Different as the album’s worlds are from each other, they have in common a sense of stasis, paralysis, and entrapment: “Well, the room is so stuffy / I can hardly breathe” “We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it” “But deep inside my heart / I know I can’t escape.” As Nashville-based music journalist Daryl Sanders notices, in his deep dive into the album, That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound: Dylan, Nashville, and the Making of Blonde on Blonde, many songs revolve around the narrator “being blocked in one way or another, resulting in sexual frustration.” Dylan’s lyrics teem with blindness, stuckness, and muteness. We then wind up in a house of worship, where the singer keens an 11-minute paean to his lover (“ Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”). We begin in the midst of a raucous, inebriated street processional (“ Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”), and swerve into a smoky, claustrophobic room with two mistrustful lovers (“ Pledging My Time”), emerging into an eerily lonely, nocturnal cityscape peopled by chimerical figures like the fiddler, the peddler, and Louise (“ Visions of Johanna”). BOB DYLAN’S Blonde on Blonde (1966) isn’t so much an album as a series of worlds through which the disoriented, mesmerized listener stumbles, hypnotized by each new sonic texture and pile-up of words.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |