A Dylan a Day: "Blonde On Blonde"
I finally got it, but I had to leave home and head up north to school before I did. Drugs were involved, of course. I was finally off my chain. Late at night in Madison, in our rooms in the euphoniously named Ogg Hall, we’d burn a stick of sweet jasmine incense, stuff wet towels into the crack in the bottom of the door, and light one up. The house fellows turned a deaf nose to it all. And so I found myself lofted high enough to sink my ears into what Bob Dylan had recently wrought.
Of course I’d heard the singles that preceded the 1966 release of Blonde On Blonde. They had dropped like a string of incendiary devices to blow up the radio, musical napalm: the acid-tongued “Positively Fourth Street,” the weedhead anthem “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” the lustfully persuasive “I Want You,” the sublimely beautiful, pitying “Just Like a Woman” (o dear Edie Sedgwick, was that really you?). There was another 45 most people, including myself, had missed: the hectoring, slavering “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window,” which Dylan had cut with his new touring band, a bunch of slamming Canuck rockabillies called the Hawks.
He had wanted to make what became Blonde On Blonde with the Hawks, but only managed to record one usable song with them, the levitating “One of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later).” The group, still all bama-lama pow-pow-pow then, couldn’t quite replicate the lustrous sound that Dylan heard in his head, and at his intuitive producer Bob Johnston’s suggestion he decamped, with Jaime Robbie Robertson of the Hawks and Al Kooper, to Nashville, where a group of sympathetic Music City session musicians would become well acquainted with the hours between midnight and dawn. It was an album cut from the colors of the darkest morning.
I began to grow nocturnal myself, and after I very belatedly purchased the album at Discount Records down on State Street – where a clerk named Liza, stopped my heart every time she worked behind the counter, ah! – Blonde On Blonde became a nightly companion. It was probably the first two-LP rock record ever released (though the Mothers of Invention’s contemporaneous Freak Out! was also a Page House favorite), and it demanded study, long hours of contemplation. What a disciplined young man I was.
My guru of sorts in this regard was a guy named Johnny Klate. He was slightly older, a transfer from New York if I remember right and not interested in academics whatsoever. He was handsome in a chiseled way, and he was cloning Dylan’s look (though he couldn’t pull off the ‘fro with his straight, lank black hair) – leather jacket, straight-leg jeans (no bells on our hooligan), carrying a guitar with him everywhere, affecting a seen-it-all mien and a curled lip. Co-eds launched themselves at him like rocket-propelled grenades. Some nights he’d drop by the room, glassy-eyed, to strum a bit and talk music; he supplied some of the skeleton keys to Blonde On Blonde, which we spun on my roommate’s Marantz portable stereo, and some of the smoke, too, for he was always holding. Other nights I indulged in stoned, solitary listening.
Wrecked on cheap yet effective pot, I’d stretch on my narrow dorm room bed, vividly conscious of the rising and falling of my breath, and inhale the expanses of that 73-minute cipher, certain that if I listened with that inner ear I was learning to develop, I could unlock its multitudes of secrets. Some of my friends preferred the more brazen sound of Highway 61 Revisited, but this one was it for me. I loved its wide-open spaces, its sheer scope, its spectrum of emotion, its enveloping warmth. It was tactile, velvety, my bed of roses.
The record was filled with women. A gallery of Picassos might sound like this if the paintings had voices; the Spaniard, like the Minnesotan, studied women from every angle, and like each plane on his canvases, each note on the record revealed a fresh, sparkling mystery. The first women you encounter, amid what sounds like a party in the studio, are seemingly the kind you hold not in an embrace, but in a roach clip (But we may be mistaken about the meaning of that text. For Dylan, an outcast to many, an outlaw by profession and temperament, no stranger to recent adversity, and familiar with the scriptures, may have been thinking of Deuteronomy 21: “And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.”)
The rest in Dylan’s gallery parade in and out of the scene with their own narratives, their own glamor and hilarity (“Oh, mama”), some beckoning, some rejected, some dancing madly, some collapsed in a flood of tears. Many receive a ribald, bluesy 21-gun rock ‘n’ roll salute (“Pledging My Time,” “Leopard Skin Pill-box Hat,” “Absolutely Sweet Marie”), but the ones I loved and desperately wanted to know are the objects of rough and uncontrollable desire, laid down with a soft caress.
“Visions of Johanna” had defeated Dylan and the Hawks in the New York studio. Some now-familiar outtakes offer up incongruously muscular versions of the song, sometimes tagged as “Freeze Out.” But the night played no tricks in those tracks, which would occupy bootleggers for years. He craved that ghost electricity, a sound that ran its fingers through Johanna’s hair, and in Nashville he found it with seven-and-a-half minutes of acuity worthy of the song’s title. The swell and small bird cries of Al Kooper’s organ playing, only now and then poking out of the mix, and the economical snare and hi-hat taps of Kenny Buttrey’s drums sweep the track into an ebbing and flowing eddy, but those players and the rest of the band have their true apotheosis in Johanna’s companion, “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”
The song, an 11-minute cyclone of unkempt imagery, had been finally committed to tape not long before the early morning sun started warming the studio door in Nashville. The session musicians had stood around for hours, on the clock, bullshitting and swilling coffee and soda, while Dylan wrestled with his lyrics on the studio floor. It emerged magically, born without precedent, exotic as a bird of paradise, coasting on a swirl of rhythm and the purr of Kooper’s Hammond, rising in slow-dawning force as Dylan opened wide his warehouse eyes and Buttrey pounded his Arabian drum.
Might this Lady have been Sara Lownds, whom Dylan had married in late 1965? Does it matter? Let her be whomever you will. There is nothing literal about the song; there is no way to resolve its capacious questions. Knowing it is a love song is enough. Ineffable, seductive, its every phrase and every bar and very form stretching to the limit, it is huge enough to contain any and every woman you or I or anyone else may have loved. Thus it casts the longest shadow of anything its author wrote in this period, or, to my mind, maybe ever.
It would be the last we would hear from Bob Dylan for a time. He’d returned exhausted from a tour of the world, where he was jeered and vilified. His spiritual tank was empty, but his bike was gassed up and he went for a ride. As he looked into the sky searching for a woman’s face, riding sunblind at a velocity undreamed of by most even in those cranked-up days, a wall rose up to meet him, and some believed he had come close to death as he fell.
As for myself, in a short time, I would have my own lady of the Milwaukee lowlands. Cindy’s eyes were not sad, however, until after she had been with me for a while. One night not long after we met, she took a handful of collegiate speed to study, but instead she wrote me a 20-page love letter. An amphetamine whirlpool brimming with longing, to my smitten eyes it read like it could have been Dylan’s unwritten liner notes for Blonde On Blonde, and it filled my heart as surely and as swiftly as I would break hers.
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