Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde

Another of his finest moments

Bob Dylan’s groundbreaking album, Blonde on Blonde, was another one first visited on me through an itinerant friend of one of my older sisters. I saw the iconic photo on the album sleeve , all electrified bushy hair, busting out from above a brown suede jacket and chequered scarf, looking slightly out of focus, and peering out at me, with that inscrutable expression from the depths of our parents’ teak veneered stereogram. Okay this wasn’t his ideal milieu. Not a family stereogram. Sorry Bob, your Bobness. Yet, despite the aesthetic outrage, music from a sideboard was quite The Thing back in the day. Although, unlike Dylan’s album, it wasn’t something that stood the test of time. Families bought radiograms to be updated to stereograms. While students and hipsters — with higher standards both aesthetic and audio — bought separate Hi Fi equipment, complete with fuck off speakers rising up like two venerable monoliths from the floors of countless bedsits, ready for the music to sparkle and spark as the diamond stylus gently lowered onto newly pressed vinyl.

Blonde on Blonde was the last of a trilogy, set apart from his earlier folk albums by the introduction of rock n’ roll. Someone called out

Judas

at Manchester Free Trade Hall in England. The moment encapsulated the outrage of his fans for Dylan’s audacity at going electric. It was 17th May 1966. The album had been released in the US the previous day, although the UK had to wait another month before its release. Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited had already registered the change in his direction, from acoustic troubadour of the civil rights movement to post modern electric poet, replete with Coleridge’s image of

his flashing eyes, his floating hair.

All three albums were glittering and essential moments in his career. Dylan spat back at the heckler (a certain Keith Butler from Keel University),

I don’t believe you

referencing the title to a song he had just played and continued with,

you’re a liar.

Before launching into Like a Rolling Stone, he doubled down by turning to the band, saying,