On October 5, 1965 Bob Dylan began recording Blonde On Blonde at Columbia Recording Studios, Studio A in New York.
Off and on through January 27, 1965 Dylan and a bunch of musicians that included The Band made many recordings. Most of them didn’t make it onto Blonde On Blonde. After that Dylan headed for Nashville where the bulk of the album was cut.
Below are some of the New York versions recorded. I’m obsessed with Blonde On Blonde, so I find all of these fascinating.
“I Don’t Wanna Be Your Partner”:
“Medicine Sunday”:
“Jet Pilot”:
“Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window”:
“Number One” (Instrumental):
“She’s Your Lover Now”:
“Stuck Inside Of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again”:
“I Wanna Be Your Lover”:
“She’s Your Lover Now” (Solo):
“Visions of Johanna”:
“Please Crawl Out Your Window” (another version):
“Please Crawl Out Your Window” (and another version – cuts off):
“I’ll Keep It With Mine”:
“Visions of Johanna” (another version):
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Bob Dylan was used to recording at Columbia Records’ Studio A in New York, so it was natural that when he began recording the album that would become Blonde On Blonde, he would return to the studio where he’d worked previously.
This time he went in with his touring band, The Hawks. But the onstage fireworks mostly didn’t translate into studio recordings that satisfied Dylan.
Six sessions were held in New York, but they were frustrating for Dylan. He wasn’t getting the sound he wanted, and only one song from all those sessions, “One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later),” would end up on the album.
Dylan’s producer, Bob Johnston, had suggested a change of scene during the Highway 61 Revisited sessions: Columbia Music Row Studios in Nashville. Now Dylan decided to take Johnston’s advice.
On February 14, 1966, Dylan showed up in Nashville for sessions that would produce the bulk of the recordings that would be used on Blonde On Blonde, which I think is Dylan’s true masterpiece.
Sean Wilentz wrote in a 2007 issue of the Oxford American about the making of Blonde On Blonde:
Nashville had been ascending as a major recording center since the 1940s. By 1963, it boasted 1,100 musicians and fifteen recording studios. After Steve Sholes’s and Chet Atkins’s pioneering work in the 1950s with Elvis Presley, Nashville also proved it could produce superb rock & roll as well as country & western, r&b, and Brenda Lee pop. That held especially true for the session crew Johnston assembled for Dylan’s Nashville dates. Trying to plug songs for Presley’s movies, Johnston had hooked up for demo recordings with younger players, many of whom, like McCoy, had moved to Nashville from other parts of the South. Charlie McCoy and the Escorts, in fact, were reputed to be Nashville’s tightest and busiest weekend rock band in the mid-1960s; the members included the guitarist Wayne Moss and the drummer Kenneth Buttrey who, along with McCoy, would be vital to Blonde on Blonde.
Johnston’s choices (also including Jerry Kennedy, Hargus “Pig” Robbins, Henry Strzelecki, and the great Joseph Souter, Jr.—aka Joe South, who would hit it big nationally in three years with “Games People Play”) were certainly among Nashville’s top session men. Some of them had worked with stars ranging from Patsy Cline, Elvis Presley, and Roy Orbison to Ann-Margret. But apart from the A-list regular McCoy (whose harmonica skills were in special demand), they were still up-and-coming members of the Nashville elite, roughly Dylan’s age. (Robbins, at twenty-eight, was a relative old-timer; McCoy, at twenty-four, was only two months older than Dylan; Buttrey was just turning twenty-one.) Although too professional to be starstruck, McCoy says, they knew Dylan, if at all, as the songwriter from “Blowin’ in the Wind” or simply as a guy from New York, an interloper. But they were much more in touch with what Dylan was up to on Blonde on Blonde than is allowed by the stereotype of long-haired New York hipsters colliding with well-scrubbed Nashville good ol’ boys. One of Dylan’s biographers reports that Robbie Robertson found the Nashville musicians “standoffish.” But the outgoing Al Kooper, who had more recording experience, recalls the scene differently: “Those guys welcomed us in, respected us, and played better than any other studio guys I had ever played with previously.”
Three songs were recorded on February 14, 1966 that made it onto the album: “Fourth Time Around,” “Visions of Johanna” and “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”.
The next day, February 15, 1966. Dylan cut a keeper version of “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”
The February 1966 sessions concluded on the 16th when Dylan recorded a useable take of “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again.”
He would return in March 1966 to finish recording the album.
Below are the takes that were used on the album, some alternate takes and some live versions.
“Fourth Time Around,” Blonde On Blonde version:
“Fourth Time Around,” live at the Manchester Free Trade Hall May 17, 1966:
“Fourth Time Around,” Rolling Thunder Review, Civic Center, Augusta, ME November 26, 1975:
“Fourth Time Around,” Royal Albert Hall, May 27, 1966:
“Fourth Time Around,” live in Australia, 1966:
“Visions of Johanna,” Blonde On Blonde Version:
æVisions of Johanna,æ alternate take November, 30, 1965:
“Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” Blonde On Blonde version:
“Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” [Alternate Take], January 25, 1966 session:
“Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” Sydney Stadium, Sydney, AU, April 13th, 1966:
“Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” Blonde On Blonde version:
“Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again,” Blonde On Blonde version:
“Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again,” alternate take, Feb 17, 1966:
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January 27, 2014 marks the 48th anniversary of Bob Dylan recording “I’ll Keep It With Mine.”
This song is endlessly mysterious. It’s a favorite of mine, and like most of my favorite Dylan songs, I’ve thought about it for years and still don’t know all of what it’s about. It’s a song that keeps on giving, year after year.
The session when Dylan recorded this song took place in New York at Columbia’s Studio A. It was the last New York session done for Blonde On Blonde. The album was completed in Nashville.
This version of “I’ll Keep It With Mine” was recorded on January 27, 1966, and, as we all know, wasn’t included on Blonde On Blonde. It was never recorded for a Dylan studio album.
The song ended up on the first “Bootleg Series” release, Bob Dylan The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 [rare & unreleased] 1961-1991.
This version was recorded a year earlier on January 14, 1965:
This version was recorded June 1964 and released on The Whitmark Demos 1962-1964:
Plus an instrumental version recorded in Nashville that was used in Wim Wender’s “Paris, Texas.”
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Bob Dylan and Françoise Hardy backstage at l’Olympia, Paris, May 1966.
What to say about this classic Bob Dylan song?
It has such a beautiful melody for starters. And there’s that carnival rock ‘n’roll sound that Dylan dreamed up with Robbie Robertson and a bunch of Nashville cats. The song is so seductive at first, and Bob sings it straight, no sarcasm, so we think it’s a gentle love song.
But what kind of love song?
By the second verse this is no typical love song. No way, ’cause Dylan is putting this woman down. She’s the same woman (or all the women) he sang about in “Like A Rolling Stone,” and in that second verse we learn that she’s gonna find out she’s nothing special.
Nobody has to guess
That Baby can’t be blessed
Till she sees finally that she’s like all the rest
With her fog, her amphetamine and her pearls
Then in the bridge we get a flashback. The singer telling us of the day they met.
It was raining from the first
And I was dying there of thirst
So I came in here
What’s really amazing is the final verse the roles reverse and the narrator, who up until then mostly comes across in the power position telling us about his lover, suddenly steps up and directly addresses her as he reveals that he was a mess when they first met and that she was way up above him. Dylan could now be taking the role of Dick Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is The Night” after Diver has lost his moneyed but psychologically unstable wife Nicole, has blown it with his movie star girlfriend Rosemary and become an alcoholic. In the last verse we see the narrator as totally vulnerable, asking her to keep their secret, and his too.
I just can’t fit
Yes, I believe it’s time for us to quit
When we meet again
Introduced as friends
Please don’t let on that you knew me when
I was hungry and it was your world
Dylan was writing on another plane back then. A novel condensed to a song.
Check out this cool live version of “Just Like A Woman” played May 16, 1966 at the Gaumont Theatre, Sheffield, England:
And this one from May 5, 1966 at the Adelphi Theatre, Dublin, Ireland:
Bob Dylan, “Just Like A Woman,” Live 1966:
Bob Dylan, “Justs Like A Woman,” Manchester Free Trade Hall, Manchester England, May 17, 1966:
Bob Dylan, “Just Like A Woman,” (from Blonde On Blonde):
And here’s a lo-fi version recorded by Dylan biographer Robert Shelton and played by Dylan with Robbie Robertson in a Denver hotel room March 13, 1966, five days after Dylan cut the version that would appear on Blonde On Blonde in Nashville:
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“Visions Of Johanna” is an endlessly fascinating song. It’s a song that reveals itself slowly, over the years. And then the light changes and you hear it totally different.
I’ve gathered together two outtakes from when Dylan was calling the song “Freeze Out,” a bunch of live recordings from the 1966 tour of Australia and Europe, and the official version released on “Blonde On Blonde.”
Enjoy.
“Freeze Out 1” (VOJ outtake)
“Freeze Out 2” (VOJ Outake)
Live: “Visions Of Johanna” (April 13, 1966, Sydney)
Live: “Visions Of Johanna” (April 20, 1966, Melbourne)
Live: “Visions Of Johanna” (May 5, 1966, Dublin)
Live: “Visions Of Johanna” (May 16, 1966, Sheffield)
Live: “Visions Of Johanna” (May 27, 1966, London)
Official version, “Visions Of Johanna,” off Blonde On Blonde
— A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news —
Today The Daily Beast printed an excerpt about Bob Dylan from Sherill Tippins “Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York’s Legendary Chelsea Hotel.”
It begins like this:
In the fall of 1965, all Bob Dylan wanted to do was check into the Chelsea Hotel with his girlfriend Sara Lownds and write his album, but he ended up trysting with Andy Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick—and then making the biggest decision in his life.
Bob Neuwirth, Bob Dylan’s closest friend and “supreme hip courtier” during this period, later recalled that it was on a snowy night sometime in the late fall of 1965 when he and Dylan first crossed paths with Edie Sedgwick. Dylan had finally returned east after a harrowing tour with his new band, the Hawks, and had more or less abandoned the house he had bought in Woodstock, not believing he could write something new in a place where he’d written before. “It’s just a hang up, a voodoo kind of thing,” he said. “I can’t stand the smell of birth. It just lingers.” Instead, he had returned with his girlfriend Sara Lownds to the Chelsea Hotel—the perfect environment for writing the city songs he had in mind.
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