Why Bob Dylan wanted a blurry photo for ‘Blonde on Blonde’
It’s an instantly recognisable image: Bob Dylan, in all his mid-1960s psychedelic glory, standing outside a New York brownstone. A checkerboard scarf dangles from his neck. An inscrutable look comes across his face. If you’ve ever spent hours pouring over the double-album majesty of Dylan’s 1966 LP Blonde on Blonde, you know exactly what this image looks like.
But if you ever thought that something was slightly askew about the image, you’re not wrong. A close look at the front cover shows that Dylan is slightly out of focus on the cover. It’s part of the mystique of the album – was Dylan purposefully trying to tell us something about himself with the blurry photo? Was it a comment on his famously obfuscated lyrics? Maybe he was starting to slowly resent the spotlight that captured his every detail. Could it be a reference to a drug trip?
As it turns out, the answer was none of the above. Instead of packing an endless barrage of meaning into everything that he ever did, Dylan proved to be open to randomness and happenstance. When photographer Jerry Schatzberg captured Dylan on that cold New York day, the weather was responsible for Dylan being slightly out of focus in the frame.
“I wanted to find an interesting location outside of the studio,” Schatzberg explained in the book Thin Wild Mercury — Touching Dylan’s Edge: The Photography. “We went to the west side, where the Chelsea art galleries are now. At the time, it was the meat packing district of New York, and I liked the look of it.”
“It was freezing, and we were very cold. The frame he chose for the cover is blurred and out of focus,” Schatzberg added. “Of course, everyone was trying to interpret the meaning, saying it must represent getting high on an LSD trip. It was none of the above; we were just cold, and the two of us were shivering. There were other images that were sharp, and in focus but, to his credit, Dylan liked that photograph.”
The suede jacket that Dylan wore for the sessions would later make appearances on the covers of his albums John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline. Dylan was famously tight-lipped about both the album cover and the title, refusing to take credit for the phrase Blonde on Blonde. “Well, I don’t even recall exactly how it came up, but I know it was all in good faith,” Dylan told Rolling Stone in 1969. “I don’t know who thought of that. I certainly didn’t.”
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