Bob Dylan

The 1965 Newport Folk Festival: Bob Dylan, America's most beloved young folksinger, shows up flanked by three-fifths of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (including the outstanding guitarist Mike Bloomfield) and starts firing off volleys of electric music at a stunned audience, made up mostly of folk purists. Within minutes the stage becomes a battleground, and Dylan is forced to leave after three songs; he returns a few minutes later to deliver, in strict acoustic form, a prophetic “It's All Over Now, Baby Blue.”

Despite the flood of criticism raining down on him, Dylan pushes ahead 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 more than once tips over into collective psychodrama. 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, beating “Freak Out” by Frank Zappa to the punch by a few months, and marks the definitive shift from the era of the 45 rpm single to that of the 33 rpm LP; after “Blonde On Blonde,” the album could no longer be seen as a mere collection of singles, nor as a string of filler tracks padding out whichever hit single happened to be on offer, but would instead become the unified, indivisible product of an artist's mind and soul. Thus begins, in effect, the magical era of the concept album.

But the true Copernican revolution Dylan pulled off was in the lyrics, which up to that point had been rock music's weak spot: they abandoned the register of protest song and became hermetic, metaphysical and visionary. The songs on "Blonde On Blonde" are about love, but they get there through a cascade of citations and references ranging from Shakespeare to Plato, from the symbolist poetry of Rimbaud to old songs by the pioneers of the Appalachian Mountains; moreover, the lyrics very often spring from free mental association of images ("Visions Of Johanna" is emblematic in this respect) and carry a learned, intellectual tone that was truly unusual for the era.

From a musical standpoint, with "Blonde On Blonde", recorded in Nashville with the help of musicians of the calibre of Robbie Robertson and Al Kooper (whose organ is the album's absolute protagonist), Bob Dylan definitively 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 swaggering lope of "Rainy Day Women No.s 12 & 15", a sort of lunatics' blues complete with Barnum circus trumpets, raucous voices in the background, and a Dylan more unhinged than ever; the lyrics, censored more or less everywhere, offer double meanings alluding to drug use (the phrase "Rainy Day Women" stands in for what we'd call a "joint"). The Duluth minstrel is now dead and buried. A shrill harmonica introduces the slow, visceral blues of "Pledging My Time", which sounds as though it stepped straight out of the grooves of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band's "East-West". In "Visions Of Johanna", Dylan, like Alice, passes through the looking glass and surrenders to a stream of consciousness; the hallucinated visions of love running through the song's five verses, together with Kooper's visionary organ accompaniment, creep insidiously into the labyrinths of the mind and plunge the listener into a sublime state of hypnotic trance. Without doubt the album's masterpiece, a flight of imagination soaring toward infinity.

The following "One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)" delivers one of the record's most intense moments, thanks to Robbie Robertson's guitar embroidery and gusts of organ, before exploding into its amphetamine-charged chorus. The catchy, buoyant "I Want You" (the album's biggest hit) is beautiful, colourful and full of evocative touches, like a rainbow after a rainy afternoon. Moving in the same ironic register as "Rainy Day Women No.s 12 & 15" is "Leopard-skin Pill-box Hat", an unbridled homage to rock 'n' roll's founding fathers. "Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again" is one of Dylan's apocalyptic galleries of assorted humanity, in the vein of "Desolation Row".

Next comes the sweet "Just Like A Woman", a classic, elegant folk-rock ballad built on a simple guitar progression and dotted with piano touches and Kooper's understated organ; in the lyrics, Dylan pokes ironic fun 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 vibrant blues of "Most Likely You Go Your Way And I'll Go Mine", a desolate dialogue between two lovers who have reached the end of the road.

One of the compositional high points of "Blonde On Blonde" is undoubtedly the crackling "Absolutely Sweet Marie", launched into orbit by Al Kooper's majestic organ riff and the fluid flow of the instrumentation, with Kenneth Buttrey's fine drumming particularly notable. The 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 intensely powerful minutes of "Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands", which, in this writer's humble opinion, is simply the most beautiful love song in the history of popular music: a poignant folk serenade of disarming, ingenious 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 the obsession of songwriters the world over, and which, above all, remains precious proof of how rock music can transform itself into Art with a capital A.

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29/10/2006