The Albums That Matter: Blonde on Blonde

Joe runs through every album on his iPod, mostly in alphabetical order, and offers some brief thoughts. Check out previous columns HERE.

Blonde on Blonde

Bob Dylan

1966

There are too many gardens to tend to in the fields of Puke on Your Birthday, and occasionally, some get neglected. It's not that the soil isn't rich, it's just that I only have so much time in the day. There was time when I was writing an entry in the "The Albums That Matter" column every single day. That was years ago, in the nascent stages of PoYB 3.0. I've been sitting on this next entry for over a year. Time got away from me. But I wouldn't be explaining all this in the opening paragraph if it didn't make sense in the context of what I'm going to say about Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde.

I feel like it was to my benefit to wait on it. I've known Blonde on Blonde for a decade or more, but it was helpful for me to listen to it with a critical eye over the past eighteen months, maybe once a month during moments when I'm fooling myself that I'm finally going to write about it. I needed to be absolutely sure that I'm not missing anything, because here is my thesis: I'm too stupid to understand poetry.

The rub is that Blonde on Blonde is my favorite Bob Dylan album¹. But that mostly has to do with the music, not the lyrics. There's some great shit on here that I'll get into in a second. First, I'll say that my relationship with Dylan has gone through a wild ride over the years. When I was young, he was a "hero." This was when I was immature enough that I could pretend that I knew what Dylan was talking about in his poetry. Later, as a young adult, I grew bitter, referring to Dylan occasionally as a "fraud." This is when I was old enough to realize that there were things that I didn't understand, but still young enough that it frustrated me, and I would thus lash out.

Now, I try to stay zen when it comes to that which I do not understand. Whenever I am bamboozled by something, I try to remember now that this is my fault, not the artist's fault. I wrote about this with Mulholland Drive, a movie that I sure as shit didn't "get" right away, and even now am not even sure if my rickety scaffolding of understanding is going to hold. But you take that as a challenge, right? It's not "it sucks because I don't get it," it's more "I don't get it but I want to get it or at least get to a place where I'm finding meaning in the not knowing."

Let's look at an example. "Visions of Johanna" is a good one for this exercise. Really great fucking song. Like many of the songs this album, it makes a serious claim for being one of Dylan's best. Here is a random snippet of the lyrics:

"The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes everything's been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes."

I can hear the music playing in my head as I read the words, the song is that vivid. I can hear Dylan's inflections and cadence as he sings the lyrics—the way the "-oad" rhymes at the end of each line are elongated, the way "conscience explodes" gets the implicit exclamation mark, almost making "explodes" an onomatopoeia. But as to what these words mean? I have no idea. Sixteen-year-old Joe would've have pretended he knew, and 25-year-old Joe would've said that they are stupid because they can't mean anything. But 34-year-old Joe knows enough about this world and about art to understand that it sometimes doesn't even matter what the words mean. What matters is that they look good, feel good, and are vivid and artful and meaningful emotionally, etc.

Like, I'm not gonna go down the fucking rabbit hole that Genius.com suggests that I do. Is "fish truck" a reference to "the vegetative death-and-rebirth mythology of the Fisher King via T.S. Eliot’s The Waste-Land"? Either it is (and Dylan is working at a level that I will never be capable of discerning) or it's not (and the so-called Dylantologists are fucking fooling themselves). I'd rather just let the absurdist imagery work as a valid piece of the music. "My conscious explodes" could mean something or it could not, but it's a fucking banger of a bridge into the chorus.

I just get uncomfortable because I'm surrounded on all sides by people who say that these lyrics are deep, man, and I'm over here just appreciating a harmonica solo. I'm not even saying the discussion about the poetry isn't valid. I like the act of trying to figure out what the fuck "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" is about. I believe Dylan when he says it's not about drugs. I believe Dylan when he says that "getting stoned" is about hypocrisy (i.e. "he who throws the first stone..."). I also believe that it doesn't really fucking matter what the words mean, it only matters that they are strange and mysterious and that they pair really nicely with a drunk-or-high-but-definitely-woozy "Salvation Army-style" band.

There are lyrics that are seriously sticky, and have remained with me for half my life at this point. Check out this one from "Stuck Inside a Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again": "He just smoked my eyelids, and punched my cigarette." Is the switcheroo a goof, or on purpose? If the latter, then why? Can you even smoke an eyelid? Is it a metaphor? Is the cigarette punching an oblique reference to "Canto III: Vestibule of Hell" from Dante's Inferno? These are the types of questions that someone who needs explicit explanations for these words would ask. I don't necessarily need that. I am content with the lively quasi-psychedelic imagery in the phrase. I try not to see this shit as a padlock to be picked, because after a while, I'll start getting pissed that Dylan didn't have any keys.

Maybe this becomes a problem on an album that features Dylan spitting his lyrics over an acoustic guitar, since the focus there lands on those lyrics. That's obviously not a problem here. Blonde on Blonde is the third album in Dylan's so-called "rock trilogy," and the band behind him remains phenomenal. Standouts are the late Robbie Robertson on guitar (I waited so long to write this blog post that I had to add that adjective in front of his name, unfortunately), and Al Kooper on organ (he also plays the infamous organ part on "Like a Rolling Stone," which was on the second album of the trilogy, Highway 61 Revisited).

What I appreciate about Dylan's rock music in this era is that thing the band does when every verse builds up in volume and crashes into the chorus is an even bigger way than the previous chorus. It works every time. It also works because Dylan has his peculiarities when it comes to pronunciation, and even when he's repeating words in the chorus, those separate choruses have different inflections, so they all sound like different words, even when they aren't. This is what makes "Like a Rolling Stone" such a great and difficult karaoke song, because you have no know exactly how Dylan says the words, in addition to what he says. "Stuck Inside a Mobile" pulls the same trick, and I'd love to tackle this one in a public setting one day.

There are a thousand other musical moments that I love throughout this album, and I'm comfortable in saying that this is my focus when I listen to Blonde on Blonde, not the words (though, as noted, some words are so vivid that they jump out at you anyway). The give-and-take of harmonica and organ in "I Want You," how "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine" again features that same rambunctious, sloppy energy found on "Rainy Day Women," the insane explosion into the final chorus and harmonica outro on "One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)"... talk about how much of a lyrical genius Dylan is all you want, but this is one of the best straight-up rock 'n' roll records of all time.

So I don't think what I'm saying here is that Dylan is a genius or a fraud. He is maybe both, or neither. What I'm really trying to say is that I'm comfortable now with the unknowable mystery of it all. I don't know what most of his words "mean," and I don't even know if they mean anything. What's important is that they mean something to the listener. And I'm not the type of listener who needs to understand poetry in order to understand the beauty of music. Blonde on Blonde gives me permission to be whatever kind of listener I want to be.

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If this album sounds interesting, then check out this song: "Pledging My Time"

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Stray Observations:

• ¹...so far. I'm familiar with seventeen of Bob Dylan's 40ish studio album LPs. Mostly all from the early years in his career. I'm slowly but surely working my way through the discography, at a pace of about one per year. I know from previous experience that trying to binge on any particular artist's entire discography at the same time does not work for me, and actively turns me off of their music.
• But yeah, Blonde on Blonde is probably #1, at least in terms of "favorite." If we're talking about "best," then other cliché answers would Highway 61 Revisited and Blood on the Tracks.
• Couldn't fit in the quote "that wild mercurial sound" in the above short essay, but I feel like this description of Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan himself is almost as well known as the lyrics themselves. What can ya do, this man's words are usually taken as gospel.
• ALBUM COVER: I love the blue steel look that Dylan gives the camera in this one. I like how photographer Jerry Schatzberg shuts down any nonsense "hidden meaning" interpretations right from the get-go: "We were just cold and the two of us were shivering."
• ALBUM NAME: I was coming up on Dylan around the time that the new theory was making its rounds—"Blonde on Blonde is a tribute to Brecht on Brecht, a musical performance of Bertolt Brecht's songs which Dylan attended in 1963 and which had a profound effect on him." Eh. It's possible but not likely. But I don't want to come off as too cynical here. I want to leave at least some room for "secret meaning" shit. Maybe this can be one of them, as opposed to the likely scenario of Bob Dylan high on marijuana and free-associating random words.
• I read some an argument one time that some of the songs on Side 3 are unnecessary, especially "Obviously 5 Believers." I mean, I get the argument. Maybe you could cut down a couple songs if you wanted to. But what's the purpose of saying this? Is it some superiority thing? "Oh, I know how to construct a better Blonde on Blonde then Bob Dylan himself." Part of the deal in consider albums a single piece of art is that you're stuck with all the parts and functions of that single piece of art. The "which songs would you cut" discussion that pops up around double albums is always a nonstarter for me.
• Speaking of which—I was always just a little annoyed that my CD copy of Blonde on Blonde existed as a double album, even though, at 72 minutes, it could've fit onto a single disc. True—"Just like a Woman" has an ending that totally suggests "move to the next disc now please," but I'm sitting here right now listening to the whole thing on my iPod without having to flip anything or change anything or push any buttons, and I'm still getting something out of the experience. That whole "keep double albums on two CDs" thing was just a way to rob you of money.
• Good thing Santa Claus bought me this album instead. I definitely remember the first time I listened to it. I was in the back of the minivan on the way to my uncle's house on Christmas Day. The three toddler cousins we saw that day are all out of high school now. Time flies, Blonde on Blonde stays the same.
• Can't believe we haven't talked about "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" yet! The epic eleven-minute closer to the album, this is Bob Dylan working in peak form. It's also probably the best example on this album of the "words as emotions and not as hidden clues." Regardless, I love the mythology that Dylan builds over the course of multiple albums (like how in Desire's "Sara," he admits that he "[stayed] up for days in the Chelsea Hotel / writing 'Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' for you").
• "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" showed up as a Song Challenge selection from Sam. That was the first indication this summer that I needed to write this goddamn blog post. Then Maeve was saying that Bob Dylan was poetic, and I really needed to get on this shit. And when I sat down to write about "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," I feel like I could've used this blog post as a good introduction... if it had been written yet.
• Listening to "Stuck Inside a Mobile" and hearing Dylan charmingly screw up a lyric made me think that "A song in which the the artist makes a noticeable mistake" would be a good prompt. Though I guess I'm disqualifying this Dylan song from an answer to that prompt, if we indeed do Summer Song Challenge again next year.
• It was around the time that I had my first high school girlfriend that I was getting into Dylan, and it tickled me that "Absolutely Sweet Marie" had her name right there in the title. Good song. I thought it would be funny to find out for this bullet point the answer to the question "Where are you tonight / Sweet Marie?" for this particular Marie. Her Twitter seems to indicate that she is probably getting married this weekend? I don't think she read Puke on Your Birthday (even though she is aware of its existence), but if you do: congratulations Marie!
• CHARTS: Four songs on this album found their way onto the Billboard Hot 100, including "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35," which peaked at #2. To this day, it remains the highest Bob Dylan ever got to on that chart (not including his vocals on "We Are the World," or the cover of "Mr. Tambourine Man" by the Byrds, both of which hit #1).
  
• PREVIOUSLY ON THE ALBUMS THAT MATTER: This is our second Dylan album (alphabetically). The first was Another Side of Bob Dylan. On that one, the last bullet point was "Might be months or years before we get to another Dylan album, so let's get this out of the way: The best Bob Dylan album is Blonde on Blonde." Good thing I added "years" into that guess—it's been five years and two months since I wrote that.
• PREVIOUSLY ON THE BLOG: Tons and tons of Dylan shit scattered around the blog. Most relevant to the precedings today is probably "Visions of Johanna" showing up on this Top Five list.
• Old Crow Medicine Show performed this entire album live for its 50th anniversary. I thought that was pretty cool. I also think it's interesting that, in an interview about it, they put such an emphasis on the fact that Blonde on Blonde was made in Nashville, and how this means this album is part of the lineage of Nashville music and musicians over the years. Most of which is country, mind you, and I wouldn't say that Blonde on Blonde is "country" in any sense, but the dudes in OCMS hearing something Nashvillian about the sound, and I trust their judgment.
• Frank Ocean has an album called Blonde. Despite having never listened to that album, I am left wondering whether there is a mashup opportunity here, à la The Grey Album. Could we ever have Blonde on Blonde on Blonde?
  
• My kids love playing the harmonica now. It's equal parts endearing and annoying. When its the latter, it sounds just like the long, shrill, static harmonica note in "Pledging My Time." I gotta imagine that Dylan was doing that on purpose, right?
  

NEXT TIME: There is finally a next time! I can finally take Blonde on Blonde off this fucking list on my phone! If (when) we get to the next album, it's gonna be Blood Harmony by Dave Hause.