In spite of his disastrous Newport Festival appearance, Dylan was convinced he should continue his new rock’n’roll direction, particularly given the success of Highway 61 Revisited. But it would have to be better planned than at Newport. Accordingly, acting on the advice of Albert Grossman’s secretary Mary Martin, he checked out a Canadian rock band, Levon & The Hawks, who had recently split from ’50s rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins. Tight and disciplined, without sacrificing any of their essential wildness, the band’s chops had been honed to a fine cutting-edge by years of one-night stands in clubs and juke-joints around the South and up in Canada, which native Arkansan Hawkins had made his base. Dylan was impressed, and midway through August he called them at Tony Mart’s Nite Spot at Somers Point on the Jersey Shore, with an offer to back him at the Hollywood Bowl. “Who else is on the bill?” asked the drummer, Levon Helm. “Just us,” answered Dylan.
“We had just come from Arkansas,” recalls guitarist Robbie Robertson. “We were in a place near Atlantic City, a nice resort place to play, and we were going to try and do some stuff with Sonny Boy Williamson, even though it was a pretty off-the-wall idea for blacks and whites to be playing together at the time. So we went up to play this resort, to cool out a little, and it was there that we were contacted to meet with Bob. I went and met him and we talked about the possibilities and played a little music, and one thing led to another.”
Initially, only Robbie and Levon were hired, joining Al Kooper and organist Harvey Brooks for a late August concert at Forest Hills Stadium, New York. The reaction was mixed—not as virulent as at Newport, but with a substantial proportion of dissenters. To silence the catcalls, Dylan had his band play the intro to ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’ for what seemed like an eternity, and eventually most of the crowd were won over, rushing the stage during ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and knocking Kooper’s chair out from under him. “Kooper and I just looked at each other and laughed,” recalls Harvey Brooks. “We were having the time of our lives. It was fun, gleeful, from the heart, exciting—an experience we’d never had before.” Onstage, a laughing Dylan turned round to Levon Helm and shouted, “Looks like the attack of the beatniks around here!” The Hollywood Bowl show a few days later was even better received, but following that, both Brooks and Kooper were replaced by the rest of the Hawks. The whole band decamped for a week of rehearsals in Toronto, where the Hawks’ tailor, Lou Myles, also ran up an outrageous brown houndstooth check suit for Dylan.
Through the rest of that Fall, Dylan and The Hawks toured the American heartland with a series of pioneering shows that brought high-volume rock’n’roll to the country’s old sports arenas, where Robertson’s guitar would “reverberate around the big concrete buildings like a giant steel bullwhip,” according to Levon Helm’s autobiography This Wheel’s On Fire. But the constant booing finally got to Helm, who quit the group prior to the 1966 world tour, being replaced by Mickey Jones (later to play the role of Tim Allen’s ZZ Top-lookalike TV-show sidekick in the situation comedy Home Improvement). Things didn’t improve outside America, however.
“We traveled all over the world, and people booed us everywhere we went,” recalls Robbie Robertson. “What a strange concept of entertainment! We’d go on to the next town, and they’d boo us again, and we’d pack up our equipment and go on to the next place, and they’d boo us again. All over the world! I’ll tell you what… it thickens the skin a little! After some of the places that we played with Ronnie Hawkins, and some of the rough joints we’d played when we were young—places where it’s really a wonder anyone’s left alive—after that, this was supposed to be success! You can get a little sadistic in these situations, turn up the volume that little bit louder!”
Dylan was particularly enamored with Robertson’s guitar-playing, describing him as “the only mathematical guitar genius I’ve ever run into who does not offend my intestinal nervousness with his rear-guard sound,” and using him as a sounding-board when working out new songs. “When we were on tour,” explains Robertson, “a lot of times we would get a two-bedroom suite so we could play music. We were able to play most because we had guitars, but sometimes the other guys would bring their drums in, or an organ or something. It was just having fun with music, really.” But the sound wasn’t really gelling as Dylan wanted when he tried cutting more tracks in the New York studio—after several sessions between October 1965 and January 1966, he had only a couple of workable songs finished, and then only when Al Kooper dropped by the studio to add his organ. Accordingly, when Bob Johnston suggested going down to CBS’s Nashville studio to record, Dylan agreed, taking along only Kooper and Robertson to augment a session crew comprised of the finest musicians money could hire, notably a nucleus of guitarists Wayne Moss, Jerry Kennedy and Joe South; drummer Kenny Buttrey; multi-instrumentalist Charlie McCoy; and the blind pianist Hargus ‘Pig’ Robbins.
“It was Bob Johnston’s decision to record it in Nashville,” recalls Kooper. “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.” Like Kooper, the Nashville musicians were used to being booked by the hour, in three-hour slots, during which time they would usually expect to record three tracks. “These guys came from that mentality,” Kooper acknowledges, “but they were booked open-end, and they had no preconceptions, so there was no pressure put on Bob at all. So they would sit there all day and maybe record four songs, sitting there for maybe ten hours while he went into the studio and wrote. No one disturbed him, he was completely catered to, and whatever happened, happened. Nobody bitched or complained or rolled their eyes. That was the tempo of the sessions in Nashville, that anything could happen, and these guys were fine with that. Their temperaments were fabulous—they were the most calm, at-ease guys I’d ever worked with. New York people are very New York, and these guys were very country, and it was great to work with that kind of relaxation. But there was no way they would have heard of Bob at that time—as Dan Penn says, it was off the radar!”
“We hadn’t really rehearsed the songs before we got to Nashville,” admitted Robertson. “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 set-up organized in the studio, Bob had a lot of material he wanted to experiment with, so they were just going by very 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.”
At sessions snatched in between further tour dates in February and March, Dylan searched for what he called “that thin, wild, mercury sound,” a more refined blend of the guitars/bass/drums/piano/organ/ harmonica formula that had proven so effective on Highway 61 Revisited. To facilitate proceedings, Al Kooper translated Bob’s ideas for the local musicians. “Bob had a piano put in his hotel room, and during the day he would write,” Kooper recalls. “And as there were no cassette machines in those days, I would sit and play the piano for him, over and over, while he sat and wrote. We did this to prepare for the sessions at night, as well: he would come in an hour late, and I would go in and teach the first song to the band. Then he would arrive, and the band would be ready to play. He liked that, rather than have them sitting and learning the songs—although we did do that over the course of the night. After that, it was business as usual, though these guys were a crew, not dissimilar to Spector’s Wrecking Crew—these were guys that played together, knew how to play together, and were incredibly versatile. I’d never seen anything like that.”
The results were extraordinary, even by Dylan’s previous standards, and he knew it. “…the last three things I’ve done on records [are] beyond criticism,” he told Robert Shelton. “I’m not saying that because I think I’m any kind of god. I’m just saying that because I just know.” Released as the first ever rock’n’roll double-album in May 1966, while Dylan and The Hawks were on tour in Britain, Blonde On Blonde was widely acclaimed for its musical sophistication, controlled power and subtle lyricism. Some thought that it was more approachable than his recent albums, finding its string of love songs less esoteric than the texts of Highway 61 Revisited, and everyone who heard it was struck by the way the album’s overall dark, stifling mood was sustained through such a diverse range of musical approaches.
The gatefold cover photo, taken by Jerry Schatzberg, featured a slightly out-of-focus Dylan leaning against a wall wearing a brown suede jacket with a scarf knotted around his neck, frowning slightly at the camera from beneath a tangled halo of hair; inside, a suite of photos offered suitably shadowy glimpses of his life, along with an enigmatic posed shot of Dylan holding a small portrait of a woman in one hand and a pair of pliers in the other: they all contributed further to the album’s air of reclusive yet sybaritic genius. Despite its hefty size (and price tag), Blonde On Blonde was another huge commercial success too, climbing into the American Top Ten and, upon its UK release three months later, reaching the British Top Three.
“I think Blonde On Blonde is my favorite album of all time,” reflects Al Kooper, more than three decades later. “It’s an amazing record, like taking two cultures and smashing them together with a huge explosion. I know that at one time, one of the jokier things considered was putting a paper band around the album saying ‘Recorded in the South’—that was one of the late-evening control-room conversations between Albert Grossman and Bob Johnston. Because it was a very bizarre move at the time for Dylan to go to Nashville to record that album. It was unthinkable, actually—we lose sight of that because of Nashville Skyline and other things. He was the quintessential New York hipster—what was he doing in Nashville? It didn’t make any sense whatsoever. But you take those two elements, pour them into a test-tube, and it just exploded.”
Released as a single in April 1966, ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35’ furnished the biggest shock yet for Dylan’s old folkie fans, sounding as it did like a demented marching-band rehearsal staffed by crazy people out of their minds on loco-weed. The lyric, while not his most cryptic, was Dylan’s most audacious yet, a unique mix of good-natured paranoia and nudge-nudge wink-wink bohemian hedonism in which the five verses’ lists of persecution are each capped with the redemptive invocation “Everybody must get stoned.”
The song was probably inspired by Ray Charles’ famous recording of ‘Let’s Go Get Stoned’, which Dylan had heard a few months earlier while visiting a Los Angeles coffee-shop with Phil Spector. In that short space of time, however, the argot had shifted slightly, so that the “stone” in question referred not to booze but to dope. The immediate effect was that the song had difficulty being playlisted by radio stations in both America and Britain, which didn’t prevent the song becoming Dylan’s biggest hit yet, garnering his second US No. 2 (or perhaps that should be US #2) and reaching the UK Top 10.
Nevertheless, the accusations did spur Dylan to denials. “This next song is what your English musical papers would call a ‘drug song,’” he announced at his Royal Albert Hall concert later in 1966. “I never have and never will write a ‘drug song.’ I don’t know how to. It’s not a ‘drug song,’ it’s just vulgar.” In another interview, he expanded on the theme: “People just don’t need drugs,” he said. “Keep things out of your body. We all take medicine, as long as you know why you’re taking it. If you want to crack down on the drug situation, the criminal drug situation takes place in suburban housewives’ kitchens, the ones who get wiped out on alcohol every afternoon and then make supper. You can’t blame them, and you can’t blame their husbands. They’ve been working in the mines all day. It’s understandable.” And to Nat Hentoff he explained, “I wouldn’t advise anybody to use drugs—certainly not the hard drugs; drugs are medicine. But opium and hash and pot—now, those things aren’t drugs; they just bend your mind a little. I think everybody’s mind should be bent once in a while. Not by LSD, though. LSD is medicine—a different kind of medicine. It makes you aware of the Universe, so to speak; you realize how foolish objects are. But LSD is not for groovy people; it’s for mad, hateful people who want revenge.”
The truth, of course, was rather different. He had been using several different types of drugs for different reasons—primarily marijuana, to fuel both creativity and relaxation, and amphetamines, to withstand the hectic pace of the his touring schedule, during which he would routinely stay awake for days on end, continuing to play music in hotel rooms after shows, and working on songs constantly. “It takes a lot of medicine to keep up this pace,” he told Robert Shelton between tour dates in March 1966.
The effect of stronger “medicine” was discernible to others. “Dylan is LSD on stage, Dylan is LSD set to music,” gushed Phil Ochs, who knew him better than most, while his old friend from Greenwich Village, Dave Van Ronk, told Bob Spitz that although he knew Dylan was no junkie, he believed he had dabbled on occasion with heroin. “A lot of people think that I shoot heroin,” Dylan acknowledged to Robert Shelton. “But that’s baby talk. I do a lot of things, man, which help me… And I’m smart enough to know that I don’t depend on them for my existence.” But whatever he was doing to himself, he had the integrity to keep it to himself. When an Australian actress, Rosemary Gerrette, spent some time with Dylan and The Band on their tour of Australia, he refused to turn her on to the dope he was smoking. “No, I’m not gonna give you any,” he explained. “I’m not gonna start you off on anything.”
For ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35’, recorded at the final Nashville session, Dylan wanted to try something a little different, and suggested recording the song out in the studio parking lot with a Salvation Army band. Drummer Kenny Buttrey felt that the local Salvation Army band might be a little more disciplined than Dylan expected, and suggested that, if Bob was after a more ramshackle sound, the musicians already assembled could “play pretty dumb if we put our minds to it.” Accordingly, he dis-assembled his drum kit, laying the bass drum flat across two chair-backs and deadening his snare-drum to approximate the sound of a marching-band drummer. Al Kooper switched from organ to tambourine, augmenting his part with assorted yelling and whooping. And despite the late hour—it was the early hours of the morning—a trombonist friend of Charlie McCoy’s, called Wayne Butler, was brought in to play at a moment’s notice.
“They called him in the middle of the night,” recalls Al Kooper, “and in half an hour he was there, in a shirt and tie and suit, immaculately groomed! He played for no longer than 20 or 30 minutes, and then graciously left! That’s all he was required for—called at three o’clock, and he was back home at four-thirty. Charlie McCoy played bass and trumpet on that track at the same time—the bass with one hand, and the trumpet with the other—because we didn’t overdub on that album at all, Dylan was adamant about that. So all the vocals were done live and, catering to that, Charlie McCoy played two instruments at once. I almost fell on the floor when I saw that. It’s like Roland Kirk, except they’re not all wind instruments! That was the most awesome display of musicality I’d seen in my life, just ‘Bam!’ right on the spot.”
The song was cut in just two or three takes—too fast for Robbie Robertson, who blinked and missed it completely. “On ‘Rainy Day Women’, I think I went out to get some cigarettes or something,” he believes, “and they’d recorded it by the time I returned!”
After the good-time goofing of ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35’, the slow blues ‘Pledging My Time’ sets the humid, emotionally oppressive tone for the rest of Blonde On Blonde. Slithering in on the back of Kenny Buttrey’s enervated snare-roll, it slouches along, streaked by Robbie Robertson’s spindly Chicago blues guitar lines and Dylan’s harmonica, with some of Hargus ‘Pig’ Robbins’ finest blues piano holding it all together. Lyrically, references to “a poison headache” and the room being “so stuffy, I can hardly breathe” combine vividly with the music to evoke a smoky, late-night club ambiance whose few remaining patrons have slipped beyond tipsy to the sour, sore-headed aftermath of drunk. Like much of the album, it’s a beautifully-sustained exercise in mood, notable mainly for the remarkable predictive prescience of the final verse, in which “Somebody got lucky/But it was an accident,” which spookily prefigures Dylan’s motorcycle crash of July 1966, which turned out to be probably the luckiest thing that could have happened to him at the time.
Although most of the songs on Blonde On Blonde were written as the album was being recorded, ‘Visions Of Johanna’ had been with Dylan several months by the time it was recorded in Nashville for the album. Indeed two earlier versions had been cut at New York sessions in late November 1965 and January 1966 with The Band, as he tried to discover the song’s ideal setting. Along the way, a few changes were made in the lyrics, mostly minor alterations—“like silk” becomes “she’s delicate,” little boy lost goes from being “so useless and so small” to being just “so useless and all”—but with a couple of more substantial revisions to the final verse involving the deletion of the line “He examines the nightingale’s code” and the switching of the positions of the fiddler and the peddler.
Given the lyrical malleability indicated by these changes, it’s perhaps best not to try and ascribe too literal an interpretation to ‘Visions Of Johanna’, which is more of an impressionistic mood piece anyway. If it doesn’t really matter to the writer whether it’s the peddler or the fiddler who speaks to the countess, why should it matter to us? The song remains one of the high points of Dylan’s canon, particularly favored among hardcore Dylanophiles, possibly because it so perfectly sustains its position on the cusp of poetic semantics, forever teetering on the brink of lucidity, yet remaining impervious to strict decipherment.
For a long time, the song went under the working title of ‘Seems Like A Freeze-Out’ (a term meaning “to stand-off”), which evokes something of the air of nocturnal suspension in which the verse tableaux are sketched. They’re full of whispering and muttering, low-volume radio, echoes and ghosts, a misty, crepuscular netherworld inhabited by the increasingly familiar denizens of Dylan’s imagination, a parade of lowlifes, functionaries, all-night girls and slumming snobs.
Here and there, images and lines accrete into possible wisps of meaning: the line in verse four about “the one with the mustache,” for instance, may refer to the Mona Lisa, also mentioned in the same verse—or, more specifically, to Marcel Duchamp’s “revision” of the Mona Lisa by the addition of a graffiti mustache to a print of the portrait. (It has also been noted that the picture in question is a three-quarter length portrait, which may account for why its subject may be unable to find her knees.) And Joan Baez apparently felt suspicious that certain images in the song referred to her, particularly after Allen Ginsberg, possibly primed by Dylan, tried to pump her for her opinions on the song. “I had the feeling the two of them were sort of in cahoots to make sure I never thought the song had anything to do with me,” she told Anthony Scaduto.
Certainly, on the most basic level the song is simply a delineation of the narrator’s differing feelings towards a purely carnal lover—the always available Louise—and the more spiritual, but unattainable, Madonna-figure Johanna, whose most likely model would be Sara, whom Dylan had recently married (and whom he described to Robert Shelton as “Madonna-like”). On a deeper level, however, ‘Visions Of Johanna’ would seem to be about the artist’s search for transcendence, the constant attempt to locate inspiration outside of the physical world, in some more spiritual aesthetic realm, fully cognizant of the desiccation that ultimately awaits all art through the “salvation” of curators and museums. In the final analysis, Dylan appears to be saying, the artist is doomed to pursue these visions of perfection, whatever the cost and whatever the outcome, since they are what gives meaning to his/her life—they are, effectively, all that remain.
The song’s journey to its final form echoes this process of aesthetic discovery. In the earliest of the three versions, it begins as a loose, medium-tempo rocker, which alters subtly until, by the final verse, it’s clear that everyone except the drummer (the rather limited Bobby Gregg, who continues to whack along regardless) has located something rather more haunting and transcendent in the song. The second version builds upon this insight, but it is not until the final Nashville version that it all comes together, with Al Kooper’s eerie organ casting dusky shadows across the verses and, from the second verse through to the conclusion, Robbie Robertson’s tiny, bent-note stitches of lead guitar complementing one of Dylan’s most accomplished vocal performances.
“If you listen to it very critically, it’s very important what Joe South’s bass is doing in that,” says Al Kooper. “He’s playing this throbbing thing which rhythmically is an amazing bass part, and it really makes the track. Charlie McCoy couldn’t have done that, he doesn’t think like that. On my part, I was responding to the lyrics—like when he says, ‘The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face,’ it was very challenging to play something after that line!” It says much that the track retains that challenge for the listener over three decades later. It remains one of Dylan’s finest achievements.
(Sooner Or Later)
The first track recorded for Blonde On Blonde—at New York sessions in late January 1966—‘One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)’ was originally released as a single in February 1966, failing to chart in America (although on its UK release in April, it narrowly missed the Top 30).
Schematically, the song is positioned at the opposite end of the romantic trajectory from its predecessor ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?’: having succeeded in persuading the object of his affections to elope with him, the relationship has now run its course, foundered, and the singer has moved on to the autopsy stage, trying to divine exactly what went wrong, when, and where. The air of feverish inquest is sustained by the intense, melodramatic interplay between Paul Griffin’s piano and Al Kooper’s organ, while Robbie Robertson stitches the chorus together with a beautifully-judged series of tingling grace notes.
“I wasn’t booked for the session,” admits Al Kooper, “but I visited the session and ended up playing on it. The piano playing on ‘One Of Us Must Know’ is quite magnificent, it influenced me enormously as a pianist. It’s probably Paul Griffin’s finest moment. He was an amazing player, but he felt badly done by when Valerie Simpson, the woman he loved, and to whom he had taught his piano style, left him and went off to achieve fame and fortune with Nick Ashford. He felt she had stolen his piano style.”
The song emerged out of ‘She’s Your Lover Now’ (AKA ‘Just A Little Glass Of Water’), another romantic autopsy which Dylan worked on intermittently around the same time but which was never officially released until it appeared on The Bootleg Series, Vols 1-3. The line “you were just there, that’s all” appears in both songs. The subject of the song, which is about as close as Dylan gets to an apology, might be Joan Baez: the line “I didn’t know that you were sayin’ goodbye for good” could refer to her final departure from the hotel room in Don’t Look Back, after which the pair didn’t speak for several years.
Baez undoubtedly felt deeply hurt by his behavior—she couldn’t bring herself to listen to his new records for quite some time, and it was only after urgings from her editor E. L Doctorow (subsequently the author of Ragtime) that she could be persuaded to mention Dylan in her autobiography Daybreak, and then only briefly, as “The Dada King.” For his part, Dylan bore her no malice. To Robert Shelton, he admitted she had helped establish his name, but claimed that he didn’t feel any debt to her. “I feel bad for her because she has nobody to turn to that’s going to be straight with her,” he explained, adding cryptically, “She hasn’t got that much in common with the street vagabonds who play insane instruments.”
The third single taken from the album, ‘I Want You’ was a Top 20 hit on both sides of the Atlantic when it was released in Summer 1966. Musically the straightest pop track he ever recorded, the song’s lyrics occupy a curious position, balanced as they are between the most direct of address and the most obfuscatory of images. It’s perhaps for this reason that the song is sometimes taken to be about heroin—the ecstatic profusion of imagery prompting a recurrent plea for more.
Through the verses, we encounter a typical parade of Dylan characters, too numerous to inhabit the song’s three minutes comfortably: a guilty undertaker, a lonesome organ grinder, weeping mothers, fathers, daughters, sleeping saviors, the Queen of Spades, a chambermaid and a “dancing child with his Chinese suit”—the last rumored to refer to Brian Jones, to whom Dylan was on occasion not very cute, allegedly. From this confusing tangle of characters and interrogations, Dylan emerges to repeat his simplest, most straightforward of choruses, the most basic of testaments to his affection. It’s as if the simple, secure love expressed so directly in the choruses offers him a refuge from the confusion and demands of his everyday life: it’s the fixed point to which he can return after battling the demons of his imagination and the duties of his career.
It was also the last song cut for the album. “When we were running the stuff down in his hotel room, I went fucking mental over that track,” recalls Al Kooper. “I kept saying, ‘Let’s do ‘I Want You’,’ and Bob just kept putting it off, just to piss me off. He knew he was going to do it, but I kept pressing, because I had all these arrangement ideas, and I was afraid it wouldn’t get cut, but he kept saying, ‘No,’ until finally, on the last night, I taught it to the band before he came in. “When he came in, I said, ‘I took the liberty of teaching them ‘I Want You’,’ and he just smiled at me and said, ‘Well, yeah, we could do that.’ I said, ‘It’s all set, just come on in and plug into this.’ I had the basic arrangement in my head, but then Wayne Moss played that sixteenth-note guitar run, and I wasn’t ready for that! It was a wonderful addition to what I had in mind! That was one I wrote out parts for, which the musicians embellished in their wonderful Nashville way, and it became even bigger than what I had heard in that track.”
The second of the album’s three epics crams nine complex verses into seven short minutes, each retailing an absurd little vignette illustrating contemporary alienation. In the first, the disquieting effect of an itinerant mute fails to be dispelled by the kindly attentions of ladies, leaving the narrator with a vague feeling of unease.
In the second, the unease persists through a foppish Shakespeare’s conversation with a French girl. (Dylan enthused about Shakespeare to Robert Shelton, describing the playwright and poet as “A raving queen and a cosmic amphetamine brain,” though in this context, the playwright’s attire of bells and pointy shoes may be a reference to the stylish British pop stars Dylan had been mixing with.) The sense of disjunction is reinforced by the first of a series of Spoonerized image-confusions—involving the stolen post-office and the locked mailbox—which vividly convey the sense of synaesthetic swapping of the senses reported by many LSD takers, in which sights can be smelt, sounds viewed, smells heard, and so on.
The third verse finds a girl called Mona (perhaps the same one hymned so satirically by Bo Diddley) offering the song’s narrator some advice about railroad men drinking up your blood like wine, a dubious claim which originally derives from ‘I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground’, a weird traditional folk song included on Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music in a version by the 1920s’ singing lawyer, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who learned the song from a North Carolina neighbor, Fred Moody. Clearly relishing the extension of an earlier absurdity, Dylan trumps the image with his own deliciously absurd image of one such railwayman smoking his eyelids and punching his cigarette.
And so the madness mounts up: the narrator’s grandfather goes mad and dies after building a fire in the road and shooting it; a preacher has weighty headlines stapled to his chest; further confusion—perhaps the cause of his synaesthetic turmoil—sees Dylan mixing his medicines, blowing his mind on gin and “Texas medicine,” whatever that is; and in the song’s most enduring couplet, the dancer Ruthie offers earthier relief from his high-class girlfriend: “Your debutante just knows what you need/But I know what you want.” At the song’s conclusion the narrator is overwhelmed by the barrage of absurdity, waiting to find out how much his experiences have cost him, and how he can avoid them, as if his life had become a fairground ride upon which he was trapped, an endless cycle of confusions and allusions. Which was probably closer to the truth than most realized.
“That’s Joe South playing guitar on ‘Memphis Blues Again’,” recalls Al Kooper. “I was in awe of his abilities, so I was excited to be in the room with him. He was fantastic, he has that sort of hammering-on style that Curtis Mayfield and Reggie Young have. I was very happy with the organ on that, too, it has a lot of spontaneity. I think there’s some lovely interplay between us on this one—that’s where, I think, the organ and guitar are most perfectly matched. I heard it again recently and went, ‘Wow!’ Usually I go ‘Oww!’.”
One of the album’s jokier cuts, ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’ is a plodding 12-bar blues satirizing the superficiality of fashion—and, by extension, the emptiness of materialism in general—a cogent subject for Dylan’s caustic attentions in the style-obsessed ’60s. The absurd millinery in question is exactly the kind of ludicrous garment found in fashion one day and out the next, as the industry hurried to supplant its previous designs. It’s clearly an amazing creation, balancing on one’s head “just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine”—which is to say, precariously, albeit cleverly, with an inordinate amount of time and attention spent on such a preposterous maneuver. And it’s powerfully effective, able to sway the affections even of Dylan’s doctor, an increasingly frequent figure in his songs.
Dylan had recently experienced the transient attractions of materialism at first hand, when, having been greatly impressed by John Lennon’s 22-room Weybridge mansion on a visit there during his 1965 UK tour, he went out and bought a 31-room place of his own upon his return to America. “I bought one just as soon as I got back from England,” he told Robert Shelton. “And it turned into a nightmare!” Also on that trip to England, he had demonstrated a remarkably mature (though ultimately mistaken) grasp of the transience of his own position and the ephemeral, fashion-based nature of fame in general, in an interview with Maureen Cleave of the London Evening Standard. “I’ve seen all these crazes come and go,” he told her, “and I don’t think I’m more than a craze. In a coupla years, I shall be right back where I started—an unknown.” As it turned out, his appeal proved rather more enduring than the eponymous leopard-skin pillbox hat.
The album credits specifically singled out Bob Dylan as lead guitarist on this track, but while the slightly shaky guitar introduction (center-right in the stereo mix) may be by Dylan, the piercing lines coming primarily from the left channel (with a little spillage caught on the right channel microphone), including the solo break, are undoubtedly Robbie Robertson’s work—as, perhaps, was the song’s Chicago-blues format.
“Bob liked blues singers, but it was a different blues background to mine,” Robertson told me. “His was more folk-blues, like the Reverend Gary Davis and Blind Lemon Jefferson, and I was listening more to the Chicago blues, via the Mississippi Delta—[Howlin’] Wolf and Muddy [Waters] and [Little] Walter, those people. I wasn’t as drawn to acoustic music as he was—I’d been playing electric guitar since I was quite young, so it was more attractive to me. But when Bob and I were spending so much time together on tour, a lot of the time we would get a couple of guitars and just play music together, and in the course of that, we were trading a lot of our musical backgrounds: he was turning me on to things, and I was turning him on to things, and this trading of ideas helped us a bit in the way we approached music, both live and on record.”
In May 1967, the track became the fifth single taken from Blonde On Blonde, though its hardcore Chicago style proved too tough for most people’s tastes, and it failed to chart on either side of the Atlantic. Perhaps it might have fared better if a later version of the song had been released instead. Al Kooper explains: “In the studio, besides the Hammond organ, there was also a Lowery organ, which has some great sound effects, including a doorbell that went “ding-dong!” There was one version of ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-box Hat’ where it started with “ding-dong!” and the band yelled out “Who’s there?” and then it went into the song. It was great! Too bad they didn’t use it…”
The euphonious lilt of ‘Just Like A Woman’, with Dylan’s sly croon borne as if in a sedan chair upon the delicate triplets of acoustic guitar and piano, disguises one of his more controversial songs. In the ground swell of feminist liberation which followed the counter-cultural changes of the late 1960s, Dylan was roundly condemned by some feminist commentators for the song’s unflattering portrait of its subject, and the implication in the chorus that grasping, whinging and weakness were “natural” female traits, along with a specific womanly manner of making love. This, however, seems a determinedly literal way of reading a song whose melody—the most overtly “feminine” of the album—and title—a sardonic appropriation of a classic misogynist exclamation—suggest a more ironic intention. It also ignores the fact that the song’s delimitations are not between man and woman, but between woman and girl: it’s a matter of maturity, rather than gender.
The song was widely believed—not least by her acquaintances among Andy Warhol’s Factory retinue—to be about the Factory pin-up girl Edie Sedgwick, a ’60s “ace face” and New York scenemaker with whom Dylan had a brief association in 1965. (Indeed, Robert Margoulef’s biopic of Edie, Ciao Manhattan, includes “Just Like A Woman” on its soundtrack.) A former Boston debutante and model, Sedgwick dedicated herself to meeting beautiful, talented people, with the hope that she herself might develop artistic talent of some sort, or, failing that, serve as an artist’s muse. Accordingly, she became one of Warhol’s iconic superstars, before transferring her attentions to Dylan, to whom she was introduced at the Kettle Of Fish bar on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village.
Her interest may not have been purely amicable; it was rumored that Albert Grossman was interested in developing her career—though eventually even he was forced to admit defeat as to the means by which to achieve this, when it transpired that Edie was a hopeless singer. A rumored Dylan/Edie movie, meanwhile, never got beyond the talking stage. Warhol himself was apparently annoyed at her defection, as well as paranoid about Dylan’s opinion of him: for some time, he apparently believed himself to be the chrome horse-riding diplomat in ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ (and Edie, therefore, its subject), despite the fact that the song had been written well before Dylan had met either Edie or Andy.
Edie’s growing infatuation with Bob was eventually broken early in 1966 when Warhol, who had learned that Dylan had been secretly married a month or two earlier, took great relish in breaking the news to her. She drifted away from both camps, but not before making an impression on Blonde On Blonde—she was included among the photographs in the original inner sleeve, and some (including Patti Smith, who wrote a poem about her) believe her to be the inspiration for the album title. It would certainly explain the song’s most often queried line, about “her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls,” which in the mid-’60s New York drug culture would have been recognized as references to marijuana, speed and pep-pills.
She eventually died of a barbiturate overdose in 1971, while ‘Just Like A Woman’ became one of Dylan’s most popular songs. Ironically, at a time when his publishers were kept increasingly busy collecting his royalties from the flood of cover-versions of his material—in September 1965, there were no fewer than eight of his songs in the US Top 40, half of them covers—‘Just Like A Woman’ was the only track from Blonde On Blonde to attract significant attention from other artists. It also became the song Dylan performed most often over the subsequent two decades. It’s not known for sure, however, exactly when during this period the song’s second line was changed from the recorded “Tonight is lost inside the rain” to the less evocative “Tonight as I stand inside the rain,” as in the collected Lyrics 1962–1985. In the Biograph annotations, Dylan half-remembers writing the song on the road, in a hotel in Kansas City “or something” the previous Thanksgiving, having declined an offer of dinner at someone’s house.
Apart from the intrusion of a quirky, nonsensical middle-eight concerning a badly-built, stilt-walking judge, this is perhaps the most straightforward Dylan lyric from the entire 1965/66 period, crystallizing the moment when a relationship finally cracks, the narrator tiring of the effort of dragging his lover along. In the Biograph annotations, Dylan reckons he must have written the song following a failed relationship “where, you know, I was lucky to have escaped without a broken nose.” Charlie McCoy repeated his party-trick of playing bass guitar and trumpet at the same time, though the real star is drummer Kenny Buttrey, setting a sprightly pace for the others to follow with some delightful snare-rolls.
The song continues the fascination with adverbial titles that Dylan had started with ‘Queen Jane Approximately’ and ‘Positively Fourth Street’, and which would continue through much of Blonde On Blonde’s third side. “He probably named all of them at the same time,” reckons Al Kooper. “They were called other things until he said, ‘Well, what are we gonna call this? ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’, ‘Obviously 5 Believers’, ‘Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35’… like that—they were pretty much all named at the same time, as I recall.”
Another slow, smoky blues, this one dominated by the beautifully evocative piano of Hargus “Pig” Robbins, who achieves a perfect balance between the song’s basic chord structure and the restrained trills which, aside from a brief wheeze of harmonica, serve as its sole embellishment. The song is all mood, a straightforward lament from a would-be lover kept dangling on his lady’s whims: she knows the strength of his ardor, but remains largely unmoved—though not completely inaccessible.
A couple of hallucinatory images—a crawling scorpion and a velvet door—add enigmatic color to Dylan’s plaint, while his situation is summed up in the final verse by reference to the eponymous Achilles: “How come you get someone like him to be your guard?” asks Dylan. The answer, of course, is to lead her suitor on, to keep him dangling on the vague promise of distant fulfillment. In classical mythology, Achilles was virtually impregnable, save for his heel, which eventually proved his downfall; so his presence as guard of her affections suggests that, while it may indeed be difficult for Dylan to break down her resistance, it is not completely impossible. But the task will be as difficult as catching Achilles in his one weak spot, and may take a while: for “temporary” as Achilles is, he’s still likely to be around a considerable time.
The chorus and part of the tune were salvaged from ‘Medicine Sunday’, a dour number attempted in late 1965 whose surviving minute-long fragment concludes “I know you want my lovin’/Mama but you’re so hard.” With a simple inversion of the first line, Dylan located the song’s true direction.
Containing one of the most oft-repeated of Dylan’s little life-lessons—the claim that “to live outside the law you must be honest,” which served as justification for many a bohemian existence—‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’ is one of the album’s simpler pleasures, from the Lowery organ figure with which Al Kooper opens proceedings, to the wailing harmonica solo which Dylan skates over the second middle-eight break, and the sexual jesting in the lyrics.
It was whipped up on the spot in the studio. “I can remember the ones where I had the time to show it to the band,” says Kooper, “and that wasn’t one of them. The real unsung hero on that track is [again] the drummer, Kenny Buttrey—the beat is amazing, and that’s what makes the track work.”
The lyrics are a spicy combination of sexual entendre, old folk reference and surreal intrusions by various members of Dylan’s repertory company of unusual characters, in this case the river-boat captain and the Persian drunkard. The first verse is as plain an expression of sexual frustration as Dylan penned: you can all but see his eyebrow cheekily raised as he sings about “beating on my trumpet” when “it gets so hard, you see.” The references to the railroad (and its gate) offer variations on the common train/sex metaphor, while the “six white horses” are a further blues image of sexual potency, appearing both in Blind Lemon Jefferson’s ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’—recorded by Dylan on his debut album—and in ‘Coming Round The Mountain’, the traditional song later covered by Dylan and The Band as one of the (unreleased) Basement Tapes numbers.
A strange combination of the desultory and the surreal, ‘Fourth Time Around’ describes a romantic encounter of symbolic emptiness, whose narrative, tossed this way and that by the quirky gusts of imagery, drifts along with as little volition as its protagonists’ actions. At times, it seems as if Dylan is simply rhyming whatever slips into his mind, following the story rather than dictating its course, even as it slides between verses, courtesy of an outrageously elongated “He-errrr” whose length is further exaggerated by comparison with the clipped brevity of the ensuing “Jamaican rum.”
Musically, the song stands apart from the rest of Blonde On Blonde by dint of its lightness and delicacy, Dylan’s vocal and wistful harmonica riding the rippling Spanish arpeggios of Wayne Moss and Charlie McCoy’s twin acoustic guitars. “Those guitars playing in harmony, that’s pure Nashville,” says Al Kooper. “People don’t think like that anywhere else.”
John Lennon allegedly thought the song was a parody of The Beatles’ ‘Norwegian Wood’, which appeared in December 1965 on their Rubber Soul album. “I thought it was very ballsy of Dylan to do ‘Fourth Time Around’,” recalls Kooper. “I asked him about it—I said, it sounds so much like ‘Norwegian Wood’, and he said, ‘Well actually, ‘Norwegian Wood’ sounds a lot like this! I’m afraid they took it from me, and I feel that I have to, y’know, record it.’ Evidently, he’d played it for them, and they’d nicked it! I said, ‘Aren’t you worried about getting sued by The Beatles?’ and he said, ‘They couldn’t sue me!’” And indeed, they didn’t.
The fourth and last of Blonde On Blonde’s Chicago-blues workouts (after ‘Pledging My Time’, ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’ and ‘Temporary Like Achilles’), ‘Obviously 5 Believers’ is the closest the album comes to an out-and-out rocker. Save for the apparently arbitrary references to “fifteen jugglers” (presumably from the stock circus company with which Dylan populated his songs) and the “five believers” of the title, it’s a basic love moan that steams along on Robbie Robertson’s hot-rod lead guitar, with Charlie McCoy’s harmonica fills serving as links between the verses.
“I think that was the track I did that got everybody to accept me,” reckons Robbie Robertson. “It’s a funny thing in Nashville, it was very clique-ish: the musicians that played on sessions there didn’t like any outsiders coming in, and because Bob Johnston had already got these guitar players in there, when I came along it was kind of like, ‘What do we need him for?’—nobody said that, but you could feel that kind of a vibe.”
“When we played live,” Robertson explains, “Bob would give me a lot of guitar solos—it was kind of a new experience for him, to have somebody he could just look over at, and they’d come out wailing; and when we were recording in Nashville, it was the same thing: he’d sing a couple of verses then look over at me, and I’d come out wailing! And it was at that point that the guys in Nashville accepted me, because I was doing something that none of them did, so I don’t think they felt I was treading on their territory. They became quite friendly after that. I suppose the proof was in the pudding with these guys, that if you were doing something musically that they respected, then they respected you.”
‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’ took up the entire fourth side of Blonde On Blonde, a distinction rare even in the habitually elongated arena of improvised jazz, and unprecedented in pop music. For all that, it was only about the same length as ‘Desolation Row’, around the eleven-minute mark; but Dylan evidently wanted the song to stand alone, considering it at the time “the best song I’ve ever written.”
A love song in five lengthy stanzas, it has a measured grace and stately pace that seems as much funeral procession as wedding march, with a depth of devotion absent from Dylan’s work since ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit’. Though the song has more than its fair share of enigmatic imagery, there’s no trace here of the jokey nihilism and existential absurdity that marked out Highway 61 Revisited and much of the rest of Blonde On Blonde. This time around, clearly, it’s serious.
In 1976, Dylan finally confirmed what everyone had known all along, when he admitted “Stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel/Writin’ ‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’ for you” in his song ‘Sara’, from the Desire album. The late rock critic Lester Bangs poo-pooed this explanation with characteristic bravado in Creem magazine, claiming “I have it on pretty good authority that Dylan wrote ‘Sad Eyed Lady’, as well as about half of the rest of Blonde On Blonde, wired out of his skull in the studio, just before the songs were recorded, while the session men sat around waiting on him, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer.”
There seems no reason to doubt either of these claims—the musicians were certainly kept hanging around while Dylan finished the song but, equally, he was known to work and re-work his more important songs for some time before recording them, and most of that work was probably done back in New York, before the Nashville sessions. But whatever the circumstances of its evolution, there is no doubting that the song’s subject is Sara Lowndes, whom Dylan had married in a secret ceremony on November 22, 1965. Even relatively close friends were unaware of their marriage, and Dylan contrived to keep it under wraps for as long as possible—two days after the event, he answered an interviewer’s query about the possibility of him settling down, getting married and having children with a brazenly disingenuous “I don’t hope to be like anybody. Getting married, having a bunch of kids, I have no hope for it.”
It’s perhaps an indication of the depth of his devotion that he conspired to shield Sara from the public eye in a way which didn’t apply to his other female friends. Their relationship, it appears, had been conducted along such lines right from the start: Joan Baez’s sister Mimi Fariña recalled overhearing Dylan making a secret date with another woman —whom she later realized must have been Sara—mere minutes after Baez had departed from a weekend get-together up at Woodstock shortly before the April 1965 UK Tour; and more recently, Edie Sedgwick (see entry for ‘Just Like A Woman’) was shocked to find out that the young pop rebel she had been courting was actually a happily married man.
Short, dark-haired and, indeed, sad-eyed, Sara had been married before, to Playboy chief Victor Lowndes—the “magazine husband” referred to in the final verse—but had since set about building a new life of her own. She appears to have been the perfect marital foil for Dylan, posing no threat to his ego and bearing him a string of children in quick succession. Possessed of a quiet but unimposing fortitude, she furnished him with a much-needed oasis of calm and sincerity away from the high-octane hurly-burly and habitual deceit of the entertainment industry.
There is a similar nocturnal feel to the song as there is to ‘Visions Of Johanna’, and Al Kooper confirms that it was recorded at around three or four in the morning, after Dylan had kept the musicians on hold through the evening while he finished off the song. Charlie McCoy, bassist on the track, recalled wondering “what in the hell this guy was trying to pull” as they all sat around in the basement recreation room, playing ping-pong and drinking coffee. Used to being paid by the hour for three-hour sessions, by eight in the evening they were registering perplexity, and by four in the morning they were half-asleep when Dylan called them upstairs to play.
They had been surprised when ‘Visions Of Johanna’, cut the previous day, had stretched beyond the seven-minute mark, but as ‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’ progressed, they began to wonder if the marathon song would ever finish. Dylan had given them only the sketchiest of outlines, and as each verse moved toward its chorus, they instinctively wound up the power, anticipating a conclusion, only to have to rein it all back in again as he began yet another verse. “People were looking at their watches and squinting at each other as if to say, ‘What is this—what the hell’s going on here?’” drummer Kenny Buttrey told Bob Spitz. “I have to admit, I thought the guy had blown a gasket, and we were basically humoring him.” Fatigued, they tried to concentrate on their playing, desperate not to make a mistake and have to go through the whole song again.
Extraordinarily, the song was cut in one perfect take—a glowing testament to the abilities of these Nashville cats. With Kooper’s organ adding wistful flourishes to Hargus Robbins’ rhapsodic, rolling piano, and Buttrey’s hi-hat keeping discreet time through the quiet passages, it remains a masterful piece of work, suffused with a weary resignation which seemed to signal the conclusion not just to Blonde On Blonde, but to a whole era. Nobody, however, could foresee the form that conclusion would take.