Favourite song on "BLONDE ON BLONDE" by Bob Dylan

Considered "Blue Monday" but voted "Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands" instead. :)

tip for guys:

Play her "Just like a woman" in yr car, at a loud but comfortable volume, you're in.

Hard to pick just one, but I nonetheless went with "I Want You," which is surely Bob's bounciest, popiest top 20 hit ever.

I went for One of Us Must Know

Play her "Just like a woman" in yr car, at a loud but comfortable volume, you're in.

What, all that stuff about breaking like a little girl? Worst Dylan lyrics ever?

"STUCK inSIDE of MObile.."

v hard, but sad eyed lady has slowly (like over 14 yrs) become my fave.

Tough poll - 'Visions of Johanna' melts my mind everytime I give it a spin - that wins for me ...

SIOMWTMBA wins, by dint of nostalgia. Loved it when I were a nipper.

"Obviously Five Believers". I would have loved Elvis to cover this, as it would have been even more fun than "Big Boss Man".

Stuck inside of mobile on account of the possible meaning that "punch my cigarette" means taking tobacco out of a smoke and adding herb. but it really is a tough call.

"Absolutely Sweet Marie" - great pop & very funny.

Depending on mood I like Johanna more but it'll get more votes anyway I guess.

http://bozoette.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/lsph_1.jpg

oh i don't know. "stuck inside of mobile" i guess, although i think i'm rewarding its length (and therefore momentum) as much as anything. lots of great lines -- "people just get uglier/and i have no sense of time" -- and i like the way he sounds more amused than desperate. his singing is so sly on this album in particular -- it's always sly, but he was at a specific point here where he dialed back some of the acridness of the records just before it. i think he never sounded quite this loose again (although he's approaching it on the most recent albums).

(and i would possibly vote for "most likely you'll go your way" except that my favorite version is on before the flood)

"i" wanna "want you", yo!

Extremely tough to pick, but I went with "I Want You." Has it been noted that the guilty undertaker's sigh from this song reappeared a decade later in "Band On The Run"?

4th Time Around always gets me with "she/threw me outside/I stood in the dirt/where everyone walked" – once your lover abandons you, you return to the mundane world in which everything's a little less bright.

Stuck inside of mobile on account of the possible meaning that "punch my cigarette" means taking tobacco out of a smoke and adding herb.

Haha. But isn't "She just smoked my eyelids/And punched my cigarette" just noun-transposal nonsense (nounsense?) same as "The post office has beeb stolen/And the mailbox is locked"?

Looking at all the possible contenders reminds me how good this album is. I am not a huge fan of Dylan, but few people have managed to make more consistent double albums than this one.

"Visions of Johanna" for me - he never really captured that wee-small hours "thin wild mercury sound" again. I'd swear can hear crickets chirping in the background. Special mention to "Memphis" which I heard as a teen on late-night radio and so enthralled me that I knew I had to investigate the catalogue beyond Greatest Hits.

'visions of johanna'

could well be my overall favourite track from the man if i was pressed

"visions of johanna" because of personal resonance. i could just as easily have voted for any other fucking track. easily one of my top 5 albums ever.

According to that book Mansion On The Hill "punched my cigarrette" refers to the way Al Grossman held his smoke.

went with "Absolutely Sweet Marie," the slow ones are great but mainly in album context, wouldn't want to hear "Sad Eyed Lady" in a jukebox.

She said that all the railroad men
Just drink up your blood like wine.
An' I said, "Oh, I didn't know that,
But then again, there's only one I've met
An' he just smoked my eyelids
An' punched my cigarette."

"I Want You."

'sad eyed lady' is designed for late night headphone listening. maybe i'd want to make out to it, who knows.

"One of Us Must Know" for me too.

'4th time around'

aww '4th time around' is really pretty. and very intriguing lyrically

4th time around

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

blue monday ftw

'absolutely sweet marie' maybe

I'm in a "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" mood today.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Haha I misread "Stuck Inside of Mobile" votes as 70,518.

I have two CDs of this. 1) an early CBS 2) a HDCD that plays normal on my player. I'm not one for noticing these things usually, but it seems like the organ in "Visions Of Johanna" is either almost completely missing (as on the 1st CD version) or mixed lower (on CD2. It doesn't seem to surge like it did on the vinyl mix. Am I losing my mind? Has anyone else noticed this?

has anyone else heard the remix of "most likely you'll go your way" by MARK RONSON? ugh!

haha WOW, kinda shocked what got no votes. I hated "Rainy Day Women" when it was on a mixtape my gym teacher would play in class in high school, but I enjoy it now.

Ha, I hated that one when they used to play it on the Classic Rock stations on rainy days in NYC back in the seventies, but I like it now.

I like "Rainy Day Women" fine, but it's hard to imagine it being anyone's favorite song on the album.

on Women, i'm with The guy.

I never realized that the horns in "Rainy Day Women" were just playing a standard descending blues line. When he did it with his current band and guitar #3 took care of the horn lines I went "holy crap it's a blues wtf"

Had I noticed this poll I would have been torn between my current love for "Johanna" and honoring the two years of my teens when "I Want You" meant more to me than any song in existence.

It's hilarious that the significant hit from the album got no votes. But I can't take seriously any of the votes for 5 Believers and Achilles, which have both always seemed 100% filler to me.

OH i didn't KNOW that

still Johanna.

(quite embarrassing to see the crap i wrote 7 years ago itt)

*punches cigarette*

what a great album.
visions is the best, but for some reason i always have "temporary like achilles" floating around in my brain. "helpless like a rich man's child"

hehe, I often have the title "Temporary Like Achilles" on my mind (and then i Bob-think to myself: what does that MEEEAAAN)

visions is the best

dylan delivery fun maybe peaks 66-67 for me, BoB and Basement tapes

favourite moment in Johanna - "the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face" and then a haunted organ motif follows

aw c'mONNNNNNNNNNNNNN now!

All y'all's favorite moments are my favorite moments too.

i know you know about my debutaaaante xp

favourite moment in Johanna - "the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face" and then a haunted organ motif follows
yeah i hope they release unedited session tapes of this album someday ... i want to hear how these songs developed -- how much was in-the-moment inspiration and how much of it was thought out beforehand. there's that great, pretty different early take of mobile blues on the no direction home bootleg series.

Haha, love reading those transcriptions.

Sure seems like we'll get more album-like bootlegs, as someone told RS when Another Self Portrait was released: "When fans hear the Blonde on Blonde set, they'll realize that the real hero of the sessions was pianist Paul Griffin. . ."

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bob-dylan-revisits-self-portrait-on-next-edition-of-bootleg-series-20130716#ixzz3UM95XeC9

What? Didn't know that Paul Griffin was on there.

Ttied to read that RS page but it keeps sending me through to some malware.

Hm. Works on my laptop. Phone was the problem, everytime I tried to scroll must have hit something nasty. Still didn't see mention of Paul Griffin though. Oh wait, now I see.

Hey, look what I found. I love this series: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/may10/articles/classictracks_0510.htm

I feel bad for "Pledging My Time" getting the goose egg. It's not as flashy lyric-wise as some of the epics on this album, but it's one I always like to listen to.

Yeah, I'm kind of surprised "Temporary Like Achilles" got votes and "Pledging My Time" didn't, I always much preferred the latter, particularly for "I got a poison headache, but I feel alright."

the Mojo double LP of ppl covering Blonde on Blonde is pretty good. Got it bc of Jim O'Rourke does "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," which is amazing, but "Stuck Inside of Mobile" by Promised Land Sound is so fucking great, took me by surprise.

When I saw "Blue Monday was one of the options just now I thought 'Oh gawd. Is this one of mine?'

LIED
RIDE
SIDE

you might
think he loves you for your money but
I KNOW WHAT HE REALLY LOVES YOU FOR

Well it balances on your head like a mattress balances on a bottle of wi-i-ine

You might think he loves you for your money but I know what he really loves you for

Oh, wait somehow thought two up was a different one. Never mind, nothing to see here

You know, I don’t mind him cheatin’ on me
But I sure wish he’d take that off his head!

OH, HOW
can i explain? it's so HARD to get ON

amused every time by the petulant light later years have cast on "and madonna, she still has not showed" -- what a disappointing village loft party

Aw come ON now, i KNO you know about my DEB-yoo-TAUNT

someday after our civilization is in ruins this will be the only document our successors have to learn how our tongue was spoken

has anyone else been weirded out by the sad-eyed lady versions from the cutting edge box so that now the original sounds all weird? i keep thinking i must have accidentally switched one of the alts for the original. but really i'm just hearing all dylan's hesitations and extemporizations since they sound just like the ones from the outtakes. as if i had never heard them before now.

no, cause those aren't on my LP version! but I'll certainly check it out when I get home

when I started reading your post I thought, wishfully, the alternative version had a less offensive stereo panning of the drums - always kinda annoyed me, powerful song all the same

also, I thought it was a one take? but maybe they did more takes after that 1st perfect take?

there are four takes on disc uh 14 of the whole vol. 12 bootleg series, maybe more, i don't have the whole thing

Good album imo.

someday after our civilization is in ruins this will be the only document our successors have to learn how our tongue was spoken
― j., Friday, September 2, 2016 7:05 PM (three years ago)

Also Sweet Smell of Success, but point taken.

My daughter's middle name is Johanna, mostly because of this

Just because I model my speech patterns after J.J. Hunsecker's doesn't mean the rest of the world has followed suit!

Now be warned, son, I'll have to blitz you.

(No more, I promise--I will not hijack this thread.)

I'm a schoolboy - teach me, teach me.

The last thing I will ever say in this life, on my deathbed, is that the world is wrong, "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" is Blonde on Blonde's greatest song, not its worst, and maybe the wildest, most anarchic Top-40 hit of the 1960s (hit #2), if not ever.

I just don't get it. At all.

My daughter's middle name is Johanna, mostly because of this

― cuomo money, cuomo problems (Ye Mad Puffin), Monday, 6 April 2020 12:06 (thirty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I can think of an ilxor who's also named after this song

One of those polls where I completely and utterly agree with the winner though

For a while, I've thought that for the drums, and the piano, and the organ, this is probably "One of Us Must Know" for me. I don't know, I would have think about whether I'd vote for "Sad-Eyed Lady," though.

Does anyone have intel on different versions of the CD (besides what’s in this long Hoffman thread)? I made the mistake of selling my original CD when I bought the remastered version in the 2000s; and lamenting that now, as I think it sounds like sh*t (I really don’t like any of the Dylan remasters that I own).

Wondering if I should just buy a random copy of CGK 841 (the OG CD, of which there are apparently various pressings), and not waste any more bandwidth on it; or if there’s a better way to go.

(I also don’t like the mono vinyl repress that I own... do any versions of this album sound good?)

Reaĺly? I'd be interested to hear why.

I have a sundazed mono I’ve never played, think I’ll give it a go tonight. I grew up on some old CD.

I bought 'Blonde on Blonde' on a CD splurge the same time I bought 'Trout Mask Replica', 'Rain Dogs' and that Ryko all in one Mission of Burma Cd like the first weekend I went to IU, so the CD has always been a special one to me. That said, I probably prefer 'Highway 61 Revisited' and 'Blood on the Tracks' in an all-time sense.

"Visions of Johanna" is on the 'heavily buzzed awaiting sleep' all-time playlist. There is something dreamy about it and the loping groove makes it fit that feel.

I had a crazy road trip from Bloomington, IN to Las Vegas that included a wrecked car driving and a Greyhound ride from Hayes, Kansas to Memphis for a couple of days then to Bloomington in the early 90s with 3 buddies where "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" was in the mental soundtrack loop a bunch on the way and we also had a copy of On the Road and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with us. When we crashed, we had X's "We're Desperate" on the CD player. Hipster dorks we were, yes we were. The car was owned by now a Marion County Indiana judge.

I don't know anything about actual people that might have inspired "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" but I always took as Dylan slipping a pothead coochy sex joke song across the goal line.

"Obviously 5 Believers" - killer bass line.

"Temporary Like Achilles" - this one is a later obsession as something about the loping blues groove really gets me in the turnaround.
"Temporary Like Achilles" -

xp The Sundazed mono vinyl is the one I have... It sounds muddy to me, I dunno.

(The remastered CD is a cacophony -- harp too shrill, drums too loud... the mix is "bright" but out of balance, unmusical, every track competing for attn.)

"Visions of Johanna" is on the 'heavily buzzed awaiting sleep' all-time playlist
otm

Progenitor of that riff on Obviously 5 Believers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsJMfYDUNCE

You should be able to find a VG+ 1970 or 1972 repress for around $25, which apparently (at least in some cases) is a repress of a 1968 mix, not the OG 1966 mix. I think mine sounds pretty good though I've never done an A v B comparison with the early 2000s CD remaster.

I love the way BoB sounds (2AM road-trip music otm), but I wouldn't say it is an audiophile album, even though it was recorded in a very good studio.

Thanks. As another point of comparison, the tracks on The Cutting Edge sound good (as the Bootleg Series tend to sound), without all the weird brightening of the remaster.

I wondered maybe if the ‘harshness’ was somewhat intentional eg “thin mercury sound, metallic and bright gold”