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The combination of the leader’s spontaneity and the session players’ professionalism helped mold an album that ranks with the all-time best. He brought Robbie Robertson and Al Kooper, who played on the New York sessions, with him, but the other instrumentalists were Nashville session guys.ĭylan challenged his cast by writing and arranging songs on the fly. At the suggestion of producer Bob Johnston, he switched to Columbia Records’ Studio A in Nashville. The three aforementioned works not only inspired and liberated Dylan but had a profound impact on popular music.ĭylan began recording Blonde on Blonde in New York, but wasn’t satisfied with the results. He recorded both Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited in 1965, and returned midway through the following year with this masterwork. Upon release in 1966, Blonde on Blonde signified Bob Dylan’s third rock n’ roll album in less than 18 months.
BOB DYLAN BLONDE ON BLONDE ALBUM MOVIE
Music from this album would be a great soundtrack to this movie:Īny movie set in the mid-60s, but some of the album’s songs (e.g., “Just Like a Woman”) would work well in a film about the complexities of romance. I would listen to this album while:ĭoing nothing else. All the excitement of new, interesting music being created in the era-on a daily basis, it seemed-courses through Blonde on Blonde. And we kept the mistakes ’cause they’re beautiful.Review By Joe Taylor When listening to this album I think of this band or music: We were done in two weeks, and it was total spontaneity. Just come into the studio.” And we came in and he picked the songs and we played them. For our next record, our producer Dave Cobb was like, “Don’t record any. I mean, the thing is worth many millions of dollars.įUQUA: So many people got their hands in it. There’s too much at risk because it’s so valuable to create sonic perfection. And that’s something that cannot exist in Taylor Swift’s “1989.” There’s no room for spontaneity in a pop sensation. And they’re thinking, Man, where is this thing going? You’re cutting a fourteen-minute song on us? There’s such a beautiful spontaneity to the record.
BOB DYLAN BLONDE ON BLONDE ALBUM FULL
“Blonde on Blonde” is full of human error, and it’s all the right kinds of error, because when these guys sat down to play these songs with Bob they’d get in about six minutes and, well, Bob was only halfway done. You couldn’t make a record in which you slow down time or fly in this track recorded elsewhere, you couldn’t change the melody through computer programming, you couldn’t embellish bass tracks.
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One of the things that’s so different about this current time versus a record made in Nashville fifty years ago is that, in 1966, you could only make a human record. SECOR: Yeah, to remove something from its pop hysteria.
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What was Columbia Records doing in Nashville in 1926? They weren’t recording Uncle Dave Macon. It includes migrant Mexican grape-pickers. And it was so exciting to me to be able to share with the head honcho this sort of time capsule of Columbia making African-American spiritual music nearly a hundred years ago, in the same city a record like “Blonde on Blonde” gets made by the same country musicians who would go on to make Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.” The story of country music is just so vast. In fact, when we went up to meet with Randy Goodman, the president of the label Columbia Nashville, I brought him a 78 on Columbia made in Nashville in 1926, of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. SECOR: But they’ve been making Columbia Records in Nashville since the middle of the nineteen-twenties. They realized they’ve hit upon a gold mine, and now it’s the machine kinda spitting out these, like. To put Bob Dylan in the mix is going to make for a better country-radio scene in 2018.įUQUA: I think people forget that country music’s a creative art form, and that it’s more than just tailgates and beer by a lake. Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, June Carter. We’re hoping that Nashville will include Bob Dylan among its luminaries. And it includes Bob Dylan, and no one’s paying attention to a Jewish songwriter from Minnesota. No one’s paying attention to that part of the family tree. SECOR: If you were to look at the family of country music, it includes a lot of African-American musicians.
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