Blonde on Blonde
Studio album by  Bob Dylan
Released	June 20, 1966
Recorded	January 25 – March 10, 1966
Studio	Columbia 7th Ave, New York City Columbia, Nashville
Genre	Folk rock  blues rock  country rock  rock and roll
Length	72:57
Label	Columbia
Producer	Bob Johnston
Bob Dylan chronology
Highway 61 Revisited (1965) Blonde on Blonde (1966) Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits (1967)
Singles from Blonde on Blonde
"One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" Released: February 14, 1966 "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" / "Pledging My Time" Released: April 1966 "I Want You" Released: June 10, 1966 "Just Like a Woman" / "Obviously 5 Believers" Released: September 1966 "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" / "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine" Released: April 1967

Blonde on Blonde is the seventh studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released as a double album on June 20, 1966, by Columbia Records. Recording sessions began in New York in October 1965 with numerous backing musicians, including members of Dylan's live backing band, the Hawks. Though sessions continued until January 1966, they yielded only one track that made it onto the final album—"One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)". At producer Bob Johnston's suggestion, Dylan, keyboardist Al Kooper, and guitarist Robbie Robertson moved to the CBS studios in Nashville, Tennessee. These sessions, augmented by some of Nashville's top session musicians, were more fruitful, and in February and March all the remaining songs for the album were recorded.

Blonde on Blonde completed the trilogy of rock albums that Dylan recorded in 1965 and 1966, starting with Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited (both 1965). Critics often rank Blonde on Blonde as one of the greatest albums of all time. Combining the expertise of Nashville session musicians with a modernist literary sensibility, the album's songs have been described as operating on a grand scale musically, while featuring lyrics one critic called "a unique mixture of the visionary and the colloquial". It was one of the first double albums in rock music.

The album peaked at number nine on the Billboard Top LPs chart in the US, where it eventually was certified double platinum, and it reached number three in the UK. Blonde on Blonde spawned two singles that were top-twenty hits in the US: "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" and "I Want You". Two additional songs—"Just Like a Woman" and "Visions of Johanna"—have been named as among Dylan's greatest compositions and were featured in Rolling Stone's "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list in 2003. In 1999, the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and was ranked number 38 in Rolling Stone's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" in 2020.

Background

After the release of Highway 61 Revisited in August 1965, Dylan set about hiring a touring band. Guitarist Mike Bloomfield and keyboard player Al Kooper had backed Dylan on the album and at Dylan's controversial electric debut at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. However, Bloomfield chose not to tour with Dylan, preferring to remain with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. After backing him at concerts in late August and early September, Kooper informed Dylan he did not wish to continue touring with him. Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, was in the process of setting up a grueling concert schedule that would keep Dylan on the road for the next nine months, touring the U.S., Australia, and Europe. Dylan contacted a group who were performing as Levon and the Hawks, consisting of Levon Helm from Arkansas and four Canadian musicians: Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson. They had come together as a band in Canada, backing American rocker Ronnie Hawkins. Two people had strongly recommended the Hawks to Dylan: Mary Martin, the executive secretary of Grossman, and blues singer John Hammond Jr., son of record producer John Hammond, who had signed Dylan to Columbia Records in 1961; the Hawks had backed the younger Hammond on his 1965 album So Many Roads.

Bob Dylan rehearsed with the Hawks in Toronto on September 15, where they were playing a hometown residency at Friar's Club, and on September 24, they made their debut in Austin, Texas. Two weeks later, encouraged by the success of their Texas performance, Dylan took the Hawks into Studio A of Columbia Records in New York City. Their immediate task was to record a hit single as the follow-up to "Positively 4th Street", but Dylan was already shaping his next album, the third one that year backed by rock musicians.

Release and reception

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.

A high-definition 5.1 surround sound edition of the album was released on SACD by Columbia in 2003.

The album received generally favorable reviews. Pete Johnson in the Los Angeles Times wrote, "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."

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." In May 1968 for Esquire, Robert Christgau said Dylan had "presented his work at its most involuted, neurotic, and pop—and exhilarating—in Blonde on Blonde."

Track listing

All songs written by Bob Dylan