The song Bob Dylan was forced to record: “I was really down”
One might assume that a musician knows best when it comes to their own work—surely they can be trusted to identify which songs are potential hits or which deserve to see the light of day. However, if that were always the case, and if Bob Dylan had been solely in charge of such decisions, the world might have missed out on one of his best and most beloved tracks.
There are hundreds—if not thousands—of unreleased Bob Dylan songs. The upcoming release of his 1974 live recordings is going to deliver over 400 previously unheard tracks, while his bootleg series contains hoards of tracks that never made an album playlist. The musician must have harddrive after harddrive stacked with other material that may or may not ever see the light of day.
‘I Want You’ was almost one of them, as Al Kooper revealed how he had to essentially trick Dylan into working on the song, which, for some unknown reason, he seemed to have just given up on.
Perhaps it was all down to the weirdness of the Blonde on Blonde sessions. Dylan took on a new way of making music for the 1966 record. The recording process was a mess of disorganisation, band departures, city moves and song scrapping. He couldn’t seem to get anything right or ever manage to finish a song and be happy with the result.
“Oh, I was really down,” he told a critic at the time, “I mean, in ten recording sessions, man, we didn’t get one song.”
The energy between Dylan and his band was also off as he blamed the failed recordings on his backing musicians. However, he also has plenty to thank them for as his organ player, Al Kooper, kept pushing for ‘I Want You’, telling him over and over that he had to record that track.
Time and time again, Dylan said no and shrugged the song off as he instead worked on ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’ or ‘One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)’ or any number of the other draft songs he had that were eventually scrapped. But Kooper believed in this one song, so much so that he taught the track to the rest of the band behind Dylan’s back, so he had no excuses and could make no more delays in getting the track down on tape.
Eventually, on the very last day of the sessions, he conceded. ‘I Want You’ was recorded and ultimately released as one of the album’s singles. It remains one of Dylan’s most beloved tracks, with the musician himself eventually admitting to loving the song and claiming that the delay in recording was just a way to annoy Kooper, “just to bug him”.
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