Everything was digitally recorded, a new method that, at the time, did not suit the singer. Familiar musicians, such as Al Kooper, Ron Wood, Mike Campbell, T-Bone Burnett (a sideman on the Rolling Thunder Revue of 1975–1976), and Benmont Tench played on the album, but also new names like the excellent Tom Petty and, of course, Dave A. Stewart, who dominated most of the productions of the 1980s. Knocked Out Loaded, like the previous album, lacked a clear plan.
Out of all the studios used to record the album, three were new to Dylan. The first, the Church Studios in Crouch Hill, North London, was the home base of Dave A. Stewart. In 1984, he and the Scottish singer-songwriter Annie Lennox rented the premises. They flourished, and Stewart turned it into a renowned recording studio that quickly became a stop for many artists, such as Radiohead, Elvis Costello, Depeche Mode, and U2. The second studio was the famous Topanga Skyline Studio in Topanga Canyon, outside Los Angeles, that hosted musicians like Sting, Neil Young, and Robert Plant. Finally, recordings took place at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, a neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Elton John, Santana, Nirvana, and others worked.
Two new sound engineers worked on the album: Don Smith, who recorded the Eurythmics, U2, the Travelling Wilburys, and the Rolling Stones; and Britt Bacon, owner of Topanga Skyline Studio, where Chicago and Brian Wilson, among others, had recorded.
In concert, Dylan regularly plays the same guitars, usually a Fender Stratocaster, a Telecaster, a Washburn, a Yamaha, or a Martin. There are few details known about the guitars he used in the studio on this album. On Knocked Out Loaded, he did not play harmonica.