While driving around Music Row, meandering as if trying to trace the logic of a Bob Dylan lyric, producer Bob Johnston explained to me how Dylan wound up cutting nearly all of Blonde on Blonde in Nashville exactly 30 years ago.
This seemed to me a matter of no small importance, for besides marking the close of Dylan’s brilliant youth (he would lay half-dead on a road near Woodstock just eight weeks after the album’s release), Blonde on Blonde also happens to be the record that at least one international critics’ poll has voted the No. 1 rock album of all time. It hit the streets in May 1966, at the exact same time as the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. While much has been written about the impact of Pet Sounds on all subsequent rock ’n’ roll—especially on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—one would guess that at least the title cut of Sgt. Pepper’s owed an equally sizable debt to “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” from Blonde on Blonde. On the latter, with Dylan bellowing “everybody must get stoned,” the Nashville session pickers played deliberately bad enough to make him sound like the leader of the world’s most besotted Salvation Army band.
“I didn’t talk Dylan into coming down,” Johnston stresses, not wanting to take credit for what was the singer’s own decision. “We were doing Highway 61 in New York, and I told him, ‘Sometime you oughtta come down to Nashville and check these people out.’ Because it was a brand-new world down here. And that’s the last I heard. Until I remember [Dylan’s then-manager] Al Grossman and the president of CBS came over to me and said if I ever mentioned Nashville to Dylan again, they’d fire me.”
Too late. Dylan and Johnston booked the Columbia studio in Music City for two sets of sessions for Blonde on Blonde—one in mid-February 1966, the other March 8-9. (Though some of the musicians have maintained there was only one group of sessions, news reports from 1966 clearly indicate the February-March split.) Dylan brought his buddies Al Kooper and Robbie Robertson with him from New York, as well as his bride of less than three months, Sara Lowndes, for whom he wrote “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” They were joined in Nashville by guitarists Jerry Kennedy, Wayne Moss, Joe South and (uncredited on the album) Mac Gayden; pianist Hargus “Pig” Robbins, keyboard player Bill Aikins, bassist Henry Strzelecki, and drummer Kenneth Buttrey. The session leader was Charlie McCoy, who played bass, harmonica, guitar, trumpet, and, if the situation dictated, combinations thereof. (Kooper, for one, was flabbergasted by McCoy’s ability to play bass and trumpet at the same time. “Shit like that was just blowing my mind,” he says.) And on “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” the trombone part was played by Wayne Butler, who was called in for just that one song.
On the surface, it seemed the least likely of creative collaborations: Bob Dylan, folk iconoclast, enfant terrible of the counterculture, hot off two of the most acid, unconventional Top 40 hits in music history (“Like a Rolling Stone” and “Positively 4th Street”), flies south to Nashville to further his career by recording on factory-method Music Row. But what the surface view doesn’t account for is Dylan’s creative focus—he not only cut the album in Nashville, he also wrote much of the material during his stay—and the local pickers’ unrivaled professionalism. Supporting Dylan the same as they would have supported Elvis Presley or Roger Miller, they gave him the instrumental underpinning for what Dylan himself would later describe as “the closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind.... ”
“The Nashville musicians did what they do the best,” McCoy says of Blonde on Blonde. “They adapt to songs.”
In certain respects, McCoy was the real link between Dylan and Nashville. Johnston had already worked with McCoy and his rock ’n’ roll buddies, several of whom were in McCoy’s band the Escorts, on some demos in Music City. After Johnston moved to New York, he told McCoy that if he was ever in town, he should call him; Johnston would get him theater tickets.
“So,” says McCoy, “I had a trip planned to New York in ’65, I think it was, and I called him up—‘OK, I’m comin’, where’s my tickets?’ He said, ‘No problem, I’ll have ’em for you.’ When I got there, I called him, and he said, ‘What are you doin’ this afternoon?’ And I said, ‘Well, nothin’, really.’ He said, ‘I’d like for you to come over to CBS studio. I’m recordin’ Bob Dylan over there and he wants to say hello to you.’ I didn’t even know he knew who I was. So I went over there, and he introduced me to him, and [Dylan] said to me, ‘I have one of your records.’ It was a record I had out called ‘Harpoon Man.’ ”
At Dylan’s urging, McCoy played acoustic guitar that afternoon on “Desolation Row,” the monumental closing track of Highway 61 Revisited. “And then, because of that, I think Johnston said to him—you know, probably later on—‘Well now you see how easy that was? You see how you guys got along? Now see, you could record in Nashville, ’cause everybody in Nashville’s just like that.”
But everybody in Nashville was definitely not like Dylan—as the Music City players were soon to discover.
“Everybody in Nashville shows up on time, or did back then, and ready to go to work,” pianist Robbins explains. “And we waited and waited and waited.”
“We were called at 2 o’clock,” McCoy says, “and Dylan showed up, oh, 4 or so, and said, ‘I haven’t finished writin’ the first song yet. You guys hang loose.’ And we finally started recording at 4 a.m. the next morning. And it was ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.’ Fourteen minutes long.
“He sat at that table [in the studio],” McCoy continues. “I think he went—maybe got up to go to the bathroom two or three times. But he sat at that table the whole time. And wrote.... It was a tough night because nobody wanted to go to sleep because you knew if you went somewhere in the corner and laid down, the very minute you did, they’d say, ‘OK, let’s go.’ Boy, I tell you, 4 o’clock there were some tired puppies picked up those instruments.”
Even Johnston, who had already made one album with Dylan, was a bit disturbed by his initial withdrawal. “I thought he was a junkie,” Johnston says, “ ’Cause he never left the studio...and he kept ordering milkshakes and malts, candy bars. And I thought, ‘Well goddamn, he’s a junkie.’ But he wasn’t, he was just gettin’ energy. And he stayed out there about 12, 14 hours and wrote ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.’ And then he said, ‘Well man, anybody around here?’ And everybody was—I had ’em all plopped out on the floor, playing ping-pong or whatever—and they all got together, and he said, ‘Well this goes like this.’ We cut it, and that was it.”
“That’s about as fresh,” says Jerry Kennedy, “as I’ve ever seen material done.”
Game as they were to cut in Music City, Dylan, Kooper and Robbie Robertson did not travel to Tennessee in 1966 without a certain degree of trepidation. Given the tenor of the times, they could not be sure they would be welcome. “There was this subtle feeling that they were possibly behind enemy lines,” says Mac Gayden.
Such fears as they may have had were apparently confirmed when a group of street toughs nearly beat up Kooper down on Lower Broad. And Kooper wasn’t the only one. “Robbie had a problem too,” he says. “Somebody pulled a knife on him.”
But in the studio, the Nashville pickers did their best to make their out-of-town guests feel comfortable. Says Kennedy, “Part of that mystique that we had here, that Nashville Sound, or whatever that thing was, was putting artists at ease who weren’t used to recording in that situation.”
Indeed, Kooper, who not only played organ but was also responsible for some of the arrangements on Blonde on Blonde, credits the Nashville players with taking his instructions easily, thereby making him feel comfortable in what seemed like foreign territory. “I was in a difficult position,” he says. “I was telling them what to do, and they were all older than me.”
As for the producer, Johnston, he played the role of studio motivator. “Bob [Johnston] was one of those kind of guys that was bouncing off walls all the time,” Kennedy says. “Really excitable. Always up. I never saw him having a bad day or night. He had that big smile, and kept everybody rockin’ all the time.”
“Johnston was a pretty smart cookie,” McCoy adds, “in that he realized that Dylan was a kind of a guy that...through his music, had real strong ideas. And I think what he assumed real quick was to just let it go. You know, keep everybody in line, keep things moving, and let Dylan’s music be the centerpiece. And if he wants to change something, let him change it.”
True enough, to this day Johnston has strong opinions about trusting an artist’s instincts—especially an artist like Dylan. “If the artist wants to play a ukulele over in the bushes, there’s a reason,” he says. “Now maybe ukulele will be the biggest instrument in the world tomorrow.” For Blonde on Blonde, his instructions to the pickers couldn’t have been more simple and to the point. “Don’t quit playin’,” he says he told them. “Whatever it is. You know, if you miss it, or whatever, we can always overdub something.”
As the days and nights wore on, the sessions loosened up and the pickers slipped deeper into Dylan’s groove. “Their temperament was just perfectly suited to Bob’s,” Kooper says, “ ’cause he could just relax with it.” Dylan never said much, and few hangers-on were permitted inside the studio. There was very little press, for as Red O’Donnell of the Banner noted after the first set of sessions, “Dylan was publicity shy during this three-day visit.... Maybe because the talented folksinger is becoming tired of reporters asking him about his marriage on Nov. 22, 1965 to Sara Shirley H. Lowndes.”
Even so, certain odd visions have stood out in various musicians’ memories: Visions of Grossman and Johnston pitching quarters at the ceiling (“I’m sure there was about $50 up there,” Kooper says), of Dylan flipping through a movie magazine for inspiration, and of Dylan uncomfortable calling Robbins by his nickname, “Pig.”
“I saw him once pull out a Holy Bible,” says Mac Gayden. “Big white Holy Bible. And he started thumbing through it to get lyrics.”
One thing that everybody agrees upon is that something special happened on “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.” If there was any lingering tension between Dylan’s crowd and the Nashville crowd, it was broken on that cut. Everyone present got caught up in the mood of the piece—the hootin’ and hollerin’ and cheesy brass arrangement. “He wanted it to sound like ‘Mayberry RFD,’ or one of those bands,” says Buttrey. Several of the musicians switched instruments. Strzelecki, the bassist, literally crawled underneath the organ to play the bass pedals, while Buttrey set up his drums cockeyed on purpose to prevent himself from playing too well.
“Got to a point where it was a party, more or less,” says Pig Robbins. “You know, you can hear old Dylan laughing in there in places. So he was gettin’ off as much as everybody else.”
Released as a single in April, “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” marched its way to No. 2 on the charts, becoming the biggest AM hit of Dylan’s career, other than “Like a Rolling Stone.” The album (a two-record set, with an out-of-focus cover shot that had the clueless Columbia brass ready to fire the entire graphics department) came out a month later. Dylan’s life-altering motorcycle accident happened in July. After a year of hiding out, during which the rest of the rock world was moving almost uniformly toward big productions, Dylan returned to Nashville to cut one of the most austere albums of his career, John Wesley Harding.
“It was like a big change,” says McCoy. “His haircut was changed. The material itself seemed to have changed a lot. A lot more simple or straight-ahead.”
And Nashville had changed. For one thing, Johnston had taken over Columbia’s Nashville office; his brief tenure there would profoundly affect the careers of such artists as Johnny Cash and Flatt and Scruggs. Meanwhile, more and more out-of-town artists were coming to Nashville to record.
“After Dylan came, the floodgate opened,” McCoy says. “Joan Baez, Buffy St. Marie, The Byrds, Gino Vannelli. I mean, it was amazing the people that came here after Dylan came. It was almost like, ‘Oh, well, if he will go there then it must be OK.’ ”
But it wasn’t just a question of importing more outside acts; Blonde on Blonde helped open up the Nashville industry internally as well. “Dylan broke all the rules, lyrically and musically,” says Mac Gayden, whose job at one point on Blonde on Blonde was to play a box with a pencil. Among other things, he says, “the [studio] clock was no longer an issue.... And that was unheard of around here.” As for Gayden personally, though he had been a fan of Dylan’s since the first album, after his up-close contact in the studio, his own songwriting would never be the same. “I just kind of threw all the formula songwriting totally out the window,” he says.
To Charlie McCoy, Blonde on Blonde may have been “one of the biggest incidents that happened here in the recording business.” Nevertheless, as a Music Row session man, he is quick to place the record in its proper perspective.
“I’m proud of all the records I’ve played on,” he says. “You know, I played on a No. 1 record with Johnny Carver. I’m just as proud of it as I am of playing on Blonde on Blonde.”
