Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 69

Record label: CBS

Produced: Bob Johnston

Recorded: Columbia Studios, New York; October 5–January 1966; Columbia Music Row Studios, Nashville, Tennessee; February–March 10, 1966

Released: May 16, 1966

Chart peaks: 3 (UK) 9 (US)

Personnel: Bob Dylan (v, g, k, hm); Robbie Robertson (g); Wayne Moss (g); Jerry Kennedy (g); Charlie McCoy (g, hm, t); Al Kooper (k); Hargus ‘Pig’ Robbins (k); Richard Manuel (k); Joe South (b); Henry Strzelecki (b); Rick Danko (b); Kenny Buttrey (d); Bobby Gregg (d); Wayne Butler (tb)

Track listing: Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 (S); Pledging My Time; Visions Of Johanna; One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) (S); I Want You (S); Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again; Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat (S); Just Like A Woman (S); Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine); Temporary Like Achilles; Absolutely Sweet Marie; 4th Time Around; Obviously Five Believers; Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands

Running time: 72.30

Current CD: Sony 5123522

Further listening: The other core works of Dylan’s electric period, Bringing It All Back Home (1965) and Highway 61 Revisited (1965), form a triple pinnacle with Blonde On Blonde.

Further reading: Chronicles (2006); The Bob Dylan Encylopedia (Michael Gray, 2006); www.bobdylan.com

Download: iTunes

Following some largely unsuccessful sessions in New York (from which only One Of Us Must Know, featuring Band members Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, eventually made the album), Dylan took producer Bob Johnston’s advice and recorded the rest of Blonde On Blonde in Nashville, taking along only guitarist Robbie Robertson and organist Al Kooper to augment a crew of Tennessee’s top session players. Used to recording three tracks in a typical three-hour session, the Nashville cats were surprised to find themselves left to their own devices for hours on end while Dylan finished writing the songs, whereupon Al Kooper – serving as musical director – would translate his ideas for the band.

‘We would come in an hour late,’ explains Kooper, ‘and I would go in and teach the first song to the band. Then he [Dylan] would arrive, and the band would be ready to play.’ Compared to the more abrasive manner of New York players, the Nashville crew took everything in their stride as Dylan searched for what he called ‘that thin, wild, mercury sound’, a more refined blend of the guitars/ piano/organ/bass/drums/harmonica set-up that had proved so effective on Highway 61 Revisited.

‘Nobody bitched or complained or rolled their eyes,’ recalls Kooper. ‘Their temperaments were fabulous – they were the most calm, at-ease guys I’d ever worked with.’ They weren’t even fazed when Dylan requested a marching band to play on Rainy Day Women #12 & 35, assuring him that if he was after a more ramshackle sound, they could ‘play pretty dumb if we put our minds to it’. With a local friend, Wayne Butler, drafted in to play trombone, and Charlie McCoy playing bass and trumpet simultaneously, the track was cut in 20 minutes – so quickly that Robbie Robertson, who had nipped out to buy cigarettes, missed the session completely.

The album’s string of love songs was generally found to be less esoteric than the texts of Highway 61 Revisited, though the dense, allusive imagery of Visions Of Johanna and Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again, in particular, exercised the explicatory faculties the time he considered the album’s third epic, Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands – amazingly, cut in one perfect 11-minute take – ‘the best song I’ve ever written’.

‘It’s an amazing record, like taking two cultures and smashing them together with a huge explosion,’ reckons Al Kooper. ‘Dylan was the quintessential New York hipster – what was he doing in Nashville? But you take those two elements, pour them into a test-tube, and it just exploded.’