Nashville will always be the home of country, yet Rock &
Rollers such as Paul McCartney, The Beach Boys, Neil Young, Mike Nesmith, The
Byrds, and R.E.M. all recorded there. This pop gravitation toward Music City
started in earnest when Bob Dylan cut Blonde
on Blonde there in 1966. If there’s an artist who tends to lead his peers
around like a Pie-Eyed Piper, it’s Bob.
Dylan’s time in Nashville is the focus of Daryl Sanders’s That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound: Dylan,
Nashville, and the Making of Blonde on Blonde. At 200 pages, the book is a
quick read, kind of like what a 33 1/3 book would be if the series banned its
writers from pretentious tangents and navel gazing. Sanders keeps the narrative
focused, describing the circumstances behind the writing and recording of each
of the album’s fourteen luxurious rough gems. There’s light analysis (Sanders
notes that “Just Like a Woman” is “intentionally sexist” without daring to
explain why Dylan would want to write such a thing) and pretty extensive
biographies of the great Nashville session men who brought Rock’s first double
album to life.
Sanders could have pumped a bit more life into Nashville,
itself. He plainly states the significance of having a Rock musician record in
the Country Capital, but there’s only spare sense of the abrasions of two
worlds colliding. The Nashville Cats think it’s a bit weird that Dylan’s songs
are longer than three minutes, and some bluegrass-playing studio visitors sneer
at bluesy stuff like “Pledging My Time”, but the only thing that really shines
a light on the town’s friction is a short but scary anecdote in which Al Kooper
discusses being chased around town by a clan of Good Ol’ Boys. Yet for a tidy
rundown of session facts spiced with quotations from a lot of the guys involved
in them, That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound hits
the spot.
