Bob Dylan - Blonde On Blonde (2LP)

Blonde On Blonde is the seventh studio album by Bob Dylan, originally 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. Critics often rank Blonde On Blonde as one of the greatest albums of all time, and it has also been described as rock's first studio double LP by a major artist, as it was released just one week before the Mothers Of Invention's Freak Out!.

The album peaked at number nine on the Billboard 200 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 mentioned as among Dylan's greatest compositions.

In 1999, the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

"Rock's first studio double LP by a major artist was, as Bob Dylan declared in 1978, 'the closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my head ... that thin, that wild-mercury sound.' Blonde on Blonde was mainly recorded in Nashville with session pros (another rock first), who created an almost contradictory magnificence: a tightly wound tension around Dylan's quicksilver language and incisive singing in barrelhouse surrealism such as 'Rainy Day Women #12 and 35' and 'Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again.' Amid the frenzy, Dylan delivered some of his finest, clearest songs of comfort and desire: the sidelong beauty 'Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' and 'I Want You,' the title of which Dylan almost used for the album." - Rolling Stone, 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time

"A sprawling abstraction of eccentric blues revisionism, Blonde On Blonde confirms Dylan's stature as the greatest American rock presence since Elvis." - Tim Riley, Bob Dylan scholar

Blonde on Blonde is an album of enormous depth, providing endless lyrical and musical revelations on each play... Throughout the record, the music matches the inventiveness of the songs, filled with cutting guitar riffs, liquid organ riffs, crisp pianos, and even woozy brass bands ('Rainy Day Women #12 & 35'). It's the culmination of Dylan's electric rock & roll period - he would never release a studio record that rocked this hard, or had such bizarre imagery, ever again.

Blonde On Blonde is a scintillating fusion of rock, blues, folk and country guitar music, an intoxicating brew of surrealist imagery and some of the finest poetry to unfurl from Dylan's masterly pen...Despite stretching to an hour and 12 minutes, there isn't a weak song on Blonde On Blonde.