Dylan Revisited: Blonde on Blonde (1966) - part 1

The final part of Dylan's classic mid-60's trilogy, rock's first double album is a monumental pop record.

This is a series by DylanRevisited based on former Twitter threads, now available here in an easier to read and longer lasting format.

Five of the songs on Blonde on Blonde feature a bridge. By my count, just one – Ballad of a Thin Man – does on Bob Dylan’s previous two albums combined. Which makes me think that Dylan wanted his seventh LP to be more of a pop record.

And it’s not just the bridges. Blonde on Blonde has more sing-along choruses than before and the lyrics are more direct expressions of love, longing and leaving. The core of Blonde on Blonde is pop music. But this is Dylan, so the result is naturally unconventional.

I Want You is about as conventional as Dylan gets. Sure, the verses are filled with oddball characters who could be castoffs from Highway 61 Revisited. But the chorus? “I want you so bad” – jeez, just go ahead and say what you feel Bob.

In his early black and white days, Dylan wrote topical songs that were sincere and forthright. But his love songs back then were layered with light and shade. On Don’t Think Twice, you know it really isn't Alright. Of course, that was more of a breakup than a love song, as is the first recording that Dylan completed for Blonde on Blonde.

One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later) is an apology of sorts for the end of an affair and the mistreatment that occurred within it. Joan Baez is a likely target for the contrition after Dylan's 1965 UK tour, during which she felt suddenly ostracised. But as we’ll see with most of Blonde on Blonde's love songs, Sooner or Later also functions as part of a collective address to all of Dylan’s former lovers.

If the lyrics stemmed from an ill-fated relationship, Sooner or Later’s recording was also born of frustration. In January 1966, Dylan was in Columbia's Studio A in New York with most of the Hawks and a few other players, but not getting near the sound he wanted.

Sooner or Later took 19 takes though to be fair to the musicians, the song Dylan turned up with was half-baked, without a hook and with ever-evolving lyrics. Eventually, the group found its groove and crafted a classic together.

The highlight of Sooner or Later is Paul Griffin’s piano playing, which begins to build in the lead-up to each chorus before letting loose as Dylan sings the title (in reverse). Griffin had honed his skills in church and here his ecstatic playing has a divine touch.

Sooner or Later was released as a single a month later. It was only a modest hit in the UK and failed to make the Billboard 100. But Dylan’s biggest disappointment was with the rest of the New York sessions, where he tried and failed to capture several other songs.

Dylan had a particular sound in his head – a specific quality that would eventually crystalize on Blonde on Blonde’s quintessential pop song, I Want You. But as he prepared for yet another tour, it remained out of reach.

The problem, Dylan decided, was the other musicians. So producer Bob Johnston came up with a solution that would unearth that elusive tone. It was time for Bob Dylan to take his pop songs to the home of country music.

Al Grossman didn’t want Bob Dylan to record Blonde on Blonde in Nashville and barked at Bob Johnston, “Suggest it one more time and you’re fired.” But with Dylan doubtful about whether his New York musicians could help him capture his inner music, the producer put his job on the line.

Johnston risked the wrath of Grossman by once again conveying the calibre of the players he knew in Nashville. Dylan was intrigued. It helped that he already knew one of them – Charlie McCoy, who showed up during the recording of Desolation Row, picked up a guitar and improvised the lush Latin licks that decorate Highway 61 Revisited’s closing track.

Showing up and nailing a song is what these Nashville musicians did for a living. A typical session lasted three hours, in which time the band would expect to complete half a dozen songs. Day one with Dylan would prove to be anything but typical.

Some of Nashville finest session players went to Columbia’s Studio A in the city at 2pm on Feb 14th 1966, signed their union cards and…sat around waiting. Dylan’s flight was delayed and when he finally arrived after 6pm, he went straight to his hotel to finish writing lyrics.

The musicians spent more than six hours getting paid good money to play cards and ping-pong. Though Dylan’s regular collaborator Al Kooper may have regretted cutting short his first ever menage á trois in order to make it to Nashville on time.

The first Nashville session finally got underway after 9pm with Fourth Time Around. After a few takes Kooper nervously noted that Dylan’s homage to / pointed dig at The Beatles sounded so like Norwegian Wood, the Fab Four might sue.

Dylan wasn’t worried, assuring the organ player that it was The Beatles who were copying him. When John Lennon heard Fourth Time Around, he assumed lines like “I never asked for your crutch, now don’t ask for mine” were caustic warnings against imitating Dylan's style.

Whether Fourth Time Around is a Beatles piss-take or homage is ultimately less interesting than hearing how Dylan and this group of musicians he’d never played with before, gradually coalesced to create a light, delicate song.

A particular highlight of Fourth Time Around is the acoustic guitar arpeggios played by Wayne Moss and Charlie McCoy. Once again, like on Desolation Row, McCoy imbues a Dylan song with an unexpectedly vibrant Latin feel.

Dylan and his band would later blast through several superb takes of Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat, a song initially attempted in New York. Though the singer was content with these fresh Nashville efforts, the master would wait for another day.

Finally retiring late that night, the Nashville musicians were astonished by Dylan’s lack of productivity. Yet the third song they played that day showed they were dealing with a different kind of talent.

During those frustrating Blonde on Blonde sessions in New York, Bob Dylan tried 14 takes of a song slated as Freeze Out. Not only was he was still working on the lyrics of what would eventually become Visions of Johanna, he was unhappy with the music coming his studio band.

Drummer Bobby Gregg’s struggles to land on a satisfactory tempo were especially exasperating. Johnston’s solution to Dylan’s diagnosis was proved more than correct by the Nashville session that captured the master take of Visions of Johanna.

After a brief harmonica intro, Kenny Buttrey introduces a stuttering snare, which soon settles into a perfectly paced march that keeps the song’s midnight meanderings on track.

Buttrey’s tempo is more than ably supported by Joe South’s thrumming bass line that Al Kooper described as “very important” to the song’s rhythm. Meanwhile, Kooper’s organ flickers and shivers, illuminating the shadows cast by Visions of Johanna’s nocturnal milieu.

The story goes that Dylan originally wrote Visions of Johanna during the blackout that affected most of the US northeast in late 1965. As ever with Dylan, this fact has been contested by some and never fully confirmed by the man himself.

But the legend is worth printing because it fits with Visions of Johanna’s feel of the night, of regular life suspended, hanging hesitantly somewhere outside the glow of candles and whispering voices.

The song’s strange characters are inert, uncertain, waiting – like Beckett’s pair of mystery tramps – for something to happen. Even the narrator is continually distanced from the reality in front of him by “these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind”.

Who is Johanna and why does Dylan keep refocusing on her despite the more palpable presence of the delicate, mirror-like Louise? Joan Baez thought it might be her given their partly shared names and that she was in the audience when Dylan first performed the song.

Naturally, Dylan wasn’t telling, nor did he deign to explain the song’s other enigmas:

“Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule”

“The ghost of ‘lectricity howls in the bones of her face”

“Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial”

Whatever they mean, Visions of Johanna’s words are intoxicatingly inexplicable and charmingly mischievous. This is the most inviting, least sinister of the worlds Dylan created during this era. You wouldn’t mind if the lights never came back on.

I first heard Visions of Johanna on the Biograph compilation, which was a solo acoustic cut from the infamous 1966 UK tour. The song really suits this spare, quiet arrangement.

So, it was remarkable when I later heard what the full band added to the atmosphere on the Blonde on Blonde version. Aside from the stately rhythm section and Kooper’s organ, Visions of Johanna is also laced by gorgeous blues licks from Robbie Roberston’s guitar.

Dylan had told the floundering New York players that only Robertson should rock. That's what happens in Nashville, as the band’s delicate, considered playing provides a compelling foundation while Robertson’s magnetic notes both sustain and disrupt the story’s measured spell.

Though initially intimidated by the Nashville players, Visions of Johanna was Robertson’s impressive first impression. He would ascend even further in their estimation as Blonde on Blonde took shape.

The Hawk’s guitarist was a road warrior, much more used to strutting on stage than sitting confined to a studio. When Dylan invited Robertson to record Blonde on Blonde in Nashville, he was nervous about playing alongside the local session talent

Robertson had been in New York when Dylan failed to capture a satisfactory take of Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat. He endured some frustration during day one in Nashville when the new group also tried multiple versions of this relatively simple song.

But with solid progress happening on other tracks, Dylan was happy to park Leopard-Skin until the second set of Nashville recording sessions for Blonde on Blonde. These took place in March 1966, after Robertson and Dylan had left the city for yet another series of live dates.

Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat uses the template laid down by Lightnin’ Hopkins' Automobile Blues to once again disparage that socialite type so brutally rebuked on Like a Rolling Stone.

The titular headgear was famously worn by Jackie Kennedy, so Dylan may also have intended some broader social satire. But his target has taken a new lover, so the scorn is traced with envy and regret that he’s not the one donning the hat in an unexpectedly exposed garage.

In these second sessions, Dylan’s Nashville crew really hit the levels of lively driving blues required by the song, while the increasingly assured Robertson tears it up on guitar.

With Dylan, Robertson and Al Kooper becoming ever more comfortable with the Nashville players, the ensemble took just two takes to master the swaggering Chicago blues of Pledging My Time. Based on the tremendous It Hurts Me Too by Elmore James, Blonde on Blonde’s second tracks echoes that song’s theme of waiting for a woman who is currently with another lover.

An overdub allows Dylan to use his harmonica in an immediate call-and-response with his own vocals. But the main man’s dual prominence is matched by Robertson’s fiery licks and a stomping piano from Hargus ‘Pig’ Robbins.

Not to be outdone, Dylan ends Pledging My Time with a screeching harmonica solo that amplifies the lyrical distress and devotion. At the other end of the album, we finally get to hear Charlie McCoy play his preferred instrument and his style is a marked contrast.

Inspired by Memphis Minnie’s Me and My Chauffeur Blues, Obviously Five Believers is a fun platform for McCoy's controlled bluesy blowing. Dylan urged his band to get the song done quickly and, after an initial breakdown, they nailed it in four takes.

If Dylan didn't seem too fussed about Obviously Five Believers, it proved an extremely significant song for Robbie Robertson. He later said that his solos on the song earned him the full respect of his Nashville counterparts.

That was quite an achievement for Robertson, given the calibre of these guys and the other musicians they played with. I’ll explore more of the songs and the characters who played on them in part two of my revisit to Dylan’s epic double album.

DylanRevisited is a Twitter (or X if you must) account where writer and longtime Dylan fan Colm Larkin revisits Bob Dylan's back catalogue one album/bootleg/live record at a time.

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