BOB DYLAN: "Blonde On Blonde"

Original released on double LP Columbia C2L41

(US 1966, May 16)

If "Highway 61 Revisited" played as a garage rock record, this double album "Blonde on Blonde" inverted that sound, blending blues, country, rock, and folk into a wild, careening, and dense sound. Replacing the fiery Michael Bloomfield with the intense, weaving guitar of Robbie Robertson, Bob Dylan led a group comprised of his touring band the Hawks and session musicians through his richest set of songs. "Blonde on Blonde" is an album of enormous depth, providing endless lyrical and musical revelations on each play. Leavening the edginess of "Highway 61" with a sense of the absurd, "Blonde on Blonde" is comprised entirely of songs driven by inventive, surreal, and witty wordplay, not only on the rockers but also on winding, moving ballads like "Visions of Johanna," "Just Like a Woman," and "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." Throughout the record, the music matches the inventiveness of the songs, filled with cutting guitar riffs, liquid organ riffs, crisp pianos, and even woozy brass bands ("Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"). It's the culmination of Dylan's electric rock & roll period - he would never release a studio record that rocked this hard, or had such bizarre imagery, ever again. (Stephen Erlewine in AllMusic)

The way you understand Dylan is to listen to him. Listen carefully; listen to one song at a time, perhaps playing it over and over to let it sink in. Try to see what he’s seeing; a song like "Visions of Johanna" or "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" (or almost any of his more recent songs) is full of pictures, moods, images, persons, places and things. ‘Inside the museums,’ he sings, ‘infinity goes up on trial.’ It doesn’t mean anything; but you know what a museum feels like to you, and you can see the insides of one, the particular way people look at things in a museum, the atmosphere, the sort of things that are found there. And you have your image of a trial, of a courtroom: perhaps you donít try to picture a lazy-eight infinity stepping up to the witness chair, but there's a solemnity about the trial, easily associable with the image of a museum. And see how easily the feeling of infinity slips into your museum picture, endless corridors and hallways and rooms, a certain duskiness, and perhaps the trial to you becomes the displaying of infinity on the very walls of the museum, like the bones of an old fish, or maybe the fact that museums do have things that are old in them ties in somehow, there’s no explanation, because the line (from "Visions of Johanna," by the way) is what it is, but certainly the line, the image, can turn into something living inside your mind. You simply have to be receptive, and of course it is a prerequisite that you live in a world not too unlike Dylan’s, that you be aware of museum courtrooms in a way not too far different from the way he is, that you’d be able to appreciate the images by having a similar cultural background. It is not necessary that you understand mid-century America and the world of its youth in order to understand Dylan; but you have to be a part of those worlds, or the songs will lose all relevance. This is true of most literature, in a way; and of course Dylan has his elements of universality as well as his pictures of the specific. "Blonde On Blonde" is a cache of emotion, a well-handled package of excellent music and better poetry, blended and meshed and ready to become a part of your reality. Here is a man who will speak to you, a 1960s bard with electric lyre and color slides, a truthful man with X-ray eyes you can look through if you want. All you have to do is listen.(street mouse in RateYourMusic)