Bob Dylan (23 page)

“When we played live,” Robertson explains, “Bob would give me a lot of guitar solos—it was kind of a new experience for him, to have somebody he could just look over at, and they'd come out wailing; and when we were recording in Nashville, it was the same thing: he'd sing a couple of verses then look over at me, and I'd come out wailing! And it was at that point that the guys in Nashville accepted me, because I was doing something that none of them did, so I don't think they felt I was treading on their territory. They became quite friendly after that. I suppose the proof was in the pudding with these guys, that if you were doing something musically that they respected, then they respected you.”

‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands' took up the entire fourth side of
Blonde On Blonde
, a distinction rare even in the habitually elongated arena of improvised jazz, and unprecedented in pop music. For all that, it was only about the same length as ‘Desolation Row', around the eleven-minute mark; but Dylan evidently wanted the song to stand alone, considering it at the time “the best song I've ever written.”

A love song in five lengthy stanzas, it has a measured grace and stately pace that seems as much funeral procession as wedding march, with a depth of devotion absent from Dylan's work since ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit'. Though the song has more than its fair share of enigmatic imagery, there's no trace here of the jokey nihilism and existential absurdity that
marked out
Highway 61 Revisited
and much of the rest of
Blonde On Blonde
. This time around, clearly, it's serious.

In 1976, Dylan finally confirmed what everyone had known all along, when he admitted “Stayin' up for days in the Chelsea Hotel/Writin' ‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands' for you” in his song ‘Sara', from the
Desire
album. The late rock critic Lester Bangs poo-pooed this explanation with characteristic bravado in
Creem
magazine, claiming “I have it on pretty good authority that Dylan wrote ‘Sad Eyed Lady', as well as about half of the rest of
Blonde On Blonde
, wired out of his skull in the studio, just before the songs were recorded, while the session men sat around waiting on him, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer.”

There seems no reason to doubt either of these claims—the musicians were certainly kept hanging around while Dylan finished the song but, equally, he was known to work and re-work his more important songs for some time before recording them, and most of that work was probably done back in New York, before the Nashville sessions. But whatever the circumstances of its evolution, there is no doubting that the song's subject is Sara Lowndes, whom Dylan had married in a secret ceremony on November 22, 1965. Even relatively close friends were unaware of their marriage, and Dylan contrived to keep it under wraps for as long as possible—two days after the event, he answered an interviewer's query about the possibility of him settling down, getting married and having children with a brazenly disingenuous “I don't hope to be like anybody. Getting married, having a bunch of kids, I have no hope for it.”

It's perhaps an indication of the depth of his devotion that he conspired to shield Sara from the public eye in a way which didn't apply to his other female friends. Their relationship, it appears, had been conducted along such lines right from the start: Joan Baez's sister Mimi Fariña recalled overhearing Dylan making a secret date with another woman —whom she later realized must have been Sara—mere minutes after Baez had departed from a weekend get-together up at Woodstock shortly before the April 1965 UK Tour; and more recently, Edie Sedgwick (see entry for ‘Just Like A Woman')
was shocked to find out that the young pop rebel she had been courting was actually a happily married man.

Short, dark-haired and, indeed, sad-eyed, Sara had been married before, to
Playboy
chief Victor Lowndes—the “magazine husband” referred to in the final verse—but had since set about building a new life of her own. She appears to have been the perfect marital foil for Dylan, posing no threat to his ego and bearing him a string of children in quick succession. Possessed of a quiet but unimposing fortitude, she furnished him with a much-needed oasis of calm and sincerity away from the high-octane hurly-burly and habitual deceit of the entertainment industry.

There is a similar nocturnal feel to the song as there is to ‘Visions Of Johanna', and Al Kooper confirms that it was recorded at around three or four in the morning, after Dylan had kept the musicians on hold through the evening while he finished off the song. Charlie McCoy, bassist on the track, recalled wondering “what in the hell this guy was trying to pull” as they all sat around in the basement recreation room, playing ping-pong and drinking coffee. Used to being paid by the hour for three-hour sessions, by eight in the evening they were registering perplexity, and by four in the morning they were half-asleep when Dylan called them upstairs to play.

They had been surprised when ‘Visions Of Johanna', cut the previous day, had stretched beyond the seven-minute mark, but as ‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands' progressed, they began to wonder if the marathon song would ever finish. Dylan had given them only the sketchiest of outlines, and as each verse moved toward its chorus, they instinctively wound up the power, anticipating a conclusion, only to have to rein it all back in again as he began yet another verse. “People were looking at their watches and squinting at each other as if to say, ‘What is this—what the hell's going on here?'” drummer Kenny Buttrey told Bob Spitz. “I have to admit, I thought the guy had blown a gasket, and we were basically humoring him.” Fatigued, they tried to concentrate on their playing, desperate not to make a mistake and have to go through the whole song again.

Extraordinarily, the song was cut in one perfect take—a glowing testament to the abilities of these Nashville cats. With Kooper's organ adding wistful flourishes to Hargus Robbins' rhapsodic, rolling piano, and Buttrey's hi-hat keeping discreet time through the quiet passages, it remains a masterful piece of work, suffused with a weary resignation which seemed to signal the conclusion not just to
Blonde On Blonde
, but to a whole era. Nobody, however, could foresee the form that conclusion would take.

THE BASEMENT TAPES

By summer 1966, something had to snap; Dylan had simply been working too hard for too long on too many fronts.

His tour with the Hawks seemed to go on forever, and despite the extraordinary music they were making (as evidenced by the widely-distributed live bootleg purporting to come from the Royal Albert Hall concert in London, but actually recorded at the Manchester Free Trade Hall), in country after country they encountered the same mix of hysteria and hostility. Things got so bad that at the Paris Olympia concert, when sections of the crowd started whistling during a break between songs, Dylan responded, “I'm just as anxious to go home as you are. Don't you have a paper to read?”

Even his more supportive fans posed a threat, as he realized when a girl lunged at his head with scissors as he was leaving the stage at one concert, snipping off a lock of his hair. Things were getting dangerous out there, strapped to the accelerating projectile of fame at exactly the moment that celebrity became a global concept. Few others—the Beatles and the Stones, perhaps—had experienced such hysterical adulation before, and there had been more of them to share it around: for though he had his band alongside him, they went largely unrecognized; Dylan was the complete focus of attention.

The debilitating effects of the tour were exacerbated by his increasingly out-of-control offstage lifestyle, which involved lots of drugs and little sleep. Donn Pennebaker, who was filming the tour for another cinema-verité film, remembered Dylan being
physically sick in the back of the limousine in which he and John Lennon were traveling. But he refused to slow down, snatching every opportunity to work on songs. Pennebaker recalled watching Dylan and Robbie Robertson dashing off dozens of songs in a row one night, never even letting up enough to write them down; the next day, nobody could remember them. “I did it enough to know that there must be something else to do,” he said later of this period of constant touring. “It wasn't my own choice; I was more or less being pushed into it—pushed in, and carried out…”

He was not best pleased, then, when upon his return to America, he discovered that Albert Grossman had lined up another 60 concerts. Besides that, there was the usual round of interviews and promotional duties to be carried out in support of the just-released
Blonde On Blonde
, and there were broadcasters and publishers pushing for completion of the new tour film,
Eat The Document
, which Dylan was intent on editing himself, and his book
Tarantula
, which had seemed a good idea a year before when he had signed up to write it, but which had since become more of a chore. Everybody, it seemed, wanted a part of him. “Everybody is always taught to be thankful for their food and clothes and things like that,” he told Nat Hentoff, “but not to be thankful for their obscurity.” His values were changing.

The atmosphere was changing, too, as the downside of the fast life began to take its toll. Old friends like Richard Fariña, Geno Foreman and Paul Clayton had died—Fariña in a motorcycle accident, the others through drugs—and many of his own inner circle of friends, like David Blue and Bob Neuwirth, had slipped into drug addiction or alcoholism. Dylan had exhibited a fascination with death since his first album, and had recently admitted to Robert Shelton, “You know, I can think about death openly. It's nothing to fear. It's nothing sacred. I've seen so many people die.” All around Dylan, darkness seemed to be drawing in.

It seemed almost inevitable, then, when on July 29, 1966, Dylan was badly injured in an accident while out riding his Triumph 500cc on Striebel Road, near his home in Woodstock. Dylan had been an avid rider ever since buying his first bike, a Harley 45, as a teenage tearaway back in Hibbing. He was, however, a terrible driver, by all accounts. “He used to hang on that thing like a sack of flour,” recalled Joan Baez of her times out riding with Bob. “I always had the feeling it was driving him, and if we were lucky we'd lean the right way and the motorcycle would turn the corner. If not, it would be the end of both of us.” It was not the first accident he had been in: back in Hibbing in 1958, he had been badly shaken after hitting a three-year-old boy who had run out between parked cars, chasing an orange. Luckily, the
child wasn't badly injured. All he could remember, he told his girlfriend Echo Helstrom, was the orange rolling across the street.

After the motorbike crash in Woodstock, it was reported that Dylan had broken his neck, and rumors swiftly spread that he was either dead or in a persistent vegetative state, the next worst thing to dead. As it happened, he had merely cracked a vertebra, but he grabbed gratefully at the opportunity to take time out from his schedule to recuperate. All of a sudden, the biggest rock star in the world became its most reclusive, as Dylan followed the examples of his friends Marlon Brando and Phil Spector, and shut himself away from the world in Byrdcliffe, his Woodstock home. For the next few years, he shunned public contact, settling down to raise a family, paint, and maybe make a little music when the fancy took him.

As luck would have it, the Hawks had moved into a large pink house nearby, where, after more than a decade spent on the road, they were coming to terms with life as a group, trying to find their own sound in their own time. With equipment borrowed from Peter, Paul & Mary, they set up a makeshift rehearsal studio in their basement, and set about working on some new material.

“The tape machine was set up behind Garth,” recalls Robbie Robertson, “and he would just turn it on and turn it off, mostly. It was just a stereo input,
so I think we used four mikes mixed down to a stereo pair—it could have been more—but some of the sound was leakage on to another mike: a lot of things didn't even have a microphone on them, it would just leak on to another microphone. “It was just getting an idea down on tape, most of those things, so there was no care taken whatsoever with the quality of the recordings and the balances. They were done exactly the opposite to everything that you learn in how-to-make-a-record school: the worst thing you can have is cement walls, all studios have sound stuff all over the walls; and then there was a big furnace right in the middle of all this, which is bad for the sound—but nobody was thinking about what was right for the sound, it was just a case of getting an idea down on tape as a little blueprint or something like that. It was a discovery process, which was quite different from what we had done on our own in the past, and quite different from what we had done with Bob.”

Before long, Dylan was driving on over to hang out with them and play. The results, never intended for consumption, would take on legendary status when they were bootlegged as
Great White Wonder
, and were eventually officially released eight years later as
The Basement Tapes.