Trivia / Blonde on Blonde

• Enforced Method Acting: Mostly recorded in Nashville with professional studio musicians, so Dylan pulled a lot of tricks to loosen them up, including making them trade instruments with each other ("Rainy Day Women"), "forgetting" to tell them just how long a song was ("Sad-Eyed Lady"), et cetera.
• Multi-Disc Work: While multi-LP releases were already common for longer classical and jazz releases (especially the former), Blonde on Blonde was the first double studio album in rock music, though it cheats a bit by placing "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" alone on its final side, even though it's only about half the length of the other sides (the song is basically the same length as "Desolation Row", which comfortably fit onto his previous single album Highway 61 Revisited). Because of its 73-minute runtime, it was able to fit onto a single cassette and CD in its later reissues.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: Until researchers finally cleared things up, it was widely believed by Dylan fans that The Hawks/The Band backed him on "One of Us Must Know", the only song not recorded in Nashville (it was actually just two-fifths of them, with Robbie Robertson on guitar and Rick Danko on bass alongside various Highway 61 Revisited vets^* Al Kooper on organ, Paul Griffin on piano, Bobby Gregg on drums), and that "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" was done in a single take (the released version is the fourth and final take, finished at the end of an all-night session that got delayed because he had to finish writing the lyrics).
• Release Date Change: May 16, 1966 was cited for decades as the album's release date, but eventually some Dylan fans and commentators noted that evidence seemed to point more toward a late June or early July release. After scouring Sony Music's databases, biographer Clinton Heylin confirmed in 2017 that the album actually came out on June 20. It may well have originally been scheduled for May 16, only for Dylan to postpone it to do some last-minute tinkering, like he did with Blood on the Tracks years later (which might be further corroborated by the fact that there was an overdub session for "4th Time Around" on June 16, four days before the album's release).
• Throw It In!: "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" has one genuine flub on Dylan's part ("I sp—he built a fire on Main Street") and one other possible one ("the tea preacher" might be because he started to say "teacher" instead of "preacher" and corrected himself).
• What Could Have Been: Dylan had initially wanted to record the album with The Hawks (later to be known as The Band), but after being disappointed with the results of some early sessions in New York he decided to dismiss them (apart from guitarist Robbie Robertson) and work with a different backing group instead. He would tour the UK with them later that year, however, and would go on to collaborate with them on numerous other projects.
• Working Title: Boasts such classic tunes as "A Long-Haired Mule and a Porcupine Here", "What You Can Do for Your Wigwam" and "Seems Like a Freeze-Out"...or, as they ended up becoming, "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35", "Pledging My Time" and "Visions of Johanna".
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Dylan wrote a good chunk of the lyrics for this album in the recording studio, often leaving the musicians to jam or play cards while they waited for him to finish.

---