Apparition in brown suede

Alternate photo for the cover of Blonde on Blonde

He stands at the mouth of the empty alley.

The wind makes a nest of his hair;

the cold deciphers the pattern in his scarf.

It tells how he met her Sunday morning

(writing terza rima in the automat,

among cups of cold coffee and a bandaged flute);

how they discussed Dvorak and Doc Watson,

and he explained, over apple pie, that he had a dream

of orchards where the pickers sang "Desolation Row";

how he moved in with her on Sunday night

with his photographs of Nashville in a bag

and a new guitar he'd polished like a Buick;

and how she's thrown him out before breakfast

for insisting the window be open all night,

for leaning out into the New York sky

and trying to connect the scattered stars

into some vaguely human figure, no matter

what direction it might be moving in--

a brand-new, man-shaped constellation,

even if it was playing a Hammond organ

plugged into the aurora borealis.

New Brunswick, 1969

Like many Americans of my generation, I remember exactly where and when I bought my first copy of Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde in 1966. I was so eager to hear it that I ran straight to the new Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center and put it on a turntable there.

It was a lot wilder and more soulful than Bringing It All Back Home, the Dylan album I knew best in those days. For a few weeks I listened to "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" every night before I went to sleep.

I wrote this three years--and many hours of listening--later, still very much enthralled by Dylan. (If you've ever wondered about the photo on the album cover, it was taken on Jacob Street in lower Manhattan, now the site of Southbridge Towers.)

• Excerpts from each of the album's songs on the Bob Dylan site
• A track-by-track account of the album
• A track-by-track account of the album (in espanol)
• A track-by-track account of the album (auf Deutsch)
• A brief review from the BBC's site

Photograph by Jerrold Schatzberg