As organist Al Kooper put it, “Nobody has ever captured the sound of 3 a.m. Yet Blonde on Blonde still feels like it came out of nowhere, with a sound he never attempted again, and neither Dylan nor the rest of the world has ever quite figured out how it happened. He was moving too fast for anyone to keep up, and writing masterpieces faster than he could release them. Still only 24, writing songs and touring the world at a wired lunatic pace that would come crashing to a halt in a couple of months, Dylan was on a historic roll, dropping this double-vinyl epic just 14 months after going electric with Bringing It All Back Home in March 1965 and Highway 61 Revisited in August. How True Is 'Respect'? Fact-Checking the Aretha Franklin Biopicīlonde on Blonde is full of that “not around” chill – Dylan mixes up the Texas medicine and the railroad gin for a whole album of high-lonesome late-night dread, blues hallucinations and his bitchiest wit. “I don’t consider myself outside of anything,” Dylan said when the album came out. Released on May 16th, 1966, Blonde on Blonde remains the pinnacle of Dylan’s genius – he never sounded lonelier than in “Visions of Johanna,” funnier than in “I Want You,” more desperate than in “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again.” It’s his most expansive music, with nothing that resembles a folk song – just the rock & roll laments of a vanishing American, the doomed outsider who’s given up on ever belonging anywhere. Yet the glossy surface just makes the songs more haunting. Recorded fast with Nashville session cats who were used to grinding out country hits, Blonde on Blonde has a slick studio polish that makes it sound totally unlike any of his other albums, with sparkling piano frills and a soulful shitkicker groove.
Happy 50th birthday to Blonde on Blonde, the most mysterious, majestic and seductive of Bob Dylan albums – not to mention the greatest.
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