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''Blonde on Blonde'' peaked at #9 on [[Billboard Music Charts|Billboard]]'s Pop Albums chart in the US, eventually going double-platinum, while it reached #3 in the UK.
In [[1997]] ''Blonde on Blonde'' was named the 16th greatest album of all time in a 'Music of the Millennium' poll conducted by [[HMV]], [[Channel 4]], ''[[The Guardian]]'' and [[Classic FM (UK)|Classic FM]]. In [[1998]] [[Q_(magazine)|''Q'' magazine]] readers placed it at number 47.▼
==The Recording Sessions==
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"The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the ''Blonde on Blonde'' album," Dylan would later say in 1978. "It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up. That's my particular sound. I haven't been able to succeed in getting it all the time. Mostly I've been driving at a combination of guitar, harmonica, and organ."
==The Songs==
[[Salon.com]] critic Bill Wyman praised ''Blonde on Blonde'' for its songs and performances, writing that "[Dylan's] singing alone is a catalog of the human emotion genome, excepting perhaps mercy. Dylan swaggers, brags, sighs, loves, loses, smiles, grieves, pleads, lusts, swoons and trips - and that's just on 'Pledging My Time' and 'Visions of Johanna.' The album contains 'Just Like a Woman,' a love song so elegant and confused it's not clear today, nearly 35 years later, whether it is insufferably condescending or startlingly loving. Another picaresque, 'Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again,' has his most canny female character -- Ruthie, who tells him that his debutante just knows what he needs, but she knows what he wants. The album ends with a song that took up an entire album side back in the vinyl days, a love song to Sara Dylan, 'Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,' more feverish and disturbed than even Van Morrison's ''[[Astral Weeks]]''."
"Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" opens ''Blonde on Blonde'' with "a Salvation Army sound," as Dylan describes it. Wyman referred to it as a "stoner anthem" due to its drunk atmosphere and the continual use of the word "stoned" ("But I would not feel so all along / Everybody must get stoned"), but as Clinton Heylin writes, the song generated "some controversy among those unconversant with Proverbs 27:15." ("A continual dropping in a very rainy day and a contentious woman are alike.")
Though every song on ''Blonde on Blonde'' has received a fair share of critical acclaim, the most important and celebrated song on the double-album is arguably "Visions of Johanna." Heylin wrote that it was perhaps "his most perfect composition. The song's imagery is bone-chillingly precise, even as its subject matter, the omnipresent yet physically absent Johanna, hovers nebulously out of reach."
[[NPR]]'s Tim Riley writes that "'Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again' may be rock's grandest costume piece, balancing displacement and alienation with the offhand hatchet job (Shakespeare hitting on a French girl, the preacher 'dressed / With twenty pounds of headlines / Stapled to his chest')."
When Dylan played an early acetate of "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" to his friend, Jules Siegel, he told him, "Now that is religious music! That is religious carnival music. I just got that real old-time religious carnival sound there, didn't I?"
==Different permutations of ''Blonde on Blonde''==
''Blonde on Blonde'' has been issued in no fewer than eleven different forms, with marked differences in mixes and track lengths. No specific version has been established as canonical. In at least one European market, it was originally released as two single LPs. Even the album's original release date remains in doubt; while Columbia reports an official date of May 16, 1966, several Dylan discographers have challenged the date. In 1968, Columbia revised the album cover's inside gatefold.
==Aftermath==
''Blonde on Blonde'' was a commercial success; it even spawned several hit singles that restored Dylan to the upper echelons of the singles chart. However, it was an even greater critical success. As critic Dave Marsh wrote in <u>The Rolling Stone Record Guide</u>, ''Blonde on Blonde'' is widely regarded as one of Dylan's "best albums, and [one] of the greatest in the history of rock & roll."
"A sprawling abstraction of eccentric blues revisionism, ''Blonde on Blonde'' confirms Dylan's stature as the greatest American rock presence since [[Elvis Presley]]," writes Tim Riley. Critic [[Greil Marcus]] wrote that ''Blonde on Blonde'' is "the sound of a man trying to stand up in a drunken boat, and, for the moment, succeeding. His tone was sardonic, scared, threatening, as if he'd awakened after paying all his debts to find that nothing was settled."
▲In [[1997]] ''Blonde on Blonde'' was named the 16th greatest album of all time in a 'Music of the Millennium' poll conducted by [[HMV]], [[Channel 4]], ''[[The Guardian]]'' and [[Classic FM (UK)|Classic FM]]. In [[1998]] [[Q_(magazine)|''Q'' magazine]] readers placed it at number 47.
Soon after handing the final mixes of ''Blonde on Blonde'' over to Columbia Records, Dylan flew to Hawaii for the first of many concerts scheduled in a two-month tour. The album would not be released until mid-May of 1966, and until then Dylan had a series of concert engagements to attend to.
Despite their disappointing performances in the studio, the Hawks were far more successful on-stage. Though some 'fans' remained prejudiced against Dylan's new musical direction, the Hawks would eventually become Dylan's most celebrated touring band. That reputation would be secured with the upcoming tour, arguably the most celebrated tour in rock history, and eventually documented in ''[[The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert]]''.
==Track listing==
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