Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  Less than three months after the Philharmonic Hall concert, Bob Dylan showed up at Columbia Records’ Studio A in Manhattan for the second session of recording Bringing It All Back Home—and he brought with him three guitarists, two bassists, a drummer, and a piano player. One of the first songs they recorded was “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” a Chuck Berry–ish rock number, less sung than recited, about lures, snares, chaos, not following leaders, cooking up illegal drugs, and keeping an eye out for the cops. That spring, Dylan would tour England and return to his acoustic playlist, but the film made of that tour, Dont Look Back, shows him a conscientious trouper who is obviously bored with the material and the audiences’ predictable responses. The new half-electric album appeared in March; by midsummer, “Like a Rolling Stone,” recorded in June in the opening sessions for what would become Highway 61 Revisited, was all over the radio; and in late July came the famous all-electric set at Newport that sparked a civil war among Dylan’s fans.

  Bob Dylan at the sessions for Highway 61 Revisited, Columbia Records’ Studio A, New York City, June 1965. (photo credit 3.7)

  He was no longer standing alone with his guitar and harmonica. The once pleasant joker now wore menacing black leather boots and a shiny matching jacket. No more Joan Baez. A bit of the old rapport reappeared when Dylan was coaxed back onstage to play some of his acoustic material. “Does anybody have an E harmonica, an E harmonica, anybody?” he asked—and E harmonicas came raining out from the crowd and thumped onstage. But now the envoi was unmistakable as Dylan serenaded the folkies with “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” as well as “Mr. Tambourine Man.” A year after that—with the Vietnam War tearing the country apart, urban ghettos beset by arson and riots, and a conservative backlash coming on strong—Dylan would suffer his famous motorcycle crack-up, concluding the wild period when he pushed his innovations to the limit with Blonde on Blonde and with his astonishing concerts with the Hawks (with Bobby Gregg, then Sandy Konikoff, and finally Mickey Jones playing drums), not least the “Judas” show at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England.

  In retrospect, the concert at Philharmonic Hall was Dylan’s springboard into that turmoil, turmoil that he somehow survived. His trial would reach a spiritual, musical, and literary apex sixteen months later in Nashville, Tennessee.

  * The relief would have been all the greater given they had heard “I Shall Be Free No. 10,” one of the songs on Another Side that Dylan did not perform at the concert, which included the following lyrics: “Now, I’m liberal, but to a degree / I want ev’rybody to be free / But if you think that I’ll let Barry Goldwater / Move in next door and marry my daughter / You must think I’m crazy! / I wouldn’t let him do it for all the farms in Cuba.”

  * Alternatively, the allusion could be to the famous final, freeze-frame scene on a beach in François Truffaut’s Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows).

  4

  THE SOUND OF 3:00 A.M.:

  The Making of Blonde on Blonde, New York City and Nashville, October 5, 1965-March 10 (?), 1966

  A memory from the summer of 1966: Across the Top 40 airwaves, an insistent drumbeat led off a strange, new hit song. Some listeners thought the song too explicit, its subject of madness and persecution too coarse, even cruel. Several radio-station directors banned it. Yet despite the controversy, or more likely because of it, the record shot to number three on the Billboard pop-singles chart. The singer-songwriter likened the song, which really was more of a rap, to a sick joke. His name was Jerry Samuels, but he billed himself as Napoleon XIV, performing “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!”

  That spring, an equally controversial single, with an eerily similar opening, had quickly hit number two, and by summer “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” had reappeared as the opening track on the mysterious double album Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan, who said the song was about “a minority of, you know, cripples and orientals and, uh, you know, and the world in which they live.”1 Over Coppertone-slicked bodies on Santa Monica Beach and out of secluded make-out spots and shopping-center parking lots and everywhere else American teenagers gathered that summer, it seemed that the ba-de-de-bum-de-bum announcing Dylan’s hit about getting stoned was blaring from car radios and transistor radios, inevitably followed by the ba-de-de-bum-de-bum announcing Jerry Samuels’s hit about insanity. It would be Samuels’s only big recording, and in July, Dylan suddenly left the scene and retreated into seclusion in Woodstock.

  Such were the cultural antinomies of the time as Bob Dylan crossed over to pop stardom. Blonde on Blonde might well have included a character named Napoleon XIV, and the album sometimes seemed a little crazy, but it was no joke (not even the frivolous “Rainy Day Women”), and it was hardly the work of a madman, pretended or otherwise. At age twenty-four, Dylan, spinning on the edge, had a well-ordered mind and an intense, at times biting rapport with reality. The songs are rich meditations on desire, frailty, promises, boredom, hurt, envy, connections, missed connections, paranoia, and transcendent beauty—in short, the lures and snares of love, stock themes of rock and pop music, but written with a powerful literary imagination and played out in a pop netherworld.

  Blonde on Blonde borrows from several musical styles, including 1940s Memphis and Chicago blues, turn-of-the-century vintage New Orleans processionals, contemporary pop, and blast-furnace rock and roll. With every appropriation, Dylan moved closer to a sound of his own. Years later, he famously commended some of the album’s tracks for “that thin, that wild mercury sound,” which he had begun to capture on his previous albums Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited—a sound achieved from whorls of harmonica, organ, and guitar.2 Dylan’s organist and musical go-between Al Kooper has said that “nobody has ever captured the sound of 3 a.m. better than that album.3 Nobody, not even Sinatra, gets it as good.” These descriptions are accurate, but neither of them applies to all the songs, nor to all of the sounds in most of the songs. Nor do they offer clues about the album’s origins and evolution—including how its being recorded mostly in the wee, small hours may have contributed to its 3:00 a.m. aura.

  Al Kooper and Bob Dylan in 1966. (photo credit 4.1)

  Publicity photograph of the Hawks, circa 1964. Left to right: Jerry Penfound, Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, Robbie Robertson. (photo credit 4.2)

  Reminiscences and scraps of official information have added up to a general story line. During the autumn and winter of 1965–66, after his electric show at the Newport Folk Festival in July and amid a crowded concert schedule, Dylan tried to cut his third album inside of a year at Columbia Records’ Studio A in New York with his newly hired touring band, Levon and the Hawks, which until 1964 had been the backup band for the rhythm-and-blues and rockabilly star Ronnie Hawkins.* The results were unsatisfactory. Blonde on Blonde arose from Dylan’s decision to quit New York and record in Nashville with a collection of seasoned country-music session men joined by Al Kooper and the Hawks’ guitarist, Robbie Robertson. But that story line is incomplete.

  From the time he began recording regularly with electric instruments, Dylan, his palette enlarged, fixated on reproducing the sounds inside his mind with minimal editing artifice. The making of Blonde on Blonde combined perfectionism with spontaneous improvisation to capture what Dylan heard but could not completely articulate in words. “He never did anything twice,” the album’s producer, Bob Johnston, recalls of Dylan’s mercurial manner in the studio, “and if he did it twice, you probably didn’t get it.”4 Making the record also involved happenstance, necessity, uncertainty, wrongheaded excess, virtuosity, and retrieval. One of the album’s finest musical performances, maybe its finest, unfolded in New York, not Nashville, perfected by a combo that included three musicians—Rick Danko, Bobby Gregg, and Paul Griffin—who have never received proper credit for working on the album. Some of the other standout songs were compact compositions that took shape quickly during the final Nashville sessions. And what has come to be remembered as the musical b
ig bang in Nashville actually grew out of a singular evolution that turned one grand Dylan experiment into something grander.

  “THAT’S NOT THE SOUND”

  The first recording date at all connected to Blonde on Blonde took place with the Hawks in New York on October 5, 1965, barely a month after the release of Highway 61 Revisited. Dylan had just performed his half-electric show at Carnegie Hall and in Newark (only his fifth and sixth concerts ever with any of the Hawks) and received a warmer response than expected. “Like a Rolling Stone” had hit number two on Billboard over the summer; now, following successful concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, and in Austin and Dallas, the booing furies of Newport and Forest Hills seemed to have receded, at least temporarily. Dylan’s new sound initially went over much better with audiences down south, where rock and roll was born, than in most other places, and so the applause at Carnegie Hall was unexpected. Dylan was also still learning about how to play onstage with a band, and the Hawks were still getting used to playing with him; the kinks would surface inside Studio A.

  At the discotheque Ondine in Manhattan on the evening of the first recording session for Blonde on Blonde, October 5, 1965. Left to right: Rick Danko, Bob Dylan, Bob Neuwirth, David Blue, and unidentified [Venetia Cunningham?]. (photo credit 4.3)

  The producer Bob Johnston, a Texas-born protégé of John Hammond’s, had overseen the last four of the six Highway 61 sessions (replacing Tom Wilson, Dylan’s record producer since The Times They Are A-Changin’), and Johnston was back for Blonde on Blonde. Not surprisingly, Dylan had not written any new material that approached “Like a Rolling Stone” or “Desolation Row.” This first day’s efforts included two takes of “Medicine Sunday,” an early version of what would evolve into “Temporary Like Achilles,” and two takes (separated by a good deal of sketchy instrumental riffs) of another song that became two songs with very different lyrics: the first, a downtown hipster joke given the title “Jet Pilot”; the second, a quasi-parody of the Beatles’ “I Wanna Be Your Man.” The parody morphed, later in the session, into six takes of what Dylan, on the session tape, calls “I Don’t Wanna Be Your Partner, I Wanna Be Your Man,” and was later labeled “I Wanna Be Your Lover.” The parody improved during the session and had some intriguing lines—fragments from the entire day’s work would later reappear on Blonde on Blonde—but the results, maybe intentionally, amounted to musical warm-ups. The session ended with an untitled instrumental, later called “Number One,” also unreleased on Blonde on Blonde but later bootlegged. The date’s bright spot was recording new takes of “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” a single left over from the Highway 61 sessions.

  Left to right: Dylan, Johnny Cash, unidentified, and Bob Johnston, Nashville, Tennessee, 1969. (photo credit 4.4)

  Over the next two months, Dylan and the Hawks resumed touring—from Toronto, Canada, to Washington, D.C.—and the booing resumed, though not in Memphis. On November 22, Dylan married Sara Lownds, née Shirley Noznisky, a recently divorced former actress and fashion model whom he had met privately in New York through Albert Grossman’s wife, Sally. Eight days after the wedding, two days after the Washington concert, and one day before flying off for a West Coast tour, he was back in the studio with the Hawks, minus the leader, Levon Helm, who had wearied of playing in a backup band and quit; Bobby Gregg played drums in his stead. The newlywed now carried with him a masterpiece he had to record right away. “This is called ‘Freeze Out,’ ” Dylan announced with a note of triumph as the tape started rolling for the first session take.

  Bob Dylan and the Hawks at the War Memorial, Syracuse, New York, November 21, 1965. (photo credit 4.5)

  “Freeze Out” was “Visions of Johanna,” virtually intact, but Dylan was even less certain about how he wanted it played than he was about the title. On the session tape, he and the Hawks change the key and slow the tempo at the start of the second take, if only to hear more closely. “That’s not right,” Dylan interrupts. He speeds things up again—“like that”—and bids Gregg to go to his cowbell, but some more scorching tests are no good either. “Stop … That’s not the sound, that’s not it,” he breaks in early on. “I can’t … ’at’s not … bauoom … it’s, it’s more of a bauoom, bauoom … It’snota, it’snota, it’s not hard rock. The only thing in it, man, that’s hard is Robbie.” A broken attempt features a harpsichord, possibly played by Garth Hudson. “Naah,” Dylan decides, though he keeps the harpsichord in the background. Out of nowhere comes the idea for a new introduction, starting off with Dylan on harmonica, preceding a slower, hair-raising, bar-band rock version. But Dylan doesn’t hear “Freeze Out” that way either, so he quiets things down, inching closer to what will eventually appear on Blonde on Blonde—and it is still not right. Dylan had written an extraordinary song—he would boast of it at a San Francisco press conference a few days later—but had not rendered its sound. Over the coming months, starting in Berkeley, he would perform the song constantly in concert, but in the solo acoustic half of the show. (The first “Visions of Johanna” date did yield, in an evening session, a forceful final take of “Crawl Out Your Window”—but the single’s ill-timed release, just after Christmas, generated mediocre American sales.)

  Dylan became frustrated and angry at the next Blonde on Blonde date, held three weeks into the new year during a break from touring. In nine hours of recording, through nineteen listed takes, only one song was attempted, for which Dylan supplied the instantly improvised title “Just a Little Glass of Water.” Eventually renamed “She’s Your Lover Now,” it is a lengthy, cinematic vignette of a hurt, confused man lashing out at his ex-girlfriend and her new lover. Nobody expected it would be recorded easily. (Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, interjects on the tape, just before the recording starts, that there is a supply of “raw meat coming up for everybody in the band.”) The first take rolls at a stately pace, but Dylan is restless and the day has just begun.

  On successive takes, the tempo speeds, then slows a bit, then speeds up again. Dylan tries singing a line in each verse accompanied only by Garth Hudson’s organ, shifting the song’s dynamics, but the idea survives for only two takes. After some false starts, Dylan says, “It’s not right … it’s not right,” as if something just keeps eluding him, and soon he despairs: “No, fuck it, I’m losing the whole fucking song.” He again changes tempos and fiddles with some chords and periodically scolds himself as well as the band: “I don’t give a fuck if it’s good or not, just play it together … just, just, make it all together, you don’t have to play anything fancy or nothing, just … just together.” A strong, nearly complete version ensues, but Dylan flubs the last verse. “I can’t hear the song anymore,” he finally confesses. He wants the song back, so he plays it alone, slowly, on the tack piano he has been playing for the entire session, and nails every verse.* He reacts to his own performance with a little “huh” that could have been registering puzzlement or rediscovery. But Dylan would end up discarding “She’s Your Lover Now,” just as he would abandon a later, interesting take of an older song, originally written for the blond European chanteuse Nico, “I’ll Keep It with Mine.”

  For better or worse, Dylan had become used to honing his songs and then working quickly in the studio, even when he played with sidemen. He had finished Bringing It All Back Home in just three studio dates involving fewer than sixteen hours of studio time. It took five dates, one overdub session, and twenty-eight hours for Highway 61 Revisited (along with the single “Positively 4th Street”). After three dates and more than eighteen hours in the studio on this new endeavor, Dylan had one unrealized tour de force, one potentially big song, and one marginally popular single, but little in the way of an album. One way to move forward was to bring in veterans of earlier Dylan sessions. Four days after failing on “She’s Your Lover Now,” Dylan recorded with Paul Griffin on piano, William E. Lee on bass, and, fortuitously, Al Kooper (who stopped by to see his friend Griffin but wound up sitting in on organ). Bobby Gregg returned once again to
substitute for Levon Helm on the drums and was joined this time by the Hawks’ guitarist, Robbie Robertson, and bassist, Rick Danko. Dylan also brought two new songs: the funny, jealous put-down blues “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” (based in part on Memphis Minnie’s “Me and My Chauffeur Blues,” and in part on Lightnin’ Hopkins’s “Automobile Blues,” but laid aside temporarily after two strong takes) and “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),” recorded simply as “Song Unknown” after Dylan pondered in the studio but could not come up with a title. The results on “Song Unknown” were stunning.*

  The lyrics are straightforward, even ordinary, tracking a burned-out love affair’s misunderstandings. Dylan shifted tempos and pieced together the lyrics section by section inside the studio, working off the line, later abandoned, “Now you’re glad it’s through”; the title chorus only began to emerge on the fifth take. But the sound texture that makes “One of Us Must Know” so remarkable was built steadily, late into the night and into the next morning. After take seventeen, Dylan heeds the producer Johnston’s advice to start with a harmonica swoop. Crescendos off of an extended fifth chord, led by Paul Griffin’s astonishing piano swells (“half Gershwin, half gospel, all heart,” an astute critic later wrote), climax in choruses dominated by piano, organ, and Bobby Gregg’s drumrolls; Robbie Robertson’s guitar hits its full strength at the finale.5 Intimations of the thin, wild mercury sound underpin rock-and-roll symphonics. Johnston delivers a pep talk before one last take—“it’s gotta be that soul feel”—there is a false start, then Gregg snaps a quick click opener, and less than five minutes later the keeper is in the can.