Obviously 5 Believers - Critical Reception and Legacy

Critical Reception and Legacy

Blonde on Blonde reached the Top 10 in both the US and UK album charts, and also spawned a number of hits that restored Dylan to the upper echelons of the singles charts. In August 1967, the album was certified as a gold disc.

On its release, Blonde on Blonde was not short of critics who argued the album was a major work. To accompany the songbook of Blonde on Blonde, Paul Nelson wrote an introduction stating, "The very title suggests the singularity and the duality we expect from Dylan. For Dylan’s music of illusion and delusion—with the tramp as explorer and the clown as happy victim, where the greatest crimes are lifelessness and the inability to see oneself as a circus performer in the show of life—has always carried within it its own inherent tensions...Dylan in the end truly UNDERSTANDS situations, and once one truly understands anything, there can no longer be anger, no longer be moralizing, but only humor and compassion, only pity."

The album received generally favorable reviews in 1966. For Pete Johnson in the Los Angeles Times, "Dylan is a superbly eloquent writer of pop and folk songs with an unmatched ability to press complex ideas and iconoclastic philosophy into brief poetic lines and startling images." The editor of Crawdaddy!, Paul Williams, reviewed Blonde on Blonde in July 1966: "It is a cache of emotion, a well handled package of excellent music and better poetry, blended and meshed and ready to become part of your reality. Here is a man who will speak to you, a 1960s bard with electric lyre and color slides, but a truthful man with x-ray eyes you can look through if you want. All you have to do is listen."

The achievement of Blonde on Blonde seems to have lingered in Dylan's memory. Twelve years after its release, Dylan said: "The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up." For critics, the double album was seen as the last installment in Dylan's trilogy of mid-1960s rock albums. As Janet Maslin wrote, "The three albums of this period—Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited both released in 1965, and Blonde on Blonde from 1966—used their electric instrumentation and rock arrangements to achieve a crashing exuberance Dylan hadn't approached before." Mike Marqusee has described Dylan's output between late 1964 and the summer of 1966, when he recorded these three albums, as "a body of work that remains unique in popular music." For Patrick Humphries, "Dylan's body of work during the 14-months period...stands unequalled in rock's 30-year history. In substance, style, ambition and achievement, no one has even come close to matching Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde."

Blonde on Blonde has been consistently highly placed in polls of the greatest albums of all time. In 1974, the writers of NME voted Blonde on Blonde the No. 2 album of all time. Demonstrating the transitory nature of such polls, in 1997 the album was placed at No. 16 in a "Music of the Millennium" poll conducted by HMV, Channel 4, The Guardian and Classic FM. In 2006, TIME magazine included the record on their 100 All-TIME Albums list. In 2003, the album was ranked No. 9 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In 2004, two songs from the album also appeared on the magazine's list of the 500 greatest songs of all time: "Just Like a Woman" ranked No. 230 and "Visions of Johanna" No. 404. (When Rolling Stone updated this list in 2010, "Just Like a Woman" dropped to No. 232 and "Visions of Johanna" to No. 413.)

Dylan scholar Michael Gray wrote: "To have followed up one masterpiece with another was Dylan's history making achievement here...Where Highway 61 Revisited has Dylan exposing and confronting like a laser beam in surgery, descending from outside the sickness, Blonde on Blonde offers a persona awash inside the chaos...We're tossed from song to song...The feel and the music are on a grand scale, and the language and delivery are a rich mixture of the visionary and the colloquial." Critic Tim Riley wrote: "A sprawling abstraction of eccentric blues revisionism, Blonde on Blonde confirms Dylan's stature as the greatest American rock presence since Elvis Presley."

Biographer Robert Shelton saw the album as "a hallmark collection that completes his first major rock cycle, which began with Bringing It All Back Home". Summing up the album's achievement, Shelton wrote that Blonde on Blonde "begins with a joke and ends with a hymn; in between wit alternates with a dominant theme of entrapment by circumstances, love, society, and unrealized hope... There's a remarkable marriage of funky, bluesy rock expressionism, and Rimbaud-like visions of discontinuity, chaos, emptiness, loss, being 'stuck'." For Mike Marqusee, Dylan had succeeded in combining traditional blues material with modernist literary techniques: " took inherited idioms and boosted them into a modernist stratosphere. 'Pledging My Time' and 'Obviously 5 Believers' adhered to blues patterns that were venerable when Dylan first encountered them in the mid-fifties (both begin with the ritual Delta invocation of "early in the mornin"). Yet like 'Visions of Johanna' or 'Memphis Blues Again', these songs are beyond category. They are allusive, repetitive, jaggedly abstract compositions that defy reduction."

That sense of crossing cultural boundaries was, for Al Kooper, at the heart of Blonde on Blonde: " was the quintessential New York hipster—what was he doing in Nashville? It didn't make any sense whatsoever. But you take those two elements, pour them into a test tube, and it just exploded."