Bob Dylan's Carnival Jukebox: Musical Textures of Blonde on Blonde (1966)

Thanks, Ray, I'm counting on you to bail me out from time to time, so please check in again.

I meant to post this earlier: For anyone who's interested in the backstory of how Blonde on Blonde was created, or the various editions of the album that have been released over the years, here are some helpful resources:

- Sean Wilentz
Mystic Nights: The Making of Blonde on Blonde in Nashville
Very well-written and extremely informative. The author was granted access to the original Blonde session tapes, and he describes studio chatter and outtakes that have never been made public. Highly recommended.
http://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/186-mystic-nights

- Roger Ford
Blonde on Blonde: The Record That Can't Be Set Straight
In great detail, Mr. Ford patiently sorts out mono and stereo mixes, jacket variations, edits of certain tracks, etc., and he discusses the sound quality of each and every edition of Blonde on Blonde that's been issued over the years, on vinyl and CD.
http://www.rdf.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Blonde.htm

- bjorner.com
A longtime resource, and the curious Dylan fan's best friend. Studio session logs, live setlists and anything else you might want to know about Dylan's musical activities over the past six decades is here.
http://www.bjorner.com/bob.htm

BOOK
- Al Kooper
Backstage Passes
The man was there, starting with the session that produced Like A Rolling Stone in 1965, and he played on all 14 tracks of Blonde on Blonde. A very enjoyable book.

BOOK
- Clinton Heylin
Revolution In The Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, Vol. 1 (1957-73)
The author seems obsessed with coming off as pithy, witty and/or clever, but Heylin is probably the most well-informed Dylan digger around, and his books are a goldmine of information, including this one, which presents the Blonde-era songs in chronological order, with commentary and details about each composition.

 

Not an influence on a specific song, but just across the whole album:

I think it's a precursor to that Blonde on Blonde sound. Although, the lyrics and the way the song is structured is very similar to "Obviously 5 Believers".

 

Well, it wouldn't have been entirely unwarranted:


I think "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" is really just a big F-you to his critics.

 

I think Rainy Day Women #12 & #35 is a great song, unless you meant a **** you in the lyrical content...in which case I definitely agree.

 

Awesome...I forgot about that one [I Wanna Be Your Driver, Chuck Berry]. 100% agree.

Some Dylan parodies, yes, but a shot at Sonny & Cher's "I Got You Babe," as well.

 

BLONDE ON BLONDE: Side 1./Track 2.

PLEDGING MY TIME
- Also released, in truncated form, as the B-side of Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.

One of the two songs on Blonde that start off with "early in the morning..." -- the other being Obviously 5 Believers -- this track may resemble a thousand other blues recordings (the Rolling Stones version of Confessin' The Blues on the 12 x 5 album comes to mind), but to me it has a totally unique feel to it, and is one of the first songs I think of whenever someone mentions Blonde on Blonde.

It was clearly based on several old blues standards, with Come On In My Kitchen (Robert Johnson) and It Hurts Me Too (Tampa Red/Elmore James) probably topping the list. Dylan even adapts Johnson's line "The woman I love/took from my best friend/Some joker got lucky/stole her back again," into "They sent for the ambulance/and one was sent/ Somebody got lucky/but it was an accident..." As for Dylan's song, one of his favorite artists, Johnny Ace, did put out Pledging My Love back in the '50s, but the two songs have little else in common apart from their titles.

To my ears, and maybe to my ears only, one of the tracks that may have inspired the sound and the feel of Pledging My Time was Otis Redding's version of Rock Me Baby, composed by the late, great B. B. King, which appeared on the Otis Blue/ Otis Redding Sings Soul LP in 1965. There are no minor chords in the Redding arrangement, and the horns give the track a definite Stax/ Memphis flavor, but Dylan's recording has a similar vibe to it, IMO. We know that Bob wanted Otis Redding to record Just Like A Woman, so I think he was a fan.



[To veer off-thread for a moment: Dylan broke into Rock Me Baby during the Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid sessions in 1973, and that version eventually spawned "Wagon Wheel," which Darius Rucker adapted into a hit for the Old Crow Medicine Show a few years ago.]

 

Does this thread mean we get a BOB Bootleg Series later this year? Can it happen again?
Great thread, spinning BOB right now!

 

The tea leaves suggest that a Blood On The Tracks box set will be next, but next year is the 50th anniversary of Blonde on Blonde, so keep your fingers crossed. And if Sony needs any help in compiling a Blonde box, or needs someone to go through the '66 session tapes, I will once again step forward to offer my services...

 

Darius Rucker only covered "Wagon Wheel"... & well-after the fact. OCMS's Ketch Secor "wrote" the track & shares the credit with Dylan. OCMS released their original version almost a decade before Rucker covered it.

 

Arghh, you are, or course, correct. I garbled the facts and they were lost in translation. Thanks for clearing that up.

 

Charlie was something special, something I'm sure Dylan knew well.

 

By the account I read (it was in a Dylan bio, but I can't recall which one at the moment), it's not a Salvation Army band. Dylan asked for one, but Johnston had to explain to him that this was Nashville and even the Salvation Army band were pros who couldn't play that sloppily if they wanted to. What they did instead was have the musicians already assembled for the album exchange instruments, so they were all playing something they barely knew how to play.

 

Actually, session leader Charlie McCoy called in one his regular bandmates, Wayne "Dock" Butler, to play the slide trombone, at like three in the morning. Supposedly he played on the one track, packed up his trombone and went home.

EDIT:
"...Butler is best known as the trombone player McCoy called in the middle of the night to help create the Salvation Army sound on Dylan’s 'Rainy Day Women #12 & 35'..."
http://theeastnashvillian.com/article/escorts-to-history

 

BLONDE ON BLONDE: Side 1./Track 3.

VISIONS OF JOHANNA
Some people consider this to be the finest song that Dylan has ever written. It's going to be a tough one to deconstruct musically, but we'll give it a shot.

Before talking about the Nashville studio take of Visions of Johanna that was ultimately released on Blonde on Blonde, listening to two earlier alternate takes that Dylan recorded in New York would probably be appropriate. It was called Freeze Out at that time. Dylan had begun performing a solo acoustic version of the song in December 1965, and it would remain in his set list all the way through to Royal Albert Hall in London at the end of May 1966.

This "electric" version, from November 1965, was released on the No Direction Home /Bootleg Series set:

 

Here is a subsequent alternate take that more closely resembles the final album track, but apparently Dylan felt it may have been cluttered with too much instrumentation:

 

Thanks! Great stuff.

My impressions over the years was always that Blonde On Blonde always had an undercurrent of Jazz music as its underbelly. Even on songs that musically are totally distant from jazz, either the mood, lyric or rhythm had a jazz touch.

I often see a jazz jam down South when hearing Rainy Day Woman.

The streets of NYC seem to evoke its jazz vibe in Visions of Johanna. Given Bob's linguistic impressions, it's plausable that his musical bent was impressionistic, as well. This would incorporate the very music you and others mentioned as a blended musical painting that becomes jazz.

Just my thought. LOL

 

Before we proceed, a word of praise for Al Kooper. His organ work on Blonde on Blonde (and during the Highway 61 sessions in 1965) added so much color and flavor to the songs that it would difficult to imagine what the album would have sounded like without him. And his talents were never more in evidence than on Visions of Johanna. There were many popular organ soloists on the music scene back in the '60s, including jazz stylists Groove Holmes and Jimmy Smith, but I think the masterful Booker T. Jones may have helped inspire some of the sounds that Kooper was laying down. Here's one example:

 

Musical impressionism is a good description of some his music, I think, especially when it becomes a blurry mixture of organ, harmonica, drums and electric guitar. It's a blend that I really like!

 

Is it true that Al Kooper had never played organ (professional) when he entered the Highway 61 sessions? Hard to believe. Can't imagine H61R or BOB without the organ.

 

Where is the "unlike" button when you need it!

 

What "Visions of Johanna" means to me, in (not quite) 25 words (but less than 5 pages).

I'll try (and likely fail) to be brief. I often identify "Visions of Johanna" as one of my favorite Dylan songs. So people have asked me "Well, what is the song ABOUT?" A difficult question to answer.

For the sake of brevity, I'll focus on my favorite verse:

Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles

In "Tombstone Blues", Dylan suggests that those most interested in "road maps for the soul" (in other words, those concerned with existential questions) tend to be the aged (who are facing their own mortality head on) and college students. I first encountered "Visions of Johanna" as a 19 or 20 year old college student - one quite concerned about the road map for his soul. This verse jumped out at me in that regard. An afterlife, a salvation, an eternity in Heaven ... might just turn out to be painfully boring. Eternally painfully boring. Where better to question the value of infinite (or eternal) ANYTHING than inside a museum, where time has been intentionally frozen in place? And even Mona Lisa, with the smile that is universally admired, might, as Nat Cole suggested, be hiding some sadness ... maybe because she's been condemned to the staleness of the museum. The bliss suggested by mainstream impressions of eternal happiness, or in the beauty of a revered work of art, may just be more lies that the "they" (from "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie") try to sell us in their lotions and potions. This verse was certainly a "carpe diem" experience for this college student. The other verses are pretty damn good too.

 

No, Ray, you did not fail. Brilliant!

 

I nominate this song as a major,influence upon Rainy Day Woman

• 
  4:35
  Louis Armstrong - When the Saints come Marching in
  youtube.com

 

Visions of Johanna:

One of Dylan's (many) perfect songs, aided by a perfect performance on the LP. But the alternate performances are jaw droppingly great too. And worth our obsessions too.

The song admits to many interpretations and every time you hear it again it seems different, like it's a very complex old friend you returned to, and has changed a lot since you saw him or her last.

It's a film, a book and a museum all rolled into one! It's the start and the end of a journey.

I've always loved the verse with "in this room the heat pipes just cough" because that reminds me of my old apartment!

 

Are you familiar with "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by Keats? That's what I'm reminded of by that verse.