The Making of Blonde on Blonde

"A memory from the summer of 1966: Across the Top 40 airwaves, an insistent drum beat led off a strange, new hit song. Some listeners thought the song too explicit, its subject of wild lunacy too coarse, even cruel; several radio-station directors banned it. Despite the controversy over the lyrics about madness and persecution, or more likely because of it, the record shot to No. 3 on the Billboard pop-singles chart. The singer-songwriter likened the song, which really was a rap, to a sick joke. His name was Jerry Samuels, but he billed himself as Napoleon the XIV, performing “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!”

That spring, an equally controversial single, with an eerily similar opening, had quickly hit No. 2; and by summer, “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” had reappeared as the opening track on the mysterious double album, Blonde on Blonde, by Bob Dylan, who said the song was about “a minority of, you know, cripples and orientals and, uh, you know, and the world in which they live.” Over Coppertone-slicked bodies on Santa Monica Beach and out of secluded make-out spots and shopping-center parking lots and everywhere else American teenagers gathered that summer, it seemed that, the ba-de-de-bum-de-bum announcing Dylan’s hit about getting stoned was blaring from car radios and transistor radios, inevitably followed by the ba-de-de- bum-de-bum announcing Jerry Samuels’s hit about insanity. It would be Samuels’s last big recording; and after July, Dylan would be convalescing from a serious motorcycle crash. ..."

Mystic Nights - The Making of Blonde on Blonde in Nashville. Article in Oxford American by Sean Wilentz. (via del.icio.us/runky.funky)