Bob Dylan Is a Nashville Cat (A Bob Dylan Story, Chapter 3)

you thought you knew died. This is his story. It's the morning of day three, Sunday, July nineteen sixty six. It's been a long night here at my home in Middletown, New York, and the patient, Robert Zimmerman, a k a. Bob Dylan, is still in distress and seems to have had a slight reaction to the pain killers I've given him. His fever like state continues, although at this stage they are more lucid moments than not. I have put psychological

evaluation on hold for the time being. It's my suggestion that we treat his physical injury fully before we explore that. He's also refusing to go home, so he'll remain in my care here in my house for the foreseeable future. That was a decision that was made with the patient's wife, Sarah. We primarily made this choice because, well, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure that at this moment Bob knows where his homeless Nashville. That was important to me. Transfiguration, invention, reinvention,

those can all come in different forms. But you know, sometimes you actually need physical movement. Sometimes you need a change of scenery. If I never went to New York, then I would have existed if I'd never gone to Nashville. Who knows, creativity is a funny thing. You never know what's going to move the needle or how I went to that country town for the first time in it put my head into a different space. It put my

music into a new lane. And now I can see that it left a whole lot of blood on the tracks. Chapter three, Bob Dylan is a Nashville cap M. I need to get out of here. I need to get out outside. Hyde Park goes spinning by, and I feel like I haven't slept in days. I turned to the man next to me and say, I wish we could speak English, and he laughs. I thought I'd always record in New York. You know, it was Bob Dylan's hometown. Sure, Bobby Zimmerman was born in Duluth, but Dylan, he was

a New Yorker. But you can't just stay on one track your whole life. Remember, life is all about inventing yourself. At some point I would have to leave New York physical movement, and it all started on August four. We've been working on the Highway sixty one revisited album on which I decided to close. The whole thing was called Desolation Row. Another decision we'd come to was that it would be an acoustic song. We'd cut some electric takes, but I don't know. I knew an acoustic one would

just be better. So we booked some more studio time. But it didn't I don't know. It just needed something transfiguration, invention, reinvention. Bob Johnston, the producer in charge of the session, mentioned that he had asked a guy to come and watch us record. Now, I hadn't been with Johnston for too long at this point, but I trusted him. It turns out I was right to That guy who came by to watch us called himself Charlie McCoy. Charlie was a

Nashville player, a country guy. I knew Charlie's work. I think most people knew his work without even knowing they knew it. He was a killer harp player, still young, but man could he play. He did a spot on a song called Harpoon Man Blew Me Away. We had a little introduction courtesy of Bob Johnston, and just as he was gonna leave, I figured I'd throw him a curveball the new lane. I told him that we were just about to do a song and wondered if he

fancied sitting in. I wanted to see how he'd react. Sure, he said, completely unfazed. I told him to grab the acoustic guitar at the back of the studio and give us some licks. We had finished the take of Desolation Row within the hour. Within the hour, he put my head into a different space. We tried to get it in three different sessions before Charlie, but with him, the song just fell into place. He did these Flamenco type fills.

It gave the song a real identity Nashville. After he left, Bob Johnston told me that that's what it was like and now Shille That's how they did it. We released the Highway sixty one album later that month. That song with Charlie was the last thing we cut for the record. By the end of the year, I was back in the studio man that year Transfiguration. I started cutting songs for Bringing It All back Home, and then we cut Highway sixty one. Then before the year was out, we

were making Blonde on Blonde, Invention. The workload was beginning to show reinvention. Those first sessions for Blonde on Blonde in New York, they weren't good. I take responsibility. We didn't really have the songs, but the band. The band was the band, you see. I remember one session we were trying to get the track She's Your Lover. Now. Back then it was called just a Little Glass of Water. I'd written it about a relationship I'd been in and out of. We spent all day on that song. I

mean all day. Do you actually need physical movement? It started it too in the afternoon. Garth Hudson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson, all those guys I'd relied on before. We're there in a setting I knew well too Columbia's Studio A in New York City. It should have been easy, but it wasn't. Like before we started to cut the track, Bob Johnston asked me what the song was called from the control room, and before I could properly answer, Robbie said,

it's called you Can Have Her. We shared a laugh about that, but there wasn't much more laughter that day. As the minutes of the studio time ticked on, we tried the song a number of ways. By three pm, we changed the tempo and the arrangement. By four I was at the piano, then the guitar. By five pm we were no closer than we've been at two. Do you need a change of scenery? I lost my temper with them on one take. I don't know which one, take four thousand Maybe I just said to them together,

you've just got to play it together. Robbie bit back at me. We are, he yelled. He moaned that every take was different. They needed time to process it, to process my ideas. Creativity is a funny thing. Well, we didn't have time. Of course, every take was different. We were in the studio, which means you're paying for every second. You literally don't have time to waste. Plus, when I'm in the studio, I can't stand too many retakes. Doing the same song again and again sucks the life out

of them. He need to capture that magic. We try it again again. It fell apart. I shouted about how ugly the song was. We took a break at five thirty. I smoked and smoked and smoked. Seven pm. Still no good takes. We switched tactics and rehearsed a version we all liked. I remember looking at the big studio clock pm. We should have had the thing in the can hours ago. Another break, Then eleven PM came and went still working out the damn song. Then midnight I remember saying, I

can't hear the song anymore. It's gone and it had. It was two am when the band went home. I was alone with Bob Johnston. He asked me if I wanted to do another take. I said sure, Sometimes you need a change of scenery. So I sat at the piano and mumbled my way through the first verse. But then then something clicked. It all fell into place, what it should sound like, how we should structure it. The song's d n A. It just formed in front of me.

It put my head into a different space. By the time I had finished running through it, the song was there. We had our first complete take that I was happy with. Johnston asked from the control room if I should get the guys back to do one last take. No, absolutely not. I realized that very second the fault was with the band. I pressed the talk back button to the control room and I asked Bob a question, Hey, what time is the next flight to Nashville? I thought I was going

to be sick. I tried to breathe, but I couldn't get an affair. I put my fingertips over my eyes. What time was it? Six seven? I couldn't remember where the last twenty four hours had gone. The time I spent in Nashville recording from ninety six to nineteen sixty nine was an important time in my career. I cut some good albums there and also got to work with a hero of mine. I first met Johnny Cash at the Newport Folk Festival on one of my shall we say,

less eventful shows there. I remember after back in my hotel room, I jumped on the bed shouting, I've just met Johnny Cash. I couldn't believe it. You never know what's going to move the needle. By the end of the decade we were recording together, I was working in Nashville on the Nashville Skyline LP. The city had become my new recording home since the collapse of those Blonde on Blonde New York sessions. It was bearing fruit too.

I was cutting albums that I liked in a way that I liked Nashville Skyline like all them, Nashville LPs was quick to make, and it contained tunes that I still stand by today. Lay Lady Lay, for example, That's a big song for me. Norman Blake steel guitar and Kenny Buttery's drums and the highlight of that song. I'd wanted some bongos on the tunes, so Kenny found me some. I remember him running a cigarette lighter underneath them to tighten the skin. We added some cow was on top

of that too. Chris Christofferson, who would win his first Grammy only two years later, was working as a studio janitor at the time. Yeah, that's the truth. Chris had to hold the bongos and cow bell next to Kenny's drum kit. He just stood there holding them for all the takes. He should have won a Grammy for that reinvention. The sessions weren't always a breeze. There were also months of bitter disappointment. Jerry Lee Lewis was recording in Nashville

at the same time as us. Bob Johnston took me to see him, knowing I was a big fan. We went into his studio with Johnston being his usual affable self. Meanwhile, Louis was, well, whatever the opposite of affable is, this is Bob Dylan, Johnston said. The killer turned to me shrugged, said so, I suggested in my most friendly voice that we could do something together in the studio. He just paused, then said no, that was it. Two words, so and no. I would have admired his attitude if I weren't such

a fan. But Johnny Cash and I we had a much better meeting. Johnny was recording in the studio next to us. He came in and saw us cut Nashville skyline Rag and tonight I'll be staying here with you. He was very complimentary. He'd always been supportive. He had recorded a version of my song it Ain't Me Babe a couple of years before it beats mine by a country mile. He was truly the greatest of the grades. We stayed in touch since that first meeting, trading letters

and postcards. He defended me when all this acoustic electric nonsense started. He rightfully pointed out that country music was always electric, and no one found issue with that. After that session, we went out for dinner and the next day decided it was time we record it with each other. Bob Johnston had produced Johnny's Fulsome Prison album the year before, so everybody was comfortable in the studio. We also like

to work in the same way. While recording quickly with little or no overdubs, Johnston had made the studio into a sort of nightclub. The main lights were down low and he'd set up little lights everywhere. There was a ton of guitars on hand and a couple of microphones for me and Johnny. Before we started, Johnston said to us, both, I can't produce YouTube. You produce yourselves. Creativity is a funny thing. We both laughed, and before we knew it,

we'd recorded eighteen songs. Johnston wanted us to do another session together for a duets album, which I would have loved, but it never happened that session with Johnny though. That remains a defining moment for me. And while for the longest time only one song was released from it, Girl from the North count Free, the opener to Nashville Skyline, it meant everything to me. Johnny was and is the north Star. You could guide your ship by him. It

was a big time for him too. He had signed a deal with ABC for a new television show, imaginatively titled The Johnny Cash Show. Now I hated doing TV, really I did. I hated it. But when john asks you to appear on his show, what are you gonna do? Say no? No one says anything but yes to Johnny Cash. So I agreed to be on the first ever episode. I didn't realize it was live live. Usually these things are taped, but this was live. Playing live had become so alien to me. And now I was having to

do it in front of the whole country. And I do mean the whole country. People from coast to coast were tuning in to see Johnny and his music. Can hear they had Bob Dylan doing the thing that they all loved country music. Man, I had to do it well. Creativity is a funny thing. It was at the Rhyman Auditorium, a small venue at the best of times, but when you add in a camera crew, stage, set equipment, and

studio audience, well, it's suffocating. Johnny assured me it would be okay, but for the first time in a long time, I was nervous, beyond belief. They asked me to wear a velvet suit for the show. It's TV, they told me. I tried it on and felt even more terrified about the whole thing. I declined their offer. I knew I must have looked nervous because Kenny, the drummer, asked me if I was okay. Ship Man. He said, you look like a frightened kid at a talent show. You know what?

Kenny was right? Man Transfiguration H Jones. People led us to the stage and told us would be on in two minutes after his introduction, I was sweating. It was a mistake, all of it. I was sure of it. It put my head into a different space. Why was I even doing this? Why was I here? I hadn't rehearsed properly. If you run a marathon without training, you'd crash out after the first mile. Why did I think this would be any different. Johnny was on the other

side of the auditorium and he nodded to me. As the lights went out. They had the band in darkness, I mean complete darkness. They might as well have not been there. No one could even see them. It was just me in the spotlight, like I was at a James or something. At last. I was never comfortable with that pop star ship, especially not at this moment in my life that was important to me. Someone start to counting down from five to four. I thought to myself, what if I ran, just ran out that door now?

And then I cursed myself for picking a new song. I couldn't have picked something I'd played a thousand times before on a thousand stages. No. But before I could even finish that thought, I heard three, two one, and then a huge red light illuminated everything, followed by a spotlight. Johnny and his trademark drawl said, ladies and gentlemen, here's Bob Dylan, and I felt my stomach dropped. Fifteen stories I played, I threw it all away, and somehow I

didn't throw it all away. You never know what's going to move the needle or how even though the song's run time is only two and a half minutes, it felt like it went at a glacial pace. Later, I sang with john A live on air, which was even more exhilarating than in the studio. But the whole thing reminded me I wasn't the man I was before. Something had changed, maybe forever. I didn't know it that night, but the Johnny Cash Show would be my last fond

memory in Nashville. Music City would soon turn sour and I'd once again have to pack my bags and find a new creative home. We'll be right back after this. We were were. My cigarette was burning to the bitter end. I took one last drag and tried to get my vision and focus. I turned to the person next to me and saw the most famous man in the world, and he looked angry. Nashville saved Blonde on Blonde, no doubt about it. Me though I was pretty beat up at that point. The pace I was living at during

that time wasn't livable without drugs. The rate I was going always meant I was going to crash. The pills they could prolong that speed well for a little while. At least. Sometimes you actually need physical movement. When we were recording Blonde on Blonde in Nashville, I was still writing the songs. Some days I'd make the session players, Charlie McCoy, Wayne Moss, Pig Robbins, all those Nashville cats. I'd make them hang around in the studio until I

had finished the songs. Some nights they'd wait until two or three in the morning. I'd saunter in and say, okay, we're ready. Creativity is a funny thing. At first, I think they enjoyed it, but after a while boardom set in. They played cards and even invented a game where they'd throw quarters into the ceiling tiles. You could get them lodged in there if you threw them just right. This pressure for creativity meant that I had to have a stimulant to keep me going, and it worked just about

Who got the album done, didn't we? Even if the final session literally lasted all night until the dawn. Those cats, man, they could play Nashville. They got the songs, they helped get down on tape what was in my head. Sometimes you need a change of scenery. There was one evening that stayed with me though after a rehearsal of the song Rainy Day Women. I asked the guys in the band what they did here, you know, when they weren't busy making records. They weren't used to artists asking them that.

I could tell the song talks about getting stoned. So is it about drugs? Make up your own damn mind, use your own ears. I'm not here to discuss that. But for the song to work, to have the atmosphere that I wanted to have, I needed everyone in the studio to be in the right frame of mind. It put my head into a different space. I couldn't make this song with everyone straight. So we came up with a plan. We sent one of the studio custodians out

to a bar. Now Nashville cats never drank in a studio ever, so this was quite new to them, and they took to it instantly. There was one slight problem, however, I had sent out for a drink I had seen somewhere um lepre con cocktail. You heard of him? No, me neither, Well, not before Nashville. Anyway. They're supposed to come in a shot glass of miniature yet highly toxic concoction. But the custodian became back with all these drinks in

milkshake cartons. They were gigantic transfiguration. We drank him down, of course, they were like razors on your throat, and that feeling only got wilder when we passed round joints too. The atmosphere was finally taking shape. That was important to me. Later someone had the idea of putting a trombone on the song, and so we called up a friend of one of the cats, Wayne Butler. Woke him up in

the middle of the night. He got dressed, grabbed his trombone, came to the studio, took a quick swig from the milkshakeed Carton, played his part, and then went right back to bed. That was it. I wanted them all to sound like a salvation army vand that had been defiled, and let me tell you, they delivered. That's what it was like in those sessions. But that's not what it was always like with drugs. Later that year, I was in London, Man London had become a drag. This was

on that Judas tour. You recall, I'm still struggling to escape from that damned tour. I'll be struggling to escape it for the rest of my life, mark my words. Who knows. I'd been up all night with John Lennon at his house in the Suburbs. We decided to get his driver to take us into London to have a look around the place. It all seemed so pretty in that spring morning light. But somewhere between the Rits and

Hyde Park, the hangover and come down kicked in. The whole thing was filmed for that ABC documentary, the one I was supposed to be working on in Woodstock. Look, the footage is awful. There you have two of the biggest musicians in the world, not solving any problems, not writing any songs, just blabbing on, talking shit. It wasn't just the drugs though. John and I were too tens around each other. I can never exactly say why. We

were similar in a way I guess too similar. We would never have made it work in the studio together. Creativity is a funny thing now. George Harrison he was a good writing partner. I always got on with George. We wrote and spent time together. We ended up becoming good friends. Hell, we'd even end up in a band together. But John, John was different. He'd tell me years later about how uptight he was in the car that day, and not just because of the junk we were on.

I don't know. I was embarrassed about it all, being out of control, burnt out. I didn't want him to see me like that. That was important to me. I was a mess. You know, you can't hide it when you're a mess. The veil had slipped and I didn't have the energy to pick it back up. As the car journey wore on, I knew I was going to be sick. I remember saying I was going to be sick right into the camera. I've done and said everything else straight into that fucking camera on that tour, so

why not be sick in front of it. They'd love that Judas crowd that would finish off their story, the final miserable act of their former folk hero. I was sweating and I couldn't see straight. My mouth tasted of cigarettes and snot. Even the pale morning light gave me a headache through my shades. I said to John, look, I don't want to be sick in here, but I'm going to be sick. He made some quip about a remedy for sore eyes, groovy forehead or curly hair. I

couldn't even respond. Sometimes you need a change of scenery. Later, when he dropped me off at the Mayfair Hotel, I made good on my promise and spilled my guts everywhere. I thought back to Nashville. While in that hotel, sobering up, I thought about how fun drugs used to be. That crazy night while still recording Rainy Day Women in the morning after two those quarters still dangling from the ceiling tiles.

As I was finishing off some lyrics, the cats were in the next room on a break, playing with a Luiji board. I'm not even joking. They were having to find new ways of keeping boredom at bay. Between takes. The bass player, this guy named Henry Stress Lucky. He said, you know this is going to be the biggest album in the world, or it ain't gonna do nothing. Then I grabbed the lyrics sheet to I Want You and told him I was ready to go again. J New

York City. Tom Wilson stood in the middle of Columbia Records Studio A and narrowed his eyes at Bob Dylan. His scrunched up eyes did the talking forum. What the fuck man? Tom Wilson was the producer, not Bob Dylan. Dylan didn't know what the hell he was talking about. He was way out of his league. He wanted Wilson to actually turn the organ up in the song's mix. Wilson shook his head. That cat's not even an Oregon player. Man. Dylan jumped out of his seat and moved the goddamn

fader himself. He looked Wilson in the eyes. Don't ever tell me who's an organ player and who's not. Tom Wilson kind of had a point. The guy on Oregon, Al Cooper, wasn't actually an organ player, or a piano player for that matter. He was laboriously working out the song's chords and sequence on the HAMM and B two keyboard, which he did by waiting for the rest of the band to play a chord before he would join in

behind them. It resulted in a delayed organ riff that, to Tom Wilson sounded like a child's third lesson, but to Bob Dylan sounded just right. When Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone was released as a single in the summer of nineteen, it shattered the earth, and that argued over organ riff was left up high in the mix just where Bob Dylan had put it. Bob Dylan's journey to Nashville was a long time coming, and it actually started

before the fateful Newport Folk Festival. Up until the recording of Like a Rolling Stone, Dylan had made most of his records with producer Tom Wilson, but for both the producer and the artist, the sessions for Like a Rolling Stone would prove to be the last straw. The relationship soured when Wilson named Dylan's fourth album Another Side of

Bob Dylan. Dylan wasn't overly impressed with it, but he was less impressed when, just the year before, Wilson had booked a session without Dylan's knowledge in order to add some overdubs to his recordings. While Wilson was a godfather of folk music, Dylan decided he'd had enough. He needed a facilitator in the producer's chair, not a babysitter, and since Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman also had a fraid relationship

with the producer, the decision was an easy one. Wilson was out after the Newport Folk Festival, Bob Johnston was in the control room. He received the call from Columbia Records a few weeks before ever the Southern Gentleman. He actually called Wilson to explain the situation, to which Wilson replied, help,

I knew they were going to fire me. Bob Johnson, on the other hand, it long admired Dylan and had even explicitly expressed his desire to work with him, and now he could go into the forthcoming sessions with a

clear conscience. In those early Highway sixty one sessions, while in the presence of Grossman and Columbia Records Vice chairman Bill Gallagher, Johnston suggested Dylan might one day want to record in Nashville, and Dylan brushed off the suggestion as he did, and Johnston couldn't help but notice Gallagher and Grossman exchange glances. A week later, Johnston sat outside Gallagher's office at the Columbia Records Building, and he tried to comb his messy hair with his fingers, and he buttoned

up a shirt. He attempted to calm his nerves. He tried, but could not imagine any scenario where the record producer being summoned to the vice chairman's office was a good thing. Columbia Records Vice Chairman, Bill Gallagher's secretary appeared and he was ready. Johnston walked inside Gallagher's office and after Grossman sat next to the vice chairman's large wooden desk, gross and dwarf the damn thing. His huge physical presence was

matched only by the presence of his character. Grossman didn't say hello. In fact, he didn't say anything until after five minutes of forced conversation between the other two men. He addressed Bob Johnston directly, if you ever mentioned Nashville to Dylan again, we will fire you. The words were half spoken and half spat. Gallagher attempted to soften the delivery. What Albert is trying to say is we're having too

much success the way things are at the moment. Gallagher and Grossman outlined in no uncertain terms that Bob Dylan was the quintessential New York hipster and after everything that had happened with his career image, that the music over the last few months Nashville will be a change that Columbia was not willing to accommodate, so instead Johnston brought Nashville to Bob Dylan. The next month, he called Charlie McCoy into the Desolation Rose Session, and Nashville immediately became

an inevitability. Once Dylan had seen what Nashville could offer in the form of McCoy's stunning guitar work, it rendered both Gallagher and grossmen powerless, and if they wanted to argue, they would be the ones who would be fired, and they'd wind up wherever it was Tom Wilson had crawled

off to Bob. Dylan's time in the Capital of Capital c Country was time well spent, and not only did it deliver one of his greatest albums in the form of Blonde on Blonde, but it also brought him back into the studio after his nineteen sixty six motorcycle crash. Once installed in the city fully, he recorded his next

three LPs there. Two of those albums, seven John Wesley Harding in sixty nine Nashville Skyline, were commercial and critical hits, confirming Dylan's artistic status debilitating motorcycle accident be Damned, and simply by making those records, he changed Nashville forever. After it was revealed that he cut his magnum opus and one of rock's first and finest double albums in the city.

The floodgates opened, Nashville became not just a center for country music, but a center for music, partly due to the fact that Dylan had included the names of the album's musicians those Nashville Cats across the LPs gatefold. However, by the turn of the decade, the magic and refuge Nashville had given Dylan was starting to wear off, and for the nineteen seventy album New Morning, he returned to New York. He wouldn't cut another studio album in Nashville.

His time in Nashville also coincided with the end of the sixties, a decade where Dylan had been both the poster boy for a generation and its saboteur. His celebrity had swelled and burst. He'd gone on a supersonic pace and then slowed to a crawl. It was a decade of change and reinvention for both him and for the world, and in many ways the fate of both were intertwined. The next decade, the nine seventies, would bring even more change.

The ride would be rougher, fate's simple twists not so simple, and there would be plenty of blood on the tracks. Blood on the Tracks is produced by Double Elvis in partnership with I Heart Radio. It's hosted an executive produced by me Jake Brennan, also executive produced by Brady Sadler. Zeth Lundie is lead editor and producer. This episode was written by Ben Burrow, Story and copy editing by Pat Healy, Mixing and sound designed by Colin Fleming. Additional music and

score elements by Ryan Spreaker. This episode featured Chris Anzeloni is Bob Dylan. Sources for this episode are available at double Elvis dot com on the Blood of the Tracks series page, follow Double Elvis on Instagram at double Elvis and on Twitch at s Grace Slant Talks, and you can talk to me per Usual on Instagram and Twitter at Disgrace Landpond, rock and Roll Crazy, or Dad