1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 65. Bob Dylan – Blonde on Blonde (1966)

 

I didn’t mention it on his earlier albums, but Dylan is, I think, the first artist on the list that I’ve seen live. Not back in the Sixties, I’m not that old. It was in 1995 at the Phoenix Festival, a short-lived Mean Fiddler-run event set near Stratford-Upon-Avon, that got mired with staging issues and became merged with Reading/Leeds . But I thought it was good. There was some behind the scenes brouhaha where Suede and Dylan vied for the top spot, in the end Dylan taking the penultimate slot of the night. 

Given his infamous reputation for being a prickly performer, it was entirely possible that he might do one song and leave, or play a desultory set facing away from the audience, but he and his band turned up in force and rocked the festival, bursting out with a barnstorming version of Rainy Day Women. In retrospect, a good festival choice with a chorus where everyone can shout out “Everybody must get stoned!” You wouldn’t expect there’d be a mosh pit forming at a Bob Dylan concert, but there was. 

Some of the tracks on this album are quite bluesy, but without bluesy lyrics, like Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat or Pledging My Time. None of the “Oh the first line of the blues is always sung a second time, Yes the first line of the blues, is always sung a second time. So when you get to the fourth line, you’ve had time to think up a rhyme” stuff here. Nobody “woke up this morning”. And here we get almost all of the band that will become The Band – Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Levon Helm. But no Garth Hudson calliope-stye organ as yet. But this gives the album a much more rounded sound.

Some more Dylan Epics on show here - Visions of Johanna, Stuck Inside of Mobile (With the Memphis Blues Again) clocking in at around 7 minutes each, but it's Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands (allegedly a love song to his then wife Sara) that beats them, it's 11 minute runtime taking up the whole of Side 4.

There's a nice mix of Dylan's flights of random fancy, up-tempo numbers, and slower more romantic songs (especially the famous Just Like A Woman). It's a double album, but doesn't quite outstay its welcome.

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