Highway 61 Revisited

Writing and recording Highway 61 Revisited

Before work began on his sixth studio album, Dylan embarked on a brief English tour in May of 1965, which was filmed and recorded by Don A. Pennebaker. (Pennebaker would use the footage to create the film, Don't Look Back, which was released the following year.) The tour lasted eight shows over the course of two weeks; by the end of the tour, Bringing It All Back Home was released in the U.K., eventually topping the English charts by the end of the month. Its rapid ascent in the U.K. seemed to indicate widespread commercial acceptance of his new 'electric' sound, but as Don't Look Back would ultimately show, there were 'fans' who weren't afraid to voice their disproval. (The film documents one fan who tells Dylan she did not like "Subterranean Homesick Blues," at the time his latest single. Dylan's response: "Oh, you're one of those. I understand now.") Furthermore, Dylan's new musical direction was so far confined to the studio, as his live performances remained strictly acoustic and often solo.

Related Topics:
Don't Look Back - Bringing It All Back Home

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Nevertheless, Dylan was intent on continuing in his new direction. A large English r&b movement had emerged in just a few short years, including such notable bands as The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, Van Morrison's Them, and The Animals. Dylan had become an avid listener of these bands (he was particularly struck by The Animals' rendition of "House of the Rising Sun"), and he decided to audition one of these bands while he was in England. Producer Tom Wilson was flown out to England, and a session was held at Levy's Recording Studio on May 12th. For this experiment, Dylan recruited John Mayall's Bluesbreakers - a popular guitarist named Eric Clapton had recently joined the band after leaving The Yardbirds, but the Bluesbreakers were still a relative obscurity.

Related Topics:
The Rolling Stones - The Yardbirds - Van Morrison - Them - The Animals - Tom Wilson - John Mayall - Eric Clapton

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The session was ultimately a failure. "It was just messing around," recalled drummer Hughie Flint, "I don't think we played a complete number. It was a real mess. There was a lot of booze there...I'd never seen so much wine, and everybody got very , very quickly."

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If the session wasn't discouraging enough, Dylan suffered an attack of food poisoning later that spring. During his week of bed rest, Dylan felt he "was going to quit singing. I was very drained. I was playing a lot of songs I didn't want to play. I was singing words I didn't really want to sing." It was a fleeting decision, one he would not reveal until months later, when he was confident about continuing his career, but it was a strong reflection of his uncertainty at the time.

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In the meantime, Dylan was nearing completion of a book he'd been writing. Titled Tarantula, it would not be published until 1971, but it was Dylan's prime motivation for writing a substantial amount of prose during 1964 and 1965. At least one piece of prose became the source for an actual song. As Dylan recalled in 1966, "I found myself writing this song, this story, this long piece of vomit about twenty pages long, and out of it I took 'Like A Rolling Stone'...After writing that, I wasn't interested in writing a novel, or a play."

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The original twenty-page manuscript has been described by biographer Clinton Heylin as "an ill-formed mass of words whose direction was uncertain." As it was rewritten down to ten pages, "it wasn't called anything," recalled Dylan, "just a rhythm thing on paper, all about my steady hatred, directed at some point that was honest."

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When Dylan felt it was ready to record, he and Tom Wilson assembled a band. On lead guitar, Dylan recruited an old acquaintance, Michael Bloomfield. Bloomfield had met Dylan on a few occasions, even jamming with him in Chicago back in April of 1963. By 1965, he was the lead guitarist in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a critically-acclaimed, American blues-rock band. Dylan contacted Bloomfield and invited him to his retreat in Woodstock, New York. "I didn't even have a guitar case," recalled Bloomfield, "I just had my Telecaster. And Bob picked me up at the bus station and took me to this house where he lived...he taught me these songs, 'Like A Rolling Stone,' and all those songs from , and he said, 'I don't want you to play any , none of that , I want you to play something else.' So we fooled around and finally played something he liked...he was playing in weird keys which he always does, all on the black keys of the piano."

Related Topics:
Tom Wilson - Michael Bloomfield - Paul Butterfield - Woodstock

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Days later, on June 15th, Dylan held a recording session at Columbia's Studio A in New York. In addition to Bloomfield, Dylan and Wilson recruited pianist Frank Owens, bassist Russ Savakus, and drummer Bobby Gregg. Also present was Al Kooper, a young musician invited by Wilson, apparently to play lead guitar. With Bloomfield present, Kooper became a mere observer.

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Dylan and his band recorded three songs: a new composition titled "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry," a song held over from the Bringing It All Back Home sessions titled "Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence," and "Like A Rolling Stone." A number of unsuccessful attempts were made at "It Takes a Lot to Laugh" and "Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence" before Dylan turned his attention to "Like A Rolling Stone."

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After several false stars, Dylan decided to use both a piano and an organ on "Like A Rolling Stone." Kooper volunteered to play organ, and even though Wilson made it very clear that he was aware of Kooper's inexperience with the instrument, he allowed him to play it. In Kooper's widely-quote words, he was feeling his "way through the changes like a little kid fumbling in the dark for a light switch." Kooper was so uncertain he purposely played behind the beat in order to hear the chord changes first. After recording one complete take, they "all adjourned to the booth to hear it played back," recalls Kooper. Halfway through the take, Dylan asked Wilson to push the organ up in the mix. With a little reluctance, Wilson accommodated Dylan; Dylan liked what he heard and now had the blueprint for the famous organ-guitar sound that would define the recordings of this era.

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Everything recorded on the 15th was ultimately rejected, but it set the stage for the remaining sessions. Dylan and his band returned to Studio A the following day. Virtually the entire session was devoted to "Like A Rolling Stone," with Kooper once again playing organ. The fourth take was ultimately selected as the master, but Dylan and the band would record eleven more takes before listening to the recorded results in the studio booth.

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Though recorded for a single, Dylan ultimately decided to include it on his next album. With a shortage of new material, Dylan spent a month in his new home in Byrdcliffe, New York (located in upstate New York), writing new songs.

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Before he could record these songs, or possibly finish composing them, Dylan made a historic appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The amount of planning and preparation for this performance is unclear, but in any case, Dylan played two sets at Newport. The first was an acoustic set played at a songwriters' workshop held on a Saturday afternoon. However, the performance was cut short when his presence alone was drawing too much attention. "The crowd around the songwriters' workshop was so immense that it was swamping the other workshops," recalls organizer Joe Boyd.

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The situation grew more volatile the following day. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band was already creating controversy because members of the festival's board, including Alan Lomax, did not fully approve of their appearance. Though bluesmen were always invited to Newport Folk Festival, a young band like The Paul Butterfield Blues Band was not viewed the same way as revered veterans like Son House, Muddy Waters, and Lightnin' Hopkins.

Related Topics:
The Paul Butterfield Blues Band - Alan Lomax - Son House - Muddy Waters - Lightnin' Hopkins

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Nevertheless, Dylan was preparing to perform his next set with Bloomfield on guitar, Kooper on organ, and Barry Goldberg on piano. To complete the band, he recruited two more members of The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, bassist Jerome Arnold and drummer Sam Lay.

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Eyewitness accounts of the resulting performance have elevated the incident to mythical proportions. Though some details remain hazy, it's clear that Dylan and his band performed three songs in the following order: "Maggie's Farm," "Like A Rolling Stone," and "Phantom Engineer" (an early version of "It Takes a Lot to Laugh"). When he introduced the band, Pete Yarrow elicited an unruly response when he announced that Dylan's set would be very brief. (It's not clear why Dylan planned on just three songs; years later, even Kooper would admit that it was "weird.") Soundboard recordings of the proceedings support eyewitness accounts that the performances were a bit rough, and virtually everyone agrees that the P.A. sound during the performances were very inadequate. What's not clear is the audience reaction. Soundboard recordings show a fair share of applause as well as booing during the performances. It's unclear what proportion the crowd was voicing their displeasure, how much of that displeasure was directed at the P.A. sound, and how much was directed at the music itself. Pete Seeger was famously upset by the proceedings; he would later insist that he was upset at the P.A. sound, which allegedly distorted Dylan's vocals to a large degree. At one point, Seeger intended to cut Dylan's microphone cord.

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Eyewitness accounts say Dylan was shaken by the experience, and after the electric set, Johnny Cash and Peter Yarrow, among others, convinced Dylan to placate the unruly crowd with an acoustic performance. Dylan played solo renditions of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" and "Mr. Tambourine Man" before leaving the stage.

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Though Dylan's popularity continued to grow, his Newport appearance prompted a number of fans to vocally oppose his new direction. In the year following the appearance, the folk community was seemingly split over the new music. Dylan's friend, Paul Nelson, had just assumed editorship of Sing Out when he wrote a piece in support of Dylan, while Sing Outs Irwin Silber published a piece criticizing Dylan's Newport set as "not very good 'rock'... very good Dylan"; Nelson also resigned in a show of support to Dylan.

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Four days after Newport, on July 29th, Dylan returned to Studio A and resumed work on his next album. He was backed the same band from the previous studio session (pianist Paul Griffin was also recruited for the remainder of the sessions), but for reasons unknown, Tom Wilson did not return; instead he was replaced by Columbia producer Bob Johnston, who had lobbied to work with Dylan (he was not involved in Wilson's dismissal).

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When Johnston arrived, he picked a new staff engineer, Mike Figlio, who had also recorded Tony Bennett's ?I Left My Heart In San Francisco,? and who would follow Johnston down to Columbia Nashville a few years later.

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Johnston recalls, "I don't know how Tom Wilson recorded him, but when I did Dylan, we set up all of the musicians in the same room, with Bob behind a glass baffle so you could see him. With Dylan, you always had to keep your eye on him. He came in and played a song to the band once and that was how they learned it. He never counted off, just launched right into it, so you always had to keep the tape rolling. And that wasn't easy at Columbia; we were using 4-track for that record, 8-track on of Blonde on Blonde, and the machines were way down the hall. We had union engineers, so one would be in the control room at the console with me, and I'd say, 'Roll tape,' and he'd tell his assistant near the door, 'Roll tape,' and he'd yell down the hall to a guy at the other end, 'Roll tape,' and then they'd start all over again yelling, 'Is tape rolling?' God, it took 20 minutes to get those damned machines going. It was like a Three Stooges short. So I got in the habit of using several machines with Dylan so as not to lose anything. He would start a song on the piano, and if the musicians dropped out during it, he'd go to the guitar and start playing another one. I lost one song that way and said never again, so I always used multiple machines.

Related Topics:
Tom Wilson - Blonde on Blonde - Three Stooges

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"I always used three microphones on Dylan, 'cause his head spun around so much," recalls Johnston. "I used a big U47 on him, same as I used on Johnny Cash later. I would put a baffle over the top of his guitar because he played while he sang lead vocals. I didn't use any EQ on the band, just set the mics up right to make each instrument sound the best it could. I used some EQ on Dylan's voice."

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Their first session together was devoted to three songs. After experimenting with different keys and tempos, master takes of "Tombstone Blues," "It Takes a Lot to Laugh," and "Positively 4th Street" were successfully recorded. "Tombstone Blues" and "It Takes a Lot to Laugh" were included in the final album, but "Positively 4th Street" was issued as a single-only release.

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The following day, Dylan and his band returned to Studio A and recorded three songs. A master take of "From a Buick 6" was successfully recorded and later included on the final album, but most of the session was devoted to "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" Dylan was not satisfied with the results, and set the song aside for a later date; it would eventually be re-recorded months later. (An 'alternate' take from this session was accidentally released on a mis-pressed single. It's easily identified by a different arrangement, featuring a glockenspiel.) A complete take of "Desolation Row" was also completed, but the full band performance of this epic song was ultimately rejected. "By the first verse into it, it was obvious that Bob's guitar was rather painfully out of tune," recalls Dylan's friend Tony Glover, who was an observer at the session. "Both Neuwirth and I pointed it out, but didn't want to stop the take...Some twelve minutes later, Bob called for a playback and as it began he scowled, 'It's way outta tune - why didn't you stop me? It's a long song.'"

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During the next two days, Dylan spent much time writing out chord charts for the remaining six songs he had yet to record. (By now, bassist Russ Savakus had left, replaced by Harvey Brooks.) Sessions resumed at Studio A on Monday, August 2nd, this time with Sam Lay sitting in on drums. "Highway 61 Revisited," "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," "Queen Jane Approximately," and "Ballad of a Thin Man" were all recorded successfully and master takes were selected for the album. "Desolation Row" was also recorded in a smaller arrangement (acoustic guitar, electric guitar, and bass), but once again, the results were rejected.

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One final session was held on August 4th, again at Studio A. Most of the session was devoted to "Desolation Row," recorded with an acoustic guitar and bass. According to Johnston and Kooper, guitarist Charlie McCoy was flown in from Nashville, Tennessee to accompany Dylan on the song. Seven takes were recorded (with only three complete), and takes six and seven were spliced together to create the master recording included on the final album. One take of "Tombstone Blues" was also recorded, but it did not replace the master take selected from an earlier session.

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