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Johnston tapped McCoy to be session leader and gave him a list of the musicians he wanted to use. That list included drummer Kenny Buttrey, one of the five players who appeared on all 13 tracks recorded on Music Row.

Kenny Buttrey, who died of cancer in 2004, was one of the greatest studio drummers in pop-music history — a player supple and flexible enough to back everyone from Elvis and Chuck Berry to Donovan, Cohen and Young. His innovative drumming and percussion would give the Nashville sessions their foundation.

The other musicians who played on all the Nashville sessions were guitarist Wayne Moss, guitarist/bassist Joe South and keyboardist Al Kooper — a sideman of Dylan's in New York who famously snuck into the session for "Like a Rolling Stone," only to emerge with the organ hook that made the record. Another important player, the legendary blind pianist Hargus "Pig" Robbins, was at all but two of the sessions.

The basic lineup for the February dates was Buttrey on drums, Moss (and in some cases South) on electric guitar, Robbins on piano, Kooper on organ, either McCoy or South on bass, and Dylan on acoustic and electric guitars and harmonica. When he wasn't playing bass, McCoy contributed acoustic rhythm guitar.

The first session was scheduled for 2 p.m. Feb. 14, but Dylan arrived several hours late as a result of delays at the Norfolk airport, accompanied by Grossman, Dylan's newlywed wife Sara and their month-old son Jesse. Kooper, who had been touring with his band The Blues Project, flew in separately from Ohio after a date on Feb. 12 at Antioch College.

Robbins had a date with another recording artist that afternoon, so keyboardist Bill Aikins got the call. "It was one of the most unusual dates I ever worked," Aikins tells the Scene.

What made it so unusual was the amount of downtime the musicians had. The Nashville studio cats were accustomed to precision-tuned three-hour sessions where a minimum of three songs would be tracked —more, if luck were with them. But during their first three hours at Studio A that afternoon, they didn't hit a single lick.

McCoy introduced the players to Dylan, who then told them that because of the flight delay, he needed to finish some lyrics. "Take a break," he said, then went and sat at the piano — with a legal pad and a Bible.

"I can remember him sitting at the piano in deep, deep, meditative thought," Aikins remembers. "He was creating, writing. So we were just on hold as musicians, on the payroll, on a master session, and we were just hanging out. ... That's the kind of budget they had for him.

"Then, after I don't know how long, but it was hours, they said, 'OK, Bob's ready to put this song down.' "

The song in question served notice that this wouldn't be another business-as-usual engagement. It was "Visions of Johanna" — seven minutes and 33 seconds of Dylan's muse at its most unfettered, full of dazzling phrase-making ("Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule") and profoundly suggestive pronouncements ("Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial"). For his part, Aikins recalls trying to understand what Dylan was saying in the song. It wasn't like Nashville session cats — or those in any other city — typically found themselves contemplating lines such as, "See the primitive wallflower freeze / When the jelly-faced women all sneeze."

"I thought it was really ... far out would be the term I would have used at the time," Aikins recalls, "and still today, it was a very out-there song."

Dylan ran it down one time for the players so they could notate the chord changes. Then they began working on the arrangement, which featured superb lead guitar fills by Moss. In four attempts, they only recorded one complete take — but that was all they needed.

The artist worked on two other songs the first day: a master take of "Fourth Time Around," a delicate, wistful waltz that featured some gorgeous arpeggiated acoustic guitar interplay between Moss and McCoy, and a wacky car-horns-and-chaos arrangement of the rowdy blues "Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat." It didn't make the album.

The Nashville cats soon learned that the waiting around they did that first day would be the norm for the Blonde on Blonde sessions — not only the dates in February, but also when Dylan returned in March to complete the album. "There were quite a few days where [Dylan] would go into the studio and sit at the piano himself and work on lyrics for hours — I mean, you know, for six or seven hours," Kooper tells the Scene.

"And he would be in there extremely concentrating, and never coming out until he finished. ... A lot of days, we didn't get anything started till 7 o'clock at night, and we'd come in at noon."

Such a day was Feb. 15, which yielded only one song in a marathon session. And not just any song. The Nashville players were accustomed to cranking out singles. "Back in the '60s, we were doing 2:20 songs, or or 2:45 or 2:50 — that was a long song, you know," Hargus "Pig" Robbins recalls. "We rolled in there and did some that were seven or eight minutes."

This one, however, was something else. It was the epic "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" — the 11-minute-19-second wonder that not only closes the double album but requires an entire LP side to speak its piece. It did not come early or fast. "We took a break," Wayne Moss says, recalling the scene, "and three hours later we signed a [union] card, and took another break."

By the time Dylan was ready to record, the musicians had no idea what kind of beast they were about to tackle. The late Kenny Buttrey painted a picture of the actual recording for author Clinton Heylin:

"He ran down a verse and a chorus, and he just quit and said, 'We'll do a verse and then a chorus, and then I'll play my harmonica thing. Then we'll do another verse and chorus, and we'll play some more harmonica and see how it goes from there.'... Not knowing how long this thing was going to be, we were preparing ourselves dramatically for a basic two-to-three minute record, because records just didn't go over three minutes. ... 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. This is going to be the last chorus and we've got to put everything into it we can.' ... After about 10 minutes of this thing, we're cracking up at each other, at what we were doing. I mean, we peaked five minutes ago. Where do we go from here?"

Although they had worked late-night sessions with artists like Elvis, the Nashville musicians weren't used to pulling all-nighters. According to Kooper, after being at the studio past daybreak for the second consecutive day, Moss quipped, "Boy, that hour of sleep I got last night is getting pretty lonely."

"That session started at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, and at 8:30 the next morning we went home," Moss remembers. "We didn't mind playing ping pong and signing a card every three hours ... but it wasn't what we were used to."

Nevertheless, they returned at 6 p.m. that same day — Feb. 16 — and did some more waiting as Dylan finished the lyrics for another song that would top the seven-minute mark, "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again." According to studio records, they finally began working on the song at 4 a.m. the following morning, Feb. 17. Three hours later, they had the take that appears on the album, highlighted musically by gospel-inspired trills from guitarist Mac Gayden.

Like Dylan's best songs from this fertile period, it sounds at once tossed-off and monumental. It's newly minted mythology, full of lyrical swagger, wit and verve, peopled by a kaleidoscopic cast whose players include Shakespeare, the preacher with the headline-stapled chest, the French girl and Mona and Ruthie with her honky-tonk lagoon, and poor old Grandpa, the nutty prophet who "built a fire on Main Street and shot it full of holes."

But the players got the most important thing about Dylan's writing: that he was having fun, not handing down tablets from a mountain. Their lack of deference — their regarding this as another paying gig, even as they rose to the occasion — helps keep Blonde on Blonde so freewheeling and buoyant. Except, arguably, in the daunting length of "Sad-Eyed Lady," it's not choked by any sense of its own importance.

During the downtime, the musicians would go to the lounge one floor below the studios in the Columbia Records building, where they would play ping pong or cards, watch television or grab a bite to eat. Bassist Henry Strzelecki, who joined the sessions on the final day of recording in February, recalls playing around with a Ouija board which divined that the album was "either gonna be the biggest album in the world or it ain't gonna do nothin'." Gayden, who contributed electric rhythm on several sessions but was not credited because of a clerical oversight, remembers taking a nap on the floor in the back of the studio while Dylan worked on lyrics at the piano and his wife nursed the baby in the corner.

According to Moss, while everyone waited for Dylan, Al Grossman, who still resented his client being in Nashville, sat in the control room throwing quarters up at the ceiling tiles to see how many he could make stick. "If I tear some of them up, just send Columbia the bill," Grossman grumbled. "They've got lots of money." Interestingly, any cleanup probably would have been handled by the custodian Columbia Nashville employed at the time — a guy named Kris Kristofferson.