Blonde on Blonde released: May 16, 1966 BUY

Issued at the height of Dylan’s fame and just before the July 1966 motorcycle accident that brought his career to a halt, this double album is another of Dylan’s landmark recordings. Except for the opening track, “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” a hit single on which Dylan sings over a raucous brass band, with the famous refrain, “Everybody must get stoned,” Dylan had found yet another voice for himself, slightly husky and softer, and the songs he delivers in that voice steer for a place of deeply symbolic and sometimes hallucinatory poetry, not as angry or distanced as the songs on Highway 61 Revisited. Blonde on Blonde’s mixture of mystic love poems, blues, picaresque Americana and urban fantasy speaks out of the whirlwind of a time when everything was out of whack. Songs like “I Want You,” “Visions of Johanna,” “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again,” “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” “Just Like A Woman,” “Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat,” and the epical “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” which took up an entire album side on the original issue, were love songs, alternately funny, tender, and recriminatory, dark and giddily illuminated landscapes. Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 | listen | Pledging My Time | listen | Visions of Johanna | listen | One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later) | listen | I Want You | listen | Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again | listen | Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat | listen | Just Like a Woman | listen | Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine | listen | Temporary Like Achilles | listen | Absolutely Sweet Marie | listen | 4th Time Around | listen | Obviously Five Believers | listen | Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands | listen |