#BOB DYLAN BLONDE ON BLONDE ALBUM LYRICS HOW TO#
#BOB DYLAN BLONDE ON BLONDE ALBUM LYRICS PORTABLE#

The album was the warm yellow window of someone elseвЂ™s house as you walk by on a cold night. I wanted to be Joanna and Louise and Marie and the debutantes and chambermaids who betrayed him and lied to him and bummed cigarettes from him, and were such crazy bitches that he had to write a song about them. I wanted to be all the train-jumping cowboys and drunks and liars and poets passed out in alleyways as whom Dylan disguises himself. I wanted to be the person singing, and I wanted to be all the people Dylan sang about, all the begging and heartbreaking and abject and unfaithful women. In the thirteen other tracks that follow, Blonde on Blonde moves through lust, regret, adultery, love, marriage, divorce, and why itвЂ™s a bad idea to mix whiskey and gin. The album reminded me that I was waiting to enter the experiences everyone else in the world was already having. If everybody was getting stoned, I wasnвЂ™t everybody.

I was a very sheltered teenager and had never done any drugs at all. Everyone was getting stoned - Dylan, DylanвЂ™s band, the people they were singing about and the audience they were singing to. So is the rest of the four minutes and thirty seconds of the opening track. The first words Dylan utters are about getting stoned.

#BOB DYLAN BLONDE ON BLONDE ALBUM LYRICS HOW TO#

The album is the sound of a bunch of people trying to learn how to do something while doing it for the first time, baffled at what it asks of them. Much of the energy and noise of this first track on the album, the giddy, drunk-parade build of it is the sound of a bunch of the best and most famous session-men in Nashville growing more and more confused as yet another verse comes after the last verse they played, as one more time the song, for some reason they canвЂ™t understand, doesnвЂ™t end but insists on repeating its nonsense. They had no idea how long these tracks would be, no idea Dylan would, in the era of the three-minute radio barrier, ask them to record five and eight and ten and twelve minute songs. He didnвЂ™t emerge until around 4am, and the session men chain-smoking and playing cards while they waited for him had never seen the songs before playing them.

As the album begins, the harmonica and the guitar and the rest of the band, exhausted, high out of their mind and fed up with this byzantine ritual of a recording session, assaults you with the opening of вЂњRainy Day Women Nos 12 & 35.вЂќ Dylan, according to legend, wrote the songs on Blonde on Blonde in a minute-beyond-the-last-minute speed-fueled race, locked in the studio after the time they were supposed to start recording had come and gone. Although I know IвЂ™m not the only child of the I-Had-Tickets-to-Woodstock-But-DidnвЂ™t-Go generation whose parents put Bob Dylan and Lou Reed and the Stones on the You Need To Know This list along with great literature and Carl Sagan and geometry and how to drive.Д«ut my main memory of that first listen is of being plunged into the depiction of experiences I had never had. But during that train ride, the rest of that year, and in a way the rest of my life, I never really got past Blonde on Blonde.Д«londe on Blonde is, admittedly, kind of a weird album to give to your teenage kid. My Dad had also bought me Highway 61 Revisited, Blood on the Tracks, The FreewheelinвЂ™ Bob Dylan, Bringing it All Back Home, and Desire, and IвЂ™d get to all of them, eventually, each one its own singular obsession and backdrop to a particular section of my life.

#BOB DYLAN BLONDE ON BLONDE ALBUM LYRICS PORTABLE#

I took the Counting Crows out of my portable CD player, and put in Blonde on Blonde. But if IвЂ™d listened before, IвЂ™d never noticed. His unfriendly, indecipherable whine and mumble is ubiquitous to American culture, to the air and sky and car radio and malls and Starbucks of the nation and probably the world. I had never listened to Bob Dylan before except in the way that itвЂ™s impossible not to have listened to Bob Dylan.

DonвЂ™t talk to me again until you have an opinion about Bob Dylan.вЂќ Now, on the train, my dad hands me a stack of CDs heвЂ™s bought. In Boston we stopped at a record store where I bought a Counting Crows album while my Dad made friends with the Nick Hornby character working at the register and I, being a teenager, did my best to ignore them. This plan, however, has been derailed by a snowstorm, which is how weвЂ™ve ended up on a train between Boston and New Haven one desolate, snowy February afternoon.

WeвЂ™re visiting colleges, and weвЂ™ve rented a car to drive up and down the Eastern Seaboard. IвЂ™m seventeen, and my Dad and I are on a train between Boston and New Haven.

Bob dylan blonde on blonde album lyrics