Recording
Bob Dylan began to record the Blonde on Blonde album in New York in October 1965. Frustrated by the slow progress in the studio, Dylan agreed to the suggestion of his producer Bob Johnston and moved to Columbia's A Studio on Music Row, Nashville, Tennessee, in February 1966. Bringing with him Robbie Robertson on guitar and Al Kooper on keyboards, Dylan commenced recording with the cream of Nashville session players.
On February 15, the session began at 6 p.m., but Dylan simply sat in the studio working on his lyrics, while the musicians played cards, napped, and chatted. Finally, at 4 a.m., Dylan called the musicians in and outlined the structure of the song. Dylan counted off and the musicians fell in, as he attempted his epic composition, "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands". Drummer Kenny Buttrey recalled, "If you notice that record, that thing after like the second chorus starts building and building like crazy, and everybody's just peaking it up 'cause we thought, Man, this is it...This is gonna be the last chorus and we've gotta put everything into it we can. And he played another harmonica solo and went back down to another verse and the dynamics had to drop back down to a verse kind of feel...After about ten minutes of this thing we're cracking up at each other, at what we were doing. I mean, we peaked five minutes ago. Where do we go from here?" The finished song clocked in at 11 minutes, 23 seconds, and would occupy the entire fourth side of the album. Four takes of the song were completed, but were mainly rehearsals; take 2 is also interrupted.
The technique employed by Dylan to write the song was to construct the verses as a series of "lists" of the attributes of the eponymous Sad Eyed Lady. These "lists" are complemented by a sequence of rhetorical questions about the Lady which are never answered within the song. Thus, the first verse runs:
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- With your mercury mouth in the missionary times
- And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
- And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes
- Oh, who do they think could bury you?
- With your pockets well protected at last
- And your streetcar visions which you place on the grass
- And your flesh like silk, and your face like glass
- Who could they get to carry you?
- Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands
- Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes
- My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
- Should I leave them by your gate
- Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
Read more about this topic: Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands
Famous quotes containing the word recording:
“Self-expression is not enough; experiment is not enough; the recording of special moments or cases is not enough. All of the arts have broken faith or lost connection with their origin and function. They have ceased to be concerned with the legitimate and permanent material of art.”
—Jane Heap (c. 1880–1964)
“Write while the heat is in you.... The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I didn’t have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room. Weary, I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough, let’s say, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony. Nothing doing!”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)