Inside Bob Dylan’s ‘Blonde on Blonde’: Rock’s First Great Double Album
“I was going at a tremendous speed… at the time of my Blonde on Blonde album,” Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone editor and publisher Jann S. Wenner in 1969. On Blonde on Blonde, all the tension and angst of Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home were blown wide open to reveal pure freedom. It’s rock’s first double-album monument, where the distance between Dylan’s imagination and his music collapsed entirely: “The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind,” he famously said, “that thin, that wild mercury sound.” With its chain-lightning mix of rock & roll, novelty music, surrealist ballads, Chicago blues and psychedelic country, its peels of lyrical invention and epic song lengths, Blonde on Blonde might seem like the kind of work that involved long-term contemplation.
In fact, most of the album was knocked out between stints on the road during a historically intense bout of touring. In the fall of 1965, Dylan wanted to continue pushing his new sound, and tour with an electric band. A decision was made to split a series of upcoming concerts between an acoustic set and a plugged-in performance. At the suggestion of his manager Albert Grossman’s secretary, Dylan checked out Canadian band the Hawks, who had cut their teeth backing rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins. Dylan was especially impressed by Robbie Robertson, the band’s 22-year-old guitarist, and asked the Hawks to play two shows, one in New York and one in L.A. At the New York show, held in front of a crowd of 14,000 at the Forest Hills tennis stadium in Queens, fans sat patiently through Dylan’s acoustic songs and then commenced booing during his electric set (some people sang along to “Like a Rolling Stone” and then booed when it was over). After they completed their West Coast date, the Hawks (soon to be renamed the Band) were hired for a year of shows that began in Texas in September 1965.
That October, just as the tour was beginning, Dylan and the Band went into Columbia Studios in New York and recorded the single “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” a curt blast of “Like a Rolling Stone”-style acrimony Dylan was so pleased with that he once kicked folk-scene grandee Phil Ochs out of a limo for saying he didn’t like it. Surprisingly, though, more attempts by Dylan and the Band throughout the fall and winter produced only one song that made it onto Blonde on Blonde, “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),” a swirling haymaker that took 24 takes and had to be finished with the help of other musicians. “Oh, I was really down,” Dylan told writer Robert Shelton.
Salvation came from a surprising place. The previous summer, during the end of the at-times-difficult sessions for Highway 61 Revisited, producer Bob Johnston had introduced Dylan to multi-instrumentalist Charlie McCoy, a seasoned musician from Nashville who’d played with everyone from Elvis to Perry Como. After McCoy sat in on the recording of “Desolation Row,” Johnston suggested Dylan might like recording in Nashville. “See how easy that was,” Johnston said.