name	Blonde on Blonde
type	Double album
artist	Bob Dylan
cover	Music blonde on blonde.jpg
released	Officially May 16, 1966 (possibly delayed until late June)
recorded	January 25, 1966, Studio A, Columbia Recording studios, New York; February 14–17 and March 8–10, 1966, Columbia Music Row Studios, Nashville, Tennessee
genre	folk rock, blues rock
length	71:23
label	Columbia
producer	Bob Johnston
last album	Highway 61 Revisited(1965)
this album	Blonde on Blonde(1966)
next album	Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits(1967)
misc	}}

Blonde on Blonde is American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan's seventh studio album, released in June 1966 by Columbia Records and produced by Bob Johnston. Recording sessions for the album commenced in New York in October 1965, with a plethora of backing musicians, including members of Dylan's live backing band, The Hawks, and continued until January 1966, but yielded only one track that would make it onto the final album—"One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)". At Johnston's suggestion, Dylan, accompanied by keyboard player Al Kooper and guitarist Robbie Robertson, moved to the CBS recording studios in Nashville, Tennessee. These sessions, augmented by some of Nashville's top session musicians, were more productive, and the album was successfully completed in March 1966.

Blonde on Blonde has frequently been regarded as the third part of Dylan's mid-1960s trilogy of rock albums, which commenced with Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. The album was the first significant double album in rock music. Featuring songs which combine a New York literary sensibility with the expertise of the Nashville session musicians, the music on this album has been described as operating on a grand scale, while the lyrics offer what one critic called "a unique blend of the visionary and the colloquial".

The album peaked at #9 on Billboard's Pop Albums chart in the US, eventually going double-platinum, while it reached #3 in the UK. It is ranked as the ninth greatest album of all time by both VH1 and Rolling Stone. The album spawned two singles which were US Top Twenty hits: "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" and "I Want You". Two further songs, "Just Like A Woman" and "Visions of Johanna", have been described as among Dylan's greatest compositions, and featured in the Rolling Stones 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list at No. 230 and No. 404 respectively.

Recording sessions

Background

After the release of the album Highway 61 Revisited at the end of August 1965, Dylan set about hiring a touring band. Guitarist Mike Bloomfield and keyboard player Al Kooper had backed Dylan, both on his new album and at Dylan's controversial electric debut at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Bloomfield chose not to tour with Dylan, preferring to remain with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Kooper backed Dylan at concerts at Forest Hills Stadium, in Queens, New York, on August 28, and at the Hollywood Bowl on September 3, and then informed Dylan he did not wish to tour with him. Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, was in the process of setting up a gruelling concert schedule which would keep Dylan on the road for the next nine months, touring the US, Australia, and Europe. Dylan contacted a group who were performing under the name Levon and the Hawks. The Hawks comprised four Canadian musicians: Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson, plus Levon Helm from Arkansas. They had come together as a band in Canada, backing US rocker Ronnie Hawkins. Two people had strongly recommended the Hawks to Dylan: Mary Martin, the executive secretary of Albert Grossman, and John Hammond, Jr., a blues singer who was the son of the record producer, John Hammond, the man who had signed Dylan to Columbia Records in 1961. The Hawks had backed Hammond, Jr. on his 1965 album So Many Roads.

Dylan rehearsed with the Hawks in Toronto on September 15, where they were playing a hometown residency at Friar's Club, and on September 24, they made their debut in Austin, Texas. Just two weeks later, encouraged by the success of their Texas performance, Dylan led the Hawks into Studio A of Columbia Records in New York City. Their immediate task was to record a hit single as the follow-up to "Positively 4th Street". But Dylan was already trying to formulate the shape of his next album, the third album he had begun that year on which he would be backed by rock musicians.

New York sessions

Producer Bob Johnston, who had overseen the successful completion of Highway 61 Revisited, started work with Dylan and the Hawks at Columbia Studio A, 799 Seventh Avenue, New York on October 5. They concentrated on a new arrangement of "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?", a song which had been recorded but rejected during sessions for Highway 61 Revisited. Three further songs were attempted, but none of them progressed beyond the half-ideas they had been to start with. Both the fragmentary "Jet Pilot" and "I Wanna Be Your Lover, a quasi-parody of the Beatles' "I Wanna Be Your Man", finally appeared on 1985's box-set retrospective, Biograph. Also attempted were two takes of "Medicine Sunday", a song that would later evolve into "Temporary Like Achilles".

On November 30, the Hawks joined Dylan again at Studio A, but with drummer Bobby Gregg replacing Levon Helm, who had tired of playing in a backing band and quit the group. They began work on a new composition, "Seems Like a Freeze-Out", which was later retitled "Visions of Johanna", but Dylan was not satisfied with the performances recorded that day. One of the November 30 recordings was eventually released on The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack in 2005. At this session, they successfully completed "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?". The song was released as a single in December, but only reached #58 on the US charts.

Dylan spent most of December in California, performing a dozen concerts with his band, and then took a break through the third week in January following the birth of his son Jesse. On January 21, 1966, he returned to Columbia's Studio A to record another long composition, "She's Your Lover Now", accompanied by the Hawks (this time with Sandy Konikoff sitting in on drums). Despite 19 takes, the session failed to yield any complete recordings. Dylan would not attempt the song again, but one of the outtakes from the January 21 session would ultimately appear 25 years later on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991. (Though the song breaks down at the start of the last verse, Columbia released it as the most complete take from the session.)

Around this time, Dylan became disillusioned about using the Hawks in the studio. He recorded more material at Studio A on January 25, backed by drummer Bobby Gregg, bassist William E. Lee, pianist Paul Griffin, and Al Kooper on organ; Robbie Robertson and Rick Danko were the only members of the Hawks playing on the session. Two more new compositions were attempted: "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" and "One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)". Dylan was satisfied with "One of Us Must Know"; the January 25 take was released as a single a few weeks later and was selected for the album.

Another session took place on January 27, this time with guitarist Robbie Robertson, bassist Rick Danko, Al Kooper, and drummer Bobby Gregg. Dylan and his band recorded "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" and "One of Us Must Know" again, but Dylan was not satisfied with the recorded performance of either song. Also at this session, Dylan attempted a rough performance of "I'll Keep It With Mine", a song which he had already recorded twice in demo form. The musicians added some tentative backing, and Heylin describes this rendition as cursory. The recording was ultimately released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 in 1991.

The shortage of new songs and the slow progress of the sessions contributed to Dylan's decision to cancel three further recording dates which had been scheduled. Six weeks later, Dylan confided to critic Robert Shelton, "Oh, I was really down. I mean, in ten recording sessions, man, we didn't get one song ... It was the band. But you see, I didn't know that. I didn't want to think that."

Move to Nashville

Frustrated by the slow progress of their recordings with the Hawks in New York, producer Bob Johnston suggested to Dylan that they move the recording sessions to Nashville. Johnston lived there and had extensive experience of working with Nashville session musicians. Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, was hostile to the idea: "Grossman came up to me and said 'If you ever mention Nashville to Dylan again, you're gone.' I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'You heard me. We got a thing going here'." Despite Grossman's hostility, Dylan agreed to Johnston's suggestion, and preparations were made to record the album at the Columbia "A" studio on Music Row, Nashville, in February 1966.

In addition to Kooper and Robertson, who accompanied Dylan from New York, Johnston recruited harmonica player, guitarist and bassist Charlie McCoy, guitarist Wayne Moss, guitarist and bassist Joe South, and drummer Kenny Buttrey. At Dylan's request, Johnston removed the baffles—partitions separating the musician—so that there was "an ambience fit for an ensemble". Buttrey credited the disitinctive sound of the album to Johnston's re-arrangement of the studio, "as if we were on a tight stage, as opposed to playing in a big hall where you're ninety miles apart." Furthermore, Al Kooper has explained that Dylan had a piano installed in his Nashville hotel room; there Kooper would play piano for Dylan, to aid the songwriting process, and then would teach the tunes to the studio musicians at the recording sessions.

On the first Nashville session on February 14, Dylan successfully recorded "Visions of Johanna", which he had attempted several times in New York. Also recorded was a take of "4th Time Around" which made it onto the album, and a take of "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" which did not.

On February 15, the session began at six in the evening, but Dylan simply sat in the studio working on his lyrics, while the musicians played cards, napped, and chatted. Finally, at 4.00 a.m., Dylan called the musicians in and outlined the structure of the song. Dylan counted off and the musicians fell in, as he attempted his epic composition, "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands". Kenny Buttrey has recalled, "If you notice that record, that thing after like the second chorus starts building and building like crazy, and everybody's just peaking it up 'cause we thought, Man, this is it ... This is gonna be the last chorus and we've gotta put everything into it we can. And he played another harmonica solo and went back down to another verse and the dynamics had to drop back down to a verse kind of feel ... After about ten minutes of this thing we're cracking up at each other, at what we were doing. I mean, we peaked five minutes ago. Where do we go from here?" The finished song clocked in at 11 minutes, 23 seconds, and would occupy the entire fourth side of the album.

The next session in the studio similarly began with Dylan writing lyrics in the afternoon, and spilled over into the early hours of February 17, when the musicians began to record "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again". After several musical revisions and false starts, the fourteenth take was deemed a master recording.

Second recording sessions in Nashville

Most accounts of recording Blonde on Blonde, including those by Dylan scholars Clinton Heylin and Michael Gray, agree that there were two blocks of recording sessions: from February 14 to 17, and from March 8 to 10, 1966. This chronology is based on the logs and files kept by Columbia Records.

Dylan and the Hawks performed concerts in Ottawa, Montreal, and Philadelphia, in February and March, and then Dylan resumed recording in Nashville on March 8. On that day, Dylan and the musicians recorded a successful version of "Absolutely Sweet Marie". Wilentz writes that "with the sound of 'Sweet Marie', Blonde on Blonde entered fully and sublimely into what is now considered classic rock and roll". March 9 saw the successful master takes of "Just Like a Woman", and "Pledging My Time", the latter "driven by Robertson's screaming guitar".

According to Wilentz, the final recording session produced six songs in thirteen hours of studio time. The first number to be successfully recorded was "Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)", which changed its sound radically when McCoy picked up a trumpet to reinforce a musical phrase which Dylan had been playing on his harmonica. Dylan and his band then quickly recorded "Temporary Like Achilles". The session began to "get giddy" around midnight, when Dylan roughed out "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" on the piano." Johnston has recalled that he commented, "That sounds like the damn Salvation Army band". Dylan replied, "Can you get one?" Johnston then telephoned trombonist Wayne Butler, the only additional musician required, and Dylan and the band, with McCoy again on trumpet, played a high-spirited version of the song.

In quick succession, Dylan and the musicians then recorded "Obviously 5 Believers", and a final take of "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat", powered by Robertson's lead guitar. According to Wilentz, McCoy shouts excitedly, "Robbie, the world'll marry you on that one," after the take. The session concludes with "I Want You", where, for Wilentz, "Wayne Moss's rapid-fire sixteenth notes on the guitar" are as impressive as Dylan's ability to remember all the words.

Controversy over Nashville recording dates

Al Kooper, who played keyboards on every track of Blonde on Blonde, has contested the conventional account that there were two blocks of recording sessions in Nashville. In acrimonious comments at Michael Gray's website, Kooper wrote: "There was only ONE trip to Nashville for Robbie & I, and ALL THE TRACKS were cut in that one visit." Kooper also wrote that Charlie McCoy agreed with Kooper's version. Historian Sean Wilentz analyzed the recording of Blonde on Blonde in one chapter of his book, Bob Dylan In America, and concluded that "the official documented version jibes better with Dylan's known touring schedule. It also jibes with the fact that five songs first recorded after "Memphis Blues Again", but none of those recorded earlier, include a middle-eight section—Dylan's first extensive foray as a writer into that conventional structure." However, Wilentz adds that "the testimony of two key participants carries weight, especially when set against an easily misconstrued paper trail."

Mixing and album title

Both Heylin and Wilentz refer to the album being mixed by Dylan in Los Angeles in early April, before he departed on the Australian leg of his 1966 "world tour". Wilentz writes that it was at this point that Dylan and Johnston realized they had "produced enough solid material to demand an oddly configured double album, the first of its kind in contemporary popular music."

According to producer Steve Berkowitz, who supervised the reissue of Dylan's LPs in mono, The Original Mono Recordings, on Legacy Recordings in 2010, Johnston told him that they carefully worked on the mono mix for about three or four days whereas the stereo mix was finished in about four hours.

Al Kooper has stated that both the album title, Blonde on Blonde, and song titles arrived during the mixing sessions. "When they were mixing it, we were sitting around and Bob Johnston came in and said, 'What do you want to call this?' And [Bob] just like said them out one at a time... Free association and silliness, I'm sure, played a big role." Another Dylan chronicler, Oliver Trager, notes that besides spelling out the initials of Dylan's first name, the album title is also a riff on Brecht on Brecht, a stage production based on works by German playwright Bertolt Brecht that had influenced his early songwriting. Dylan himself has said of the title: "Well, I don't even recall exactly how it came up, but I know it was all in good faith. ... I don't know who thought of that. I certainly didn't."

Songs

Side One

;"Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35" By starting his new album with what sounded like "a demented marching-band... staffed by crazy people out of their mind on loco-weed", Gill writes that Dylan delivered his biggest shock yet for his former folkie fans. The elaborate puns on getting stoned combine a sense of paranoiac persecution with "nudge-nudge wink-wink bohemian hedonism." Heylin points out that the Old Testament connotations of getting stoned made the Salvation Army-style musical backing seem like a good joke. The enigmatic title came about, Heylin suggests, because Dylan knew a song entitled "everybody must get stoned" would be kept off the airwaves. (However, it should be noted that a "rainy day woman" was street slang for a marijuana cigarette.) Heylin links the title to the Book of Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 15: "A continual dropping in a very rainy day and a contentious woman are alike." Released as a single in April 1966, Rainy Day Women reached #2 on the U.S. Pop Singles chart and #7 in the UK.

;"Pledging My Time" Following the good-time fun of "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35", the Chicago blues-influenced "Pledging My Time" sets the somber tone that runs through the album. The song draws on Tampa Red's "It Hurts Me Too" and also borrows from The Mississippi Sheiks's "Sitting on Top of the World". The couplet at the end of each verse expresses the theme: a pledge made to a prospective lover in hopes she "will come through, too." Besides Dylan's vocals and improvised harmonica breaks, the song's sound is defined by Robbie Robertson's guitar, Hargus "Pig" Robbins's blues piano and Ken Buttrey's snare rolls. "Pledging My Time" was recorded at the March 8, 1966 session in Nashville and was released as the B-side of "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" on May 16.

;"Visions Of Johanna" Described by many critics as one of Dylan's greatest masterpieces, capturing this song on tape proved difficult. Heylin places the writing in the fall of 1965, when Dylan was living in the Chelsea Hotel with his pregnant wife Sara. Heylin notes that "in this déclassé hotel…. the heat pipes still cough". In the New York recording studio, on November 30, Dylan announced his epic composition: "This is called 'Freeze Out'." Gill notes that this working title captures the "air of nocturnal suspension in which the verse tableaux are sketched... full of whispering and muttering." Wilentz has analyzed how Dylan guided his backing musicians through fourteen takes, trying to sketch out how he wanted it played, saying at one point, "it's not hard rock, The only thing in it that's hard is Robbie." Wilentz notes that, as Dylan quietens things down, he inches closer to what will appear on the album.

Ten weeks later, "Visions Of Johanna" fell into place quickly in the Nashville studio. Kooper has recalled that he and Robertson had become adept at responding to Dylan's vocal, and Kooper also singled out Joe South's contribution of "this throbbing... rythmically amazing bass part". Gill has commented the song begins by contrasting two lovers, the carnal Louise, and "the more spiritual but unattainable" Johanna. Ultimately, for Gill, the song seeks to convey how the artist is compelled to keep striving to pursue some elusive vision of perfection. For Heylin, the triumph of the song is in "the way Dylan manages to write about the most inchoate feelings in such a vivid, immediate way".

;"One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" When Dylan arrived at the studio on January 25, 1966, he had yet to work out the lyrics and title for what was to become the closing track on Blonde on Blonde's first side. With Dylan piecing together the song's sections, the session stretched thru the night and into the next morning. It wasn't until the 18th take that a full version was recorded. The next take, the 19th, closed the session and made it onto the album four months later. Critic Jonathan Singer has written that Griffin's piano binds the song together: "At the chorus, Griffin unleashes a symphony; hammering his way up and down the keyboard, half Gershwin, half gospel, all heart. The follow-up, a killer left hand figure that links the chorus to the verse, releases none of the song's tension."

"One of Us Must Know" is a straightforward account of a burned-out relationship. Dissecting what went wrong, the narrator takes a defensive attitude in a one-sided conversation with his former lover. As he presents his case in the opening verse, it appears he is incapable of either acknowledging his part or limiting the abuse: "I didn't mean to treat you so bad. You don't have to take it so personal. I didn't mean to make you so sad. You were just there, that's all." "One of Us Must Know" was the first recording completed for Blonde on Blonde and the only one selected from the New York sessions. On February 14, as Dylan was starting to record in Nashville, the song was released as the album's first single. It failed to make the US charts, but reached #33 in the UK.

Side Two

;"I Want You" Analyzing the drafts of the lyrics, Wilentz writes that there are numerous failures, "about deputies asking him his name... lines about fathers going down hugging one another and about their daughters putting him down because he isn't their brother". Finally Dylan arrives at the right formula. Heylin points out that the gorgeous tune illustrates what Dylan explained to a reporter in 1966: "It's not just pretty words to a tune or putting tunes to words... [It's] the words and the music [together]—I can hear the sound of what I want to say."

Andy Gill notes that the song displays a tension between the very direct tone of the chorus, the repeated phrase "I want you", and a weird and complex cast of characters, "too numerous to inhabit the song's three minutes comfortably", including a guilty undertaker, a lonesome organ grinder, weeping fathers, mothers, sleeping saviors, the Queen of Spades, and the "dancing child with his Chinese suit". Al Kooper has recalled how this was his favorite of the songs that Dylan had shown him in Nashiville, so Dylan delayed recording it to the very end, "just to bug him". Released as a single in June 1966, shortly before the album Blonde on Blonde, "I Want You" peaked at #20 on July 30. The single reached #16 in the UK.

;"Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again" Recorded at the third Nashville session, this song was the culmination of another epic of simultaneous writing and recording in the studio. Wilentz has described how the lyrics evolved through a surviving part-typed, part-handwritten manuscript page, "which begins 'honey but it’s just too hard' (a line that had survived from the very first New York session with the Hawks). Then the words meander through random combinations and disconnected fragments and images ('people just get uglier'; 'banjo eyes'; 'he was carrying a 22 but it was only a single shot'), before, in Dylan’s own hand, amid many crossings-out, there appears 'Oh MAMA you’re here IN MOBILE ALABAMA with the Memphis blues again'."

Inside the studio, the song evolved through several musical revisions. Heylin writes, "It is the song's arrangement, and not its lyrics, that occupies the musicians through the wee small hours." On Take Five, released in 2005 on the No Direction Home Soundtrack, midtake Dylan stumbles on the formula "Stuck inside of Mobile" on the fourth verse, and never goes back. The song contains two oft-quoted pieces of Dylan's philosophy: "Your debutante just knows what you need/ But I know what you want" and "here I sit so patiently/ Waiting to find out what price/ You have to pay to get out of/ Going through all these things twice".

;"Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" is a sarcastic satire on materialism, fashion and faddism. Done in Chicago-blues style, the song derives its melody and part of its lyrics from Lightnin' Hopkins's "Automobile (Blues)", which in turn owes much to Memphis Minnie's 1941 classic "Me and My Chaffeur Blues". Its putdowns have been criticized as misogynistic, though the emotion underlying them is jealousy. In the lyrics, the narrator observes his former lover in various situations wearing her "brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat", at one point finding his doctor with her and later spying her making love with a new boyfriend because she "forgot to close the garage door". In the closing lines, the narrator says he knows what her boyfriend really loves her for, her hat.

The song evolved over the course of six takes in New York, 13 in the first Nashville session, and then one try on March 10, the take used for the album. Dylan, who gets credit on the liner notes as lead guitarist, opens the song on lead; however, Robertson handles the solos with a "searing" performance. A year following the recording, "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" became the fifth single released from Blonde on Blonde, making it to #81 on Billboard's Hot 100.

;"Just Like A Woman" After listening to the recording session tapes, Wilentz has written that Dylan felt his way into the lyrics of one of his most popular songs, singing "disconnected lines and semi-gibberish". He is unsure what the person described in the song does that is just like a woman, rejecting "shakes", "wakes", and "makes mistakes". This exploration of female wiles and feminine vulnerbalility was widely rumored—"not least by her acquaintances among Andy Warhol's Factory retinue"—to be about Edie Sedgwick. The reference to Baby's penchant for "fog amphetamine and pearls" suggests Sedgwick or some similar debutante, according to Heylin.

Literary critic Christopher Ricks, discussing the lyrics, has detected a "note of social exclusion" in the line "I was hungry and it was your world". Responding to the accusation that Dylan's depiction of female strategies is mysoginistic, Ricks asks, "could there ever be any challenging art about men and women where the accusation just didn't arise?"

Side Three

;"Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)" A bright blues "stomper" about lovers parting, "Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)" is one of the more literal songs Dylan recorded in his 1965–1966 period. The narrator has tired of carrying his lover and is going to let her "pass". As in "Just Like a Woman" and "Absolutely Sweet Marie", he waits until the end of each verse to deliver the punch line, which in this case comes from the title. The song, the first track on the album's third side, was recorded March 9, 1966 in Nashville. "Most Likely You Go Your Way" was issued as a single a year later, in March 1967, on the B-side of "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat".

;"Temporary Like Achilles" This hazy, slow-moving blues number is highlighted by Hargus "Pig" Robbins's barrelhouse piano and Dylan's "wheezing" harmonica. In the song, the narrator has been spurned by his lover, who has already taken up with her latest boyfriend. Referring to his rival as "Achilles", the narrator senses the new suitor may end up being discarded as quickly as he was. The refrain that ends each of the main verses—"Honey, why do you have to be so hard?"—is a double entendre Dylan had been wanting to work into a song. "Temporary Like Achilles" was recorded during the Nashville session on March 9, 1966.

;"Absolutely Sweet Marie" This song, described as "up-tempo blues shuffle, pure Memphis" and an example of "obvious pop sensibility and compulsive melody", was recorded in four takes on March 7, 1966. Gill describes the lyrics as a series of sexual metaphors, including "beating on my trumpet" and keys to locked gates, many deriving from traditional blues. Nonetheless, the song contains what has been termed "one of the most oft-repeated of Dylan's life lessons", the thought that "to live outside the law you must be honest", which was invoked in many bohemian and counter-cultural contexts.

;"4th Time Around" When the Beatles released Rubber Soul in December 1965, John Lennon's song "Norwegian Wood" attracted attention for the way in which Lennon disguised his account of an illict affair in cryptic, Dylanesque language. Dylan sketched out his own response to the song, also in 3/4 time, copying the tune and circular structure, but taking Lennon's tale in a darker direction. Wilentz describes the result as sounding "like Bob Dylan impersonating John Lennon impersonating Bob Dylan".

;"Obviously 5 Believers" "Obviously 5 Believers", Blonde on Blonde's second-to-last track, is a roadhouse blues love song similar in melody and structure to Memphis Minnie's "Me and My Chaffeur Blues". Recorded in the early morning hours of the March 9–10 Nashville session under the working title "Black Dog Blues", the song is driven by Robertson's guitar, Charley McCoy's harmonica licks and Ken Buttrey's drumming. After an initial breakdown, Dylan complained to the band that the song was "very easy, man" and that he didn't want to spend much time on it. Within four takes, the recording was done.

Side Four

;"Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" Written over the space of eight hours in the CBS recording studio in Nashville, on the night of February 15–16, "Sad Eyed Lady" eventually occupied the whole of Side Four of Blonde On Blonde. Critics have noted that "Lowlands" hints at "Lownds", and Dylan biographer Robert Shelton wrote that this was a "wedding song" for Sara Lownds, whom Dylan had married just three months earlier. In his paean to his wife, "Sara", written in 1975, Dylan amends history slightly to claim that he stayed "up for days in the Chelsea Hotel/ Writin’ 'Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' for you".

When Dylan played Shelton the song, shortly after recording it, he claimed, "This is the best song I've ever written." Around the same time, Dylan enthused to journalist Jules Siegel, "Just listen to that! That's old-time religious carnival music!" However, in 1969, Dylan confessed to Jann Wenner, in Rolling Stone, " I just sat down at a table and started writing... And I just got carried away with the whole thing... I just started writing and I couldn’t stop. After a period of time, I forgot what it was all about, and I started trying to get back to the beginning, (laughs)."

Heard by some listeners as a hymn to an other-worldly woman, for Shelton "her travails seem beyond endurance, yet she radiates an inner strength, an ability to be re-born. This is Dylan at his most romantic." Sean Wilentz wrote that Dylan's writing had shifted from the days when he asked questions and supplied answers. Like the verses of William Blake's "Tyger", Dylan asks a series of questions about the "Sad Eyed Lady" but never supplies any answers.

Outtakes

The following outtakes were recorded during the Blonde on Blonde sessions.

"I Wanna Be Your Lover" (later released on Biograph)

"I'll Keep It With Mine" (later released on The Bootleg Series: Volumes 1–3)

"Jet Pilot" (later released on Biograph)

"Medicine Sunday" (early version of "Temporary Like Achilles")

"Instrumental"

"She's Your Lover Now" (later released on The Bootleg Series: Volumes 1–3)

Album cover and packaging

Blonde on Blonde's cover photo is printed sideways to unfold to form a color 12-by-26-inch portrait of Dylan. The artist's name and the album's title only appear on the spine. A sticker was applied to the shrink wrap to promote the release's two hit singles, "I Want You" and "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35".

The cover shows Dylan in front of a brick building, wearing a suede jacket and a black and white checkered scarf. The jacket is the same one he wore on his next two albums, John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline. The photographer, Jerry Schatzberg has described how the photo was taken: }}

The original inside gatefold featured nine black-and-white photos, including a shot of actress Claudia Cardinale that Dylan selected from Schatzberg's portfolio. Since it had been used without her authorization, Cardinale's photo was subsequently removed, making the original record sleeve a collector's item. The inside cover also includes a picture of Schatzberg that Dylan chose in appreciation of the photographer's work. The photos, for Gill, added up to "a shadowy glimpse of [Dylan's] life, including an enigmatic posed shot of Dylan holding a small portrait of a woman in one hand and a pair of pliers in the other: they all contributed to the album's air of reclusive yet sybaritic genius."

Release

The dating of the album's release is uncertain. May 16, 1966 has been widely accepted as the official release date; however, Michael Gray, author of The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, disputes this. Gray maintains the earliest Blonde on Blonde was available was late June or early July. This coincides with the album's promotion in Billboard, which carried a full-page Columbia advertisement on June 25, selected the album as a "New Action LP" on July 9, and ran a review and article on July 16. The album debuted on Billboard's Top LP's chart on July 23—just six days before Dylan's motorcycle accident in Woodstock removed him from public view. Heylin agrees that early July is the likely release date, stating that an overdub on "Fourth Time Around" was recorded in June.

Critical reception and legacy

The achievement of Blonde on Blonde seems to have lingered in Dylan's memory. Twelve years after its release, Dylan said: "The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up."

Several critics have described Blonde on Blonde as a satisfying conclusion to the mid-1960s trilogy of albums which Dylan had initiated with Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. Andy Gill and Mike Marqusee have described this trilogy as perhaps Dylan's greatest achievement. Dylan felt pride in his trilogy in 1966, when he told Robert Shelton: "A lot of the stuff I've done... the last three things I've done on records, is beyond criticism. I'm not saying that because I think I'm any kind of god. I'm just saying that because I know."

Blonde on Blonde reached the Top 10 in both the US and UK album charts, and also spawned several hits that restored Dylan to the upper echelons of the singles charts. In August 1967, the album was certified as a gold disc. It was an even greater critical success. As critic Dave Marsh wrote in the Rolling Stone Record Guide, Blonde on Blonde is widely regarded as one of Dylan's "best albums, and [one] of the greatest in the history of rock & roll." Blonde on Blonde is considered to be the first significant double album in rock music, preceding the Mothers of Invention's Freak Out! by exactly a week.

Blonde on Blonde has been consistently highly placed in polls of the greatest albums of all time. In 1974, the writers of NME voted Blonde on Blonde the #2 album of all time. Demonstrating the transitory nature of such polls, in 1997 the album was placed at number 16 in a "Music of the Millennium" poll conducted by HMV, Channel 4, The Guardian and Classic FM. In 2003, the album was ranked number 9 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In 2006, TIME magazine included the record on their 100 All-TIME Albums list.

Dylan scholar Michael Gray wrote: "To have followed up one masterpiece with another was Dylan's history making achievement here... Where Highway 61 Revisited has Dylan exposing and confronting like a laser beam in surgery, descending from outside the sickness, Blonde on Blonde offers a persona awash inside the chaos... We're tossed from song to song... The feel and the music are on a grand scale, and the language and delivery are a rich mixture of the visionary and the colloquial." Critic Tim Riley wrote in 1999, "A sprawling abstraction of eccentric blues revisionism, Blonde on Blonde confirms Dylan's stature as the greatest American rock presence since Elvis Presley."

Summing up the achievement of the album, Robert Shelton wrote: "Blonde on Blonde begins with a joke and ends with a hymn; in between wit alternates with a dominant theme of entrapment by circumstances, love, society, and unrealized hope... There's a remarkable marriage of funky, bluesy rock expressionism, and Rimbaud-like visions of discontinuity, chaos, emptiness, loss." For Mike Marqusee, Dylan had succeeded in reconciling traditional blues material with avant-garde, literary techniques: "[Dylan] took inherited idioms and boosted them into a modernist stratosphere. 'Pledging My Time' and 'Obviously 5 Believers' adhered to blues patterns that were venerable when Dylan first encountered them in the mid-fifties. Yet like 'Visions of Johanna' or 'Memphis Blues Again', these songs are beyond category. They are allusive, repetitive, jaggedly abstract compositions that defy reduction."

That sense of crossing cultural boundaries was, for Al Kooper, at the heart of Blonde on Blonde: "[Bob Dylan] was the quintessential New York hipster—what was he doing in Nashville? It didn't make any sense whatsoever. But you take those two elements, pour them into a test tube, and it just exploded."

Track listing

All songs written by Bob Dylan.

;Side one #"Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" – 4:36 #"Pledging My Time" – 3:50 #"Visions of Johanna" – 7:33 #"One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" – 4:54

;Side two #"I Want You" – 3:07 #"Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" – 7:05 #"Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" – 3:58 #"Just Like a Woman" – 4:52

;Side three #"Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine" – 3:30 #"Temporary Like Achilles" – 5:02 #"Absolutely Sweet Marie" – 4:57 #"4th Time Around" – 4:35 #"Obviously 5 Believers" – 3:35

;Side four #"Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" – 11:23

Personnel

Bob Dylan – vocals, guitar, harmonica, piano

Paul Griffin – piano (New York)

Rick Danko – bass (New York)

Bobby Gregg – drums (New York)

Robbie Robertson – guitar, vocals

Charlie McCoy – bass, guitar, harmonica, trumpet

Al Kooper – organ, guitar

Hargus "Pig" Robbins – piano, keyboards

Bill Aikins – keyboards

Kenneth A. Buttrey – drums

Joe South – guitar

Jerry Kennedy – guitar

Wayne Moss – guitar, vocals

Henry Strzelecki – bass

Wayne Butler – trombone

Bob Johnston – producer

Jerry Schatzberg – cover photographer

Charts

Album

!Year	!Chart	!Position
	Billboard 200
UK Top 75

Singles

!Year	!Single	!Chart	!Position
		Billboard Hot 200
UK Top 75
	Billboard Hot 100
UK Top 75
	Billboard Hot 200
UK Top 75
	Billboard Hot 100
UK Top 75
		Billboard Hot 100
UK Top 75

Notes

Footnotes

References

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Category:Bob Dylan albums Category:1966 albums Category:Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients Category:Double albums Category:Columbia Records albums Category:Albums produced by Bob Johnston Category:English-language albums Category:Blues rock albums Category:Blues albums by American artists

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