In 1965 and 1966, Bob Dylan went on a creative sprint that has never been matched. Over the course of fourteen months, Dylan recorded Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited — and then capped it off with Blonde on Blonde, rock’s first significant double album. Cut in Nashville with an ace team of studio musicians (and, for the first time, Robbie Robertson as Dylan’s lead guitar foil), the album had a tense, shimmering tone that Dylan described as a “thin, wild mercury sound.” Though unfortunately it opens with the tiresome one-liner “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35″ (universally known as “Everybody Must Get Stoned”), after that the Blonde on Blonde reaches some of Dylan’s greatest heights — which is to say, the very pinnacle of rock.
