Blonde on Blonde - Dylan, Bob (CD 1990)

It has always seemed to me that words like "great" and "classic" are easy to throw around, since--unless you are using the latter term to describe an automobile--they lack strict, objective benchmarks. If you say X is great, it's your opinion and you are entitled to it. The closest thing I've ever come to as a way to quantify the enduring quality of a record is to count the number of copies you've owned of it down the years. I've owned at least four copies of Bob Dylan's 1966 album Blonde On Blonde so far. I played the first double LP copy that I owned of it to the point where it wouldn't play anymore, replaced it with a CD that I sold with a bunch of others (most of which have gone unreplaced) during a particularly broke patch of graduate school, bought another LP copy a couple years later that got sold to a friend along with the bulk of my record collection when I moved to California, and finally replaced that with the CD copy I currently own. This confirms the album as a masterpiece, at least in my eyes.

Some of Dylan's best known songs are collected on Blonde On Blonde, including big hits like "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35," "Just Like A Woman," and "I Want You." But a truly great album has to be more than an assortment of good songs. The individual songs should add up to something greater than the sum of these parts. Blonde On Blonde, with its fourteen tales of dissolute living, broken romance, and idealized beauty told in an authentic and unique white blues idiom, comes together to create an overall work with its own overarching theme. Even the songs that seem a little throwaway in execution, like the 12 bar blues of "Leopard Skin Pill-Box Hat," are an essential part of the whole.

"Rainy Day Women" is the opening track, Dylan singing his famous refrain "Everybody must get stoned" atop a boozily reeling musical accompaniment unlike any other rock song I can think of (name five others off the top of your head that prominently feature a tuba). The genius of this song is not that it is a double entendre, but that the double entendre belies the serious meaning of the literal interpretation of the lyric. Is the song an ode to getting high? That's in there, but it's also about existential despair and a narrator who truly feels put upon by the forces around him. It may be a goof, but the song has a bite to it.

Indeed, most of the songs are rather biting. "Just Like a Woman," a beautiful ballad on its face, is essentially a nasty kiss-off, softened only by Dylan's admission of weakness when he closes the song begging the woman of the title "Please don't let on that you knew me when/I was hungry and it was your world." Harsher still are songs like "Absolutely Sweet Marie" and "Most Likely You'll Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)," where the narrators spurn their former lovers with an unrestrained glee accentuated by the shuffling blues that accompany them. The farewell of "Sooner or Later (One of Us Must Know)" is a little bittersweet, the singer here trying to make amends to a lover he jilted more callously than intended.

Song after song is filled with pithy lines and vivid imagery, declaimed by Dylan in a breathless, stream of consciousness style that belies the amount of craft obviously involved in the writing of them. Musically, the songs are all performed with urgency at times bordering on haste. On a couple of occasions Dylan catches himself in the middle of misdelivering a lyric, but just collects himself and moves on. This approach is perhaps a bit sloppy, but it keeps the music sounding spontaneous and therefore has a logic of its own.

Taken individually, some songs are better than others on Blonde On Blonde. The best are individual masterpieces, but even the lesser tunes progress the overall arch of the album as it winds its way from the ersatz polka of "Rainy Day Women" to the epic dirge of "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." It forms a musically and lyrically cohesive whole that finds Bob Dylan working from his own individual niche within the blues. All in all, Blonde On Blonde is a powerful and consistently compelling musical statement.