Bob Dylan (20 page)

“We traveled all over the world, and people booed us everywhere we went,” recalls Robbie Robertson. “What a strange concept of entertainment! We'd go on to the next town, and they'd boo us again, and we'd pack up our equipment and go on to the next place, and they'd boo us again. All over the world! I'll tell you what… it thickens the skin a little! After some of the places that we played with Ronnie Hawkins, and some of the rough joints we'd played when we were young—places where it's really a wonder anyone's left alive—after that,
this
was supposed to be success! You can get a little sadistic in these situations, turn up the volume that little bit louder!”

Dylan was particularly enamored with Robertson's guitar-playing, describing him as “the only mathematical guitar genius I've ever run into who does not offend my intestinal nervousness with his rear-guard sound,” and using him as a
sounding-board when working out new songs. “When we were on tour,” explains Robertson, “a lot of times we would get a two-bedroom suite so we could play music. We were able to play most because we had guitars, but sometimes the other guys would bring their drums in, or an organ or something. It was just having fun with music, really.” But the sound wasn't really gelling as Dylan wanted when he tried cutting more tracks in the New York studio—after several sessions between October 1965 and January 1966, he had only a couple of workable songs finished, and then only when Al Kooper dropped by the studio to add his organ. Accordingly, when Bob Johnston suggested going down to CBS's Nashville studio to record, Dylan agreed, taking along only Kooper and Robertson to augment a session crew comprised of the finest musicians money could hire, notably a nucleus of guitarists Wayne Moss, Jerry Kennedy and Joe South; drummer Kenny Buttrey; multi-instrumentalist Charlie McCoy; and the blind pianist Hargus ‘Pig' Robbins.

“It was Bob Johnston's decision to record it in Nashville,” recalls Kooper. “I gotta give him credit for that. Bob was a little reticent, but he thought it might be an interesting idea, so he took Robbie and I along to increase his comfort level.” Like Kooper, the Nashville musicians were used to being booked by the hour, in three-hour slots, during which time they would usually expect to record three tracks. “These guys came from that mentality,” Kooper acknowledges, “but they were booked open-end, and they had no preconceptions, so there was no pressure put on Bob at all. So they would sit there all day and maybe record four songs, sitting there for maybe ten hours while he went into the studio and wrote. No one disturbed him, he was completely catered to, and whatever happened, happened. Nobody bitched or complained or rolled their eyes. That was the tempo of the sessions in Nashville, that anything could happen, and these guys were fine with that. Their temperaments were fabulous—they were the most calm, at-ease guys I'd ever worked with. New York people are very
New York
, and these guys were very country, and it was great to work with that kind of relaxation. But there was no way they would have heard of Bob at that time—as Dan Penn says, it was off the radar!”

“We hadn't really rehearsed the songs before we got to Nashville,” admitted Robertson. “Sometimes Bob would be working out the ideas, and I'd play along and see if I could think of any ideas. The songs were just going by—once we had a set-up organized in the studio, Bob had a lot of material he wanted to experiment with, so they were just going by very quickly. Making a record, a lot of times you go in and record a song a day,
laying down the tracks and overdubbing on them, but on this one we were just slamming through the songs.”

At sessions snatched in between further tour dates in February and March, Dylan searched for what he called “that thin, wild, mercury sound,” a more refined blend of the guitars/bass/drums/piano/organ/ harmonica formula that had proven so effective on
Highway 61 Revisited
. To facilitate proceedings, Al Kooper translated Bob's ideas for the local musicians. “Bob had a piano put in his hotel room, and during the day he would write,” Kooper recalls. “And as there were no cassette machines in those days, I would sit and play the piano for him, over and over, while he sat and wrote. We did this to prepare for the sessions at night, as well: he would come in an hour late, and I would go in and teach the first song to the band. Then he would arrive, and the band would be ready to play. He liked that, rather than have them sitting and learning the songs—although we did do that over the course of the night. After that, it was business as usual, though these guys were a crew, not dissimilar to Spector's Wrecking Crew—these were guys that played together, knew how to play together, and were incredibly versatile. I'd never seen anything like that.”

The results were extraordinary, even by Dylan's previous standards, and he knew it. “…the last three things I've done on records [are] beyond criticism,” he told Robert Shelton. “I'm not saying that because I think I'm any kind of god. I'm just saying that because I just know.” Released as the first ever rock'n'roll double-album in May 1966, while Dylan and The Hawks were on tour in Britain,
Blonde On Blonde
was widely acclaimed for its musical sophistication, controlled power and subtle lyricism. Some thought that it was more approachable than his recent albums, finding its string of love songs less esoteric than the texts of
Highway 61 Revisited
, and everyone who heard it was struck by the way the album's overall dark, stifling mood was sustained through such a diverse range of musical approaches.

The gatefold cover photo, taken by Jerry Schatzberg, featured a slightly out-of-focus Dylan leaning against a wall wearing a brown suede
jacket with a scarf knotted around his neck, frowning slightly at the camera from beneath a tangled halo of hair; inside, a suite of photos offered suitably shadowy glimpses of his life, along with 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 further to the album's air of reclusive yet sybaritic genius. Despite its hefty size (and price tag),
Blonde On Blonde
was another huge commercial success too, climbing into the American Top Ten and, upon its UK release three months later, reaching the British Top Three.

“I think
Blonde On Blonde
is my favorite album of all time,” reflects Al Kooper, more than three decades later. “It's an amazing record, like taking two cultures and smashing them together with a huge explosion. I know that at one time, one of the jokier things considered was putting a paper band around the album saying ‘Recorded in the South'—that was one of the late-evening control-room conversations between Albert Grossman and Bob Johnston. Because it was a very bizarre move at the time for Dylan to go to Nashville to record that album. It was unthinkable, actually—we lose sight of that because of
Nashville Skyline
and other things. He 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.”

Released as a single in April 1966, ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35' furnished the biggest shock yet for Dylan's old folkie fans, sounding as it did like a demented marching-band rehearsal staffed by crazy people out of their minds on loco-weed. The lyric, while not his most cryptic, was Dylan's most audacious yet, a unique mix of good-natured paranoia and nudge-nudge wink-wink bohemian hedonism in which the five verses' lists of persecution are each capped with the redemptive invocation “Everybody must get stoned.”

The song was probably inspired by Ray Charles' famous recording of ‘Let's Go Get Stoned', which Dylan had heard a few months earlier while visiting a Los Angeles coffee-shop with Phil Spector. In that short space of time, however, the argot had shifted slightly, so that the “stone” in question referred not to booze but to dope. The immediate effect was that the song
had difficulty being playlisted by radio stations in both America and Britain, which didn't prevent the song becoming Dylan's biggest hit yet, garnering his second US No. 2 (or perhaps that should be US #2) and reaching the UK Top 10.

Nevertheless, the accusations did spur Dylan to denials. “This next song is what your English musical papers would call a ‘drug song,'” he announced at his Royal Albert Hall concert later in 1966. “I never have and never will write a ‘drug song.' I don't know how to. It's not a ‘drug song,' it's just vulgar.” In another interview, he expanded on the theme: “People just don't need drugs,” he said. “Keep things out of your body. We all take medicine, as long as you know why you're taking it. If you want to crack down on the drug situation, the criminal drug situation takes place in suburban housewives' kitchens, the ones who get wiped out on alcohol every afternoon and then make supper. You can't blame them, and you can't blame their husbands. They've been working in the mines all day. It's understandable.” And to Nat Hentoff he explained, “I wouldn't advise anybody to use drugs—certainly not the hard drugs; drugs are medicine. But opium and hash and pot—now, those things aren't drugs; they just bend your mind a little. I think everybody's mind should be bent once in a while. Not by LSD, though. LSD is medicine—a different kind of medicine. It makes you aware of the Universe, so to speak; you realize how foolish objects are. But LSD is not for groovy people; it's for mad, hateful people who want revenge.”

The truth, of course, was rather different. He had been using several different types of drugs for different reasons—primarily marijuana, to fuel both creativity and relaxation, and amphetamines, to withstand the hectic pace of the his touring schedule, during which he would routinely stay awake for days on end, continuing to play music in hotel rooms after shows, and working on songs constantly. “It takes a lot of medicine to keep up this pace,” he told Robert Shelton between tour dates in March 1966.

The effect of stronger “medicine” was discernible to others. “Dylan is LSD on stage, Dylan is LSD set to music,” gushed Phil Ochs, who knew him better than most, while his old friend from Greenwich Village, Dave
Van Ronk, told Bob Spitz that although he knew Dylan was no junkie, he believed he had dabbled on occasion with heroin. “A lot of people
think
that I shoot heroin,” Dylan acknowledged to Robert Shelton. “But that's baby talk. I do a lot of things, man, which help me… And I'm smart enough to know that I don't depend on them for my existence.” But whatever he was doing to himself, he had the integrity to keep it to himself. When an Australian actress, Rosemary Gerrette, spent some time with Dylan and The Band on their tour of Australia, he refused to turn her on to the dope he was smoking. “No, I'm not gonna give you any,” he explained. “I'm not gonna start you off on anything.”

For ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35', recorded at the final Nashville session, Dylan wanted to try something a little different, and suggested recording the song out in the studio parking lot with a Salvation Army band. Drummer Kenny Buttrey felt that the local Salvation Army band might be a little more disciplined than Dylan expected, and suggested that, if Bob was after a more ramshackle sound, the musicians already assembled could “play pretty dumb if we put our minds to it.” Accordingly, he dis-assembled his drum kit, laying the bass drum flat across two chair-backs and deadening his snare-drum to approximate the sound of a marching-band drummer. Al Kooper switched from organ to tambourine, augmenting his part with assorted yelling and whooping. And despite the late hour—it was the early hours of the morning—a trombonist friend of Charlie McCoy's, called Wayne Butler, was brought in to play at a moment's notice.

“They called him in the middle of the night,” recalls Al Kooper, “and in half an hour he was there, in a shirt and tie and suit, immaculately groomed! He played for no longer than 20 or 30 minutes, and then graciously left! That's all he was required for—called at three o'clock, and he was back home at four-thirty. Charlie McCoy played bass and trumpet on that track at the same time—the bass with one hand, and the trumpet with the other—because we didn't overdub on that album at all, Dylan was adamant about that. So all the vocals were done live and, catering to that, Charlie McCoy played two instruments at once. I almost fell on the floor when I saw that. It's like Roland Kirk, except they're not all wind instruments! That was the most awesome display of musicality I'd seen in my life, just ‘Bam!' right on the spot.”

The song was cut in just two or three takes—too fast for Robbie Robertson, who blinked and missed it completely. “On ‘Rainy Day Women', I think I went out to get some cigarettes or something,” he believes, “and they'd recorded it by the time I returned!”

After the good-time goofing of ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35', the slow blues ‘Pledging My Time' sets the humid, emotionally oppressive tone for the rest of
Blonde On Blonde
. Slithering in on the back of Kenny Buttrey's enervated snare-roll, it slouches along, streaked by Robbie Robertson's spindly Chicago blues guitar lines and Dylan's harmonica, with some of Hargus ‘Pig' Robbins' finest blues piano holding it all together. Lyrically, references to “a poison headache” and the room being “so stuffy, I can hardly breathe” combine vividly with the music to evoke a smoky, late-night club ambiance whose few remaining patrons have slipped beyond tipsy to the sour, sore-headed aftermath of drunk. Like much of the album, it's a beautifully-sustained exercise in mood, notable mainly for the remarkable predictive prescience of the final verse, in which “Somebody got lucky/But it was an accident,” which spookily prefigures Dylan's motorcycle crash of July 1966, which turned out to be probably the luckiest thing that could have happened to him at the time.