A special birthday is just around the bend – May 16. On that day, 50 years ago, Bob Dylan gave a great gift to the world, an album called Blonde on Blonde. And it was a great big gift – a double album. What songs! Fourteen masterworks.
Blonde on Blonde has long been not only my favorite Dylan album but my favorite album, period. It’s impossible to express all the pleasure those songs have given me, time and time again, for half a century.
Blonde on Blonde was released just three weeks before my graduation from St. Cloud Tech High School. I can remember the very day I put it on the cheap record player in my upstairs bedroom of the old house on Fifth Avenue South. It was yet another transcendent experience, as all of Dylan’s six previous albums had been.
Why do I love that album so much? Well, it’s hard to describe why, but I’ll try. For one thing, it contains seven of my all-time favorite Dylan songs: Visions of Johanna, Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, I Want You, Just Like a Woman, One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later), Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine and Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again. The latter is my favorite of all Dylan songs.
I call that incredible album Dylan’s “Baroque Surrealism.” The sound on the previous great work, Highway 61 Revisited, was a bit more hard-edged and angular. On Blonde on Blonde, the master’s music and songwriting bloomed into a kind of wild, exhilarating tangle of sounds and words. I say “baroque” because that is a style in art that uses exaggerated motion and vivid details to evoke drama, tension, exuberance and mystery. I say “surrealism” because that is a style, first developed in painting, that releases contents from the subconscious mind, as in dreams, where images are juxtaposed in often jarring, irrational ways.
Another reason I love Blonde on Blonde is because of its sly humorous touches. The album is drenched in deep, mysterious drama, but flashes of humor and piercing wit pop up all through it – that street-slang hipster wit through which Dylan revealed his incomparable genius that rivals Shakespeare’s.
From Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat “It (pillbox hat) balances on her head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine.”
From Pledging My Time:
“Well, they sent for the ambulance
And one was sent.
Somebody got lucky
But it was accident.”
Blonde on Blonde seems to have been inspired by paintings. It’s filled with scintillating imagery as vivid as paintings by Picasso.
One of my favorite verses, in fact, takes place in an art museum within the melancholy mystery of Visions of Johanna.
“Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial.
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after awhile
But Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues.
You can tell by the way she smiles.
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the moustache say
‘Jeeze, I can’t find my knees.’”
That verse is a perfect example of how Dylan combines profound observations and insights with keen wit and cheeky humor, not to mention his wonderful rhymes from which a lot of his mordant humor derives. The paintings on the museum wall are “up on trial” to determine which ones will outlast time. The primitive wallflower and the jelly-faced women are images typical of surrealistic art works, reminiscent of Picasso’s disturbing, garish portrait called Weeping Woman. The man with the moustache is a painting of a man’s face, probably looking alarmed because he can’t “find” his knees, which the artist didn’t paint.
Blonde on Blonde is brimming, overflowing with such evocative gems.
There is also a wild, absurdist, almost cartoony vision in some of the songs, especially in my favorite, Stuck Inside of Mobile . . . Its eight verses contain a dazzling collision of incongruous but captivating absurdist images and characters:
“Grandpa died last week
And now he’s buried in the rocks,
But everybody still talks about
How badly they were shocked.
But me, I expected it to happen.
I knew he’d lost control
When he built a fire on Main Street
And shot if full of holes.
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end,
To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues again.”
Oh, how I wish I could live another 50 years so I could keep enjoying the treasures of that album, as fresh today as it was in the spring of 1966. If there is really such a thing as the gift that keeps on giving, it’s that towering masterpiece called Blonde on Blonde.
