Bob Dylan, Blonde On Blonde
Featured Album
How loose could Dylan get? Loose enough to kick off rock's first double-LP with a stoned and staggering party anthem, played by the perplexed Nashville session cats with whom he cut most of it. (The album's front-cover photo is a little out of focus, and there's a certain smoked-up blurriness to most of the songs, too.) How tight could he get? Tight enough to end it with the spellbinding epic "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," which his admirers are still unpacking. The real joy of Blonde on Blonde, though, is that it's hard to tell its meticulously crafted jewels (and binoculars) from its casually thrown-together mules — most of its highlights, like the seething blues "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat," seem to have accidentally stumbled onto their enduring power. Dylan's loopy free associations aren't just a tic, they're the centerpiece of his art. Anyone else would've called the jolly breakup tune here "You Go Your Way and I Go Mine" without the "Most Likely," which isn't even in the lyrics; anyone else would've thought twice about throwing in an apropos-of-nothing bridge involving a stilt-walking judge; anybody else in 1966 would have, you know, sung it, instead of magisterially drawling the lyrics like a drunken accusation. But Dylan wasn't like anybody else, and nearly every wild, counter-intuitive gesture he made on this sprawling album was a Zen arrow hitting a bullseye.
