Blonde on Blonde
| Bob Dylan
Blonde on Blonde
Blonde on Blonde is the seventh studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released June 20, 1966 on Columbia Records. Recording sessions began in New York in October 1965 with numerous backing musicians, including members of Dylan's live backing band, the Hawks. Though sessions continued until January 1966, they yielded only one track that made it onto the final album "One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)". At producer Bob Johnston's suggestion, Dylan, keyboardist Al Kooper, and guitarist Robbie Robertson moved to the CBS studios in Nashville, Tennessee. These sessions, augmented by some of Nashville's top session musicians, were more fruitful, and in February and March all the remaining songs for the album were recorded.-Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Rolling Stone
May 16, 2016. Bob Dylan never sounded lonelier, funnier or more desperate than he did on his 1966 double-album triumph, 'Blonde on Blonde.'
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Rolling Stone
May 31, 2012. Released on May 16th, 1966, rock's first studio double LP by a major artist was, as Dylan declared in 1978, "the closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind… that thin, that wild-mercury sound." There is no better description of the album's manic brilliance.
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BBC
2007. Consolidating what he’d begun on Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, the recording of Blonde On Blonde was part of an intense, fertile outpouring for Dylan. One can understand why Dylan and producer Bob Johnston were keen to present as much of it as they could.
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All Music
If Highway 61 Revisited played as a garage rock record, the double album Blonde on Blonde inverted that sound, blending blues, country, rock, and folk into a wild, careening, and dense sound. . . . It's the culmination of Dylan's electric rock & roll period -- he would never release a studio record that rocked this hard, or had such bizarre imagery, ever again.
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Only Solitaire
August 7, 2016. Where in 1965, his persona was mainly explosive and aggressive, putting down society as a whole or its individual members, this album gives us the most multi-layered psychological portrait of a human being that rock music had seen up to then - a portrait that you can stare at for days, months, years on end and still be able to discover new traits and features. And it covers pretty much the entire emotional spectrum, so there's at least something in there for everybody, isn't there?
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Pop Matters
May 23, 2003. . . . . More likely than that, he kept it vague on purpose; giving us listeners the song, to do with it what we wanted. Blonde on Blonde has so many different voices, faces, places, and sounds it has been relevant to every phase of life I have been in since I first bought it.
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Goldmine
April 27, 2011. “Blonde on Blonde” changed music forever, and Bob Dylan is still singing it, still living it, stuck on the never-ending roller coaster with the Memphis blues again.
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Vinyl Reviews
In contrast to the jagged rock feel of his previous two albums, a slightly more pronounced blues and country strain comes through here and shows Dylan’s talent for bringing nearly every kind of American music together into a seamless, unique whole.
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Consequence of Sound
November 15, 2016. . . . Dylan ended up with one of the first double albums in rock. Featuring “Just Like A Woman”, “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”, and “Visions of Johanna”, Blonde on Blonde would go on to be certified double platinum and is widely considered the bard’s best work.
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Classic Rock Review
September, 10, 2011. It is a seminal album in Dylan’s sixties career that somehow balances the silly, philosophical, and melancholy.
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Jim DeRogatis
June 15, 2003. But while the attitude behind that laugh on "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" can still be glimpsed onstage and heard in the grooves of his latest recordings, it hasn't been present with such sustained force, vigor and brilliance since "Blonde on Blonde," the parting gift from the first phase of one of rock's most significant careers.
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Sputnik Music
June 14, 2005. Dylan's lyrical abilities are strange at times, but the message always seems to be floating around somewhere in the imagery. That's what he was best at, painting mental pictures and getting people to think. For that he's a great musician, and Blonde on Blonde is one of his best works.
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Billboard
May 16, 2016. By melding down-home blues with Beat poetry and Shakespearean lyricism, Robert Zimmerman reached the zenith of his musical genius with this 1966 masterpiece, released 50 years ago today (May 16, 1966). The vivid imagery, organic instrumental warmth, and paeans of love and heartbreak are spellbinding.
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MoFi
Blonde on Blonde: A double album that transcends time, defies space, suspends reality, and looks through the human soul and tells the listener characteristics about themselves they didn't know.
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Ultimate Classic Rock
July 11, 2016. Blonde on Blonde was the culmination of a period that found Dylan, in a sign of things to come throughout his career, restlessly exploring shades of the same themes, and sometimes disassembling and then rebuilding them into strange new beings. The thread between his Woody Guthrie-inspired 1962 self-titled debut and the fertile 1965-66 months that yielded his three best albums may seem tenuous at times, but those later LPs' freewheeling spirit – best exhibited on Blonde on Blonde – was there from the start.
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Fat Pigeon Live
While it's preceding album Highway 61 was wonderful rock & roll, Blond On Blond is more blues orientated and soon established its reputation as being a Bob Dylan masterpiece.
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Pitchfork
June 8, 2016. If Dylan’s 1966 double album *Blonde on Blonde *is generally viewed among his most iconic, it’s because it was his first album to show all the different Dylans in their best light, with appearances from the freewheeling folk singer from the early ‘60s all the way up to the weirdo bluesman he would later become.
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The Current
September 11, 2017. This record is praised by Dylan fans and music critics as a masterpiece
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Howl and Echoes
May 13, 2016. Blonde on Blonde captures Bob Dylan’s craft at one of its finest moments. Redefining the role of the singer-songwriter and the very fabric of popular culture with prophetic ease, the album serves to remind us why Dylan remains an exalted musical figure
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Spill Magazine
It is a stunning album, and one of the most influential albums of all time.
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The Digital Bits
April 7, 2003. On Blonde on Blonde, Dylan drives his experiments even farther, proving that no musical style exists that cannot be grafted onto a well-written song. This album is simply breathtaking. He tackles so much, but he achieves even more. Each song becomes a journey into narcotic landscapes, another world where the terrain constantly shifts, one's footing is none too certain, and the slightest word can mean everything.
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MOJO
July, 2016. Bob Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde album is a landmark in music: the ultimate combination of rock’n’roll thrills and lyrical mysteries.
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The Rumpus
May 17, 2013. The album was the warm yellow window of someone else’s house as you walk by on a cold night. Listening to it was the feeling you get when you look into this stranger’s window and wish you lived there.
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Phoenix New Times
June 9, 2016. At the time Blonde on Blonde was written, Dylan was winding up one of the most prolific periods of his storied career. In the mid-'60s, Dylan was a busy man. One minute he's charming his way into the hearts of the folk rockers with an acoustic guitar, a harmonica, and one of the most easily identifiable vocal deliveries ever, and the next minute he's actively pissing off many of his fans by going all electric on them
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Rocknuts
May 3, 2017. Not only did Dylan bring psychedelic and country flavors into the mix, but he also reimagined the Pop/Rock song, adapting pop constructions and melodies very successfully in songs like “I Want You” and “Just Like A Woman”. He taught the world that you could be deep and profound in a pop song, but as so many have discovered ever since, it ain’t easy.
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Wilson & Alroy's Record Reviews
Recorded in Nashville and New York with a horde of backing musicians, the songs aren't quite as sharp as on the two previous albums . . ., which is exacerbated by the fact that there are twice as many of them. (It was the first rock and roll double album, as far as I know.) There are, though, plenty of lyrical gems . . . and some terrific comedy numbers . . . . Arrangements vary from gentle and acoustic ("Visions Of Johanna") to loud and raucous ("Absolutely Sweet Marie").
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Radio Live
8/27/2018. Recorded in late 1965 and early 1966 in Nashville, Tennessee, this album 'Blonde on Blonde' is famous for being the very first double album. Rolling Stone ranked it #9 on their list of 'the 500 Greatest Albums of All-Time'.
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AZ Central
May 17, 2016. There's never been a more compelling argument in favor of the double album as an art form, with apologies to Dylan's friends, the Beatles. The lyrics are brilliant, naturally. And Dylan never made a better-sounding record. Every detail plays its part.
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The Spectrum
December 19, 2016. The style of electric blues is a clear touchstone here, encompassing both upbeat numbers and ballads. This is the electric Dylan that shocked audiences less than a year earlier with his set at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965.
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Paste Magazine
Septmeber 12, 2012. After going electric and releasing two records full of raving existentialism and subversive societal commentary in Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan took a broader, more tender approach to his 1966 double album Blonde on Blonde. Though still rife with surreal imagery, the album tackles more love-centric themes with songs such as “Visions of Johanna,” “I Want You” and “Absolutely Sweet Marie.”
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Vinyl Me Please
November 16, 2016. . . . this one — critically acclaimed, considered Dylan’s last masterwork not called Blood on the Tracks — still feels like it has tons of territory to uncover and enjoy, 50 years after it came out. Each listen can yield favorite new micro-moments.
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Fokusera Resurspoolens Nattidning
7/5/2014. From my perspective Blonde on Blonde with it ecclectic expression, ambiguous emotions and burning passion is Dylan’s unquestionable masterpiece. He would never reach the same heights again through out an entire album again, even if Blood on the Tracks comes pretty damned close. To maintain this level of emotional intensity through out a single l.p is hard enough, to do it through a double is nothing short of awe inspiring.
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Scaruffi
2011. With this record an era ends and another begins. After Blonde On Blonde rock music will be an art and not just a subcultural phenomenon or a commercial gimmick. With Blonde On Blonde the quality control process begins, which will transform each album into a work of art. With Blonde On Blonde rock music joins jazz among the great achievements of the twentieth century musical civilization. The album is a limit of net demarcation, separating the era of amateurism by vocation from that of conscious art, the Middle Ages from the Renaissance.
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Rawckus Magazine
June 25, 2016. Some of my complaints are purely musical. Like The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, and the Clash’s London Calling, I don’t think this album needs to be 77 minutes for a series of musically (if not lyrically) straightforward folk-rock songs, with some electric flourishes. Additionally, I’m in the party of those against Dylan’s singing style, more particularly the affectation that is so clearly affectation that it sounds sarcastic.
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The Student Playlist
May 17, 2016. The final installment of the triptych of masterpieces that made up Bob Dylan’s imperial phase of the mid-1960s, Blonde On Blonde is arguably the most impressive album he has ever recorded. Thought to be the first ever ‘double album’ in rock history, his seventh album is an exhaustive (but not exhausting) tour through Dylan’s ever-evolving musical and songwriting repertoire. Inventive, sophisticated and cryptic, it raised the bar for other artists as a vision for popular music as a whole, equipping them with a musical manual they used to be progressive and experiment with pop and succeed at the same time.
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50th and 3rd
May 16, 2016. On 16 May 1966 – 50 years ago today – BOB DYLAN released BLONDE ON BLONDE. A double (regarded as the first one ever) album viewed by many critics as his greatest tour de force ever, both musically and lyrically.
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Redbrick
January 26, 2017. . . . Blonde on Blonde never overstays its welcome, featuring not only some of the highlights of Dylan’s career, but also some of his most defining statements as an artist. Irritated by the ‘voice of a generation’ epithet thrust upon him by the American media, Dylan’s use of esoteric and surrealist lyrics is best seen on Blonde on Blonde, which abandons many of the socially conscious or protest themes often found in his previous work.
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