blonde on blonde vs. highway 61 revisited.

Great posts above

Despite my lifelong Dylan fandom, I’m not sure that I’ve ever actually owned a copy of H61… I may just have the songs ingrained in my brain via Dylan collections. Honestly, I think I sort of forget the album exists; my brain jumps from BIABH to BOB (both of which were among the first CDs I owned, by any artist).

(Looking at the H61 tracklist now… I should give this one a spin some time, looks like a pretty good album, lol)

H61 is my weird Dylan blindspot, also. I borrowed a copy from my local library years and years back and listened to it a good deal but it never clicked - just wasn't in that headspace. I'm at the stage where I'm more interested in his less celebrated periods (xian, 80s, etc.)

Amphetamine pace of H61 makes it a great driving album.

These two records are usually paired together, but I think Blonde on Blonde actually marks a shift that is completed with his 1967 recordings. There's more attention to songcraft, writing bridges and hooks, the tempos are easing off, there are many more country music touches. I suspect that the motorcycle accident had less to do with his change in style than that he had burnt off a lot of the intensity of 1965. This may correlate with changes in drug intake and family situation?

i buy that. part of why it's taken me a long long time to get into BoB is that i find the energy level kinda sluggish. i was wondering last night if that was partially a matter of the mix --- the drums in particular feel really muffled/distant a lot of the time. but it could totally also be the songwriting and tempos making things feel a little bit less urgent. much moreso than on the previous two albums, i find the lyrics kinda washing past me --- just a parade of randomly identified characters doing miscellaneous things, not really adding up to a point or a narrative. maybe that'll change with more attentive listens, idk, but I feel like a lot of these songs could shed 2 or 3 verses and we'd never know the difference. disc one is also weighed down by having Rainy Day Women and Just Like a Woman which reallllly bore me (except the opening of JLaW). do Dylan fans get into "one-disc" versions of this record, the way Beatles people will tinker around with the White Album on rainy Sundays? i guess it gets tricky if you're committed to keeping Sad-Eyed Lady, which i probably would be.

sorry, that coulda used a paragraph break

i've never cared for BoB that much tbh, it is slow and plodding and too long. i honestly have never listened to it all the way through. highway 61 is perfection though for me

at 14 i was browsing my parents' record collection, which was terrible. just awful. they didn't even really listen to music. but my favorite uncle had left a worn copy of H61 in there, and i saw it and it stood out from the rest. i think i put on side 2 first, i have a very distinct memory of listening to "queen jane" and just feeling enraptured by the timbres and textures of everything - the out of tune guitars, the organ and piano, dylan's voice, the harmonica. the same for the rest of this album really.

I've always had the same feeling about Blonde On Blonde. The songs kind of meld together in my mind: a lot of words, a lot of psychedelia that doesn't give me much to hang onto, less variety than the other albums, fewer peaks of energy, less of an arc. It's great, of course, but it's also the album from that era that I listen to least.

Highway 61, I think I imprinted on at an early age and it formed my idea of what an album should be like. Sometimes when I'm in one of those discussions about the best Rolling Stones album, I catch myself saying, "Well, of course Let it Bleed is the best album as an album," and then I realize that what I actually mean is that it's the one that's most like Highway 61.

I don't know if I've read anyone say they love Blonde on Blonde top to bottom; for such a canonized album, everyone seems to say, "I don't like this, don't like that, skip a bunch of songs", me included. Of course, everyone has different choices.

I think the whole thing is pretty great, but it’s a particular vibe… a long, languid album that’s in absolutely no f’n hurry. The most upbeat, “poppy” tracks are all on side 3!

The first rock double album, before there were any rules about how such a thing should be structured!

oh man, blonde on blonde was the first dylan album i really loved and i largely think of it as energetic?

The Classic Dylan Album I listen to least, and, yeah, it's got its dull patches, but, well, fuck it -- it's great.

(xpost) By exactly one week! BOB, June 20/66; Freak Out!, June 27/66. (Not that the structuring of Freak Out! might serve as any kind of useful blueprint for someone else.)

It came out a few weeks before Revolver and a week before Freak Out; it's funny to think that at the time, hipsters likely regarded it as the most far-out, hallucinatory rock record possible, based largely on the lyrical content. Now it sounds like an atmospheric country-rock record with a lot of words.

Both Dylan and Zappa put their side-long tracks on side 4. The third rock artist to release a double: Donovan, following in Bob's footsteps as usual...

BoB is great but it is an epic listen as a whole, and one best done at 2AM, furthering the difficulty. It's a pretty strung-out album.

Vinyl Me Please is doing a MONO Blonde On Blonde pressing as their Essentials title for December.

Oh yeah, that seems right. Check that, people. I first heard it in mono because I always bought mono because it was cheaper (not that much, but I was on an allowance). I thought stereo was corny parental stuff anyway, like Cinemascope. Much cooler to hear the wild sounds pressing the wall---Wall of Sound, yeah---and Dylan's crew blaring down Highway 61. with "It Takes A Lot To Laugh" {" I been up all night, leanin' on the window sill") and the beginning and end of moodswinging "Desolation Row" locating the Row pretty close to the funky old high-rise hallways of BoB (which I thought of re Village, Lower East Side, the Dakota, the Chelsea, and then realized it was all recorded in Nashville, which fit too, with my 70s visits to the Nashville of Altman's Nashville, with newspapers blowing around wet narrow little old streets, and even childhood memories of Chicago: all those scarred-up bad cough American cities back then, where thee action was).
Yeah blaring along Hwy61, then floating through rooms and halls of Bob, with moodswing to sneer also in "Visions of Johanna," in context of the narrator's own search-flailing: he's fogged and stoned and floating but can't relax---"my conscience explodes"---and "The ghost of electricity/Howls in the bones of her face" not far from "with her fog (Vogue?) her ampheta-meen, and her pearls," which is the key line of otherwise ho-hum-ish "Just Like A Woman," and the post-moodswing, crucial wordplay turning one "stone" to another, dodging terminal self-pity, is crucial in "Rainy Day Women." So there are enough bits standing out even in the foggiest, draggiest tracks (and "Visions," of course is far more than that, or that appproach at its best, but I think there are enough effective lines/contrast all through this thing to carry me between the most consistently compelling stand-alone tracks).
Even "Sad-Eyed Lady," which I don't think I ever paid that much (enough?) attention to, has "With your mercury mouth/In the missionary times" at the beginning, and "my Arabian drums" awaiting Milady's instructions all through: they're gonna be parked somewhere, this exotica imagery, so he can go off to the sere, clear(er), though even darker, backwoods streets ov John Wesley Harding.

(Some great comments on this thread, which I'd never seen before. Good to compare these albums, but don't know that I prefer one over the other, though Hwy61 plays itself without warning in my head pretty often, as it has for many a year.)

So what I meant to convey was that his albums came out so quickly and had just enough intimations on one of what the next soon led to---and Bringing It All Back Home had the isolation of being young etc. in the sticks, then jumping onto Highway 61, to city fog of BoB, back to the boonies, in a bloodstained historical way, still unfurling, for JWH, closing tracks of which foretold Nashville Skyline in different context, of course.

blonde on blonde hands down. it just seems less self conscious, like he’s not looking over his shoulder or winking as much, just letting it all spill out. It’s an ornate maroon and gold carpet. it sounds like home.

“like a rolling stone” is so awesome, tho, I will never deny that

It’s an ornate maroon and gold carpet. it sounds like home. So much so that I couldn't listen to it for several decades: when I tried, there were too many associations pressing in. Though very eventually, that was okay, and I was just amazed, that's all (in part by what he could do while obviously in his mid-twenties, an age range I was also much impressed by when I was much, much younger than that).
Now my fave version of "Stone" is by Hendrix at Monterey, the way the pointedness of the song comes through thee canny cuetness of his delivery's dynamic.

I'm 40, and my parents were big Dylan fans. These two + Bringing It All Back Home were in regular rotation when I was growing up and were thus among the first "adult" music that I heard somewhere other than the radio that I really tried to develop my own connection with. Predictably, my relationships with all 3 albums have continued to evolve throughout my life.

Posts upthread by marcos and Dr. C describing the airier, more limp mix of BoB had me sold on where I would put my allegiance between these 2. While I have always loved the poetry of Dylan's phrase "thin, wild mercury sound," the actual SOUND he seems to be describing leans a little too heavily on the "thin" part, on BoB anyway. But then I read brimstead's gorgeous

like he’s not looking over his shoulder or winking as much, just letting it all spill out. It’s an ornate maroon and gold carpet. it sounds like home.

and I'm back to thinking of these two deeply similar albums as incomparably different.

Also, cannot believe I have never noticed before today that Blonde on Blonde abbreviated spells BOB!

Re: trimming the fat on BoB to create a regular length LP, it would be interesting to see if there's any consensus. A lot of the songs are quite similar, and I suspect that aside from a few obvious standouts (and cutting Rainy Day Women) the ones you keep and cut are very personal, based on specific lines and moments that resonate. I won't try to get into track order - it definitely wouldn't be this - but a very quick pass for me says something like

A:
Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again
I Want You
Visions of Johanna
One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)
Temporary Like Achilles

B:
Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine)
Fourth Time Around
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands

Cut:
Rainy Day Women #12 & 35
Pledging My Time
Just Like a Woman
Absolutely Sweet Marie
Obviously Five Believers

But wait! Whut about

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKqQJuJqN6Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlnlrtsHC6s

I'd keep "Absolutely Sweet Marie" because it's got am instrumental hook and interesting chord changes, which I bet no-one ever said about half of the songs on the record.
I admit I never got "Visions of Johanna".

It's like Bob saying, "do you see what I did there?" for seven minutes straight.

Johanna vs. Sweet Marie is exactly the kind of personal preference I alluded to - neither has much in the way of hooks, both long, but both have lots of indelible lines. "The ghost of ’lectricity howls in the bones of her face" - cmon

I do like "Sweet Marie" a lot but it is sort of Blonde on Blonde by numbers to me. It doesn't stand out.

"Just Like a Woman" also has plenty of great moments but could've been a non-album single

Oh, I love Sweet Marie. I could see maaaaybe losing Five Believers.

People. Just enjoy the record. Also if anybody so much as *touches* the Kenny Buttrey tour de force of “Marie”, I will be over with the enforcers.

^otm

Inspired by this revive, I listened to BoB tonight and was thinking about how the album is kind of divided between serious or intense songs (Visions, One or Us Must Know, etc.) and lighter/funnier material (Rainy Day, Leopard Skin, etc.). It's its own little White Album. I was imagining the single album version of BoB not in terms of my favorites (I'd take some from both styles), but solely from the serious or intense side. There isn't quite enough for an entire album imo, so I added "She's Your Lover Now" and came up with this:

Emo Blonde on Blonde
Side A:
1. She's Your Lover Now
2. Visions of Johanna
3. One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)
4. Just Like a Woman

Side B:
1. Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again
2. Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands

That fumble at the end of She's Your Lover Now leads into Visions really well.

So I've been listening to this version, which I now call Blonde on the Tracks, and it is killer imho (I know ppl don't like Just Like a Woman, but it works in this much more thematic context).