Any Major Dude With Half A Heart

The 60th anniversary on June 20 passed me by, but it’s never too late to pay tribute to Bob Dylan’s epochal Blonde On Blonde double album. This Recovered set slides in nicely with the five-part Bob Dylan Songbooks. In my song selection for this Blonde On Blonde Recovered set, I’ve tried not to duplicate any of the Songbook tracks, other than one for which there were no alternatives.

Blonde On Blonde was recorded in Nashville in February and March 1966. By then, Dylan was already one of the most influential songwriters of his generation. Within four years he had evolved from the earnest folk singer of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan into the gone-electric provocateur whose performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival had, charitably put, split opinion.

Highway 61 Revisited had yielded the folk-and-rock fusion of Like A Rolling Stone — “Judas!” — so expectations for what would come next were immense.

Dylan delivered an album quite unlike anything before it. Blonde On Blonde was the first widely recognised double album in rock consisting entirely of new material. At the time, double LPs were generally live recordings or collections of jazz or classical music. Dylan wasn’t the first artist to demonstrate that rock, like jazz, could use the long-playing record as an artistic canvas rather than just a collection of songs, but he nevertheless broke new ground by doing so on a double album — and one on which a single song, Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands, filled an entire side (after an hour and 13 minutes of music, you wouldn’t quibble that he might have fit another track to Side 4).

It took a lot of self-confidence to omit both artist’s name and album title from the front cover, and even the back, which also features no track-listing, nor did the inside gatefold. If you wanted to know the title playing, you had to be able to read a label at 33 rotations per minute.

Dylan didn’t just go electric, but also eclectic, drawing on folk, rock, blues, country and pop. On Fourth Time Around he openly copies The Beatles’ Norwegian Wood — whether as a droll dig at a band that had been inspired by him or as an affectionate homage is unclear, but it reportedly freaked out John Lennon when he first heard the song, seeing it as a dig.

Dylan’s lyrics became increasingly stream-of-consciousness, making songs such as Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again and Visions Of Johanna difficult to interpret. But when it came to love, Dylan could also be direct, as he was on I Want You, reportedly written for his wife Sara. The eleven-minute Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands was a meditation on his relationship with Sara, with the title playing on her maiden name, Lownds.

Bob and Sara in 1965.

Initial reviews of the album reflected both admiration and bafflement. It was not long before it came to be regarded as a masterpiece. Whether it is Dylan’s greatest album is a matter of personal preference (though perhaps less so if you reduce Blonde On Blonde to a single LP!), but it is undeniably one of the defining albums in the history of popular music.

When it comes to covers of Dylan songs, it is usually pointless to argue whether they are better or worse than the originals. Of course, some are really bad (none here, of course), but much depends on how one can bear Dylan’s voice and delivery. Some people can’t abide by it; for others, the voice is an inseparable part of the package. And others still — I hope including the readers of this blog — can delight in both.

The Recovered set kicks off with perhaps the least unexpected cover: bluegrass legends Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs doing Rainy Day Women #12 & #35, with its chant, “Everybody must get stoned”, a double entendre referring both to public stoning and getting high. It must have been quite a thing for the conservative Lester Flatt to be involved in. Yet on the duo’s 1968 album Nashville Airplane, four of the 11 tracks are Dylan songs, alongside the Dylan-inspired protest songs Universal Soldier and Catch The Wind.

Three covers here stand out in particular. Richie Havens, that superb interpreter of songs, gives Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands a lovely 1970s pop sensibility. I’d play this ahead of Dylan’s version any time. Nina Simone brings Just Like A Woman a raw emotional vulnerability, and a quite wonderful arrangement. And Australian singer-songwriter Emma Swift (no relation to the other Swift) turns the rather overlooked One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) into one of the highlights of this set. It comes from her superbly titled 2020 Dylan tribute album Blonde On The Tracks.

As always, the mix is timed to fit on a standard CD-R and includes home-leopardskinned covers as well as the text above in an illustrated PDF. PW in comments.

1. Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs – Rainy Day Women #12 & #35 (1968)
2. Luther Johnson – Pledging My Time (1995)
3. Marianne Faithfull – Visions Of Johanna (1985)
4. Emma Swift – One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) (2020)
5. Cher – I Want You (1966)
6. Grateful Dead – Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again (live) (1988)
7. Beck – Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat (2009)
8. Nina Simone – Just Like A Woman (1971)
9. Rita Coolidge – Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine) (1971)
10. Deborah Coleman – Temporary Like Achilles (2003)
11. The Flamin’ Groovies – Absolutely Sweet Marie (1979)
12. The Sports – Fourth Time Around (1981)
13. Toni Price – Obviously 5 Believers (1995)
14. Richie Havens – Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands (1974)

GET IT!

More Recovered albums:
What’s Going On (Marvin Gaye)
Tapestry (Carole King)
Blue (Joni Mitchell)
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (Elton John)
Darkness On The Edge Of Town (Bruce Springsteen)
Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars (David Bowie)
Purple Rain (Prince)
Every Beatles album

More Cover Mixes
Previous Albums Recovered
More CD-R Mixes