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Oct 12, 2022 14 tweets 5 min read Read on X
Before Al Kooper sat behind the Hammond organ during the Like a Rolling Stone sessions, he first tried out on guitar. After all, he was a guitarist, not an organ player.

But then Mike Bloomfield arrived and Kooper abandoned any hope of being Bob Dylan’s new guitarist. 🧵
As soon as Bloomfield started to play, Kooper realised that The Paul Butterworth Blues Band guitarist was streets ahead of him.

So Kooper retreated back behind the glass and waited for his next opportunity, while Bloomfield impressed more than just the hopeful usurper.
Bob Dylan was very excited about Mike Bloomfield.

In an outtake for the unused song Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence, he sings “she ain’t as good as this guitar player I got right now”.

Bloomfield proved his worth on Like a Rolling Stone and even relegated another guitar star, Bruce Langhorne, to playing tambourine.

Dylan then recruited Bloomfield for his electric Newport band before inviting the guitarist to join the sessions for his next album.
Though Highway 61 Revisited is Dylan’s first true rock’n’roll album, guitars are rarely the star.

Even the most straightforward 12-bar blues song, From a Buick 6, is largely driven by Harvey Brooks' incredible bass line.

Bloomfield’s guitar solos are overpowered by Dylan’s harmonica but he’s doing sterling work throughout.

From a Buick 6 is about a strong, dependable, earthy woman - likely Dylan’s future wife, Sara Lownds, who may not have appreciated her walk being compared to Bo Diddley’s.
Bloomfield does get his chance to shine on the album’s second song - the one unenviably tasked with following up Like a Rolling Stone.

This is not a problem for the guitarist whose unleashes scorching solos after each chorus of Tombstone Blues.

Bloomfield is more than aided by Bobby Gregg’s drums, which are military-tight and relentlessly propel Tombstone Blues forward.

Dylan would later say that nothing like the song had ever been done before.
I had certainly never heard a sentence as acutely oblique as “The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone”.

Or as comically Orwellian as “the sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken”.

And I just adore that final verse about easing “the pain of your useless and pointless knowledge”.
Dylan asked Mike Bloomfield to join him on tour but the guitarist decided to stick with The Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

He soon grew weary of that band’s relentless schedule and left to form his own group, Electric Flag, which included Harvey Brooks on bass.
Electric Flag didn’t last long and Bloomfield spent the next decade flitting between various short-lived projects.

Plagued by insomnia and increasing drug use, he became erratic and unreliable, walking out on an Al Kooper collaboration after just one session.
By the late 70s, this prodigious talent was a recluse reduced to writing porn movie scores.

In 1981, less than a year after rejoining Dylan for a live show in San Francisco, Mike Bloomfield was found dead in his car after an accidental overdose of cocaine and methamphetamine.
Dylan would move on to longer lasting collaborations with other great guitarists.

Join me tomorrow for an unexpected encounter with another six-string virtuoso, who would amplify the allure of Highway 61 Revisited’s extraordinary closing song.

Image via @TimSmith2021
@TimSmith2021 Here's part 4 of my revisit to Highway 61 Revisited:

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More from @DylanRevisited

Jan 30
Catching up with an episode of Iggy Pop’s 6Music radio show from a couple of weeks back and discovered that he goes deep on Bob Dylan by playing It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue “in triplicate”. 🧵

bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0…
The Stooge says that Baby Blue is a song he’s “always admired” as “it had such feeling” and “was full of beautiful imagery”.

First, he plays the twinkling version from the recent Shadow Kingdom performance.

He follows this with Them’s brilliant cover of Baby Blue from 1966, with its enticing intro.

Pop quotes Van Morrison on song: “this guy is not singing about moon and June and he’s getting away with it…this opens up the whole thing”

Read 7 tweets
Nov 24, 2023
Bob Dylan did not arrive in Nashville in Feb 1969 intending to complete an album – he only brought four finished songs with him.

But over two weeks in Tennessee, he wrote just enough additional material to make Nashville Skyline - his shortest record yet. 🧵

📷 Elliott Landy Image
That quartet of pre-completed songs included One More Night – a tribute of sorts to Hank Williams and one of Nashville Skyline's more traditional country songs.

Like his hero, Dylan’s narrator is so “lonesome” that though the moon and stars are out, “no light will shine on me.” Image
Once again, Dylan is using a crutch as he methodically relearns how to write songs.

Kenny Buttrey and Charlie McCoy give One More Night a solid country rhythm, while Norman Blake’s dobro twangs mournfully.

Read 18 tweets
Apr 26, 2023
Eat the Document opens with a shot of Bob Dylan snorting something off a tabletop then asking, "Have you ever heard of me?”

An ego indulging itself is an appropriate introduction to this film. 🧵 Image
Eat the Document reunites Dylan with Dont Look Back director D.A. Pennebaker, who had free rein to capture that 1965 UK tour.

But for the following year’s return to Europe, Dylan wanted more control over the filmmaking process. Image
Though Pennebaker shot most of the footage, it was often under Dylan’s direction.

Rather than quietly capturing real events, Dylan wanted to stage certain scenes, like (I suspect) this inane moment of a plate being passed around a restaurant table.

Read 15 tweets
Jan 19, 2023
During those frustrating Blonde on Blonde sessions in New York, Bob Dylan tried 14 takes of a song slated as Freeze Out.

Not only was he was still working on the lyrics of what would eventually become Visions of Johanna, he was unhappy with his band. 🧵
Drummer Bobby Gregg’s struggles to land on a satisfactory tempo were especially exasperating.

Dylan diagnosed the New York musicians as the problem.

The first Nashville session that captured the master take of Visions of Johanna suggests he was right.
After a brief harmonica intro, Kenny Buttrey introduces a stuttering snare, which soon settles into a perfectly paced march that keeps the song’s midnight meanderings on track.

Read 14 tweets
Jan 18, 2023
“Suggest it one more time and you’re fired.”

Al Grossman didn’t want Bob Dylan to record Blonde on Blonde in Nashville and threatened Bob Johnston, whose suggestion it was.

But with Dylan unhappy after the New York sessions, the producer put his job on the line. 🧵 Image
Dylan didn’t believe his New York musicians could help him capture the specific sound he had in his mind.

When Johnston risked the wrath of Grossman by conveying the calibre of the players he knew in Nashville, Dylan was intrigued. Image
It helped that Dylan already knew one of them – Charlie McCoy, who showed up during the recording of Desolation Row, picked up a guitar and improvised the lush Latin licks that decorate Highway 61 Revisited’s closing track.

Read 13 tweets
Jan 17, 2023
Five of the songs on Blonde on Blonde feature a bridge.

By my count, just one song – Ballad of a Thin Man – does on Bob Dylan’s previous two album combined.

Which makes me think Dylan wanted his seventh album to be more of a pop record. 🧵 Image
And it’s not just the bridges. Blonde on Blonde has more sing-along choruses than before and the lyrics are more direct expressions of love, longing and leaving.

The core of Blonde on Blonde is pop music. But this is Dylan, so the result is naturally unconventional.
I Want You is about as conventional as Dylan gets.

Sure, the verses are filled with oddball characters who could be castoffs from Highway 61 Revisited. But the chorus?

“I want you so bad” – jeez, just go ahead and say what you feel Bob.

Read 13 tweets

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