by Sean Wilentz
“AFTER THAT, IT WENT REAL EASY”
“We knew we had cut a good ’un when it was over,” Al Kooper remembers.6 But despite the successful experiment, the next day’s recording was canceled, as were two other New York dates; during the one completed session, on January 27, Dylan played around with words and driving melodies and tried to nail down some songs, but the work produced nothing of lasting consequence for the new album.* A change in venue had been in the works, and despite the results on “One of Us Must Know” it would go forward. During the Highway 61 sessions, Bob Johnston had suggested that Dylan try recording in Nashville, but according to Johnston, Grossman and Columbia objected and insisted everything was going fine in New York. Dylan, though, finally went along with Johnston. He had been listening to Nashville-recorded music since he was a boy and knew firsthand how Johnston’s Nashville friends might sound on his songs. At Johnston’s invitation, the multi-instrumentalist Charlie McCoy had sat in on a Highway 61 session and overdubbed the borderland acoustic guitar runs that grace the released version of “Desolation Row,” strongly reminiscent of the great session guitarist Grady Martin’s work on Marty Robbins’s “El Paso.” It was an impressive calling card. “After that,” McCoy remembers, “it went real easy.”7
Nashville had been ascending as a major recording center since the 1940s. By 1963, it boasted eleven hundred musicians and fifteen recording studios. After Steve Sholes’s and Chet Atkins’s pioneering work in the 1950s with Elvis Presley, Nashville also proved it could produce superb rock and roll as well as country and western, rhythm and blues, and Brenda Lee pop. That held especially true for the session crew Johnston assembled for Dylan’s Nashville dates. Trying to plug songs for Presley’s movies, Johnston had hooked up for demo recordings with younger players, many of whom, like McCoy, had moved to Nashville from other parts of the South. Charlie McCoy and the Escorts, in fact, were reputed to be Nashville’s tightest and busiest weekend rock band in the mid-1960s; the members included the guitarist Wayne Moss and the drummer Kenneth Buttrey, who, along with McCoy, would be vital to Blonde on Blonde.
Charlie McCoy and the Escorts, Cadence Records publicity photograph, 1960s. McCoy is in the center playing harmonica; standing are (left) the drummer Kenny Buttrey holding a guitar and (right) the guitarist Wayne Moss. (photo credit 4.6)
Johnston’s choices (also including the guitarist Jerry Kennedy, the pianist Hargus “Pig” Robbins, the bass player Henry Strzelecki, and the great Joseph Souter Jr.—a.k.a. Joe South—the guitarist and singer who would hit it big nationally in three years with a single, “Games People Play”) were certainly among Nashville’s top session men. Some of them had worked with stars ranging from Patsy Cline, Elvis Presley, and Roy Orbison to Ann-Margret. But apart from the A-list regular McCoy (whose harmonica skills were in special demand), they were still up-and-coming members of the Nashville elite, roughly Dylan’s age. (Robbins, at twenty-eight, was a relative old-timer; McCoy, at twenty-four, was only two months older than Dylan; Buttrey was just turning twenty-one.) Although they were too professional to be starstruck, McCoy says, “everybody knew what a brilliant songwriter [Dylan] was” from songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” but as a performer, and especially as a rock performer, Dylan’s reputation did not precede him.8 Still, the session men were much more in touch with what Dylan was up to on Blonde on Blonde than is allowed by the stereotype of long-haired New York hipsters colliding with well-scrubbed Nashville good ol’ boys. One of Dylan’s biographers reports that Robbie Robertson found the Nashville musicians “standoffish.”9 But the outgoing Al Kooper, who had more recording experience, recalls the scene differently: “Those guys welcomed us in, respected us, and played better than any other studio guys I had ever played with previously.”10
Joe “South” Souter, Hargus “Pig” Robbins in Nashville, Tennessee, circa 1975. Jerry Kennedy at the Mercury Records studio in Nashville, Tennessee, circa 1975. (photo credit 4.7) (photo credit 4.8) (photo credit 4.9)
(What aloofness there was seems mainly to have come from Dylan’s end. Kris Kristofferson, then an aspiring songwriter working as a janitor at the studio, recalls that police had been stationed around the building to keep out unwanted intruders. Asked if he got to meet the star, he told an interviewer, emphatically, he did not: “I wouldn’t have dared talk to him.11 I’d have been fired.”)
Johnston, apparently at Dylan’s request, helped bring everybody together by emptying the studio of baffles—tall partitions that separate musicians to reduce sonic reflections and prevent the sounds from one player bleeding into the microphone of another. The producer wanted to create an ambience fit for an ensemble, and he succeeded—so much so that Kenny Buttrey later credited the album’s distinctive sound to that alteration alone. “It made all the difference in our playing together,” he later told an interviewer, “as if we were on a tight stage, as opposed to playing in a big hall where you’re ninety miles apart.12 From that night on, our entire outlook was changed. We started having a good time.”
Of course, Nashville, for all of its musical sophistication, was not Manhattan. Kooper tells of going to the country-music star Ernest Tubb’s famous record store downtown and getting chased in broad daylight by some tough guys who disliked his looks. There were differences inside the studio, too. The Nashville musicians were accustomed to cutting three- to four-minute sides, several a day, where, McCoy says, “the artist and the song was always the number-one item.”13 Dylan, though, had undertaken some remarkably long songs, and apart from “Visions of Johanna” none of them was finished. Departing from his reputation for recording rapidly, Dylan kept sketching and revising in his hotel room and even in the studio—sometimes laboriously, sometimes spontaneously, seizing on inspiration so quickly it seemed like free association (and sometimes was free association). The first day of Nashville sessions passed briskly enough, but none of the remaining marathon dates ended before midnight, and they usually lasted until after daybreak. Late-night work was not uncommon in Nashville, especially when Elvis Presley was recording, but McCoy relates that it “was just unheard of at that time” to devote so much studio time and money to recording any single song.14
Dylan came to Nashville after playing a show in Norfolk, having resumed his touring with the Hawks (now joined by their old backup drummer, Sandy Konikoff). He was determined to finish “Visions of Johanna,” the masterpiece that had initiated the entire enterprise. It emerged in its final recorded form at the first date and inside just four takes (only one of them complete). Dylan now knew what he wanted, and the sidemen quickly caught on: Kooper swirled his ghostly organ riffs around Dylan’s subtle, bottom-heavy acoustic strumming and Joe South’s funk hillbilly bass; Robbie Robertson’s feral lead electric guitar sneaked in at the “key chain” line in the second verse; Kenny Buttrey mixed steady snare drum with tolling cymbal taps that came to the fore during Dylan’s lonesome-whistle harmonica breaks. The thin, wild mercury sound hinted at in New York was now a fact, spun out of what had been the underlying triad of Kooper’s organ, Dylan’s harmonica, and the guitars—Dylan’s acoustic and Robertson’s electric. Yet Dylan was still experimenting. The date had begun with a song in 3/4 time, “4th Time Around,” which critics call Dylan’s reply to the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood.” Like “Visions of Johanna,” “4th Time Around” evolved little in the studio, and even with Charlie McCoy buttressing the band on his bass harmonica, it was a much slighter song, like Bob Dylan impersonating John Lennon impersonating Bob Dylan. In still another vein, numerous takes that reworked “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” into a sort of knock-knock joke complete with a ringing doorbell, shouts of “Who’s there?” and car honks fell completely flat.
The strangest Nashville recording dates were the second and third. The second began at six in the evening and did not end until five thirty the next morning, but Dylan played only for the final ninety minutes, and on only one song: “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” He would later call it a piece of religious c
arnival music, which makes sense given its faint melodic echoes of Johann Sebastian Bach, especially the chorale “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”15 Unlike “Visions of Johanna,” though, this epic needed work, and Dylan toiled over the lyrics for hours. The level of efficiency was military: hurry up and wait.
Kristofferson has described the scene: “I saw Dylan sitting out in the studio at the piano, writing all night long by himself.16 Dark glasses on.” Bob Johnston recalled to the journalist Louis Black that Dylan did not even get up to go to the bathroom despite consuming so many Cokes, chocolate bars, and other sweets that Johnston began to think the artist was a junkie: “But he wasn’t; he wasn’t hooked on anything but time and space.”17 The tired, strung-along musicians shot the breeze and played Ping-Pong while racking up their pay. (They may even have laid down ten takes of their own instrumental number, which appears on the session tape, though Charlie McCoy doesn’t recollect doing this, and the recording may come from a different date.) Finally, at 4:00 a.m., Dylan was ready. “I don’t think we’ll take a break,” he told the musicians. “Let’s just make it, see what it sounds like.”
“It’s two verses and a chorus—five times,” one of the Nashville musicians says, half-inquisitively, on the tape, just to make sure he understood right. But none of the accompanists knew what they were in for. “After you’ve tried to stay awake ’til four o’clock in the morning, to play something so slow and long was really, really tough,” McCoy recalls.18 After he finished an abbreviated run-through, Dylan counted off, and the musicians fell in. Kenny Buttrey recalled that they were prepared for a two-or three-minute song and started out accordingly: “If you notice that record, that thing after like the second chorus starts building and building like crazy, and everybody’s just peaking it up ’cause we thought, Man, this is it … After about ten minutes of this thing we’re cracking up at each other, at what we were doing.19 I mean, we peaked five minutes ago. Where do we go from here?”
Yet if the session men were baffled, it didn’t show once the tape started rolling. They were among the best artists in the business, and once they actually began playing, the song came to life about as swiftly as any of Dylan’s ever had—an astonishing feat for a track that, on the album, clocked in at eleven minutes and twenty-three seconds. After a single, beautiful, complete preliminary take—with the lyrics finished and the musical arrangement, amazingly, set—that final version was done.
“NEXT!”
At the third session, the recording of another epic, “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” began at 4:00 a.m. after another long wait. The lyrics cohere gradually on a surviving part-typed, part-handwritten manuscript page, which begins with a standard line about honey, it being too hard (which had survived from “Medicine Sunday” at the very first New York session with the Hawks). Then the words meander through random combinations and disconnected fragments and images about people getting uglier, and musical instrument eyes, and toting a .22 caliber rifle that is really just a single shot, before suddenly, in Dylan’s own hand, amid many crossings-out, there appears the first rough version of Mama being in Mobile, Alabama, with the Memphis blues again. Inside the studio, several musical revisions and false starts followed, and frustration began setting in, when suddenly, on take fourteen, everything fell into place.
There is some disagreement about what happened next. According to most accounts, based on the logs and files kept by Columbia Records, Dylan departed Nashville, then returned with Kooper and Robertson less than three weeks later to finish recording. Supposedly, Dylan, in the interim, adapted and came up with the rudiments of eight more songs, most of them in the three-and-a-half- to four-minute range, closer to the traditional pop-song form. Al Kooper, however, insists that the entire album was recorded in a single visit to Nashville, most likely in February, meaning that Dylan had all of the songs sketched out from the get-go; Charlie McCoy, too, says he remembers only one set of dates, although he also concedes he just might be mistaken. The official documented version jibes better with Dylan’s known touring schedule. It also jibes with the fact that five of the eight songs first recorded after “Memphis Blues Again,” but none of those recorded earlier, include a Tin Pan Alley middle-eight or bridge section—Dylan’s first extensive foray as a writer into that conventional song structure.* Nevertheless, the testimony of two key participants carries weight, especially when set against an easily misconstrued paper trail.
But whether the Nashville sessions occurred in two clusters or just one, New York hip and Nashville virtuosity converged; indeed, musically, the two seem never to have been much apart. It produced enough solid material to demand an oddly configured double album, the first of its kind in contemporary popular music.
The songs recorded after “Memphis Blues Again” fell into three categories: straight-ahead eight- and twelve-bar electric blues; blistering rock and roll; and a miscellany of hip pop songs. A few of the tracks retrieved sounds from the early New York sessions with the Hawks, but in tighter and richer forms. The others ventured into entirely new territory.
The recording at the fourth Nashville date began well after midnight, with a pair of run-through takes by what sounds like an ensemble of piano, two guitars (one played by Robbie Robertson), bass, organ, and drums. Dylan, rich voiced, practically croons at times. The lyrics to what was then called “Where Are You Tonight, Sweet Marie?” are not quite done, and Dylan sings some dummy lines (“And the eagle’s teeth / Down above the train line”). The band even changes key between takes, but the song seems basically set—though, on these preliminary takes, Kenny Buttrey shifts his snare beat half a minute or so into the song and then steadily increases the layered patterns of his drumming. On the last take, the one we know from the album, Buttrey builds the complexities to the point where he is defying gravity or maybe Newton’s third law of motion. By the time Dylan sings of the six white horses and of the Persian drunkard, Buttrey and the song are soaring—and then Dylan launches a harmonica break. The band stays in overdrive, but Dylan and Buttrey, pushing each other forward, nearly pop the clutch. For just under a minute, the song becomes an overpowering rock-and-roll concerto for harmonica and drums. “Absolutely Sweet Marie” is esteemed chiefly for lines like “But to live outside the law, you must be honest” and “Well, anybody can be just like me, obviously / But then, now again, not too many can be like you, fortunately”—the second phrase one of many that Dylan has freely mutated in concert over the last forty years. But with the sound of “Sweet Marie,” Blonde on Blonde entered fully and sublimely into what is now considered classic rock and roll.
Bob Dylan, 1965. (photo credit 4.10)
Less than twelve hours later, everybody was back in the studio to start in on what Dylan called “Like a Woman.” The lyrics, once again, needed work; on several early takes, Dylan sang disconnected lines and semi-gibberish. He was unsure about what the person described in the song does that is just like a woman, rejecting “shakes,” “wakes,” and “makes mistakes.” The improvisational spirit inspired a weird, double-time fourth take, somewhere between Bo Diddley and Jamaican ska, that on the tape finally disintegrates into a voice in the background admitting, “We lost, man.” That escapade prompted a time-out. Robbie Robertson and the pianist Pig Robbins then joined the band, and laying aside “Just Like a Woman,” they helped change Dylan’s boogie-woogie piano number “What You Can Do with My Wigwam” into “Pledging My Time,” driven by Robertson’s screaming guitar. Only then, after several false starts and near misses, the final proud, pained version of “Just Like a Woman” surfaced. The concluding date produced six songs in thirteen hours of booked studio time, no time at all compared with the earlier sessions—and serendipity had not departed. They were rolling. “Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine” was originally a straightforward rock song, dominated by Robertson’s guitar—until Charlie McCoy picked up a trumpet between takes and asked to repeat a little lick alongside Dylan on the harmonica. The song’s s
ound changed utterly, and for the better. The boys then made quick work of “Temporary Like Achilles,” ending with a performance steered by Robbins’s dusky barrelhouse piano—doubtless the only stroll like it ever to carry the name of a character from the Iliad.
Round midnight, the mood on the session tape gets giddy. As later related by Johnston to Louis Black, Dylan had roughed out the next song on the piano.
“That sounds like the damn Salvation Army Band,” Johnston said.20
“Can you get one?” Dylan replied, either perplexed, inspired, joking, or a little of all three.
After a couple of quick phone calls, the trombonist Wayne “Doc” Butler showed up, the only extra musician (with McCoy playing trumpet) whom Johnston thought was needed. But at this point in the story recollections clash once again. Legend has it—and more than one of the session musicians have affirmed in great detail—that at someone’s insistence, possibly Dylan’s, potent marijuana got passed around, along with a batch of demonic drink ordered in from a local bar. But not everybody was interested. And Charlie McCoy, who by all accounts did not partake, denies categorically that anybody was intoxicated. “It just didn’t happen,” he insists, either at this session or (with isolated exceptions) at any of the many thousands of others on which he has performed in Nashville.21 Al Kooper, who had given up alcohol years earlier, agrees that the Blonde on Blonde sessions were sober and says that the hyper-professionals Dylan and Albert Grossman would never have permitted pot or drink inside the studio.