By then, Dylan wasn’t about to record the song himself, and it would be rather early for its copyright to relate to Writings and Drawings (some songs were copyrighted during the compilation of that collection, but most old songs copyrighted in 1970–1 appear to belong to some
Columbia-related project/s). It begs the obvious question, What version was used to copyright the song? The Band had recorded their own studio version in February 1968, which would feature on the 1975 Basement Tapes set (a misnomer all along), but unless they intended to include the song on Cahoots, why copyright it in 1971?
As it happens, the version The Band did ultimately release corresponds to the lyrics in Writings and Drawings, suggesting that the 1968 recording is in some way bound up with its 1971 copyright (its Dwarf Music status explaining why it was assigned to the basement tapes section in Dylan’s collected lyrics). However, there is another possibility: Dylan recorded the song at the Big Pink sessions in 1967, and this take became the basis for both the later Band studio version and the published lyrics. Maverick musicologist Rob Bowman suggests as much in his notes to the recently remastered Music from Big Pink CD. Assuming Bowman has some basis for his claim that "it had . . . been recorded with Dylan singing as part of [t]he Basement Tapes," one awaits the emergence of said recording with barely contained anticipation.
{164} VISIONS OF JOHANNA
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, November 30, 1965—14 takes [NDH—tk.8]; Studio A, Nashville, February 14, 1966—4 takes [BOB—tk.4].
First known performance: [Berkeley Community Theater, December 3, 1965] Westchester, NY, February 5, 1966.
Dylan really had to work at "Visions of Johanna"—which many, myself included, consider Dylan’s finest work/song—in the studio before capturing the sublimity of the Blonde on Blonde recording. In keeping with previous instances when he stepped beyond the paradigms of popular song, he initially seemed in something of a hurry to get the song captured in the studio, as if the inspiration would fade as quickly as the night vision he sought to contain.
It had been less than four months since completing his sixth album, but already Dylan was feeling the strain. The songs had not come, which was fast becoming a source of frustration. Indeed, it is awfully tempting to see Johanna as his muse, who at the start of the song is "not here," but by the final line is "all that remain[s]" (other possible incarnations of said lady include "Dirge" and "What Was It You Wanted"). It is certainly one of the oddest songs ever written by a man who has just tied the knot and is enjoying a brief honeymoon in the city.
It would appear he had already abandoned his Woodstock mansion, unhappy with the vibe of the place and superstitious about the possibility of writing more breakthrough songs there. As he told Shelton the following March, "I don’t believe in writing some total other thing [my italics] in the same place twice. It’s just a hang-up, a voodoo kind of thing. I just can’t do it. When I need someplace to make something new, I can’t go back there."
As a result, on his return from Texas at the end of September, Dylan again immersed himself in New York’s nightlife, holing up at the Chelsea Hotel on 23rd St. Its fin de siècle feel would provide a redolent backdrop to the songs he wrote, or began to write, that winter. The Chelsea was (and still is) hardly the Ritz. But Dylan liked the vibe and the centrality of this mauve-bricked edifice. As late as 1985 he still had fond memories of this place (and time), telling Scott Cohen, "Me and my wife lived in the Chelsea Hotel on the third floor in 1965 or ’66, when our first baby was born. We moved out of that hotel maybe a year before [Warhol’s] Chelsea Girls. When Chelsea Girls came out, it was all over for the Chelsea Hotel. You might as well have burned it down."
That first baby, Jesse, a son and heir, would be born the following January. Sara, six months pregnant when they were married, was no longer the secret backwoods girl. She was at Dylan’s side on (or around) November 8, when they were photographed by Don Paulsen at a Young Rascals show with Jerry Schatzberg and Brian Jones. So, should these visions really be set in this déclassé hotel—and, rest assured, the heat pipes still cough at the Chelsea—we can be fairly sure it was not her absence that set him musing.
Unlike a number of other songs Dylan wrote during this annus mirabilis, few folk have stepped forward to claim they are Johanna, evidently another of Dylan’s goddesses of doom, but not necessarily a corporeal entity. Strangely, though, Joan Baez has been one such claimant, telling Scaduto, "He’d just written ‘Visions of Johanna,’ which sounded very suspicious to me. . . . He had never performed it before, and Neuwirth told him I was there that night and he performed it."
While it is true that he debuted the song at the Berkeley Community Theatre on December 4, a show Baez attended, this was his first opportunity to play the song since writing it. And if he was playing it for anyone that night, it was Allen Ginsberg and fellow Beat poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who were sitting in the front row surrounded by Hell’s Angels. He considered Ginsberg a profound influence on his songwriting at this juncture. And though he had stopped "auditioning" breakthrough songs to those he admired in late-night, sitting-room sessions, he still wanted their benediction, and Ginsberg was not cagey about dispensing it. (He may even have known that Allen planned to tape the show.)
But before he could play the song in Berkeley, Dylan set out to record it himself, with the typewriter ribbon not yet dry. Which is where the fun begins. The session he booked for November 30 in New York must have been slotted in very much at the last minute because Dylan and the Hawks were due to fly to the West Coast the following day. An evening session (according to the log, it broke up around ten-thirty p.m.) hardly qualifies as an obvious way to rest and relax before embarking on an important West Coast tour, especially with a new drummer to break in (Bobby Gregg had been hastily drafted after Levon Helm cried "Enough" at the end of the East Coast dates). But Dylan was determined to get the song down before time quelled the fire in his fingertips. As he complained to journalist Jim Jerome almost exactly ten years later, "I write fast. The inspiration doesn’t last. Writing a song, it can drive you crazy. My head is so crammed full of things I tend to lose a lot of what I think are my best songs." He didn’t want to lose this one.
Convening at Columbia’s New York studio at two-thirty in the afternoon, Dylan intended to concentrate on this one song. The first order of the day was to teach the band the song itself, since they would hardly have had time on the road to learn it (though guitarist Robbie Robertson, now firmly attached to Dylan by bonds of mutual self-interest, probably heard it in some hotel room).
Dylan’s faith in his new band to translate his thought patterns quickly and efficiently in the studio had already been dampened by his experience at the October session/s. And this was an era when it was the norm to have bands teach arrangements to session musicians who efficiently executed said licks on their behalf at the session itself (the Byrds’ "Mr. Tambourine Man" and Them’s "Baby Please Don’t Go" being two good examples of session musicians doing the actual playing "on record," though the arrangement remained the same).
So this time Dylan hedged his bets, drafting in just about every key player from previous 1965 sessions to step in should they be required. As such, Joe South and Bruce Langhorne were standing by on guitar, while Al Kooper was there to play "supplementary organ," and Paul Griffin constituted an additional pianist. With Bobby Gregg now the temporary Hawks drummer, Dylan effectively brought two separate bands to the studio to make sure there was an imprint of the song on tape while the vision remained. Which certainly helps explain the slightly schizophrenic nature of the versions recorded here.
Quite when the rehearsing process ended and tape started rolling is not clear, but there was clearly a point when the two crossed over. According to Sean Wilentz, who gave a talk on the Blonde on Blonde sessions at the Morgan Library in 2006 that was
interspersed with excerpts from the session tapes: "On the session tape, he and the Hawks change the key and slow the tempo at the start of the second take, if only to hear more closely; ‘that’s not right,’ Dylan interrupts. He speeds things up again—‘like that’—and bids Gregg to go to his cowbell, but some more scorching tests are no good either: ‘That’s not the sound, that’s not it,’ he breaks in. . . . Two more broken attempts feature Richard Manuel playing on the harpsichord: ‘Nah,’ Dylan decides, though he keeps the harpsichord in the background. [Then] out of nowhere comes a slower, hair raising, bar band rock version."
This "bar-band rock version," the earliest take in circulation, was cut to an acetate auctioned by Goldmine in 1980 and is both rehearsal and recording. A marathon performance, in every sense of the word, it demonstrates a Dylan mustering all of his creative focus just to keep the song on the rails, determined not to lose his train of thought in the recording process. Clocking in at eight minutes and twenty-seven seconds, it is also the longest of the four studio performances in
circulation.
Yet it may not be the longest of the lot; the November 30 studio log times the song at nine minutes and twenty-three seconds. Locating this version presents a real problem because the song actually got shorter—not longer—as Dylan started to refine the arrangement. The previously uncirculated version released on No Direction Home—which, according to the accompanying notes, is take eight (of the fourteen recorded)—sets another kind of record by clocking in at just six minutes and thirty-eight seconds, though lyrically it is almost identical to its more expansive predecessor. They shave two minutes off the song just by playing with greater assurance and singing with renewed confidence.
The musicians strip the song bare first time around, with nary a fill to be heard. Even with Dylan singing with a precision last heard on "Mr. Tambourine Man" at the Festival Hall, the song does slightly drag, and I find the NDH version preferable, even though Dylan’s vocal sounds a little rushed, as he fails to linger on the words in the way he manages consummately on the 1966 world tour. But there is far more of a contribution from the musicians, either because they have figured out how to play their parts or because they have been belatedly introduced into the mix. (Paul Griffin apparently arrived at the session around five, some two-and-a-half hours after work began.)
According to the studio log, the one on NDH was the fourth complete take. One may even wonder why this didn’t signal an end to proceedings (until one remembers how Dylan kept hammering away at "Rolling Stone" long after the moment had passed). The song had come a considerable way in a short time. Yet work continued, with four more false starts following immediately afterward. Finally Dylan and the other musicians realized the song again—twice—and then called it a night.
If, as appears to be the case from the session sheets, one of those two later takes is the one that has been in circulation since the early seventies—when it appeared (under its original title, "Freeze Out") on a couple of very famous bootleg LPs, Seems Like a Freeze Out and Forty Red, White & Blue Shoestrings—then Dylan executed quite an about turn. He suddenly stopped trying to make "Visions" into a rock song, reverting to almost a jazz-rock arrangement. This "third" version is dramatically different from both what came before and the Nashville version later released on Blonde on Blonde. Clocking in at seven minutes and twenty-eight seconds, it retains the so-called "nightingale’s code" set of lyrics, Dylan jamming in an extra line on that final verse (à la "Hard Rain"):
The peddler now steps to the road
Knowing everything’s gone which was owed
He examines the nightingale’s code
Still written on the fish-truck that loads
My conscience explodes . . .
The lyrics have subtly changed from earlier in the session, this so-called "L.A. Band" version[2] making two significant shifts. The addition of "knowing" before "everything’s gone which was owed" provides the peddler with a reason for stepping "to the road." Also, the line that on the record became, "She’s delicate, and seems like the mirror," has gone from, "Like silk, she seems like the mirror"—which is how it was sung on previous takes—to, "She’s steady, and seems like the mirror." Assuming that this version is from November 30 (and not January 1966), one must assume it is one of these last two takes. Which still leaves another mystery: Whatever happened to the nine-minute-and-twenty-three-second version listed on the tape log?
Thankfully, Dylan treated the song as something of a gift, cherishing it accordingly. As with "Mr. Tambourine Man," he refused to settle for second best (and impressive as they all are in their own special ways, the New York versions are just signposts on the way to its final destination). So he took the song with him to Nashville, where it was the second song to be cut at the bona fide Blonde on Blonde sessions. After three false starts, it just slid into the same groove as the musicians themselves, who effortlessly executed an inner intent Dylan’s touring band had struggled to discern. Hence, perhaps, why the song appeared only as an acoustic performance throughout 1966. Indeed, even on its Berkeley debut, four days after the Hawks recorded six complete studio takes, Dylan chose to do it all by himself, certain that he could tease out any subtleties frozen out in the studio setting.
But the real triumph on "Visions" is the way Dylan manages to write about the most inchoate feelings in such a vivid, immediate way. For now, it must have seemed like he didn’t even have to try writing something this great. As he said to the ever-attentive Hentoff only a matter of days before he wrote the song, "I’m not trying to say anything, any more. Once upon a time I tried to say, ‘Well, I’m here. Listen to me. . . . Will you let me stay at your house tonight?’ . . . I don’t have to say that any more. . . . [The new songs]’d be there if anybody listened to them or not. They’re not manufactured songs."
This particularly luminous vision has generally remained acoustic, or semi-acoustic, in performance, save for its Never Ending Tour debut in 1988—a rollicking rendition that unexpectedly opened a September show in San Diego. It sounds like he’d finally figured out where that New York "rock" version could have gone if time had been on its side. Post-accident—but before its Never Ending Tour debut—he had generally held off performing the song, singing it exactly twice to a paying audience: once in Denver in February 1974, and again in Lakeland, Florida, in April 1976. The former is predictably painful, while the latter proves a perfect way to introduce his finest tour in a decade. Since 1990, the song has become far more familiar to regular Dylan concert-goers, while whoops of recognition suggest it has yet to slip from its position as many fans’ favorite. Generally, though, he has struggled to realize the vision almost as much as he did that night in late November 1965.
Note: The published lyrics print the penultimate line as, "The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain." Cute, but every critique I’ve ever read hears the line as, "The harmonicas play the skeleton keys in the rain."
[1] The seven takes "of" "Jet Pilot" attributed by Krogsgaard I suspect may be the missing versions of "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window."
[2] The so-called "L.A. Band" session was a compilation tape made up by Columbia in the early seventies from the New York sessions in October and November 1965 and January 1966 with the Hawks. How it got this moniker is unclear, but it probably has something to do with a comment Dylan made at the San Francisco press conference in early December, about having just recorded "Freeze Out."
{ 1966: Blonde on Blonde }
Of the songs used to fill up rock’s first double-album, Blonde on Blonde, just one ("Visions of Johanna") had certainly been written by the turn of the year. But by mid-March Dylan had already recorded four sides of new ditties, without even touching two of his finest compositions ("She’s Your Lover Now" and "Tell Me, Momma"), both composed before the first set of Nashville sessions in February. The legend of Dylan writing songs on airplanes, in motels, and even in the studio s
tarts here. And even when the work was completed, the river of song was still flowing strong until he (literally) crashed and (metaphorically) burned on an upstate country road in late July—if one extrapolates from the tantalizing evidence of two taped hotel-room sessions and reports of at least one other from the world tour, which concluded on May 27 in London. For the remainder of the year, though, the sound of silence and the dust of rumors vied for ascendancy . . .
{165} SHE’S YOUR LOVER NOW
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004
[complete version: Words Fill My Head; Telegraph #2].
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, January 21, 1966—19 takes [TBS].
One element of "Visions of Johanna" that aligns it to the almost equally magnificent "She’s Your Lover Now," another major composition, comes in verse three ("Little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously . . ."). Such a line could easily have transferred from one to the other, something we know happened on other Blonde on Blonde compositions. "Visions of Johanna" almost certainly prompted Dylan to continue this line of reasoning, writing a song specifically about "little boy lost" and his lady friend (which may explain why he ultimately rejected "She’s Your Lover Now," not even attempting it at the Nashville sessions).
The two compositions certainly appear to have been written very close to each other—"Visions . . ." in late November, "She’s Your Lover Now" in late December. A sense pervades "Visions of Johanna" that, at any minute, the dissolute aesthete sitting there stranded may come out of his (opiate?) daze and start telling it like it is. In "She’s Your Lover Now," he does exactly this, alternating between a wistful regret for "her" and an ill-disguised disdain for "him." With "Visions of Johanna" any barely contained disgust is reserved for the various women, real and imaginary, whose only crime is that they are not Johanna—"Louise, she’s alright, she’s just near," "Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues," and "Madonna, she still has not showed." Whereas with "She’s Your Lover Now" Dylan is merciless in his dissection of every combatant: "I see you’re still with her, well, that’s fine, ’cause she’s comin’ on so strange, can’t you tell?" and, "I ain’t the judge, you don’t have to be nice to me."
Revolution in the Air Page 33