During the autumn and winter of 1965–66, after his electric show at the Newport Folk Festival in July and amid a crowded concert schedule, Dylan tried to cut his third album inside of a year at Columbia Records’ Studio A in New York with his newly hired touring band, the Hawks.
Reminiscences and scraps of official information have added up to a general story line. Nor do they offer clues about the album’s origins and evolution-including how its being recorded mostly in the wee, small hours may have contributed to its three A.M. Nobody, even Sinatra, gets it as good.” These descriptions are accurate, but neither of them applies to all the songs, nor to all of the sounds in most of the songs. Dylan’s organist and musical go-between Al Kooper has said that “nobody has ever captured the sound of three a.m. Years later, he famously commended some of the album’s tracks for “that thin, that wild mercury sound,” which he had begun to capture on his previous albums Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited-a sound achieved from whorls of harmonica, organ, and guitar. And with every appropriation, Dylan moved closer to a sound of his own.
The songs are rich meditations on desire, frailty, promises, boredom, hurt, envy, connections, missed connections, paranoia, and transcendent beauty-in short, the lures and snares of love, stock themes of rock and pop music, but written with a powerful literary imagination and played out in a 1960s pop netherworld.īlonde on Blonde borrows from several musical styles, including ’40s Memphis and Chicago blues, turn-of-the-century vintage New Orleans processionals, contemporary pop, and blast-furnace rock & roll.
At age twenty-four, Dylan, spinning on the edge, had a well-ordered mind and an intense, at times biting, rapport with reality. Blonde on Blonde might well have included a character named Napoleon xiv, and the album sometimes seemed a little crazy, but it was no joke (not even the frivolous “Rainy Day Women”) and it was hardly the work of a madman, pretended or otherwise. Such were the cultural antinomies of the time, as Bob Dylan crossed over to pop stardom. It would be Samuels’s last big recording and after July, Dylan would be convalescing from a serious motorcycle crash. 2 and by summer, “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” had reappeared as the opening track on the mysterious double album,īlonde on Blonde, by Bob Dylan, who said the song was about “a minority of, you know, cripples and orientals and, uh, you know, and the world in which they live.” Over Coppertone-slicked bodies on Santa Monica Beach and out of secluded make-out spots and shopping-center parking lots and everywhere else American teenagers gathered that summer, it seemed that, the ba-de-de- bum-de- bum announcing Dylan’s hit about getting stoned was blaring from car radios and transistor radios, inevitably followed by the ba-de-de- bum-de- bum announcing Jerry Samuels’s hit about insanity. That spring, an equally controversial single, with an eerily similar opening, had quickly hit No. His name was Jerry Samuels, but he billed himself as Napoleon the XIV, performing “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” The singer-songwriter likened the song, which really was a rap, to a sick joke. Over the lyrics about madness and persecution, or more likely because of it, the record shot to No. Some listeners thought the song too explicit, its subject of wild lunacy too coarse, even cruel several radio-station directors banned it. Text and images are copyrighted, please do not copy or redistribute.Īcross the Top 40 airwaves, an insistent drum beat led off a strange, new hit song. Published at The Band web site with permission from Oxford American Magazine. Sean Wilentz: Mystic Nights - The Making of Blonde on Blonde in Nashville Mystic Nights The Making of Blonde on Blonde in Nashville