Bob Dylan

The anniversary

Sixty years of the best Dylan of the Sixties. A perhaps unmatched masterpiece and the peak of Mister Zimmerman's golden decade, "Blonde On Blonde" – released on June 20, 1966 – turns 60 while fully retaining its historical weight: that of a cornerstone in the musical evolution leading to modern songwriting. Recognized as one of the greatest albums of all time, as well as the first significant double album in rock history – beating "Freak Out" by Frank Zappa to the punch by a month – "Blonde On Blonde" marks the definitive shift from the era of the 45 to that of the 33. Complete with the blessing of the charts: number 9 on the US Billboard 200, number 3 in Britain. But the real seal of approval would come from Dylan himself: "The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album," he would say in 1978, in a famous Playboy interview. "It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. Metallic and bright gold. That's my sound. I haven't been able to succeed in getting it all the time. Mostly I've been on the road, so I've had to settle for whatever equipment was available."

Everything about "Blonde On Blonde" is magical and perfect, including the famous cover photo, spread across both outer sides of the double LP: a snapshot taken by Jerry Schatzberg, showing Bob Dylan slightly out of focus, leaning against a wall, wearing a brown suede leather jacket and a scarf knotted around his neck, staring into the camera with a mildly irritated expression. In the original release, a photograph of actress Claudia Cardinale also appeared, included without her permission; it would be removed by an obliging Columbia two years later, to the delight of collectors who own the extremely rare copies of the original version.
"Blonde On Blonde" is the fruit of a particularly intense period in the great Dylanesque saga. In 1965, unbeknownst to almost everyone, the Duluth minstrel had married model Sara Lownds, whom he'd met the previous year in New York (yes, she's the "Sara" of the gorgeous ballad included on "Desire," 1976). In January 1966 their first child, Jesse, was born. While his life was changing so rapidly, Dylan decided to go back into the studio to follow up a feat like "Highway 61 Revisited," which had reached number three on the American charts, and thereby close out the so-called "electric trilogy" that had begun with the other album released in 1965, "Bringing It All Back Home."

Meanwhile, his legend was also traveling at 45 rpm. After "Like A Rolling Stone," in fact, Dylan had churned out two more singles in quick succession: a resentment-soaked "Positively 4th Street" and the more predictable "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" But with his new album Dylan wanted to bring to fruition the sound he'd been chasing ever since he'd decided to pick up an electric guitar: "a thin, wild mercury sound, metallic and bright," precisely. An alchemical solution made of harmonica, organ, guitar and piano, a philosopher's stone touching on blues, pop, folk and rock.
Unsatisfied with the early New York sessions, Dylan was persuaded by producer Bob Johnston to move to Nashville to record the album with a handful of local session musicians. In the home of country music, Dylan arrived once again accompanied by Al Kooper, but this time alongside him was a new guitarist, Robbie Robertson, who had already been active since the early Sixties with Ronnie Hawkins's Hawks, and who had taken Bloomfield's place on stage since the end of August 1965. Once again, the recording sessions were dominated by absolute spontaneity, with the musicians working day and night to keep up with Dylan's pace and the chase of his verses.

"Blonde On Blonde" sets sail aboard Rimbaud's drunken boat, casting off the moorings of rationality and handing the helm over to the beat poetry of Kerouac and Ginsberg. If, musically, it's the crowning achievement of the quest begun by the electric Dylan, poetically it lacks the same lucid tension of "Highway 61 Revisited": Dylan's verses venture into a dreamlike, surreal vertigo, where mules wear jewels and binoculars, railroad men are bloodthirsty and the Mona Lisa seems to have stepped out from Marcel Duchamp's iconoclastic brush. A journey that reaches its furthest shore in the sleepless hallucinations of "Visions Of Johanna," with the organ's silver thread stitching together Dylan's hypnotic voice, and the sound of the harmonica marking the passing of the verses along with the chiming of the cymbals. The visions take hold of the mind, take the place of the self, blow the consciousness apart: and in the end the visions are all that's left.

The album opens with the boozy chorus and the ramshackle fanfare of "Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35," which matched the success of "Like A Rolling Stone" by reaching number two on the American charts, despite being banned by many radio stations for its drug references. A veiled sensuality runs through tracks like "Just Like A Woman" and "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat," inspired, according to biographers, by a relationship Dylan had with Andy Warhol's favorite actress, Edie Sedgwick. For the arpeggio of "4th Time Around" he even lifts the melody from the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood." And the light dance of "I Want You," with its floating rhythm and romantic yearning, is about as close to a pop song as Dylan had ever written up to that point.
"To live outside the law, you must be honest," proclaims the Duluth songwriter in "Absolutely Sweet Marie." As if to say that the only consistency that doesn't condemn you to slavery is loyalty to the desires of your own heart. In the wake of "Highway 61 Revisited," there's no shortage of long, loose-reined rides like "Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again," nor of scorching blues like "Pledging My Time" and "Obviously Five Believers." But it's for the album's final side that Dylan reserves the most intimate of his dreams: "Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands," a mystical contemplation with a stilnovista breath in which eros is sublimated into agape, hiding, right from its title, a reference to his wife Sara Lownds. When Dylan, in the dead of night, summoned his fellow travelers to record it, no one knew it was a track of more than eleven minutes: so everyone kept playing as if suspended in an unreal dimension, bracing after every verse for an ending that never seemed to come. Dylan turns his back to the audience, an insolent smile on his lips. "Play it fuckin' loud!" he snaps at the band. The drums make their imposing entrance, quickly followed by the rest of the group. Dylan turns to the crowd with a theatrical gesture, as if to say "Here's what you've got coming." "Once upon a time, you dressed so fine…"

As soon as the recording of "Blonde On Blonde" was finished, Dylan went back on stage to embark on his first world tour. Al Kooper had left the scene, exasperated by the constant boos that accompanied the electric portion of every show, but in his place Dylan had the full Hawks lineup at his side, the core group that would become the Band. It's the beginning of another (unforgettable) chapter in the great Dylanesque saga. (Claudio Fabretti, Gabriele Benzing)

***

The milestone

Newport Folk Festival, 1965: Bob Dylan, America's most beloved young folksinger, shows up for the occasion backed by three-fifths of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (including the exceptional guitarist Mike Bloomfield) and starts firing off blasts of electric music at the stunned audience, made up mostly of folk purists. In no time at all the stage turns into a battlefield, and Dylan is forced to leave after three songs; he'll return a few minutes later to sing, in a strictly acoustic version, a prophetic "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue."

Despite the flood of criticism raining down on him, Dylan pushes forward with his electric turn, and in September 1965 records "Highway 61 Revisited," a thrilling electric blues album (save for the eleven acoustic minutes of "Desolation Row"), before embarking on a grueling world tour that on more than one occasion spills over into collective psychodrama. In the gaps between tour dates, "Blonde On Blonde" takes shape — the unsurpassed masterpiece of Dylan's art and a pivotal turning point in the evolution of rock music.

"Blonde On Blonde" is the first double album in history, arriving a few months ahead of Frank Zappa's "Freak Out," and it marks the definitive shift from the era of the 45 to the era of the 33 rpm LP; after "Blonde On Blonde," the album could no longer be conceived as a mere collection of singles, nor as a string of filler tracks padding out whatever hit single was on offer, but instead became the unified product, indivisible in its parts, of an artist's mind and soul. This, in effect, is the birth of the magical age of the concept album.

But the real Copernican revolution Dylan pulls off is in the lyrics — until then rock music's weak point — which abandon the register of the protest song and become hermetic, metaphysical and visionary. The songs on "Blonde On Blonde" are about love, but they get there through a cascade of quotations and references ranging from Shakespeare to Plato, from Rimbaud's Symbolist poetry to old songs by the pioneers of the Appalachian Mountains; what's more, the lyrics often spring from free mental association of images (emblematic in this sense is "Visions Of Johanna") and carry a learned, intellectual tone that was genuinely unusual for the time.

Musically, on "Blonde On Blonde" — recorded in Nashville with the help of musicians of the caliber of Robbie Robertson and Al Kooper (whose organ is the record's absolute protagonist) — Bob Dylan fully absorbs the folk-rock lesson of the Byrds, develops the electric blues of "Highway 61 Revisited," and builds a bridge toward the new psychedelic currents.

It opens with the lurching swagger of "Rainy Day Women No.s 12 & 15," a kind of lunatics' blues complete with Barnum circus trumpets, raucous voices in the background, and a Dylan more unhinged than ever; the lyrics, censored just about everywhere, are riddled with double meanings pointing to drug use (the phrase "Rainy Day Women" being a stand-in for what we'd call a "joint"). The minstrel from Duluth is by now dead and buried. A shrill harmonica introduces the slow, visceral blues of "Pledging My Time," which sounds as if it stepped straight out of the grooves of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band's "East-West." On "Visions Of Johanna," Dylan, like Alice, steps through the looking glass and surrenders to stream of consciousness; the hallucinated visions of love running through the song's five verses, paired with Kooper's visionary organ work, worm their way insidiously into the labyrinths of the mind and cast the listener into a sublime hypnotic trance. Without question the album's masterpiece, a soaring flight of imagination toward infinity.

The following "One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)" delivers one of the record's most intense moments, thanks to the filigree of Robbie Robertson's six-string and the gusts of organ, before exploding into its amphetamine-charged refrain. The catchy, buoyant "I Want You" (the album's biggest hit) is bright, colorful and full of charm, like a rainbow after a rainy afternoon. In the same ironic register as "Rainy Day Women No.s 12 & 15" comes "Leopard-skin Pill-box Hat," a wild-eyed tribute to rock 'n' roll's founding fathers. "Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again" is one of Dylan's apocalyptic parades of humanity, cut from the same cloth as "Desolation Row."

Next comes the sweet "Just Like A Woman," a classic, elegant folk-rock ballad built on a simple guitar figure and propped up by touches of piano and Kooper's unobtrusive organ; in the lyrics, Dylan takes an ironic jab at the fairer sex, which would land him in no small amount of trouble with the burgeoning feminist movement. The graceful "Just Like A Woman" gives way to the throbbing blues of "Most Likely You Go Your Way And I'll Go Mine," a bleak dialogue between two lovers who have reached the end of the road.

One of the compositional peaks of "Blonde On Blonde" is undoubtedly the fizzing "Absolutely Sweet Marie," launched into orbit by Al Kooper's majestic organ riff and the fluid drive of the arrangement, with Kenneth Buttrey's drumming standing out in particular. A Tex-Mex-style guitar arpeggio lends an air of ecstatic serenity to "4th Time Around," a dazed sequence of allegorical vignettes.

The album's ideal fourth side is taken up entirely by the eleven searing minutes of "Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands," which, in this writer's humble opinion, is simply the finest love song in the history of popular music: a heart-rending folk serenade of disarming, brilliant simplicity that leaves deep marks on the soul. To describe the song, I'll borrow the extraordinary words of rock critic Paul Nelson, who said of "Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands": "A celebration of woman as a work of art, as a religious figure, as an object of eternal majesty and wonder."

And so the curtain falls on an extraordinary album, one that over the years would become an obsession for songwriters the world over, and one that, above all, remains precious proof of how rock music can transform itself into Art with a capital A. (Andrea Fedeli)

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