Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  The chatter on the tape and the studio tape version of the song are, if not necessarily seriously whacked, certainly jacked up and high-spirited—much as Johnston recalled to Black, with “all of us walking around, yelling, playing, and singing.22 That was it!” The excited musicians chip in with their own musical ideas. When Johnston asks for the song’s title, Dylan’s off-the-cuff answer, “A Long-Haired Mule and a Porcupine Here” (later changed to “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”), is perfectly in character. “It’s the only one time that I ever heard Dylan really laugh, really belly-laugh, on and on, going around that studio, marching in that thing,” Johnston said. In only one take, the recording is done. And, it is important to note, three more tracks would be recorded that night, all of which would appear on the album.

  It is now long past the midnight hour, and songs are getting churned out at a rapid clip. After each final take, Johnston announces, “Next!” sounding, Texas drawl and all, like a New York deli counterman hustling things along. When the playing of “Black Dog Blues” (later “Obviously 5 Believers”) breaks down, Dylan complains, “This is very easy, man” and “I don’t wanna spend no time with this song, man.” Charlie McCoy seizes a harmonica signature line; Kooper lays down a fuzzy bass run on a Lowrey organ; a percussion shaker effaces Buttrey; and Robertson blazes. In four takes, the song is done.

  “Next!”

  Johnston gets Dylan to start one last retake of “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” with a clangy lead guitar—“Okay,” Dylan says, sounding almost boyish, before asking the other musicians to play along with him—but Robertson’s searing performance abducts the song. “Robbie, the whole world’ll marry you on that one,” Charlie McCoy raves.

  “Next!”

  “I Want You” had been Kooper’s favorite song all along, and he has said Dylan saved it for last just to bug him. More like “Memphis Blues Again” than like the other songs cut at this final session, “I Want You” starts off in manuscript with lyrical experiments that fail, about deputies asking him his name and being unable to explain what he wants from you. Sometimes, Dylan stopped to work on a phrase over and over, fiddling around with lines about all his fathers going down hugging one another and about their daughters putting him down because he isn’t their brother, until he strikes on what more or less becomes the final version. Once Dylan has finished writing, though, little changes through five takes except the tempo. Johnston expresses surprise that Dylan can sing all the words so swiftly; Wayne Moss’s rapid-fire sixteenth notes on the guitar are nearly as impressive. And then the recording of Blonde on Blonde ends.

  GHOST, HOWLS, BONES, AND FACES

  After the record was mixed in Los Angeles in April, it was obvious that the riches of the Nashville sessions could not fit on a single LP.

  During the recording, dating back to October in New York, and through all of the changes in personnel, there had been some constants. Al Kooper played on every track of the final album, his contributions essential not just as a musician and impromptu arranger but also as a conduit between Dylan and the changing lineup of session men. Kooper’s Nashville roommate, Robbie Robertson, had been involved from the start and refined his playing from unsubtle rock lead to restrained, even delicate performances, along with blues keenings that won praise from some of the most discerning ears on the planet. Kooper and Robertson, familiar with Dylan’s spur-of-the-moment ways, also helped as translators for the Nashville musicians, working mainly through Charlie McCoy. “They couldn’t have any charts or anything, so they were following where he was putting his hand,” Johnston told Black.23 “It was so spontaneous. Al Kooper used to call it the road map to hell!”

  And, of course, dominating everything was Bob Dylan’s voice, figuratively as the author and literally as one of the album’s main musical instruments. Dylan did not completely relinquish his own version of what Jack Kerouac had called “spontaneous bop prosody,” but crucially, in violation of Kerouac’s alleged miraculous practice, Dylan constantly and carefully revised, as he always had and still does, even to the point of abandoning entire songs. Three years earlier, Dylan’s deft change of a single word of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” from “my” to “young,” strengthened the song’s narrative, while it brought the lyric closer to the traditional Scots song on which it was based, “Lord Randall.” With the songs on Blonde on Blonde, the alterations were sometimes extensive and always unerring. Changing the line “I gave you those pearls” to “with her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls” was one example out of dozens of how Dylan, in the studio and in his Nashville hotel room, improved the timbre of the songs’ lyrics as well as their imagery. And Dylan’s voice, as ever an evolving invention, was one of the album’s touchstones, a smooth, even sweet surprise to listeners who had gotten used to him sounding harsh and raspy. By turns sibilant, sibylline, injured, cocky, sardonic, and wry, Dylan’s voice on Blonde on Blonde more than made up in tone and phrasing what it gave away in range. It was even more challenging to sing out than it was to write out “But like Louise always says / ‘Ya can’t look at much, can ya, man?’ / As she, herself, prepares for him,” in “Visions of Johanna,” but Dylan pulled it off.

  Blonde on Blonde was, and remains, a gigantic peak in Dylan’s career. From more than a dozen angles, it describes basic, not always flattering, human desire and the inner movements of an individual being in the world. The lyric manuscripts from the Nashville sessions show Dylan working in a 1960s mode of what T. S. Eliot had called, regretfully, the dissociation of sensibility—cutting off discursive thought or wit from poetic value, substituting emotion for coherence. Dylan had begun experimenting with that mode at least as early as 1964 in composing the songs that turned up on Another Side, with their obvious debts to the Beats. The less-finished lyrics-in-formation for Blonde on Blonde that survive in manuscript—like the archipelago of flashing images that led, finally, to intimations of “Memphis Blues Again”—became much tighter but would never completely lose their delirious quality. Along with its ruptures between image and meaning, its Rimbaud-like symbolism and Beat generation cut-up images, Blonde on Blonde evokes William Blake’s song cycle of innocence and experience, when it depicts how they can mingle, as in “Just Like a Woman,” but also when it depicts the gulf that lies between them. Many of the album’s songs, for all of their self-involved temptations and frustrations, express a kind of solidarity in the struggle to live inside that gulf. Although the songs are sometimes mordant, even accusatory, they are not at all hard or cynical. Blonde on Blonde never degrades or mocks primary experience. Its doomed, hurtful love affairs do not negate love, or abandon efforts to remake love, to liberate it: quite the opposite, as is shown in the litanies of its concluding psalm to the mysteriously wise Sad-Eyed Lady. Blonde on Blonde, as finally assembled, is a disillusioned but seriously hopeful work of art.

  The album is Blakean in other ways as well. As the young critic Jonny Thakkar has pointed out, there are allusions to Blake’s writing in the third verse of “Visions of Johanna,” where the song’s perspective temporarily shifts to that of the delicate but prosaic Louise, and which mocks Louise’s distracted lover, the singer, as “little boy lost.” The phrase repeats the title of one selection in Songs of Innocence and one in Songs of Experience, contrapuntal poems in which Blake’s little boy first is disappointed when he pursues a holy vision—“The night was dark, no father was there, / The child was wet with dew; / The mire was deep, and the child did weep, / And away the vapour flew”—and later is cruelly punished. On his earlier recordings, Dylan asked questions and supplied answers, adhering to the standard folk-ballad form if only to say that the answer was blowin’ in the wind. But some of his songs on Blonde on Blonde, like some of Blake’s poems in Songs of Experience, pose questions without providing any answers at all. Blake’s “Tyger” consists entirely of unanswered questions—“What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”—and so does “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”

  The album cha
nged how listeners and ambitious writers and performers thought about Bob Dylan and about the possibilities of rock and roll. It also affected its makers. A year later, after the breakup of the group he was in, the Blues Project, Al Kooper headed a new band that fused jazz with rock and roll and pop but took its name from an album of Johnny Cash’s released in 1963, Blood, Sweat, and Tears (as well as from the phrase’s original coiner, Winston Churchill). Soon after they finished Blonde on Blonde, several of the Nashville musicians reassembled as the Mystic Knights Band and Street Singers. Under the producer Bob Johnston (renamed, for the occasion, Colonel Jubilation B. Johnston), they recorded and released on Columbia one of the most obscure rock albums of the 1960s, Moldy Goldies—“as goofy as we could be,” Charlie McCoy remembers—sending up hits from the Young Rascals’ “Good Lovin’ ” to Sonny and Cher’s “Bang Bang.”24 They also spoofed a hit of their own, namely “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” except with one “Luscious Norma Jean Owen” singing instead of Bob Dylan, her southern voice hovering between coyness and confusion.

  William Blake manuscript of “The Tyger,” one of the poems in his collection Songs of Experience, published in 1794. See lower right. (photo credit 4.11)

  Album sleeve of Moldy Goldies, Columbia Records, 1966. (photo credit 4.12)

  Dylan helped oversee the mixing of Blonde on Blonde in Los Angeles, then departed on his famous, furious world tour with the Hawks (Mickey Jones now sitting in for Levon Helm). Despite the heckling in England and France, the instant commercial success of “Rainy Day Women” back home matched the earlier success of “Like a Rolling Stone,” and it seemed as if Dylan’s new sound had blasted away the booers for good, at least in America. Artistically complicated though it was, Blonde on Blonde affirmed Dylan’s enormous new popularity, reaching number nine on Billboard. In July, though, Dylan cracked up his motorcycle on a back road outside Woodstock, and in his new seclusion he recorded near Saugerties what became known as The Basement Tapes with all of the Hawks, soon renamed the Band. He would not return to a Columbia recording studio until a year and a half after he’d completed Blonde on Blonde—back in Nashville with Charlie McCoy and Kenny Buttrey by his side, and with Bob Johnston producing, to complete John Wesley Harding, which was released just after Christmas. Innocence and experience remained on Dylan’s mind, but the stripped-down song that took shape quickly during the first session, “Drifter’s Escape,” sounded completely unlike what had come before. “Everything was different,” McCoy remembers, referring to the efficiency of the sessions (which required fewer than ten hours of studio time) but also to the singer’s voice: “To me, he sounded almost like he was singing different.”25 Bob Dylan refused to be locked up or pinned down, even to the rapturous sounds of Blonde on Blonde. He drifted, as he still drifts, toward new peaks and valleys and peaks.

  * After leaving Hawkins, the band appeared first as the Levon Helm Sextet (led by the drummer, Levon Helm, and including a saxophone player, Jerry Penfound), then (without Penfound) as Levon and the Hawks. In 1965, they released a single on the small Ware Records label under the name the Canadian Squires—all of the members except the Arkansan Helm hailed from Canada—but then reverted to Levon and the Hawks and recorded another single for Atco Records that same year. The group had been playing a regular engagement at Tony Mart’s, a club at Somers Point on the New Jersey shore, when Dylan hired them in the late summer of 1965, based on strong recommendations from the young blues singer and son of Dylan’s first producer, John Hammond (who had recorded with Helm, the keyboard player Garth Hudson, and the guitarist Robbie Robertson earlier in the year), and from Albert Grossman’s secretary, Mary Martin.

  * A tack piano, which produces a sound reminiscent of saloons in movie and television Westerns, is an ordinary piano with tacks or nails attached to the hammers in order to produce a tinny, percussive timbre. Dylan first recorded with one two years earlier on the song “Black Crow Blues,” on Another Side of Bob Dylan.

  * One writer’s listing for all of this day’s sessions credits Michael Bloomfield on guitar and William E. Lee on bass; another listing omits Paul Griffin. The playing and talk on the session tape, though, show conclusively that Rick Danko was the bassist on “One of Us Must Know,” that Robbie Robertson played guitar, and that Griffin was, indeed, the pianist. After all these years, Bobby Gregg, Paul Griffin, and Rick Danko, whose names have never appeared in the album’s liner notes either on LP or on CD, deserve their share of credit for playing on Blonde on Blonde. My thanks to Diane Lapson for helping to sort out the identities of the various musicians on the recordings, as well as to Jeff Rosen and Robert Bowers for guiding me to and through the recordings themselves.

  The first take of “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” was also strong and ended up being released forty years later on the CD collection that accompanied Martin Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home. Curiously, this version sounded more like the one actually included on Blonde on Blonde (and recorded in Nashville at the very last studio session) than many of the numerous intervening takes. For once, Dylan ended up, musically, more or less where he began.

  * According to one dating of the Columbia reels, this session occurred on January 22, the day after the failure to capture “She’s Your Lover Now”—but all other accounts of Dylan’s recording sessions state that the date was January 27, and Columbia recording numbers given each song affirm the later date. The musicians included Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Al Kooper, and Bobby Gregg as well as Dylan. The session was mainly devoted to recording revised versions of “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” and a pair of incomplete, preliminary run-throughs of “I’ll Keep It with Mine.” Every take was discarded for Blonde on Blonde.

  * The outstanding early use of a bridge in Dylan’s work appears in the verse beginning, “You have many contacts,” in “Ballad of a Thin Man.”

  PART III: LATER

  5

  CHILDREN OF PARADISE:

  The Rolling Thunder Revue, New Haven, Connecticut, November 13, 1975

  The New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum was an uninspiring place to see and hear the Rolling Thunder Revue. Built just three years earlier, and stretched out behind the Knights of Columbus’s national headquarters tower, the building would have epitomized the drab futurism of mainstream American public architecture from the mid-1960s through the 1970s—if only it had been a little more charming and better designed. The geology of the Connecticut shoreline prevented construction of an underground garage, so the architects planted a parking lot on the roof—an ill-planned as well as off-putting innovation that caused the building to crumble, until it was finally demolished in 2007. Dylan’s revue was a tribute of sorts to the old-time carnivals and medicine shows, and it often performed, especially during its early weeks, in historic old theaters. Turning the New Haven Coliseum into something carnivalesque, let alone something historic, would require a great deal of stagecraft and make-believe.

  The Knights of Columbus tower and the New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum, undated photograph. (photo credit 5.1)

  Even so, there was a buzz inside, up near the front of the hall. New Haven was the closest to New York City that the revue would get until its very final date, so VIPs came up to hear one or both of the shows. Being one of the supremely unconnected—in my second year of graduate school at Yale and attending only my third Dylan concert ever, the Village long gone, my brain too full of history books and academic anxiety to have even thought too much about music for a while—I simply could not have known just how big the buzz was. Joni Mitchell had decided to join the tour in New Haven, flown into town, and slipped in through the stage door (though, alas, she only appeared in the evening performance, and I had a ticket for the matinee). The latest “new Dylan,” Bruce Springsteen (whom my Yale apartment mate had seen in college and always raved about), was prowling around, and would meet with the star in Dylan’s dressing room. Bill Graham, Patti Smith, and John Prine also showed up.

  I was aware enough to recognize
Albert Grossman standing in the aisle, no longer the scary, suited manager from Dont Look Back, but a white-maned, jolly-looking fellow wearing what, from a distance, looked like a campesino’s white smock. Everyone else in the first ten rows or so, especially the women, was far better heeled and more glamorous than the people I’d remembered seeing at Dylan’s Philharmonic Hall concert in 1964, let alone the unruly crowd I’d seen at a Dylan concert at Forest Hills one year later. Whatever this “revue” was to bring, the A-list Dylan fans had certainly become elegant, more outwardly taken with high style than a decade earlier. I forget how my roommate and I managed to score such good seats, behind the important people but downstairs and with a good full view of the stage. Most likely, we’d lucked out.

  As the buzz built before the houselights dimmed, there was also an odd onstage curtain to consider. Whether it was pure circus sideshow or just mockery of one was hard to tell: a yellow contrivance depicting a faux proscenium arch (emblazoned with the revue’s name) and with a trompe l’oeil curtain beneath it, covered with cartoony pictures of a he-man lifting barbells, a trained seal, and other carny acts. A man and a woman, painted in 1890s-style gymnasts’ suits and flying-trapeze boots, stared coyly from the middle of the curtain, standing on a globe colored in cobalt blue.

  Top: The opening credits of Les enfants du paradis, 1945. Bottom: Rolling Thunder Revue curtain, 1975. (photo credit 5.2) (photo credit 5.3)

  I would not make the connection until many years later, but it resembled an Americanized repeat of the opening credits to Marcel Carné’s great film of 1945, Les enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise)—which, as it turns out, was very much on Dylan’s mind at the time. Who knew—and who knows? What seemed certain, though, was that we were about to watch and listen to something very different from a rock concert, something more like a pageant or a fete.