Dylan Revisited: Blonde on Blonde (1966) - part 2
Concluding the revisit to the final part Dylan's epic double album masterpiece.
This is a series by DylanRevisited based on former Twitter threads, now available here in an easier to read and longer lasting format.
Just before Bob Dylan and his band of Nashville players were about to record Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35, Charlie McCoy suggested a new drum part for the song’s introduction. Drummer Kenny Buttrey quickly worked it out and soon Blonde on Blonde’s memorable opening was in place.
Earlier, Dylan had played the song on piano for producer Bob Johnston, who remarked that it sounded like a Salvation Army band. Next thing, McCoy was making late-night calls to his contacts, trying to rustle up a horn section.
Rainy Day Woman is the epitome of a group of musicians in full creative flow, firing out ideas and executing them with exuberance. They cut the track so quickly that Robbie Robertson missed the recording, having gone out for a pack of cigarettes.
The whole atmosphere of the recording is so raucous, with much laughter, screeching and whooping that tales of who imbibed what and when are routinely relayed and denied. Given the song's lyrics, this feels appropriate.
Rainy Day’s refrain of “everybody must get stoned” earned the single a ban on numerous radio stations, which didn’t prevent it reaching no. 2 in the U.S. Billboard chart. But while it’s obviously a knowing nod to drug taking, I also think the words run a little deeper.
Rainy Day Woman is a reaction to Dylan critics. They’ve stoned him (in the biblical sense) for not being the protest icon they need. But for him, doing what he believes in is something to be proud of. Better get stoned than be the one doing the stoning.
In Nashville, Dylan was once more following his own nose and inhaling the vibes of the players around him. While the wider rock world was looking to India and the American West coast, Dylan ploughed into country on Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again.
On the final master of Mobile each instrument weaves its way through the song’s seven minutes, forming a glorious coherent whole. But getting to this point was a struggle. Prefaced by waiting.
The Nashville players were getting used to Dylan spending hours at his hotel working on lyrics while they got paid to twiddle their thumbs. But a 4am call to start work followed by three hours on just one song must still have come as a surprise.
Stuck Inside of Mobile is another of those Dylan songs where the narrator is trapped in a strangely uncomfortable world filled with perplexing characters. I first heard it on the Hard Rain live album and it's remained a favorite since then.
The lyrics are such a mouthful that Dylan often struggled to squeeze them in to the tempo of the music. Over the long night’s 20 takes, the pace of the song changed repeatedly until the band finally settled on a country gallop that works with the words.
Though Mobile is a team triumph, it's worth highlighting the interplay of Al Kooper’s organ and Joe South’s guitar. This understanding between one of Dylan’s inner circle and a Nashville stalwart represents the alchemy that occurred from this blending of worlds in Studio A.
The man who most helped to mix this musical cocktail was Charlie McCoy, who directed Rainy Day Woman’s impulsive brass section and made another unique horn-based contribution to Blonde on Blonde.
On November 22, 1965, Bob Dylan married Sara Lownds under a Long Island oak tree. It was a quiet event that the wider world only learned about a few months later. Dylan’s new status can be felt on Blonde on Blonde’s love songs, but mostly in his typically unconventional way.
For a newly wedded guy, Blonde on Blonde is more about the end of past relationships, like Dylan is putting his exes to bed (so to speak). An example I discussed in part 1 is One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)’s potential parting shot to Joan Baez. Another is a companion piece that shares Sooner or Later’s theme of breakups and parenthetical title.
Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine) opens with a devastatingly dismissive opening line: “You say you love me and you’re thinking of me, but you know you could be wrong.” It also contains echoes of an older Dylan song like Don’t Think Twice with its bravado in the face of a relationship breaking down.
But here that bluster is not just in the lyrics, the music is inappropriately jaunty. This feeling mostly stems from Charlie McCoy’s brass playing. The multi-instrumentalist Nashville player contributes a bleating trumpet line on Most Likely. And if Al Kooper’s story is true, he played it in a most extraordinary way.
McCoy played bass guitar on Most Likely and when the brass was required, he picked up the trumpet and played both instruments simultaneously. Kooper recalled Dylan staring “at him in awe”.
I have a strong connection to Most Likely as the first Bob Dylan song I knowingly heard when as a young teen I decided to check out my older brother’s copy of the Before the Flood live album.
It’s also a song that’s stayed with Dylan, who made it a regular part of his Rough and Rowdy Ways setlists from 2021 to April 2024 and included it on Shadow Kingdom, his striking 2021 reinterpretation of his older songs.
There’s another parting of ways on Just Like a Woman where Dylan sings in one of his finest crooner moments: “I believe it’s time for us to quit”. The suggestion this was aimed at ex-lover Edie Sedgwick came from the wonderful line, "her fog, her amphetamine and her pearls."
But Just Like a Woman’s most interesting set of lyrics once more raises the spectre of Joan Baez: “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.”
While one of Dylan’s best-known songs, Just Like a Woman isn’t among my personal favorites. But the band’s playing is elegant, Charlie McCoy’s acoustic guitar arpeggios are gorgeous and there’s that great Dylan vocal. So, y’know, it’s still good.
If Just Like a Woman can be a little too leisurely, Absolutely Sweet Marie is enhanced by its strutting tempo, with Kenny Buttrey propelling a somewhat slight song to great heights with his punchy drum patterns.
Al Kooper said of Buttrey’s playing, “the beat is amazing, that’s what makes the track work”. Remarkably, the band nailed the master on just the second complete take.
It’s another song of lost love, or more accurately in this case, thwarted lust, as Dylan spouts of series of innuendos before moaning, “where are you tonight, sweet Marie?”.
If Dylan was using Blonde on Blonde to close the book on his past, he devotes the epic climax of the record to his future, as Sara finally takes centre stage.
It’s past 4am in Nashville where Bob Dylan and his sleepy band are partway through a song of indeterminate length. A tired Charlie McCoy is finding it hard to stay focused as Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ seemingly endless verses keep spilling out of the wide-awake singer.
For hours the musicians had waited in now-familiar fashion while Dylan worked relentlessly to embellish and refine an epic ode to his new wife. By the end of his endeavours, he would rate Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands as “the best song I ever wrote”.
Dylan’s song for Sara runs for more than 11 minutes, occupying an entire side of Blonde on Blonde's two vinyl discs – rock’s first major double album. But, as previously discussed, the love songs on the album’s other three sides seemed to be about anyone but his new wife.
We get hints of their story on Temporary Like Achilles, where Dylan sings of waiting in frustration for the person he’s in love with. “You know I want your lovin’ / Honey but you’re so hard”
This could reference that Sara was married to photographer Hans Lownds when she and Dylan first met, while he was with Joan Baez. The singer’s anguish on Achilles is accentuated by Hargus ‘Pig’ Robbins’ woozy piano that reels and lurches like a barroom full of heartbreak.
If the love interest in Temporary Like Achilles sounds irretrievably unavailable, the same was not true for Sara. She soon left her husband, and she and Dylan attended the wedding of her friend Sally Buehler and his manager, Al Grossman in late 1964.
Dylan didn't want to openly acknowledge this new relationship when his record label asked him to include a woman on the front of Bringing It All Back Home. Perhaps conscious of his Freewheelin’ frieze with Suze Rotolo, Dylan made the-now Sally Grossman his co-star.
Sara would soon be immortalised by Dylan as the woman with the “mercury mouth”, “eyes like smoke”, “face like glass” and “ghostlike soul”. Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands references her father’s "sheet metal" business, her “magazine husband” and her interest in “gypsy hymns”.
Dylan himself confirmed the subject of Blonde on Blonde’s epic finale a decade later, on another album closer, Sara: “Stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel / Writin’ Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands for you”.
In Nashville, Dylan had prepared his band to play Sad-Eyed Lady by mentioning two verses “then we’ll see where we go from there”. Drummer Kenny Buttrey recalled the musicians building after the second chorus assuming the song was about to end. But Dylan kept going.
At the end of five long verses and accompanying choruses, producer Bob Johnston thought the song was “one of the prettiest things I’d ever heard in my life”. Tom Waits would later compare it to Beowulf, saying “The song is a dream, a riddle and a prayer”.
Sad-Eyed Lady’s hypnotic, nocturnal mood keeps you engrossed throughout its long running time. Buttrey’s stuttering drums prod and rouse, Joe South’s bass is the steady tock of a midnight clock, while Al Kooper’s bleary organ weaves magic behind Dylan’s ceaseless singing.
But it's the words that enthrall and not just the florid depictions such as “warehouse eyes”, “matchbook songs” and “geranium kiss”. The constant repetition of “with” and “and” as the lady’s list of traits and travails unfolds creates anticipation for the next startling image.
When you listen to Blonde on Blonde on vinyl, the exclusivity of that fourth side adds to effect. Your immersion into the song and devotion to its subject is only interrupted by the cranking of the tone arm as it finally settles back to its resting place.
In 1966 Bob Dylan left the comforts of New York, where he had recorded all of his previous records, and headed to Nashville in search of a sound. Years later he’d describe it as “that thin, that wild mercury sound” and hail its exemplar as I Want You.
I Want You was recorded during Blonde on Blonde’s last session, much to the frustration of Al Kooper. The organist hung out in Dylan's Nashville hotel room, transcribing songs as the writer completed them, before teaching them to the musicians waiting at the studio.
Kooper loved I Want You and had come up with an arrangement that he was dying to try out. But every time he suggested recording the song, Dylan put him off, "just to bug him" according to Al.
When they finally got to I Want You, Kooper’s idea was blown out of the water when Wayne Moss played a 16-note run on his guitar during one of the takes. The astonished Kooper asked him if he could repeat the feat and when Moss did, they had found I Want You’s buoyant hook.
Like on Stuck Inside of Mobile, the various musicians play the song with remarkable cohesion. Over two months, Dylan and his band had melded in a fluid whole and crowned their last day of alchemy with the quicksilver sound you can hear on I Want You.
For Dylan, this was the purest expression of desire that he had yet committed to record. Those three simple words of the title are repeatedly sighed in the chorus before he adds the almost-adolescent “so bad”.
As with Temporary Like Achilles, it’s likely about the wait for Sara to separate from her husband. But now, he finally had two of those things he wanted: the woman he loved and the sound that had been resonating in his brain.
All Dylan needed next was to get some degree of normality back in his life. But at the completion of Blonde on Blonde, he was on the road again, off on that punishing UK tour where jeering audiences drove Dylan to distracted exhaustion.
What happened next became the stuff of legend. The mysterious motorcycle crash, the unclear injuries and the stark retreat from public view after five years of being one of the world’s most scrutinized icons.
But with Blonde on Blonde, Dylan left a record of such substance it could fill any void. Even the cover – an unconventionally out of focus image of the singer looking distant and pensive – incited speculation over its meaning.
Photographer Jerry Schatzberg recalled the shoot taking place outside during winter. He was so cold that his shivering hands struggled to keep the camera steady. Hence the occasional blurry shot, one of which Dylan decided should be the cover.
At the start of my epic revisit to Blonde on Blonde, I posited that Dylan was interested in making a pop record. If he believes that I Want You - the most commercial-sounding single of his career so far - was his sonic holy grail then maybe I’m not too far off.
Blonde on Blonde is a great pop album but it’s also so much more than that. In its twinning of New York and Nashville, the folk and rock stylings of its singer and the band’s country and Southern blues backgrounds, Dylan made a record that still sounds like nothing else.
Blonde on Blonde also marks the end of the first phase of Bob Dylan’s music journey. In just a few years he tore through popular culture, shifting from troubadour to protester, icon to pariah, folk singer to pop star.
We have reached the end of an era. But this is Bob Dylan. He gets more than one.
What do you think of Blonde on Blonde? Let me know in the comments.
P.S. If you want to go deeper into the background of Blonde on Blonde, I recommend Daryl Sanders’ comprehensive account, That Thin Wild Mercury Sound. It was an essential resource for this revisit.
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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