Blonde On Blonde, 60 Years Later
- 10 hours ago
- 38 min read
60 years ago, the rock-and-roll double album was born. blonde on blonde album review
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, piano, harmonica, principle songwriter
Players:
Al Kooper
Robbie Robertson
Charlie McCoy
Joe South
Henry Strzelecki
Wayne Moss
“Pig” Robbins
Rick Danko (New York)
Paul Griffin (New York)
Wayne Butler
Kenny Buttrey
Bobby Gregg (New York)
Mac Gayden
Produced by Bob Johnston
art by Jerry Schatzberg
Last month, I celebrated six decades of my favorite Bob Dylan album at the fashionable Morrison Hotel Gallery in New York. All I could think about was the L-shaped apartment I lived in seven years before. It was where I first learned, loved, and lived the magic of Blonde On Blonde. It was rare and beautiful. This album in this place in time shaped who I am as a writer and lover of music. In turn, it authored my life path. To the denizens, past and present, of apartment 212; our Chelsea Hotel behind the dumpsters.
blonde on blonde album review
“The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences...he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the one accursed — and the supreme Scholar!...He reaches the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends by losing the intelligence of his visions, he has seen them. Let him die as he leaps through unheard of and unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where the other collapsed!”
– Arthur Rimbaud, excerpt from a letter to Paul Demeny (8/15/1871)
“The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde On Blonde album. It’s that thin, that wild mercury sound. It’s metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up. That’s my particular sound. I haven’t been able to succeed in getting it all the time.”
– Bob Dylan, to Ron Rosenbaum for Playboy (3/1978)
Bob considered quitting after his 1965 tour of England. Then came “Like A Rolling Stone.” Having once said he was “reborn in New York,” he was reincarnated once more as an international pop star after receiving the Beatles’ blessing; good as the word of God back then. He “plugged in” at the Newport Folk festival. (Whether he divided the audience or simply exposed what was already there is up to your place in the crowd.) With the release of Highway 61, Revisited, any and all references to politics were seemingly scrubbed from Bob’s music. This one-time performer at the March on Washington and duet partner of Joan Baez now rubbed shoulders with Warhol’s Factory, vomited in the back of taxis, held court at the Kettle of Fish, and threw Phil Ochs out of his limousine for daring critique “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” Bob was snarky, sarcastic, and evasive in interview; careless and aloof in press conferences. It’s hard to imagine now, when his chainsmoking, Beatle boots, Ray-Bans, and half-moons stamped under his eyes are the epitome of cool. But by the back half of 1965, the messiah had transformed into the enfant terrible of rock-and-roll.
“Bob Dylan remains a fascinating subject of conversation for four good reasons. Because he has talent and originality, because, in spite of the brushes with the press and the rest of it, he possesses a great deal of personal charm; because he develops and changes course often enough to keep people guessing; and because he’s been lucky. I can think of other reasons, but they are not so good. Like all members of the pop aristocracy, Dylan inevitably finds himself being elevated into a kind of legend before the time is ripe. Probably this is a damaging process, and there have been plenty of signs that the wonder boy of folk has fought to guard against corruption by flattery, publicity and hysterical adulation.”
quoted from: Max Jones, “The Boy Dylan” Melody Maker, 2/19/1966.
The Hawks proved to be a steady backing band for Bob, if their learning curve was steep. “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” flopped. Then there was the booing. Famed, and incessant. “It was a hell of a challenge,” Levon Helm said, “because he was still learning about a band. He would suddenly stop and break the beat, and we’d get confused and not know where we were. We’d look at one another and try to figure out if we were playing great music or total bullshit.” Levon found it to be too much grief too soon, bowing out to work on a boat after the fall of ’65. (Levon and the Hawks would reunite in a few years to play great music as the Band, getting up to total bullshit while they were at it.)
After multiple false starts that fall, Bob took the first meaningful step towards following up Highway 61 on November 30th. An epic writing spell had produced “Freeze Out.” Bob miffs the opening harmonica. It's a little shakey, and in the wrong key. The treatment is positively Highway 61. In spite of the flaws, the lyric is remarkably fully-formed. "Freeze Out" would be retitled “Visions Of Johanna” sometime the next year; surrounding more failed sessions in New York. It was a difficult birth, requiring twenty-four exhausting takes to get down. But like her older sister, “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)” was remarkably fully-formed. But for whatever reason, Dylan and the Hawks in the studio “just won’t fit.”
“It takes a lot of medicine to keep up this pace,” Dylan said to biographer Robert Shelton. According to Clinton Heylin, Bob had prescriptions for amphetamines, Desbutal, and Nembutal. Bob was onto something with hisnew material, but it wasn’t clear what that “something” was. A diet of uppers, downers, marijuana, and nicotine would cloud anyone’s mind. Bob cancelled his last session date before going back out on tour. Producer Bob Johnston surely wished he had a prescription!
“The pressure was merciless. The world tour of 1965-66 was Dylan’s dance of life and death, choreographed for the eyes of thousands and orchestrated for the ears of countless more. Everything crowded in on him: three, sometimes four concerts a week; listeners hungering for a new album; acolytes awaiting new direction; businessman demanding more product, more profit. No one thought to think of the personal cost which, to Dylan, was high.”
quoted from: Robert Shelton, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (2011 ed.)
It was Johnston’s idea to move operations to Nashville. He had connections to renowned session men out there. A dejected and creatively-frustrated Dylan arrived in Nashville in February of 1966. Just two of his compatriots “survived” the New York session: organ player Al Kooper and Hawks guitarist Robbie Robertson.
The goal was to capture the excitement of Dylan’s electric sets, combined with the intimacy and wonder of the acoustic halves. Columbia Studio A gave Bob something he hadn’t had in a long time, and would never again enjoy. Since Nashville session players were such an insular social group, none of the guys had any preconceived notions of what they “should” be playing on a Bob Dylan record. They obviously knew who he was, but as Kooper put it, they simply knew Bob “was somebody.” There were no superfans in the room. Basic musician-to-musician respect was all they operated on. The rest was vibes and vibes alone. The discipline of the Nashville band helped recording along. Where Bob once struggled for hours to get a viable run-through with the Hawks, his lengthiest, wiley-est, most word-vomiting songs were captured in remarkably few takes. Across three days in February, the studio ensemble fired off “Visions of Johanna,” “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again,” “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat,” “Fourth Time Around,” and “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”
Just five tracks clocked in at 36 minutes of run time already. There were at least seven more songs to go. Blonde On Blonde was shaping up to be the first double album in rock-and-roll history, but in typical ’66 Dylan fashion, no one really cared!
Where Bob was once paralyzed by the pressure to follow up Highway 61, something changed. (Maybe a deadline lit a fire under his ass!) Ideas that had simmered for months suddenly burst forth, and friction fell away. Bob wrote and re-wrote for hours in his hotel room. Kooper would drop by, then give the finished(-ish) tune to the session players. By the time Bob stumbled into Studio A, the song would be ready to go. If Blonde On Blonde has the energy of the witching hour, that’s when most all the sessions took place! Of cutting “Sad-Eyed Lady” at four o’clock in the morning, Drummer Kenny Buttrey remembered,
“After about five, six minutes of this stuff we start looking at the clock, everybody starts looking at each other, we’d built to the peak of our limit, and bang, goes another harmonica solo...After about ten minutes of this thing we’re cracking up at each other, at what we were doing. I mean, we peaked five minutes ago. Where do we go from here?”
quoted from: Clinton Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades (2001.)
Some songs came together during sessions themselves (as the band played ping-pong to pass the time.) Others were written by just one line. “I got five fevers and fourteen believers” became “Absolutely Sweet Marie” and “Obviously Five Believers.” “If I did not just feel so all alone...” from the latter echoes “Well I would not feel so all alone…” on “Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35.” Additional sessions in March produced all three singles: “Rainy Day Women,” “I Want You,” and “Just Like A Woman,” plus “Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine,)” “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” and “Obviously Five Believers.” Bob personally oversaw the mono mix while he was still in Nashville. He quickly approved the stereo mix in Los Angeles a few weeks later. He couldn’t stay for long: him and the Hawks had to catch a plane to the next leg of their world tour.
Black Dog Barking
“I don’t know if Dylan can get on stage a year from now. I don’t think so. I mean, the phenomenon of Dylan will be so much that it will be dangerous...He’s gotten inside so many people’s heads – Dylan has become a part of so many people’s psyches – and there’s so many screwed-up people in America, and death is such a part of the American scene now.”
– Phil Ochs
“Death is certain for anyone born, and birth is certain for the dead.”
– The Bhagavad Gita, chapter 2, verse 27
Bob’s 1966 “world tour” consisted of just one gig in Hawaii, seven in Australia, one each in Sweden and Denmark, and fifteen across Ireland and the UK. Bob’s rail-thin body and ragged voice bore the brunt of these whirlwind 50 days and the heroic drug intake. “We were going all the time, even when we weren’t going,” Bob remembered in Bob Dylan: Behind The Shades. “We were always doing something else, which is just as draining as performing. We were looking for Loch Ness monsters, staying up for four days running – and making all those eight o’clock curtains, besides.” When asked in the May 28th issue of Melody Maker what it was like touring with Bob, Robbie Robertson replied, “Well, it’s kind of like eating a pumpkin pie. It’s sweet – but it gets very sticky sometimes.”
The chorus of “boos” reached a crescendo. Bob was engaged in a Mexican standoff between himself, his audience, and the press. On live recordings, you can hear the tension in the room between those hanging onto his every word and those who despised him for daring forsake his fathers. A woman in Glasgow hopped onstage and punched Bob in the face. “Woody Guthrie would roll in his grave!” An audience member in Liverpool reportedly cried. (Woody passed a year-and-a-half later.) The feeling was mutual. Bob would play his acoustic sets in front of all the electric gear and amps, then the crowds would go and act surprised that the band came out and plugged in! Bob couldn’t resist poking back. He heckled the hecklers and played in front of a great big American flag in Paris. This energy exchange fueled some of the loudest, most charged performances Bob ever gave.
The inflection point came on the night of May 17th, 1966. The show at Manchester Free Trade Hall had gone as per usual. Bob walked on wearing a tweed suit. He played the acoustic set to reserved claps and cheers. The Hawks came on stage, plugged in, “Tell Me Momma,” boooo! But this night was different. During a lull in the action after “Ballad of a Thin Man,” an unidentified audience member stood up and shouted,
“Judas!”
He’d acted as judge, jury, and executioner, convicting Dylan of being a traitor in the highest. Their messiah had forsaken the “true” folk cause. The “blood money” came in the form of chart success with rock-and-roll. Bob was pissed. The only true judge of Bob Dylan has ever been, and will ever be, Bob Dylan. “I don’t belieeeeeeve youuuu. You’re a liar!” Then he turned his back to the audience and commanded his band to, “Play it fuckin’ loud!” The set concluded with “Like A Rolling Stone,” as performed by a freshly-booted nest of hornets. That moment was the punctuation mark at the end of ’66 Dylan.
Sara went to France to collect her husband, by then exhausted and in ill health. She brought him back to Woodstock to recuperate. Some time in July, Blonde On Blonde hit store shelves. (I know the generally accepted release date is June 20th, but this date came from Clinton Heylin, who is terrible with dates in his text. Blonde On Blonde debuted at number 100 on the Record World albums chart the week of July 16th, 1966, number 92 on that week’s Cash Box albums chart, and on 101 on Billboard the week ending July 23rd.. It would be highly unusual for a hotly-anticipated Bob Dylan album to take a month to chart, even with the "Cardinale cover" debacle. If it had been released in June and immediately pulled to sort out the gatefold, it still would have charted in June, or at the very latest the first week of July. Furthermore, page 41 of the July 16th issue of Billboard and page 20 of that week’s Cash Box describe Blonde On Blonde as a new release. While June 20th may have been Columbia’s projected date, there is formidable evidence to suggest it was delayed until July.)
Bob had hardly seen his new family in seven months. He already had over 30 more gigs in the books to promote Blonde On Blonde, including at Shea Stadium. He would’ve been only the second rock-and-roll act to headline there after the Beatles. A television special was on the table. Bob’s debut novel, Tarantula, was due for the holidays. It still wasn’t done. Earlier that month, Bob got the news that his old friend Richard Farina died in a motorcycle accident during his wife Mimi’s birthday party – she was Bob’s ex-flame Joan Baez’s little sister, and the couples effectively lived as in-laws in California for a time. Bob’s past and future were about to converge. It seemed he realized not everyone survives moving at the speed he did.
“The reassessment was complex. Who was he dealing with? Why was he dealing with such people? Was the entire ballgame about being Elvis? Why were there those who hailed him as some kind of Messiah? How could he balance the long tours with family life? When would he have time to finish his novel, Tarantula? Was the image shown of him in the upcoming ABC-TV special, his Eat The Document image, the real Bob Dylan?”
quoted from: Sid Griffin, Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, The Band, and the Basement Tapes (2014 ed.)
We’ll never know exactly what happened that morning. But we do have some clues: Bob was a speed freak and erratic driver with poor eyesight, heading east on a dirt road on a sunny morning, driving a motorcycle that already needed repairs. The only people on Earth with the full story were Al Grossman, his wife Sally, Sara, and Bob. Al and Sally have passed on, and Bob and Sara aren’t saying shit.
What we can say with six decades of hindsight is that, had Bob not been forced to slow down by bodily injury or otherwise, he might not have lived to see 1967. “Truth was, I wanted to get out of the rat race,” he said.
On July 29th, 1966, Bob Dylan in Ray-Bans, the enfant terrible, died in a cloud of gravel and smoke. His world tour was rescheduled and eventually cancelled, much to Grossman’s dismay. Tarantula was postponed indefinitely, Eat The Document shelved for five years. When Bob’s contract with Columbia Records was up for renewal, he put off re-signing for as long as possible. Had Bob stayed in the public eye, psychedelia as we know it wouldn’t have happened. He benched himself for the fabled “Summer of Love.” While out of the public eye, he began the single most prolific writing period of his entire career. With the Hawks (now the Band) by his side, he wrote around 100 complete songs in just eight months; including “Tears of Rage,” “I Shall Be Released,” and “All Along The Watchtower.” His well was replenished. Bob Dylan the writer was reborn.
The Opposite Loft
“Where should I begin his story?...Perhaps the camera should focus first on a 1966 college pad where raggedy students sprawl, turning on to Blonde On Blonde.”
– Robert Shelton, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (2011 ed.)
I first heard the Manchester Free Trade Hall set via Bootlegs Vol. 4. while on a family road trip. We were somewhere in Virginia and everything was changing. The first half of the set drew me in, just a man and his guitar. Bob’s voice is worn thin. You can imagine his clothes are, too. He spins fantastical images with his words and even gets lost in them himself; strumming the same chord a few seconds too long as he searches for the next line. The intimacy of this half of the set, the vulnerability and gravelly warmth he possessed in this moment, made me fall head-over-heels for Bob. Then came the Hawks. What a stunning display of the power and range of this ensemble. The rollicking “Tell Me Momma” and venom he spat on “Thin Man” thrilled me. Something in the way he drew out every single syllable of “Like A Rolling Stone,” using cries of “Aaaaaaw!” as punctuation, resonated with my angry and lost 20-year-old self.
Weeks later, I moved into a tiny apartment with five (sometimes six) other people. The “kitchen” was so small, we had to brew our coffee on the floor in the corner of the “living room.” I stuffed two crates of albums and my full stereo system into my 7-foot-by-9-foot bedroom. A black-and-white poster of Bob in the studio hung at the foot of my bed. The town drunks pissed on my window at night and the leaves blew in whenever someone opened the front door, but I still haven’t been able to match the sound that flew off those cinderblock walls. Crude power. The building always knew when I was home.
All our friends were our neighbors, and all our neighbors were friends. Hidden from the rest of the world and wholly forgotten by the police station down the hill, we could, and did, do whatever the hell we wanted. Blonde On Blonde was my perfect soundtrack, as swirling and hectic as the goings-on of my social circle. For seven halcyon months, the party didn’t stop. Drink and drugs were cheap and easy to procure. It was an endless stream of a good thing; thin, wild mercury poisoning. By midterms of the spring semester, I was so sick I bolted from my exam to puke outside in a bush. Days later, we were all sent home for “an extended spring break.” Two weeks became four, then six, then a pandemic. The universe crashed the bike for us all. I handed in my final papers from my childhood bedroom. Most of my shit was still in boxes. I still vibrated with the manic energy of the months before, and that room never did feel right with my candles and incense. “Oh, mama, is this really the end?”
“We’ve been playing this music since we were 10 years old. Folk music was just an interruption and was very useful. If you don’t like it, that’s fine...I want now to say what you’re hearing is just songs. You’re not hearing anything else but words and sounds. You can take it or leave it. If there is something that you disagree with, that’s great. I’m sick of people asking, ‘What does it mean?’ It means nothing.”
– Bob Dylan addressing the crowd at Royal Albert Hall, London, 5/27/1966
“I read that you no longer sing protest songs. Why is that?”
“Who said that?...All my songs are protest songs. All I do is protest. You name it, I’ll protest about it.”
– Bob Dylan in Melody Maker, 5/14/1966
Much ink has been spilled over all the ways in which Blonde On Blonde broke the mold. It usurped Dylan’spolitics for love. It was the pinnacle of his stream-of-consciousness writing. It’s the liquid monolith of his discography, taking the shape of whatever it’s in, yet impossible to get around or through. It’s inspired sixty years of speculation, interpretation, and intense debate. Where does one even begin with Blonde On Blonde?!
Many barbs have been directed at the quality of Bob’s voice, or lack thereof. To set things straight: he’s never off-key, he just doesn’t care to hit the notes he “should.” By Blonde On Blonde, Dylan had perfected his “impressionistic singing.” He would pick a note, throw his voice up to the rafters, and hope it’d stick. If not? Who cares! This album also exposes the weakness of its star’s voice. Around my third listen-through, I realized just how tired Dylan sounds on Blonde On Blonde. Given how jam-packed Bob’s schedule was and the substance-fueled night-owl action, I’m not surprised our featured performer’s voice reflects the circumstances. Bob may sound thin at times, but it doesn’t really matter when he’s got an incredible band playing a top-notch body of work. Blonde On Blonde is some of the bard’s best songwriting. The situations these characters find themselves in are truly absurd. The subjects of these songs are rarely pinned down, but what few identifying traits our narrators present are mighty compelling. Give “Desolation Row” a handful of miscellaneous cross-tops from the pocket of a fur coat and you get Blonde On Blonde. You can tell the stakes are high. In his Strandedanthology, Greil Marcus wrote, “(Bob’s) tone was sardonic, scared, threatening, as if he’d awakened after paying all his debts to find that nothing was settled.”
It’s not all doom-and-gloom, though. There are some real laugh-out-loud moments on Blonde On Blonde. See the ridiculous, “I took his fluuuuuute” on “I Want You,” the deadpan observation of, “Grandpa died last week”on “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again,” Bob’s stream-of-consciousness ramblings and third-degree burns. “He just smoked my eyelids and punched my cigarette” just about sent me into orbit as well. And of course, the hooting and hollering on...
Blonde On Blonde opens with rat-a-tat-tat drums, a shaken tambourine, and a gratuitous slide on the trombone; the first brass instrument to appear on a Bob Dylan recording.
As the story goes, one of the Bobs, either Dylan or Johnston, wanted to do Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35 with a brass band, but they didn’t have a brass player. At a truly absurd hour of the morning (as most Blonde On Blondesessions were held at,) Charlie McCoy made a phone call. Al Kooper swears that within the hour, trombone player Wayne Butler strolled into Studio A. Just three takes later, “Rainy Day Women” was in the can. (In truth, the “Salvation Army band” was present from take one.) The arrangement is all Bourbon Street processional, abig barrel of fun. Bob joked in both the NME and Melody Maker that people wouldn’t get the joke unless they’dbeen down in North Mexico.
The joke is on us all on “Rainy Day Women:” the sons and daughters beyond command, parents who still criticize what they can’t understand, Bob’s own critics, and even Bob himself. Many have tried to pin “It Ain’t Me, Babe” as a song to the music industry, but this tune is a much better fit. Bob swings with a smile on his face and bitterness in his voice. Nearly a year after “Like A Rolling Stone” and the Newport fiasco, he was still getting “stoned” by purists, to his face and behind his back. “They’ll stone you when you’re tryin’ to make a buck/They’ll stone you and then they’ll say, ‘Good luck!’” But who really cares? None of this matters in the long run, because the public’s memory is oh-so-fickle. “They’ll stone you and say that it’s the end/Then they’ll stone you, and then you’ll come back again.” Damned if he do, damned if he don’t. “But I would not be so all alone/Eeeeeeeverybody must get stoned!” Bob gleefully slurs as the band whoops it up into a frenzy. Even supposed hypocrites and traitors live by their word: “When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.”
Several sources erroneously state that Dylan was inspired to write “Rainy Day Women” after hearing Ray Charles’s recording of “Let’s Go Get Stoned” on a jukebox in Los Angeles. When you consider Bob recorded this song in March of 1966, didn’t make it out to LA until April, Ray’s recording of “Let’s Get Stoned” didn’t chart until June of 1966 and didn’t peak until July, this quickly unravels. The original recording of “Let’s Go Get Stoned” by the Coasters from 1965? It’s a lot more likely Bob heard that.
Much has been made of Dylan’s time with Mary Jane and Good Ol’ ’Cid. Jon Savage alleges Bob was the first pop culture figure to ever take LSD at the afterparty for his 1964 Royal Festival Hall show. Others say “Mr. Tambourine Man” is about an acid trip. “I never have and never will write a drug song. I don’t know how to,” Bob swore to the crowd at the Royal Albert Hall. The April 29th, 1966 issue of the Gavin Record Report disagreed, recommending both “Rainy Day Women” and the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” be pulled from the airwaves. (They must’ve missed “Let’s Go Get Stoned!”) Dylan’s case wasn’t helped by a historic gaffe by TimeMagazine; saying a “rainy day woman” was the youth’s latest slang term for a spliff. It was not. Though reportedly banned in Baltimore, Houston, and Washington, D.C., the Gavin Report didn’t impede “Rainy Day Women”’s climb up the Billboard charts.
I get why “Rainy Day Women” and Pledging My Time were Blonde On Blonde’s one-two punch. They weed out anyone who isn’t ready for what Dylan’s doing.
A common misconception about Newport ’65 is that Bob suddenly divorced himself from his origins; them being folk. With Highway 61, Revisited, he announced his true intention: to return to the music that made Robert Allen Zimmerman, not Bob Dylan. That music was rock-and-roll and the blues. Both are key ingredients of Blonde On Blonde. “Pledging My Time’”s words, cadence, and tune echo blues standards like Robert Johnson’s “Come On In My Kitchen” and Albert King’s “Sittin’ On Top of the World.” In the words of Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan in the 1960s author Mike Marqusee, “the Dylan of the ’60s can never be boiled down to his sources. The quotations are not dropped in for the benefit of scholars or connoisseurs. They are building blocks with which Dylan constructs an autonomous entity, shimmering with the multi-faceted crisis of shifting times.”
Bob’s words can have an explicit meaning, yes, but they often have an electron-cloud value; you have to grabwhatever’s swirling outside the lines. Keith Relf of the Yardbirds hit the nail on the head when he described Bob as “lyrically psychedelic.”
“They sent for the ambulance,
And one was sent.
Somebody got lucky,
But it was an accident.”
“Rainy Day Women” was the circus from hell, and “Pledging My Time” is the throbbing hangover afterwards.Bob says as much: “Well, early in the morning to late at night/I got a poison headache, but I feel alright.” If hissluggish delivery and the stamping rhythm don’t have your head pounding, one of the most cursed harmonica solos he ever put to tape most certainly will! I don’t know why they decided to “send it” with this instrument in the mix, but production did something really cool with it on “Pledging My Time.” The final squealing solo pulls back before the rest of the song fades out; as if the listener walks through and away from it.
After you’ve walked through the big-top of sideshow freaks and demented harmonicas, the listener is met with one of the most beautiful songs in Dylan’s catalog. “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet?” Visions of Johanna is like stepping into a winter solstice wonderland. It captures one surreal, impossible night in New York City; which Greil Marcus estimated to be the East Coast blackout on November 9th, 1965. “Johanna” is all the most beautiful parts of bohemian living: hopping from train station to train station and party to party, lit by flashlights because a blizzard knocked your power out, giggling amongst your friends to distract yourselves from your freezing toes. “Lights flicker from the opposite loft/In this room, the heat pipes just cough/The country music station plays soft/But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off.” There are almost too many beautiful images to name: the fiddler, jewels and binoculars hanging from the head of the mule, the skeleton keys and the rain. All the sights our narrator sees and places he drifts through only make him more aware of the haunting, mythical Johanna’s absence. “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face/And these visions of Johanna have now taken my place.” “These visions of Johanna just make it all seem so cruel.” Though she’s meant to be the distraction, Louise especially reminds him of his loss. “She’s alright, she’s just near/She’s delicate and seems like the mirror/But she just makes it all too concise and too clear that Johanna’s not here.”
As “Johanna” builds and the gentle organ ebbs and flows, Bob’s rhyme schemes become little incantations to his lost love. His grasp on the melody is tenuous, and the whistling harmonica is intimate. Cut in just one take on Valentine’s Day 1966, “Johanna” is the loneliest Bob ever sounded. The narrator has lost his very sense of self in the fruitless search for his Johanna. Then, one of the most honest stanzas in any Dylan song:
“Now, little boy lost,
He takes himself so seriously.He brags of his misery,
He likes to live dangerously.”
At surface level, this is how the public sees Dylan. Dig a little deeper and he breaks the fourth wall. Though “Johanna” captures one night in Wonderland, none of it was meant for us to relive. We are the voyeur of the voyeur, who is forced outside himself by Johanna. “Inside the museums/Infinity goes up on trial.”
Fun as it is, carrying out “paternity tests” of Blonde On Blonde songs is a disservice to their greatness. But I can’t sidestep the million-dollar question: was “Johanna” supposed to be Joan Baez? She thought so. “Mona Lisa must’ve had the highway blues, you can tell by the way she smiles...” certainly suits her. As an onlooker from the distant future, all I will say is this: I will always wonder how things would’ve gone had Dylan not chosen his career over the only woman who could ever really stand toe-to-toe with to him.
One Of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later) solidifies a theme of Blonde On Blonde, that of romantic relationships. Dylan examines their tricks, nuances, catch-22s, and the myriad ways they fall apart. “Johanna” is yearning to the nth degree, all rosy cheeks and aching hearts. In contrast, the narrator airs himself out on “One Of Us Must Know;” describing all these situations in which he was a bad boyfriend.
“I didn’t mean to treat you so bad,
You shouldn’t take it so personal.
I didn’t mean to make you so sad,
You just happened to be there, that’s all.”
Classic avoidant-attachment, and a run of missed signals that are excruciating to hear.
“When I saw you say ‘goodbye’ to your friend and smile,
I thought that it was well-understood
That you’d be comin’ back in a little while.
I didn’t know that you were sayin’ ‘goodbye’ for good.”
One might call this the “situationship” of the century. No wonder she “clawed out his eyes!” Love is closer to hate than indifference, after all.
Though our narrator is “too cool to care,” the music of “One Of Us Must Know” isn’t. Bob feels comfortable enough to let his high notes rise and fall where they please. “I didn’t mean to make you soooo sad!” I love how intuitive the rhythm section is – these players certainly had time to get to know each other over 24 takes! The drums range from a conservative country click (very Nashville for New York) to crashing over the rocking bow at the chorus. Paul Griffin deals one of the most satisfying piano parts on the whole album. It towers over the choruses and drives Bob’s verses along with ease.
I Want You opens side two of the first LP. It’s one of only of two straight(-ish) love songs on Blonde On Blonde,but smooth seas never did make a skilled sailor! Bob mushes together the characters of Casanova and Romeo to make his narrator. He defies all mortal and divine command to reach his lady:
“The guilty undertaker sighs,
The lonesome organ-grinder cries,
The silver saxophones say I should refuse you.
The cracked bells and washed-out horns
Blow into my face with scorn,
But it’s not that way, I wasn’t born to lose you.”
The trope of unrequited love takes a positively “Dylan” form on “I Want You.” Our narrator dodges the “drunken politician” who leaps into his path. He slips past suitors sleeping at the base of his lady’s tower. He defies “weeping mothers” who don’t see him fit (I couldn’t help but think of the parents who would cast judgement on his momma’s homemade dress on “Tangled Up In Blue” nine years later.) He begs, borrows, and steals: “Now, your dancing child with his Chinese suit/He spoke to me, I took his fluuuuute/No, I wasn’t that cute to him, or was I?” Cheeky. He even circumvents his own Queen. I couldn’t help but notice this “Dylan-ification” of characters in Romeo and Juliet:
“Well, I return to the Queen of Spades
And talk with my chambermaid,
She knows that you’re not afraid to look at her.
She is good to me
And there’s nothing she doesn’t see,
She knows where I’d like to be, but it doesn’t matter.”
Here, it’s Romeo who is betrothed and with a faithful nurse! Each of his escapades return to the same basic thought. “I want you, I want you, I want you so bad/Honey, I want you.” The arrangement heavily leans on Nashville; entirely at-odds with such medieval imagery. The drums bump along, the guitar part meshes with the rhythm, and Al plays a spirited organ part. Its joyous melody slides up to meet Bob on his wistful choruses.
Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again is difficult to make sense of. The longer tracks on Blonde On Blonde can get tedious if you don’t fully immerse yourself in the lyrics. But the language of “Bob” has never been easy! At its core, “Memphis” laments a place left behind. This theme is essential to country music and the blues. It’s a tradition far older than “When The Levee Breaks,” and has extended far past “Hickory Wind.” Our narrator finds himself trapped in unfamiliar Mobile, Alabama, with all its surreal haunts. He runs into Mona, railroad men, the mailman, senators, and whatever a “tea preacher” is, all while fending off his hopeless Memphis blues. “Mobile” is “a masterpiece of nonsense,” as put by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guedson. Bob was a child of the Beat generation through and through. He takes glee in cutting and pasting lines to put his narrator into zany, classically “Dylan” situations. He crashes a wedding and hides under a truck when the father of the bride chases him down, then dodges a senile grandpa lighting a bonfire in the middle of the street the week before his death. It seems our narrator has ended up on the wrong side of karma. Mobile might be his purgatory. “You have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice.” By the time listener and performer are equally exhausted by “Mobile”’s repetition (Bob says “Oh, mama!” nine times but good grief, it feels like way more!) Bob deals a cripplingly honest confession: “Now people just get uglier, and I have no sense of time.”
Does Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat call out fashion victims as a whole, Warhol’s Factory scene, or one very specific superstar? In any way, I like when Dylan gets a little bitchy.
“Pillbox Hat” echoes the structure of Lightnin' Hopkins’s “Automobile Blues.” Robbie Robertson plays peekaboo lines in the left channel (he was just about solo’d to death on those Hawks tours!) while Bob handles the rhythm on the right. Robbie takes the floor with a rock-and-roll solo halfway through the number. The subtle organ and swaggering piano handle the twelve-bar blues. When Robbie seamlessly connects his solo to the turnaround, the show-offery feels like a nonverbal dig at the song’s subject.
This stupid little hat becomes the visual representation of everything Bob hates about his two-timing woman. She’s tacky, with no regard for dressing with the seasons. “You must tell me, baby, how your head feels under something like that/Under your brand-new leopard-skin pillbox hat.” She’s frivolous; she bought this thing without even trying it on first. “You know it balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine.” He saunters on to a legendary dig: “Me with my belt wrapped around your head and you just sitting there/In your brand-new leopard-skin pillbox hat,” Bob says, “I have to try to look like an idiot. You don’t. You just are one.” Damn! With great satisfaction, he deals his final blow: “You may think he loves you for your money, but I know what he really loves you for!/It’s your brand-new leopard-skin pillbox hat!” No other writer could wield this level of snark and come out on the other side remotely likeable; let alone make it aspirational to be on the other side of his pen. “Ballad of a Thin Man” was brutal, and yet everyone wanted to be Mr. Jones! “Pillbox Hat” is a worthy part of “Thin Man”’s lineage. It’s guitar-driven, it’s scathing, and it’s hilarious.
No woman who’s actually read the lyrics of Just Like A Woman would want to have this song written about her. Its narrator callously points out all of this girl’s flaws, over and over again, as the chorus. “She takes just like a woman/Yes, she does, she makes love just like a woman/Yes she does, and she aches just like a woman/But she breaks just like a little girl.”
So why is this song so romantic? The gently-rocking guitars and whirling organ certainly help. The twinkling piano might as well be the stars in our eyes, and the organ sighs. Al Kooper and Pig Robbins are easily MVPs of Blonde On Blonde. Bob Johnston comes in for the assist; his work on Highway 61, Blonde On Blonde, John Wesley Harding, and Nashville Skyline prove he was the only producer who really understood the sound Bobwas going for. Along with “Johanna,” “Just Like A Woman” is a prime example of “thin wild mercury.” Blonde On Blonde was the only time this ideal was ever achieved.
Then there’s the supposed subject of “Just Like A Woman:” the eternally-romanticized “poor little rich girl,” Edie Sedgwick. “Just Like A Woman” plays as the former Warhol darling muses about Bob in Ciao! Manhattan. (How serious a couple they were depends on the account. Her sister said it was just a fling, the Factory Girl film portrays a full-on affair. Paul Morrissey relished in telling the story of Warhol breaking the news to Edie that Bob was married.) Through this lens, Edie was the original manic pixie dream girl, and Bob the misanthropic poet who topples his muse’s pedestal. We empathize with the subject of “Just Like A Woman;” we all feel like girls acting out what womanhood “should” be.
I think the sliver of vulnerability Bob reveals through the middle-eight and final verse is what makes “Just Like A Woman” so oddly aspirational. As our narrator breaks things off with his lover, he makes just one request of her: to keep his cool-guy image intact. He confesses he could never feel at-ease with his newfound stature. He’s the king of their social scene, but only she knows of his humble beginnings, which their haughty court would surely look down upon.
“And your long-time curse hurts,
But what’s worse is this pain in here,
I can’t stay in here.
Ain’t it clear that I just don’t fit?
Yes, I believe it’s time for us to quit.
But when we meet again and are introduced as friends,
Please don’t let on that you knew me when
I was hungry, and it was your world.”
One could imagine a leading man unloading this confession on a tarmac in black-and-white. The light catches the tears in her eyes just so; her outline blurred by the grease on the lens. The wind whips around them both. The stone-cold heart that wrote “Rolling Stone” is softening. He quickly conceals it: “Ah, you fake just like a woman/Yes you do, and you make love just like a woman/Yes you do, and then you ache just like a woman/But you break just like a little girl.” With the best harmonica solo Dylan ever played on record, he dresses the wound he inflicted.
In the liners of the Biograph box set, Bob said Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine) was “probably written after some disappointing relationship where, you know, I was lucky to have escaped without a broken nose.” It’s a good song to open act two of Blonde On Blonde. If anyone without Dylan’s apparent charisma tried to dedicate “Just Like A Woman” to a girl, they wouldn’t escape without a shiner!
“You Go Your Way” is cluttered. There are guitars, a wonky trumpet which bassist Charlie McCoy apparently played with one hand as he covered bass with the other, and Bob playing see-saw harmonica between all the ways this love went sideways. “You Go Your Way” seems to turn “One Of Us Must Know” on its head. There are still miscommunications galore; a minor theme of the album. This time it’s the lady who’s been hot-and-cold, making promises she can’t keep. “You say you told me that you want to hold me/But you know you’re not that strong.” Her efforts just don’t translate, and it’s exhausting. “Sometimes it gets so hard to care/It can’t be this way everywhere.” The narrator pulls the plug on this toxic relationship and curtly sends her off. “I just can’t do what I’ve done before/I just can’t beg you any more/I’m gonna let you pass/And I’ll go last.” This may seem polite, but of course Bob’s gotta get his dig in at the end. All of a sudden, the mischievous arrangement makes sense. “Then time will tell just who has fell/And who’s been left behind/When you go your way and I go mine.”
For years I cast off Temporary Like Achilles as little more than a Highway 61 soundalike. It’s in the same key and meter as “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry,” it’s written in the same structure, and Bob even delivers “Achilles” in much the same style. But there’s a certain hidden magic in “Achilles,” which I admittedly didn’t recognize until my third go-around with Blonde On Blonde. Pig Robbins tickles the keys of a lonesome saloon piano as our narrator laments to a smoke-filled room. Where the adventurer of “I Want You” won’t take “no” for an answer, this cowboy has no choice. She won’t even see him. She sends someone else out to send him away! “Honey, why are you so hard?” The beauty is in the song’s bridge:
“Like a poor fool in his prime,
Yes, I know you can hear me walk,
But is your heart made out of stone, or is it lime,
Or is it just solid rock?”
Clearly he’s bitter. But with the reference to a soft stone like lime, he wonders if his love’s cold heart could ever be moved. However, not even the whiskey in his belly could embolden him to jump the hurdles ask such to her face. I find it odd that this was the only other Blonde On Blonde song never played live. Maybe Bob has written “Achilles” off as derivative, too.
On an album which loosely revolves around relationships, Absolutely Sweet Marie is the most casual. See the dirty jokes Bob has snuck in: “I’m just sitting here beating on my trumpet/With all these promises you left for me.” Later, “I got the fever down in my pockets” Sweet Marie promised this guy a hook-up. Now she’s gone and disappeared, leaving our poor narrator with blue balls! On a deeper level, Dylan revisits a passing theme of “Just Like A Woman.” He feels he’s simultaneously on the outside looking in and the inside looking out. “Yes, I can take him to your house, but I can’t unlock it/You see, you forgot to leave me with the key.” He may have enjoyed all the exploits of the “houses” he built – holding court in hotel rooms, the Kettle of Fish, the Factory – but he never felt they were his places. He also seems to give a warning to the next “house” over, the counterculture that would rise in his absence. “To live outside the law, you must be honest/And I know you always say that you agree…” A nod and a wink to free-love’s shadow self: proselytizing, self-important greed. It’s the same hypocrisy he saw in folkies who got rich off “the cause.” “It takes one to know one,” he smiles...
“Absolutely Sweet Marie” is one of Blonde On Blonde’s greatest wins. It’s got one of the most memorable arrangements on the whole album. I love Al’s teetering organ line, the rigid drums, and the curlicue guitar lines that border on “jangle” at times. The little guitar line harmonizing with “Sweet Marie” is adorable; an adjective hardly used to describe anything Bob Dylan ever did! By the time they cut “Marie,” the band had fabulous chemistry. The extra 30-second jam at the end of the stereo mix proves such.
Where The Music Had To Go author Jim Windolf insists that Fourth Time Around was Bob’s response to the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood.” As the story goes, Bob played an early version of “Fourth Time” for the Fabs back in 1965. Windolf dramatizes the moment he first heard Rubber Soul: “...he felt things had gone too far. He would have to respond.” Al Kooper remembers pointing out the songs’ similarities. Dylan harshly clarified it was the Beatles that sounded like him, not the other way around. Windolf’s evidence of the heist, however, iscircumstantial at best. According to his interpretation, the title means that “Norwegian Wood” was the fourth time Lennon-McCartney had supposedly ripped Dylan off; the previous three instances being “A Hard Day’s Night,” “I’m A Loser,” and “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away.” He also alleges the final verse of “Fourth Time” directly addresses John Lennon:
“And I never took much,
I never asked for your crutch,
Now don’t ask for mine.”
Compelling, but...that’s it. The truth? The romantic ideal of Latin America is a minor recurring theme in Dylan’s discography. “I was hip to Tex-Mex music and to cangacero music all my life,” he explained to Robert Shelton. “I was in Mexico in my youth. ‘Baby Blue’ and ‘Tom Thumb’s Blues’ is all back to that.” (Shelton defines cangacero in-text as “a Mexican pop-folk sound somewhat deeper than ranchero and mariachi.”) “Fourth Time Around” whisks us away with two nylon-stringed acoustic guitars, played by Wayne Moss and Charlie McCoy. (Bob struggled immensely to play it himself, opting to play just the chords live.) Dylan’s harmonica twirls foldand wheeze like an accordion. It’s totally romantic, softening the bite of his lyric.
Windolf explains “Fourth Time” as “the story of a man who goes to the home of a woman who seems not to be his main romantic partner; and, as in the Beatles song, the visit ends badly.” I boil it down to, “You think you’re still in love with your ex, but now that you’ve seen them one last time to ‘get closure’” (wink-wink, nudge-nudge,) “you realize just how much they actually suck.” Things are constantly up-and-down with this woman. She throws the narrator out in the dirt, “where everyone walked.” He forgot his shirt inside, she invites him back in. She acts cool, then pitches a fit and falls to the floor. She might even be a mirror image of Bob: “She buttoned her boot/And straightened her suit/And she said, ‘Don’t get cute.’” Again, the theme of repayment pops up in a most unlikely place. “It was then that I got up to leave, but she said, ‘Don’t forget/Everybody must give something back for something they get.’” Our narrator’s solution? Rummage through this lady’s drawers, fill up his shoe with her stuff, and bring it to the other woman! The listener feels the relief the narrator does when he turns his attention to her. Things are easy with her. “You took me in/You loved me then, you never wasted time.” “You” is everything “she” is not. That’s what every woman wants to hear.
Second-to-last number Obviously Five Believers is a barn-burning honky-tonk-meets-Chicago blues. Almost too blues: our guitarists have lifted “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” for the riff. Flying close to the sun there, Bob. Don’t Led Zeppelin yourself! The blues references don’t end there. “I got my black dog barkin’/Black dog barkin’/Yes it is now, yes it is now/Outside my yard.” The black dog is a classic symbol of death. What he could be a warning of, not even the narrator knows. “Yes, I could tell you what he means/If I just didn’t have to try so hard.” I picture “Five Believers” as struggling to hear your partner over the roar of a crowded dance hall, or the big finale of this Blonde On Blonde circus act.
While excessive speculation over which song is about who cheapens the rest of Blonde On Blonde, it’s simply obvious who the closer is about. After an hour-long three-ring show of lovers, sinners, dancers, drunks, and thieves, fifteen jugglers and five believers, our ringmaster sends the crowd home. Once the carnage is swept up and the big top comes down, he lifts the curtain to reveal who all of it was really for.
On November 22nd, 1965, Bob married Sara Lowndes at a judge’s office on Long Island. About two months later, she gave birth to her and Bob’s eldest son. Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands was a wedding gift from Bob to his bride. In his 1969 Rolling Stone interview with Jann Wenner, Bob remembered the song “started out as just a little thing...but I got carried away somewhere along the line. I just sat down at a table and started writing. At the session itself. And I just got carried away with the whole thing...I just started writing and I couldn’t stop.”
Eager for more after having heard Bootlegs Vol. 4 on that road trip, I queued up Blonde On Blonde. It was late at night in some chilly hotel room off the highway. Here, “Sad-Eyed Lady” totally took me by surprise. Until now, I’d thought of Bob’s writing as snarky and a little vague. “Rolling Stone,” “Thin Man,” “It Ain’t Me Babe,” and earlier love songs like “All I Really Wanna Do” had an air of unseriousness about them. I had no idea that Bob was capable of this tenderness before hearing “Sad-Eyed Lady.” “My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums/Should I leave them at your gate? Or sad-eyed lady, should I wait?” This is a declaration of complete, selfless love. He would wait for her forever if he had to. I imagined Bob staying up for days in the Chelsea Hotel writing this eleven-minute-long epic for his new wife and son. Everything must’ve felt so precarious, like he was on a tightrope with all these people praying on his downfall. His new family was the net at the bottom, waiting to catch him when he slipped. In the same moment, my freshly-heartbroken 20-year-old self realized this was what she wanted, and that it was entirely unattainable! I could never have the love Bob and Sara had, because they already had it. I actually choked on my tears as not to wake up my family. Though my idea of love has evolved (and I’m not nearly as dramatic as I was in my youth,) it was a life-changing moment for sure.
Though she’s been an intensely private woman both during and after her marriage to Bob, “Sad-Eyed Lady” reveals a lot about Sara. She is beautiful, with dark hair, “flesh like silk,” and a “face like glass.” She is resourceful. She is pure and selfless as the Madonna; quiet and calm, with the spiritual assurance of a guru. But she’s got grit, too, a “junkyard angel.” She’s the refuge that our wandering man can always come home to. She’s full of contradictions: reserved, yet lively; girlchild and woman; mystical and spiritual, yet a lady of the earth; burned by a past lover, but her love runs deep. Her trials – some administered by her love for Bob – are of Biblical proportions, the stakes Homerically high. Yet she radiates an inner fortitude that delivers her, and him, of it all; us-against-the-world. “They wished you’d accepted the blame for the farm/But with the sea at your feet and the phony false alarm/And with the child of a hoodlum wrapped up in your arms/How could they ever, ever persuade you?” In our narrator’s eyes, the Sad-Eyed Lady is utterly perfect. For a love to be bookended by this epic and “Sara,” it must’ve been a love for the ages.
All That Remains
“Here is a man who will speak to you, a 1960s bard with electric lyre and color slides, but a truthful man with x-ray eyes you can look through if you want. All you have to do is listen.”
– Paul Williams, reviewing Blonde On Blonde for Crawdaddy (7/1966)
“Nothing is worth analyzing – you learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past.”
– Bob Dylan, Tarantula (1966)
Sixty years later, Blonde On Blonde is still impossible to penetrate. This is my third crack at it and I still haven’t got it yet! In the words of Mike Marqusee, “these songs are beyond category. They are allusive, repetitive, jaggedly abstract compositions that defy reduction.” Blonde On Blonde is a remarkably consistent body of work, especially when you consider its blockbuster run time and elusive lyricism. It was a miracle, really, that such a mercurial man could’ve captured all the ways he saw the world with such needle-sharp accuracy. These songs capture an unpredictable, unstable, and perfect time. It couldn’t have existed any longer than it did. It wasn’t sustainable. It had to crash. Whether Bob meant to or not, he preserved a place in time for generations of listeners. He took blurry photographs of his world with his words. Fitting, I thought, as us reception attendees sang those words in a New York art gallery!
Bob preserved the smell of his favorite suede jacket. The shine of pair of binoculars hanging from a strand of jewels. The distant voices of fishmongers loading up the truck in the dawn. Someone throwing their glass in the street, a shared stick of gum, critics and believers. The woman with the full-moon eyes and her precious newborn son. Everything mundane becomes everything beautiful, and everything familiar is deliriously strange.
On cold nights, I lie in my open window and replay memories of that L-shaped apartment. It’s taken every day of the past seven years to vacuum the ash out of that carpet, I’m sure. Time has surely sweetened my memories of that place, and I seriously doubt the magic is still extant. It likely came and went with these six twenty-something-year-olds who were all hot shit. The friendships didn’t last beyond those shoebox bedrooms, and the ability to “live in the moment” went down the drains of the two hallway sinks with our youth. But there’s a chance, however slim, that Wonderland didn’t collapse when we were dragged up from the rabbit hole. Places hold the energy of whatever was there before. Walls recognize the faces of people who come go, and remember the nights they wasted away. They hear the tinkling of so many glass bottles. Young adult confusion and 151-proof possibility crackles in the air, long after the people who felt it have moved away.
Things can hold energy, too. This album still crackles with possibility. You can see it in your mind’s eye, clear as ever after 60 years. Each person, place, and sensation Bob remembers are dangerously alive in the grooves of Blonde On Blonde. But these visions are all that remain.
Personal favorites: “Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35,” “Pledging My Time,” “Visions of Johanna,” “One of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later,)” “I Want You,” “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again,” “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat,” “Just Like A Woman,” “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine,)” “Temporary Like Achilles,” “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” “Fourth Time Around,” “Obviously Five Believers,” “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”
– AD ☆
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