The one album Bob Dylan said sounded the best: “That wild mercury sound”
Any great Bob Dylan record is going to be rough around the edges by nature.
No one on this Earth came to Dylan’s work because they thought he was the Pavarotti of folk by any means, and even on his most celebrated material, there are a few bum notes and a ramshackle feel that most people tend to overlook. That’s because all good rock and roll is meant to be a little bit imperfect, but Dylan did know when he made songs that were as close to what he heard in his head as he would ever get.
But that’s always been the key behind all of Dylan’s records. He was always in search of the next great song whenever he got the chance to write, and while not everything was going to have the same impact as ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ or ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’, you can still admire the craftsmanship that he had when working his way through every single era of his career.
There were definitely some pitfalls that are hard to ignore, but Dylan lived to go in different directions than the standard rock and roll formula. He already had to take a bunch of grief from the folk community when he started to actually plug in his instruments, so when he decided to piss off the rock audience in the same way on Self Portrait, it was meant to be malicious. He simply needed to shake off that persona and find a new one, but that didn’t change the way he made people feel when he first went electric.
You have to remember that for the folk community, this was one of the most sacrilegious things that anyone could have done. Rock and roll was making a mockery of what real songwriting looked like, and no matter how many times rockers like The Beatles tried to copy him. Dylan always remained a fixture of what great songwriting looked like. So when ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ kicked that door down, it was time for Dylan to start using his band as an instrument a little bit more.
And when listening to Blonde on Blonde, you can really hear him chipping away at his songwriting at every opportunity. There are still tunes from around that time that call back to his roots like on ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’, but now that he was working with people like Rick Danko and Robbie Robertson more regularly, you can hear those melodic sensibilities coming out a lot more in the way that songs like ‘I Want You’ and ‘Rainy Day Women’ unfold.
Dylan was definitely turning a corner in his career, and even years after the fact, Blonde on Blonde was the one time he felt everything sounded right, saying, “The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It’s that thin, that wild mercury sound. It’s metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up. That’s my particular sound. I haven’t been able to succeed in getting it all the time.”
The record was certainly more longwinded than other Dylan records, but it’s hard to think of any moment that doesn’t work. Every song almost had a different lesson to teach, but beyond being one of the foundational pieces of Dylan’s catalogue, it was only one of the first signs that rock and roll was starting to grow past the typical blues structures that everyone had started with when they heard Chuck Berry.
Because if you look at the albums coming out at the time, Blonde on Blonde coupled with The Beatles’ Revolver and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds were going to reshape the way that people thought about the genre. This wasn’t only a genre to be taken seriously; it was a style that would define the next generation, and Dylan was more than happy to speak his mind like this.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Bob Dylan Newsletter
All the latest stories about Bob Dylan from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.