Fan Club Contests and Interviews

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Over the years we have had the opportunity to interview authors, journalists and musicians with unique insights and expertise, and through their generosity participate in contests and giveaways for their books and more. We have archived some of our favorite conversations here and look forward to adding more.

October 2020 – A Conversation with Daryl Sanders about his book That Thin Wild Mercury Sound: Bob Dylan, Nashville, and the Making of Blonde On Blonde

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me and with The Bob Dylan Fan Club again about hat Thin Wild Mercury Sound: Dylan, Nashville, and the Making of Blonde On Blonde. We talked with you here shortly after it first came out in late 2018, and now it’s been released this summer in paperback with new information which I do want to hear about and will get to shortly. First I was hoping you could give a little backstory on what inspired and led you to pursue the story of the making of this album.

Well I think the main motivation and opportunity was the fact that no one had written about what was arguably Dylan’s greatest record. And I believe the reason for that is it was so much a Nashville story. The authors who more or less specialize in writing about Dylan, or who have written multiple books about Dylan, none of them live here. They live on the West Coast, or in New York, or London. So, it shocks me that 50 years after the making of that record the story was still there for me to tell. But the reason that I was a good person to tell the story is because I’m someone intimate with the Nashville music history in terms of the non-country musical history – the rock and soul and jazz – and the cats who played with Bob Dylan on Blonde On Blondecame out of the rock and soul side of town.

They weren’t the country A Team guys, you know? Charlie McCoy was a multi-instrumentalist and not only the hottest harmonica player in town, but really the only one. So, Charlie as a younger guy often worked with those original cats, but he was kind of the ringleader of a younger group of guys who included members of his band, Charlie McCoy and the Escorts.

Dylan walked into a situation (with) guys who were around his age, most of them younger than 25. Charlie and Dylan are the same age; they were 24. Al Kooper was 22. Kenny Buttrey, the drummer, was 20. Joe South was 26. The old timers were only 28: Pig Robbins and Wayne Moss. So, they were all around Dylan’s age and they had picked up their instruments because of the same music that caused Dylan to pick up an instrument. The music that had “that thin wild mercury sound.” I mean, to me, if you listen to Chuck Berry or Little Richard or Hank Williams or Elvis, or any of the artists who were influencing Dylan, you can hear — there is something there. The exact quote when Dylan described his music in 1978 to a writer for Playboymagazine is “It’s that thin, that wild mercury sound, bright gold and metallic.” And to me, when I hear music from the ’50s which was the influential music for the artists I just named, it’s easy to kind of think, yeah, that’s bright gold and metallic!

When Dylan came to Nashville, even though he didn’t know these guys — well Al (Kooper) came with him both times and Robbie (Robertson) came for the second set of sessions — the Nashville guys were simpatico with him even though he didn’t know them, and it was because the music that inspired himinspired them. And on top of that, these guys, even at their young age, had done hundreds of master sessions by then. In 1966, when Dylan came to town to record Blonde On Blonde, Charlie McCoy had more than 400 other master sessions, so to me, Dylan came into the perfect situation. As Dave Marsh noted in an interview for my book: Who would have thought that where you go to create something totally new is not outside the system but all the way into the heart of the system. These guys, you know, they were session cats. They did play in Charlie’s band some of them, but Monday through Friday, they were doing sessions. Nashville was very much an industry town and a lot of people thought, you know, that they made records like it was mass-produced, like a factory. So you wouldn’t have necessarily thought that’s where Dylan would find, would come the closest that he ever came to capturing the sound that he was hearing in his head.

It’s such a fascinating story to me because it’s like this two-sided thing, you know: it’s these guys like you’re saying who are so honed at studio work and yet what they are taking on with Bob is so different. It seems like somehow the combination of their extremely finely honed chops at such a young age with this completely different style of doing things, leads to a totally new thing on its own.

And a masterpiece.

Yeah! One of my favorite chapters in the book is the chapter about “Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands.” Because it illustrates something that, like I said, I find so fascinating, how these Nashville cats who were so unused to, and probably confused to some extent by, the style of Bob and the way he went about these recording sessions, were at the same time able to give him so much of what he was looking for. You know, being woken up at 4 a.m. after being in the studio since mid-afternoon, with Bob finally ready to do some takes of this song, and they just somehow slide into it, and it’s perfect.

A lot of that speaks to the Nashville studio culture. Because the Nashville studio culture existed in service of songs. Nashville to this day is a song town. One of Nashville’s nicknames, and it has many – Music City, Guitar Town – but another one is the City Of Songs. I mean, Dylan wasn’t doing anything necessarily cutting-edge musically, you understand. But they helped him elevate his music and that’s one reason that that album stands out among all of his records, because it has the best musicianship on it. And I’m not saying there aren’t other albums that have good musicianship because there are, but that album has better musicianship than any of the others, in my opinion. The thing that they were unaccustomed to was the length of the songs, and the abstract imagery in the lyrics. If you were looking back through that “Sad Eyed Lady” chapter then you probably saw where Wayne Moss said he’s still trying to figure out what it means (laughs).

(Laughs) Love that, yeah.

Now the funny thing about that to me is that’s one of the easier songs to figure out since Bob told us years later that song was about his wife. Of course, Wayne didn’t know that later song, probably [referring to Sara and “Writing Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands for you”]. But anyway, I do think that these guys, you mention their chops, but you know, they employed those chops in service of the songs. They weren’t trying to show how fast they could play or anything like that, you know?

Right.

And that’s the reason, to me, that it really stands out musically. These guys were used to working together — and one other important element was that the Nashville cats used the Nashville Number System, which allowed them to quickly chart the chords for a song and then quickly work up an arrangement from there. Then if the key changed — and a couple times Dylan did change the key in the course of working through a song — you didn’t have to rewrite the chart because you just went by the numbers and you knew, “Oh, if it’s in the key of E then the ‘one’ chord is this and the ‘three’ chord is that.” So it made it really easy to quickly change keys or make adjustments in the studio. And of course that’s what Bob, after the February sessions, went back and told Robbie. He said, “Man, it’s amazing, I play them the song and they get in a huddle and within just a couple of minutes they’ve got it all arranged and everything.” And that’s because that’s what they were doing all day long, five days a week.

Yeah. You were talking about one of the things that was so unusual was the length of these songs, and of course none is longer than “Sad Eyed Lady.” I love how in that chapter Kenny Buttrey is talking about how they started playing on the first take of it, and a few verses in they’re all thinking, “OK, we’ve got to give it our all because it’s gotta be winding up soon,” so they’re peaking on like the third verse and of course there’s however many more (laughing). And you can hear that.

Well, another reason I wanted to write the book is I wanted to set the record straight on a lot of misinformation that was out there, and one big piece of misinformation was that Sad Eyed Lady” was done in one take, and actually there were four takes and three of them were complete takes. But the take of course that Buttrey and all of them remember was the first take, and unless you have The Cutting Edgebox set, you haven’t heard that.

Right. I of course have it (laughing)

Right, you do (laughs). But the cut that’s on the album, by then they knew it was a marathon not a sprint. The beautiful thing about The Cutting Edge box set, as you know, it allowed me to transcribe a lot of the studio dialogue, and one of the Nashville cats (Mac Gayden) helped me figure out who all the people talking were. So you can hear Charlie after they go through it that first time, and Kenny’s looking at his watch and going, “What the you-know-what?! We peaked five minutes ago,” or something. But you hear Charlie break it down for them. He goes, “It’s seven times through, then hang a D chord, if we get that far.”

But again, these guys, they were used to reacting on the spot in the studio, and coming up with ideas and going with them in the moment. So at one level all of this stuff is amazing, but on the other hand the reason they were able to do these amazing things is they were doing them all the time. In those days, there was a lot of creativity, a lot of young, yet seasoned musicians with a lot of energy and a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of creative talent. And all of that served Mr. Dylan, who was arguably the greatest creative talent then and now.

Are there other particular confluences between takes on The Cutting Edgeand parts of your book that are particularly fun to listen and read along? Anything in particular jump out?

Yeah, well, first of all, just let me say that the 18-CD box set, which Dylanologists call “Big Blue,” was the game changer for my book because that allowed me to listen to every take that was recorded in pursuit of the album that would become Blonde On Blonde. It was like 176 takes or something, beginning with “Medicine Sunday” on October 5, 1965 in Columbia’s New York studios. But a great example that I would point your club members to in the box set and in my book, is on “Rainy Day Women.” That was the final night in March when Dylan wrapped up the album and did like six songs and went from like six in the evening until seven in the morning. He went over to the piano and said, “OK, here’s the next song, and played them ‘Rainy Day Women’ on the piano. And (producer) Bob Johnston said, “Wow, that sounds like a Salvation Army song.” And Dylan said, “Can you get one!” And Johnston was like, “Get what? Get a Salvation Army band!” And he’s like, “Well, I don’t think so.” He looks at Charlie McCoy, and Charlie says, “Well, I can call Doc (Wayne) Butler (the trombone player from Charlie McCoy and the Escorts) and ask him to come. It’s midnight. So they call him, wake him up. Al Kooper said he loved it: like 30 minutes later the guy shows up, shaven, a suit and tie on.

That’s so awesome.

While they were waiting on him, Charlie was writing out the horn part that he was gonna get him to play. So when Wayne got there he was showing it to him, and Charlie says to Dylan, and presumably to Bob Johnston as well, “Hey, what if we start it out with some kind of a bass drum thing.” And they all say yeah and Kenny Buttrey actually plays the opening drum lick that we all know and love. After he plays it he says to Charlie — after everyone hears it and everyone’s going yeah, yeah, do that — he says to Charlie, “Hey Charlie, when I go da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da, whack, on the snare, you should have the trombone guy go ‘baaaa…’” And sure enough that’s what the trombone player does. So, like, in a two minute period, right there in the studio spontaneously, this idea combusted, and it became the signature opening to the song that as soon as we hear that drum and the trombone we know what song it is. There’s no mistaking what song it is.

Yeah. The opening to the whole album!

Yeah, so that signature opening was really something that illustrates how these guys were making magic for Dylan, in the studio, on the spot. Now, you mentioned the new material in the paperback book …

Yes let’s get to that.

Now, I missed my original deadline for this book by over two years, and one reason is because “Big Blue” came out, and I had an opportunity to go way deeper than I thought I was gonna be able to go because I could hear all the takes, and I could transcribe the studio dialogue. But the other thing that made it take so long is I knew I could not screw up. It was my first book, and it was Dylan. My first book was gonna be put under a microscope like no other subject matter would.

And sure enough, I set up a news alert for my book so I would get an email whenever something hit the news about my book. And within the first week I get a news alert, and I get a link to the stevehoffman.tv music forums — naturally there’s a Bob Dylan forum, and in only a matter of days, one of these Dylanologists that I later became acquainted with had set up a thread within the Bob Dylan forum that was the title of my book. So I click on the link, and I go there, and I read this amazing description of my book. This guy says, “Daryl Sanders isn’t a Dylanologist, he’s more of a Dylanographer.” I liked that distinction, and just pointing out that I was approaching it like a journalist because that’s my background. And I thought, “This guy understands my book,” and it made me feel so good that somebody got it, because, man, I worked my ass off, and I had no idea if anybody was gonna like it or not. I knew that I was satisfied, that I had given it my best work and effort, but I didn’t know … . So I signed up for the forum and went in and started interacting with these guys.

One is a guy named Roger Ford, who runs the site electricdylan.net, which is a tremendous resource for the three albums that Dylan allegedly went electric on: Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisitedand Blonde On Blonde. Roger Ford and another guy, Peter Coulthard, who both live in England, and a guy named HR from Chicago who set up the private conversation and who also set up the original thread about my book, the four of us began a thing where they were pointing out the mistakes in my book, and most of them were minor, like I said a tour ended on one day and it actually ended the next day, that kind of thing. I did have one mistake in the hardcover edition of the book that definitely needed to be corrected and has been in the paperback, and that was I had Michael Bloomfield playing guitar on the New York sessions for “Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat,” which were not released, you know, they came out, maybe one of them came out on the Bootleg Series, but prior to the Cutting Edge, none of those NY tracks made it. The version we all know was recorded in Nashville. These guys also were questioning the release date which — I had something different in my book than what has always been thought to be the date, May 16. I had June 20. But now I know that it wouldn’t have been June 20, the earliest it could have been was June 27. And therefore Blonde On Blondealmost certainly is not the first rock double album. At best, it might share that distinction with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention’s album Freak Out!

Also there was a question about a possible overdub on June 16 that in the hardcover edition I said Charlie McCoy says this didn’t happen. The Dylanologists gave me indisputable evidence that it did happen. And how we know that is when you listen to the U.S. version, as they would call it, of Blonde On Blonde, “Fourth Time Around” is different than it is on the French and Canadian releases, on which you can hear Al Kooper’s keyboard part. On the U.S. version that part’s been removed. And the only way to remove it was to erase the track — they were recording on four-track, and they were having to put multiple instruments on a single track. Al Kooper’s organ had been married with Kenny Buttrey’s drums, At some point Dylan had decided that he didn’t like Al Kooper’s keyboard part so on June 16, they went in and erased that track, and, on the fly, with no click track or anything, Kenny Buttrey recreated his drum track for “Fourth Time Around.”

So this is some exciting news, and still we may never know the exact release date, but at least we know it couldn’t have been June 20, and it definitely couldn’t have been May 16. But another important thing for people to know when they read these dates, like May 16 and June 20 and June 27, that is the ship date. So the actual in-store date would even be two, three, four, five days, a week even, later. The only reason, aside from just wanting to be accurate and nail something down as definitive, the only reason the date mattered to most people was because of the issue of whether Blonde On Blondewas the first rock double album or not.

Quite a bit of detective work for sure.

Oh, it’s still going on, I’ve still got this thread going with these guys. Just within the past 30 days, they’ve sent — you know, they collect news items to try and nail down the actual release date, and because of Roger Ford’s Electric Dylan site he has people sending him stuff. So, I recommend electricdylan.net to your members. And at some point you might like to do an interview or an online Q&A with Roger. He’s a tremendous resource.

Well this is some great new information to get in front of our members and introduce people who may have missed the release of your book initially.

Great. You know, the thing about Dylan, like I said, I knew people were going to be looking at every single word (laughs). And I’m a journalist. I’m committed to getting the truth. It doesn’t bother my ego at all! I’m thankful that these guys found my mistakes, and we were able to correct them in the paperback edition because my goal all along was to write the definitive account of the making of this album, and to have any mistakes was not ever in the plan.

50 Years of Blonde On Blonde: A Conversation with Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show

May 21, 2017

Old Crow Medicine Show is in the middle of a tour celebrating 50 years of Blonde On Blonde, performing the album start to finish (and encoring with a few additional Bob songs). The band debuted this show a year ago with two nights at the CMA Theater in Nashville, in conjunction with the “Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats: A New Music City” exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame, and they have a new live album out consisting of cuts from those shows. Old Crow is currently half-way through a US tour, then heading to the UK and the Netherlands in late June.

I had the pleasure and privilege of speaking with band leader Ketch Secor before their show in Knoxville, TN last Saturday night. We talked Bob, Blonde On Blonde, Old Crow, and got into the stories behind reworking these songs and what that was like. And, as any conversation involving Bob is inclined to do, our rap expanded backward and forward in time and space in terms of the music, the audience, and the scope it is all capable of attaining.

More importantly, get out there and see it for yourself if you can! You can find tour dates and ticket info on Old Crow’s website here. And you can buy the record or CD, with live cuts from last year’s Nashville dates, here.

Enjoy my interview with Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show. I sure did!

KS Hey, this is Ketch.

CS Hey, Ketch, this is Caroline with The Bob Dylan Fan Club. How are you?

KS Hi, Caroline, I’m doing great, thanks. Thank you for your call.

CS Good. Thank you for agreeing to set this up.

KS Yeah, glad to do it.

CS Well, again, thank you so much for granting this interview with me and with The Bob Dylan Fan Club. My Co-Director, Kait, and I are huge fans of everything that Old Crow does, and obviously also big Bob fans, so it’s kind of a match made in heaven, this confluence of Bob and Old Crow and Blonde on Blonde. I’ve been to three of the shows so far, including one of the Nashville ones last year, and I’ll be going to another three next week.

KS Wow.

CS So, yeah, I’m excited.

KS I’m impressed.

CS Well, for starters, it would be great to have you talk a little bit about your relationship with Blonde On Blonde and with Bob’s music in general and kind of how the idea for Old Crow to recreate Blonde On Blonde for its 50th birthday came to you; was there a particular conversation or moment of brilliance that inspired the idea, or was it something that you’ve been thinking about since you were a teenager? How did it all come about?

KS Well I’ve certainly been thinking about playing Bob since I was a teenager, even younger. I’ve been thinking about Bob’s music since I first heard it when I was 11 or 12 and it was so powerful to me at that time and continued to be and just went deeper and deeper. Blonde On Blonde was never my favorite Bob record and through this project I’ve really grown to understand it and I’m probably in the 99th percentile of understanding Blonde On Blonde. It kinda went past me, right? You know, it’s funny, the things that… this is a tangent, but… I think that the main reason that I didn’t identify with this record is because I never really liked the slow drag rhythm and blues sound that this band in Nashville was making; I just didn’t identify with it. And in all of the many masks that Bob wears, that’s one of the masks that I, um, you know if I wanna hear slow drag… if I wanna hear Bob and an R & B background, I’d like From A Buick 6. I think that the New York band really rocked it. And I just don’t think that the Nashville cats translated it, for my ears, as much. But for us to reinvent it or to, you know, reappropriate Blonde On Blonde is a perfect choice because, you know, it wasn’t sacred to me. It wasn’t like… it wasn’t like Jokerman, like, what are you gonna do with Jokerman? ‘Uuhhh, I dunno, man.” (Laughs) I feel like to reinvent Jokerman, you’d have to strip it down so far, like, it would have to be like, solo banjo, like maybe a bowed instrument.

CS That’s interesting. Well, I love all of the song arrangements and I really like the fact that some are quite true to the album versions, and others you can hear, you know, echoes of particular live versions that Bob played down the years of these songs, and some are just very different from anything Bob’s done and really veering off into new territory. I think it’s a really great and a really fun balance. Were there particular songs that when you guys were working them out came really easily or quickly, like THAT’S obviously the way Old Crow is meant to do this song? And then were there others that just took a little bit longer to reveal themselves in the way that you wanted to do ‘em?

KS They all presented different challenges. None of them were necessarily easier than… I guess the easiest ones were the ones where we didn’t change a whole lot. But even there, if we were just copying… like, for example, our version of Just Like A Woman. That’s my interpretation, or our interpretation, of The Concert For Bangladesh Just Like A Woman. So, I mean, that wasn’t that much of a challenge because you just gotta play that guitar style in the way that he did then, and that’s such a basic arrangement that that wasn’t very hard. But something like Temporary Like Achilles, um, was hard because… again, that slow drag blues… if you’re in a band that doesn’t have an electric guitarist, it’s hard to approximate that sound so for us to make that one into what to me feels like an up-tempo Buck Owens style country number, that’s a challenge sort of… that’s a really different direction. But the challenge of knowing that there was this incredible version of Just Like A Woman worth copying was probably just as hard to come by in the long run as it was to know that you should take Temporary Like Achilles and make it fun and kinda fruity.

CS I think that one’s really cool, it’s like a country swing dance number.

KS Because there’s so much. Because I’ve spent, probably like you, like a good 25 years in complete immersion of Bob, a project like this, it took a really long time to amass the information to be able to make these arrangement choices the way we made them. But then, in the moment of choosing them, it actually came really quickly, cuz I’d already done all the work. I already knew…

CS Yeah, in your head!

KS Yeah! In my head, I knew how I wanted Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine) to sound like.

CS Yup, that makes sense. I’d like to talk a little bit about Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands. It’s an amazing song and it’s so deep and personal and so mysterious at the same time and, like, when I’ve talked to our Fan Club members and to people about this project, that’s the song that most frequently people will be like, “How would someone other than Bob DO that song?!” Not like, how dare they, but like, how would somebody pull that off, and yet, I think you pull it off really majestically and really make it your own while just giving complete, you know, tribute to it. Was it daunting to tackle that one in particular, or does it just sort of fall into… was that one also just kind of worked out in your head?

KS No, that one was maybe the hardest one. That was the one that we saved for the end, both in the show and in the sequence of course, but also in making arrangements. We sort of pulled that one to the side and figured we’d wait and something would appear. The governing principle in many of our arrangements and this one in particular is live performance. So, Old Crow has a certain way of puttin’ on shows when we’re doing our own material. A song might be slow simply to be a springboard for the next song that’s fast and, uh, you just can’t end an Old Crow show on a waltz. We play a lot of up-tempo waltzes in Old Crow and we’ve played some slow ones, too, but Sad Eyed Lady in its 50-year form was not necessarily an appropriate choice for Old Crow to close down our concert. And so, we did what we do with last song of the night before the bows – we made it big. And we made it fast. And uh… I can’t remember, there was something that tipped me off about the… you know, I took a lot of liberties with the melody and I guess I was… I think I was listening to something on Self Portrait that made me think that way… or maybe it was… yeah, yeah, it’s that Isle of Wight stuff! I can’t remember what the song was, but there was something on the Isle of Wight… parts of… maybe it was a bootleg of Mighty Quinn from Isle of Wight…

CS And it kinda gave you the flavor for it?

KS Yeah. Well it’s got… Or maybe it’s like a little bit of ‘…just like old Saxophone Joe…’ You know, there’s like a bounce to it…?

CS Yeah.

KS … to our version of Sad Eyed Lady?

CS Yeah. You can sing along to it a lot easier than you can sing along to Bob’s!

KS But you know, it is a really deep and personal and very… as revealing as any song on that album can get. But then at the same time it didn’t feel sacred. I feel like Blonde On Blonde, at a certain point, has to enter into the statute of limitations by which common… music becomes common wealth. And that, you know, Bob… um, that, within the life span of Bob Dylan, this should happen. These songs, they mean more than the man who wrote them, than the recordings that… um… what’s the word… I’m looking for a word that has to do with jewelry… the recordings in which they are set. Yeah, so, it just feels like it’s time to think of Bob Dylan’s music as Woody Guthrie’s music, as, you know, Scott Joplin and Stephen Foster’s music… as Brahms, and Bach.

CS Yeah, well, you know, it’s the American way. People put stuff out there and other people pick it up and it’s all just sort of links down the chain, so… I get what you’re sayin’. So, you guys are playing Town Hall in NYC on Bob’s birthday. I think there’s probably a couple other places on the tour that you’re playing where Bob’s also played but that one has a real specialness to it, with a big breakthrough 1963 show, a lot of people called it his first major concert so, that’s pretty cool! Did you intentionally pick a place with a special magic to it to play on Bob’s birthday or did it just work out that way?

KS It just worked out that way. There’s been divine circumstances throughout the career of Old Crow Medicine Show and particularly as they relate to Bob Dylan. There’s just been a kind of divinity to the circumstances. You couldn’t have scripted it and for a really serious hardcore Bob Dylan fan like me this stuff is like, this is like the thing that you would dream about as a teenager that is a dream I’m sure thousands and thousands of young musicians also dreamed, “Oh someday I’m gonna write a song with Bob Dylan, oh, someday I’m gonna play Town Hall and sing Bob Dylan songs.” But we actually have gotten to do just that, and then some.

CS Are there any special surprises in store for that night, do you think?

KS Oh, you mean, happy birthday and the candles? I don’t know!

CS An extra song? Tomorrow Is A Long Time? (Laughs) Actually, no, don’t play that cuz I can’t be there so I’ll be really bummed!

KS You know, one thing we haven’t done a whole lot of is really rolling out the Bob… it’s so much work to do Blonde On Blonde and then, there’s such a curve ball to our fan base, who occasionally like Bob as much as I do but oftentimes like Old Crow more. They’re our fans and, uh, and so they… you know, I feel like it’s so much to expect an audience to jive with a performance of Blonde On Blonde, you know, if you were expecting, like, hillbilly music or Old Crow standards. In the encore position, even though I could play, you know, dozens and dozens… even though we could do it, I feel like maybe we’re supposed to play more Old Crow songs or something. So, it’s something of a dilemma but, you know, my band’s been at it now for almost 20 years and we never really threw that many curveballs. We’ve really cultivated a relationship with our listeners that has sort of been the governing principle of our enterprise… so, it’s FUN to finally say, “OK, now we’re just gonna do Bob!” On this tour.

CS Well I’m sure that you know that Bob has been covering the Great American Songbook on his last three albums, including his first ever triple album, so he’s really been focused on playing some of his favorite songs covered by people like Frank Sinatra and giving them his own spin. I’d love to hear what you think about that and just how that kind of fits into the whole flow of American and old-time music down the years that we’re talkin’ about.

KS In the liner notes on Planet Waves, he says these songs are, uh, something like cast iron torch ballads.

CS Cast iron songs and torch ballads, yup!

KS And, uh, you know, they’re not. But Bob says they are and, so, we believe him. When you stack Never Say Goodbye next to um, Hoagy Carmichael or… Frank…you know, they’re really quite different. And I think that, sort of like Old Crow might have a 15-year-old fan out there who just wants to hear Old Crow, and instead we’re gonna say, “Shut up, kid, you gotta listen to Bob!” and Bob’s doing the same thing. “Shut up kid, you gotta listen to Frank!”

CS I’ve heard you talk about Bob getting into the Country Music Hall of Fame and I think that’s something our members would be interested in hearing your thoughts on. So, do you think that’s gonna happen? Give us your opinion on that.

KS Well I believe very wholeheartedly that Bob Dylan belongs in the Country Music Hall of Fame, that his influence on country music… that he is one of country music’s greatest contributors, both directly with his own songs that are clearly evocative of the country music form and also with his sphere of influence in the Nashville music community. You know, songs like Johnny Cash’s It Ain’t Me Babe, or the influence that he has upon outside artists, collaborations with Willie Nelson… there’s so many things about Bob that have made country music a better place. And, really, I think my angle there… because I don’t know that Bob needs any more… that Bob is the one who needs the appreciation. But if Nashville could understand, or if Nashville could embrace Bob in a new way, I think it would widen the spectrum a little bit. There’s always been a real narrow way of thinking in country music that has polarized the sound and has really altered the story of country music. When you think about Bob Dylan’s childhood, you know, the Iron Ore Range – it’s just like Butcher Holler. When you think about Bob Dylan with his ear up to an AM radio crackle, you know, he’s doin’ the same thing that Dolly Parton did. He’s doing the same thing that Charley Pride did. He’s out in a far and isolated America listening in and wondering what it’s like there in the, you know, in the deep belly of the music, and it inspires him. So, it’s such a country music story. But I think that the polarizing effect is that Nashville wants to tell a story that is rigid and narrow, in which, you know, you come to Nashville with a guitar and a dream and Nashville makes you and you sing about certain subjects and not other subjects and there’s not a lot of rabble rousers up there on that Hall of Fame wall. But it’s the rabble rousers who have really made country music rich. So, tell your readers I’m workin’ on it! And I honestly think it’s gonna happen, I really do. I’ve talked to the right people and I’m gonna keep talking to them. And make my pitch and do much more of a concerted effort. Because, you know, the Nashville records aside… even if Bob never made a record in Nashville, he belongs in the Country Music Hall of Fame. But he made four of them. And you know, Bob Johnston is a Nashville cat, and Charlie McCoy’s playin’ those guitar lines on Desolation Row. He really breathed… he really swung the gates wide open in Nashville in 1966.

CS Well, anything else that you want to say before we wrap up here, in terms of this journey with Blonde On Blonde or Bob?

KS Well, I guess I just really appreciate the opportunity to promote this record in your circle. You know, there’s always so many different kinds of ways to pay tribute to Bob. And some of them are really great and, you know, I’ve heard a lot of them that I didn’t like that much either. I really like the ones where Bob is paying tribute to someone else. Like right now I’m thinking about Farewell To Tarwathie – you ever heard that one? So, that’s the one that The Clancy Brothers taught Bob that he turns into Farewell Angelina. And this process – the ‘tributing’ – it’s almost like feudal or medieval in its scope, you know? It’s a very age-old system of balancing between not just intellectual property but a kind of spiritual transfer. And, if we can be a part of that — and we are a part of that – but if we can be a part of that with this record, 50 years later, then this record continues to reach and do its work. And songs that Bob spun out in a motel room 50 years ago are now being heard and contemplated by new ears that never heard them and the potential for great change is increased. So, thanks for helping me tell the story.

CS Oh, man, no worries. We’ll post an article on our website and share it to our Facebook page which is real active and growing all the time, so it will get some nice exposure. We also have a section on our website called ‘Headin for Another Joint’ which is kinda like a road journal where my Co-Director Kait and I share stories from the road and write-ups of Bob’s shows that we go to. It’s a more informal, fun piece and I plan on doing a feature there on your tour and my experience with it.

KS Groovy. Thank you!

CS Thanks, Ketch! Have a great show tonight and I will catch up with you guys in Cooperstown.

OK, see ya then! Peace.

Dylan Goes Electric! Contest Update and An Interview with Author Elijah Wald

July 2015 – Congratulations to our winners Andy, Dag, David, Frank, Marty and Richard, who all won copies of Dylan Goes Electric! Big thanks to Dey Street Books for providing the copies for our contest. The book is now hot off the press so if you’re not among the winners, fear not – you can order a copy from the publisher, or from numerous other sites or your local book store!

Bob Dylan Fan Club: Thank you for writing such a wonderful book and for agreeing to answer a few questions for The Bob Dylan Fan Club.

I was struck by how your book is in large part a presentation of many different accounts, perspectives and opinions, rather than a particular point of view that you seem to be trying to get across. This makes it a fascinating recounting of events, since it comes at the subject from multiple angles and even admittedly through the haze of time and memory. I love this aspect of your book and found it very refreshing, as so many things that one reads about Bob Dylan seem to be written by someone trying to get their own opinion across as if it was fact!

That said, is there a key point or takeaway on the matter of Bob’s electric performance on the night of July 25, 1965 that you want the audience to ‘get’ from reading your book? Given the radical divergence in the ways that people recall that day, are there even any ‘truths’ to be revealed?

Elijah Wald: This may feel like I’m ducking the question, but my first answer would be that I hope people take away the understanding that there are many, many valid ways to view what happened that night. To me, Dylan never wrote a more profound line than “You’re right from your side and I’m right from mine.” A lot of people seem to have trouble understanding that two opposing points of view can both be right, but the job of a historian is to understand how people thought and felt in the past, and the more I tried to understand what happened at Newport that night, the more convinced I became that a lot of nice, smart, decent people disagreed about what they were seeing and hearing, and about what it meant–and I can’t honestly claim I know how I would have felt if I’d been there. So I guess what I’d like people to take away is a similar lack of certainty.

As for whether there are any “truths” to be revealed, sure: the basic facts of how long everybody played, and what they played, and that the crowd both cheered and booed. That leaves us with plenty to wonder about, but I at least tried to get those basics out there–and if anyone wants to check, the Library of Congress has the complete tapes and you can go there and hear them.

BDFC: One possible reason why Bob chose to play the electric set at Newport is simply that it showcased his most recent songs. Do you think he could have just been doing what most artists do, and playing songs from his current album, and not really trying to make any point or statement at all?

EW: Yes, I think that’s a very real possibility. He clearly was not prepared for the reaction, and clearly had not planned to play with a band until he got there, and the crowd on Saturday afternoon was yelling for “Like a Rolling Stone,” which was just hitting that week. So it seems very likely that he just decided to take advantage of the Butterfield Band and Kooper being there, wanted to test his new style live, and had no idea that it would be regarded as sacrilege. After all, nobody had complained about the Chambers Brothers or the Butterfield Band playing electric. (That’s one thing rock historians almost always get wrong: Alan Lomax, the most purist of the purists, had nothing against electric bands–he loved the Chambers Brothers’ set, and slighted the Butterfield Band because he hated white middle class kids appropriating ethnic and working class styles, not because they were electric.)

BDFC: What do you hope Dylan Goes Electric! achieves that is different from other writings on this subject?

EW: I would hope it leads people to think of Dylan more in the context of the scene(s) and music that influenced him, and to recognize how important music and musicians were to him. It is perfectly legitimate to think of his lyrics as the most important thing about him, but he was a musician before he became a songwriter and I would argue that for the last 20 years he has again been more of a musician than a songwriter–and, once again, he keeps going back to roots music styles rather than following pop trends. That was why I made Seeger a central figure in my story: to remind people that Dylan was formed by and remained part of Seeger’s world, rather than just thinking of him as a rebel against it.

BDFC: As you know, we held a contest for our Fan Club members to win a copy of your book. One of the questions that proved surprisingly difficult for people to answer correctly and completely was simply to name all the songs Bob played at Newport in 1965. Bob’s July 24 afternoon workshop set is even listed on his official website as only consisting of 3 songs, leaving out Tombstone Blues and If You Gotta Go, Go Now.

In researching your book, what types of records and documents did you use to help make sure you were getting things right? Did you gain special access to any writings, recordings, or anything else that no one had seen or heard before?

EW: As far as Dylan’s 1965 Newport appearances go, the first and most important sources were the tapes and film–and yes, I got access to the tape of his Saturday afternoon set, which has never been bootlegged and, to the best of my knowledge, has never been available even to the most assiduous collectors. Honestly, it is not an exceptional performance, but interesting for the early working version of “Tombstone Blues.” Beyond that, I dug up some newspaper reports no one else seems to have found — in particular, the one describing Dylan playing electric at 4am at Nethercliff, which I think cements the memory that the rehearsal was there (at least one writer had placed it in a hotel). Another useful source was Robert Shelton’s notebook, which settled the question of whether people were booing before the end of Dylan’s set, since Shelton was taking notes steadily through the set and wrote “some booing” as a note to “Maggie’s Farm.”

For future reference, the full setlist for the July 24 Saturday afternoon workshop was:

1. Tombstone Blues

2. Love Minus Zero, No Limit

3. If You Gotta Go, Go Now

4. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

5. All I Really Want To Do

BDFC: Bob seems to have always reached back for inspiration and forward to forge his own path simultaneously. Of course in many ways what he was doing with the songs on Bringing It All Back Home and subsequent albums was deeply influenced by traditional blues and other genres. What are your thoughts on Bob as this type of ‘folk’ artist — one who is both deeply affected by his roots and yet creating something completely new, throughout his career? Can you comment on this aspect in some of his more recent work?

EW: Dylan has never been a folk artist in the pure Lomax sense of a non-professional making music within a particular community–and Dylan himself has tended to stick with that definition, mostly using the term “folk” for older, anonymous songs rather than what he or other people write in the present to play at concerts. But if we use the newer terms “roots” or “Americana,” his work pretty much defines those categories. Especially after reading Chronicles, I get the sense that he does not care about “creating something completely new” anymore–he is writing in older forms, with older instrumentation, and seems to be enjoying the craft and not worrying about breaking any new ground. Which said, simply by going out every night and playing the music he wants to play rather than recycling old “hits,” he is doing something very unusual for a rock (or folk) star of his generation.

BDFC: After 1965, Bob next played the Newport Folk Festival in 2002. He performed the entirety of that show wearing a wig and a fake beard (and did this nowhere else on that tour). If you had to surmise, why do you think he did that?

EW: If I had to guess, I would say he was enacting a scene from a Western in which the locals had run him out of town and he was sneaking back in disguise. But that’s just a guess.

BDFC: What were some of your favorite conversations you had with people while conducting your research? Who shed light on something totally new for you? (And is Maria Muldaur as totally cool as she seems?!)

EW: Maria Muldaur is, of course, cool. For me, though, the single most illuminating interview was with Peter Stampfel, who gave me a completely different sense of Dylan’s early Greenwich Village style by describing it as a fusion of hillbilly and R&B, and also a much better sense of what it was like to be a Bohemian teen in the Midwest in the late 1950s. Honestly, I love doing this kind of research and a lot of the interviews were a huge pleasure, whether I ended up using much from them or not. For instance, I learned a lot by talking with Bill Hanley, who designed the Newport sound system, though very little of it is in the book, and it was great to meet George Wein, and fun to talk with Geoff Muldaur and Jim Kweskin, and of course Spider John Koerner, and Jon Pankake…. I could go on.

BDFC: What’s one of your favorite Bob Dylan songs?

EW: Right now, I’m completely entranced by “Floater (Too Much to Ask)” — I love the lyric, the jokes, the tune, the band, the arrangement… and it’s new to me. I had always been an “early Dylan” guy, and would have unquestionably picked something from “Highway 61” or earlier, but one of the pleasures of this project was that it forced me to go over the breadth of his work, and–maybe because I had decided to concentrate on his musicianship–I fell in love with “Love and Theft” and “Modern Times,” which I had not properly appreciated when they came out.