by Andy Gill
The song was widely believed—not least by her acquaintances among Andy Warhol’s Factory retinue—to be about the Factory pin-up girl Edie Sedgwick, a ’60s “ace face” and New York scenemaker with whom Dylan had a brief association in 1965. (Indeed, Robert Margoulef’s biopic of Edie, Ciao Manhattan, includes “Just Like A Woman” on its soundtrack.) A former Boston debutante and model, Sedgwick dedicated herself to meeting beautiful, talented people, with the hope that she herself might develop artistic talent of some sort, or, failing that, serve as an artist’s muse. Accordingly, she became one of Warhol’s iconic superstars, before transferring her attentions to Dylan, to whom she was introduced at the Kettle Of Fish bar on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village.
Her interest may not have been purely amicable; it was rumored that Albert Grossman was interested in developing her career—though eventually even he was forced to admit defeat as to the means by which to achieve this, when it transpired that Edie was a hopeless singer. A rumored Dylan/Edie movie, meanwhile, never got beyond the talking stage. Warhol himself was apparently annoyed at her defection, as well as paranoid about Dylan’s opinion of him: for some time, he apparently believed himself to be the chrome horse-riding diplomat in ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ (and Edie, therefore, its subject), despite the fact that the song had been written well before Dylan had met either Edie or Andy.
Edie’s growing infatuation with Bob was eventually broken early in 1966 when Warhol, who had learned that Dylan had been secretly married a month or two earlier, took great relish in breaking the news to her. She drifted away from both camps, but not before making an impression on Blonde On Blonde—she was included among the photographs in the original inner sleeve, and some (including Patti Smith, who wrote a poem about her) believe her to be the inspiration for the album title. It would certainly explain the song’s most often queried line, about “her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls,” which in the mid-’60s New York drug culture would have been recognized as references to marijuana, speed and pep-pills.
She eventually died of a barbiturate overdose in 1971, while ‘Just Like A Woman’ became one of Dylan’s most popular songs. Ironically, at a time when his publishers were kept increasingly busy collecting his royalties from the flood of cover-versions of his material—in September 1965, there were no fewer than eight of his songs in the US Top 40, half of them covers—‘Just Like A Woman’ was the only track from Blonde On Blonde to attract significant attention from other artists. It also became the song Dylan performed most often over the subsequent two decades. It’s not known for sure, however, exactly when during this period the song’s second line was changed from the recorded “Tonight is lost inside the rain” to the less evocative “Tonight as I stand inside the rain,” as in the collected Lyrics 1962–1985. In the Biograph annotations, Dylan half-remembers writing the song on the road, in a hotel in Kansas City “or something” the previous Thanksgiving, having declined an offer of dinner at someone’s house.
MOST LIKELY YOU GO YOUR WAY AND I’LL GO MINE
Apart from the intrusion of a quirky, nonsensical middle-eight concerning a badly-built, stilt-walking judge, this is perhaps the most straightforward Dylan lyric from the entire 1965/66 period, crystallizing the moment when a relationship finally cracks, the narrator tiring of the effort of dragging his lover along. In the Biograph annotations, Dylan reckons he must have written the song following a failed relationship “where, you know, I was lucky to have escaped without a broken nose.” Charlie McCoy repeated his party-trick of playing bass guitar and trumpet at the same time, though the real star is drummer Kenny Buttrey, setting a sprightly pace for the others to follow with some delightful snare-rolls.
The song continues the fascination with adverbial titles that Dylan had started with ‘Queen Jane Approximately’ and ‘Positively Fourth Street’, and which would continue through much of Blonde On Blonde’s third side. “He probably named all of them at the same time,” reckons Al Kooper. “They were called other things until he said, ‘Well, what are we gonna call this? ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’, ‘Obviously 5 Believers’, ‘Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35’… like that—they were pretty much all named at the same time, as I recall.”
TEMPORARY LIKE ACHILLES
Another slow, smoky blues, this one dominated by the beautifully evocative piano of Hargus “Pig” Robbins, who achieves a perfect balance between the song’s basic chord structure and the restrained trills which, aside from a brief wheeze of harmonica, serve as its sole embellishment. The song is all mood, a straightforward lament from a would-be lover kept dangling on his lady’s whims: she knows the strength of his ardor, but remains largely unmoved—though not completely inaccessible.
A couple of hallucinatory images—a crawling scorpion and a velvet door—add enigmatic color to Dylan’s plaint, while his situation is summed up in the final verse by reference to the eponymous Achilles: “How come you get someone like him to be your guard?” asks Dylan. The answer, of course, is to lead her suitor on, to keep him dangling on the vague promise of distant fulfillment. In classical mythology, Achilles was virtually impregnable, save for his heel, which eventually proved his downfall; so his presence as guard of her affections suggests that, while it may indeed be difficult for Dylan to break down her resistance, it is not completely impossible. But the task will be as difficult as catching Achilles in his one weak spot, and may take a while: for “temporary” as Achilles is, he’s still likely to be around a considerable time.
The chorus and part of the tune were salvaged from ‘Medicine Sunday’, a dour number attempted in late 1965 whose surviving minute-long fragment concludes “I know you want my lovin’/Mama but you’re so hard.” With a simple inversion of the first line, Dylan located the song’s true direction.
ABSOLUTELY SWEET MARIE
Containing one of the most oft-repeated of Dylan’s little life-lessons—the claim that “to live outside the law you must be honest,” which served as justification for many a bohemian existence—‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’ is one of the album’s simpler pleasures, from the Lowery organ figure with which Al Kooper opens proceedings, to the wailing harmonica solo which Dylan skates over the second middle-eight break, and the sexual jesting in the lyrics.
It was whipped up on the spot in the studio. “I can remember the ones where I had the time to show it to the band,” says Kooper, “and that wasn’t one of them. The real unsung hero on that track is [again] the drummer, Kenny Buttrey—the beat is amazing, and that’s what makes the track work.”
The lyrics are a spicy combination of sexual entendre, old folk reference and surreal intrusions by various members of Dylan’s repertory company of unusual characters, in this case the river-boat captain and the Persian drunkard. The first verse is as plain an expression of sexual frustration as Dylan penned: you can all but see his eyebrow cheekily raised as he sings about “beating on my trumpet” when “it gets so hard, you see.” The references to the railroad (and its gate) offer variations on the common train/sex metaphor, while the “six white horses” are a further blues image of sexual potency, appearing both in Blind Lemon Jefferson’s ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’—recorded by Dylan on his debut album—and in ‘Coming Round The Mountain’, the traditional song later covered by Dylan and The Band as one of the (unreleased) Basement Tapes numbers.
4TH TIME AROUND
A strange combination of the desultory and the surreal, ‘Fourth Time Around’ describes a romantic encounter of symbolic emptiness, whose narrative, tossed this way and that by the quirky gusts of imagery, drifts along with as little volition as its protagonists’ actions. At times, it seems as if Dylan is simply rhyming whatever slips into his mind, following the story rather than dictating its course, even as it slides between verses, courtesy of an outrageously elongated “He-errrr” whose length is further exaggerated by comparison with the clipped brevity of the ensuing “Jamaican rum.”
Musically, the song stands apart from the rest of Blonde
On Blonde by dint of its lightness and delicacy, Dylan’s vocal and wistful harmonica riding the rippling Spanish arpeggios of Wayne Moss and Charlie McCoy’s twin acoustic guitars. “Those guitars playing in harmony, that’s pure Nashville,” says Al Kooper. “People don’t think like that anywhere else.”
John Lennon allegedly thought the song was a parody of The Beatles’ ‘Norwegian Wood’, which appeared in December 1965 on their Rubber Soul album. “I thought it was very ballsy of Dylan to do ‘Fourth Time Around’,” recalls Kooper. “I asked him about it—I said, it sounds so much like ‘Norwegian Wood’, and he said, ‘Well actually, ‘Norwegian Wood’ sounds a lot like this! I’m afraid they took it from me, and I feel that I have to, y’know, record it.’ Evidently, he’d played it for them, and they’d nicked it! I said, ‘Aren’t you worried about getting sued by The Beatles?’ and he said, ‘They couldn’t sue me!’” And indeed, they didn’t.
OBVIOUSLY 5 BELIEVERS
The fourth and last of Blonde On Blonde’s Chicago-blues workouts (after ‘Pledging My Time’, ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’ and ‘Temporary Like Achilles’), ‘Obviously 5 Believers’ is the closest the album comes to an out-and-out rocker. Save for the apparently arbitrary references to “fifteen jugglers” (presumably from the stock circus company with which Dylan populated his songs) and the “five believers” of the title, it’s a basic love moan that steams along on Robbie Robertson’s hot-rod lead guitar, with Charlie McCoy’s harmonica fills serving as links between the verses.
“I think that was the track I did that got everybody to accept me,” reckons Robbie Robertson. “It’s a funny thing in Nashville, it was very clique-ish: the musicians that played on sessions there didn’t like any outsiders coming in, and because Bob Johnston had already got these guitar players in there, when I came along it was kind of like, ‘What do we need him for?’—nobody said that, but you could feel that kind of a vibe.”
“When we played live,” Robertson explains, “Bob would give me a lot of guitar solos—it was kind of a new experience for him, to have somebody he could just look over at, and they’d come out wailing; and when we were recording in Nashville, it was the same thing: he’d sing a couple of verses then look over at me, and I’d come out wailing! And it was at that point that the guys in Nashville accepted me, because I was doing something that none of them did, so I don’t think they felt I was treading on their territory. They became quite friendly after that. I suppose the proof was in the pudding with these guys, that if you were doing something musically that they respected, then they respected you.”
SAD EYED LADY OF THE LOWLANDS
‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’ took up the entire fourth side of Blonde On Blonde, a distinction rare even in the habitually elongated arena of improvised jazz, and unprecedented in pop music. For all that, it was only about the same length as ‘Desolation Row’, around the eleven-minute mark; but Dylan evidently wanted the song to stand alone, considering it at the time “the best song I’ve ever written.”
A love song in five lengthy stanzas, it has a measured grace and stately pace that seems as much funeral procession as wedding march, with a depth of devotion absent from Dylan’s work since ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit’. Though the song has more than its fair share of enigmatic imagery, there’s no trace here of the jokey nihilism and existential absurdity that marked out Highway 61 Revisited and much of the rest of Blonde On Blonde. This time around, clearly, it’s serious.
In 1976, Dylan finally confirmed what everyone had known all along, when he admitted “Stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel/Writin’ ‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’ for you” in his song ‘Sara’, from the Desire album. The late rock critic Lester Bangs poo-pooed this explanation with characteristic bravado in Creem magazine, claiming “I have it on pretty good authority that Dylan wrote ‘Sad Eyed Lady’, as well as about half of the rest of Blonde On Blonde, wired out of his skull in the studio, just before the songs were recorded, while the session men sat around waiting on him, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer.”
There seems no reason to doubt either of these claims—the musicians were certainly kept hanging around while Dylan finished the song but, equally, he was known to work and re-work his more important songs for some time before recording them, and most of that work was probably done back in New York, before the Nashville sessions. But whatever the circumstances of its evolution, there is no doubting that the song’s subject is Sara Lowndes, whom Dylan had married in a secret ceremony on November 22, 1965. Even relatively close friends were unaware of their marriage, and Dylan contrived to keep it under wraps for as long as possible—two days after the event, he answered an interviewer’s query about the possibility of him settling down, getting married and having children with a brazenly disingenuous “I don’t hope to be like anybody. Getting married, having a bunch of kids, I have no hope for it.”
It’s perhaps an indication of the depth of his devotion that he conspired to shield Sara from the public eye in a way which didn’t apply to his other female friends. Their relationship, it appears, had been conducted along such lines right from the start: Joan Baez’s sister Mimi Fariña recalled overhearing Dylan making a secret date with another woman —whom she later realized must have been Sara—mere minutes after Baez had departed from a weekend get-together up at Woodstock shortly before the April 1965 UK Tour; and more recently, Edie Sedgwick (see entry for ‘Just Like A Woman’) was shocked to find out that the young pop rebel she had been courting was actually a happily married man.
Short, dark-haired and, indeed, sad-eyed, Sara had been married before, to Playboy chief Victor Lowndes—the “magazine husband” referred to in the final verse—but had since set about building a new life of her own. She appears to have been the perfect marital foil for Dylan, posing no threat to his ego and bearing him a string of children in quick succession. Possessed of a quiet but unimposing fortitude, she furnished him with a much-needed oasis of calm and sincerity away from the high-octane hurly-burly and habitual deceit of the entertainment industry.
There is a similar nocturnal feel to the song as there is to ‘Visions Of Johanna’, and Al Kooper confirms that it was recorded at around three or four in the morning, after Dylan had kept the musicians on hold through the evening while he finished off the song. Charlie McCoy, bassist on the track, recalled wondering “what in the hell this guy was trying to pull” as they all sat around in the basement recreation room, playing ping-pong and drinking coffee. Used to being paid by the hour for three-hour sessions, by eight in the evening they were registering perplexity, and by four in the morning they were half-asleep when Dylan called them upstairs to play.
They had been surprised when ‘Visions Of Johanna’, cut the previous day, had stretched beyond the seven-minute mark, but as ‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’ progressed, they began to wonder if the marathon song would ever finish. Dylan had given them only the sketchiest of outlines, and as each verse moved toward its chorus, they instinctively wound up the power, anticipating a conclusion, only to have to rein it all back in again as he began yet another verse. “People were looking at their watches and squinting at each other as if to say, ‘What is this—what the hell’s going on here?’” drummer Kenny Buttrey told Bob Spitz. “I have to admit, I thought the guy had blown a gasket, and we were basically humoring him.” Fatigued, they tried to concentrate on their playing, desperate not to make a mistake and have to go through the whole song again.
Extraordinarily, the song was cut in one perfect take—a glowing testament to the abilities of these Nashville cats. With Kooper’s organ adding wistful flourishes to Hargus Robbins’ rhapsodic, rolling piano, and Buttrey’s hi-hat keeping discreet time through the quiet passages, it remains a masterful piece of work, suffused with a weary resignation which seemed to signal the conclusion not just to Blonde On Blonde, but to a whole era. Nobody, however, could foresee the form that conclusion would take.
THE BASEMENT TAPES
By summer 1966, something had to snap; Dylan had simply been working too hard for too long on too many fronts.
His tour with the Hawks seemed to go on forever, and despite the extraordinary music they were making (as evidenced by the widely-distributed live bootleg purporting to come from the Royal Albert Hall concert in London, but actually recorded at the Manchester Free Trade Hall), in country after country they encountered the same mix of hysteria and hostility. Things got so bad that at the Paris Olympia concert, when sections of the crowd started whistling during a break between songs, Dylan responded, “I’m just as anxious to go home as you are. Don’t you have a paper to read?”
Even his more supportive fans posed a threat, as he realized when a girl lunged at his head with scissors as he was leaving the stage at one concert, snipping off a lock of his hair. Things were getting dangerous out there, strapped to the accelerating projectile of fame at exactly the moment that celebrity became a global concept. Few others—the Beatles and the Stones, perhaps—had experienced such hysterical adulation before, and there had been more of them to share it around: for though he had his band alongside him, they went largely unrecognized; Dylan was the complete focus of attention.
