Now you stand with your thief, you're on his parole

Bob Dylan - 'Sad Eyed Lady of The Lowlands' (Blonde on Blonde - 1966)

By 1966 Bob Dylan was truly cemented as The Voice of A Generation; no matter what The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Beach Boys did as representatives of high/low culture, not even John Lennon by the end of the decade was held up as someone whose every utterance should be poured over for what it meant and what it really meant. So, it is amusing to see just how playful Dylan was already at this point. Take this Feb 1966 interview with Playboy¹ magazine.

DYLAN: …I do know what my songs are about.

PLAYBOY: And what's that?

DYLAN: Oh, some are about four minutes; some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve.

PLAYBOY: Can't you be a bit more informative?

DYLAN: Nope.

Even though the interview was conducted in late 1965, with only ‘Desolation Row’ topping out at that length by the time the magazine was released, he was well on his way to recording one that was one second longer than the Highway 61 Revisited closer at 11 minutes and 22 seconds which takes up all of side four of the double LP Blonde on Blonde.

If there was any doubt about who ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ was about, and even at the time there wasn’t, Dylan confirmed² on ‘Sara’ from 1976’s Desire that the song was for his wife, Sara Lownds.

Stayin' up for days in the Chelsea Hotel,
Writin' "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" for you.

Which is pretty un-opaque as far as a statement from His Royal Bobness goes.

Dylan started the recording of Blonde on Blonde in New York in October 1965, not even two months after his second album of the year, Highway 61 Revisited. Progress was slow, and in one of the better choices made by anyone in the history of rock music, Dylan’s producer Bob Johnston suggested they move to Columbia’s Nashville studio. That meant recording would continue with Robbie Robertson, Al Kooper, and some of Tennessee’s best session musicians.

As with any Dylan album, we know plenty about the recording sessions. On 15th February, the recording session was set to begin in the early evening, but Dylan took the opportunity to work on lyrics while the musicians waited. They talked, they slept a little, and they played cards. By 4 am, Dylan was ready to record. He explained how the song went, and they were rolling, Bob.

Kenny Buttrey, the drummer, recalled;

If you notice that record, that thing after like the second chorus starts building and building like crazy, and everybody's just peaking it up 'cause we thought, Man, this is it...This is gonna be the last chorus and we've gotta put everything into it we can. And he played another harmonica solo and went back down to another verse and the dynamics had to drop back down to a verse kind of feel...After about ten minutes of this thing we're cracking up at each other, at what we were doing. I mean, we peaked five minutes ago. Where do we go from here?

The session lasted until half five in the morning, and three complete takes and one incomplete one were laid down,³ with the last one being the album version. When the session finished, Sara came to pick up Dylan at 7 am, and Kooper said, "he asked that they play that track for her".

So what was Dylan doing for 8 hours with a pen and a piece of paper? If we rewind a couple of months back to November 1965, Dylan had married Sara Lownds, and by January, she'd given birth to their son, Jakob Dylan. This song isn't just making a Lownds⁴ / Lowlands play on words; Dylan's biographer Robert Shelton has written that the song, still to this day never performed live in concert⁵ by Dylan, was a wedding song, and not in the 'Come On Eileen' or 'Hey Ya!' fashion.

The lyrics to ‘Sad Eyed Lady of The Lowlands’ have been called among Dylan’s best and his best love song. The psychiatrist Eugene Stelzig has said that “the sad-eyed lady is a personification of Dylan’s anima". The verse lyrics list some of the qualities and characteristics of our Sad Eyed Lady, not by making statements but by asking rhetorical questions.

We can deduce references to Dylan and Sara’s lives together. Sara’s father was a scrap metal dealer (“sheet metal memories of Cannery Row”), her first husband was a photographer ("your magazine husband who one day just had to go"), their newborn son ("And with the child of the hoodlum wrapped up in your arms”), and that Dylan has stolen her out of the prison of her first marriage (“Now you stand with your thief, you're on his parole”). We even have a reference to Sara’s silver jewellery.

Bob Dylan and Sara at Heathrow airport in 1969

Elsewhere though, the woman Dylan sings of seems unreal, haunting, and dreamlike - Andy Gill wrote in Classic Bob Dylan: My Back Pages in 1998 how the late-night / early-morning recording gives the song a nocturnal quality like another song on the album, ‘Visions of Johanna’. There are also biblical references to Tyrus and Ezekiel, as well as classical literature nods to Blake and Rimbaud; there’s a sense of the likes of Huxley, Ginsberg and Leary creeping into a song that, unlike a lot of the album, is neither jovial nor nihilistic.

The song had a significant impact once the album was out. Roger Waters of Pink Floyd said the song was life-changing. He told Howard Stern;

When I heard that, I thought if Bob can do it, then I can do it. It’s 20 minutes long. It’s a whole album. It in no way gets dull or boring. You just get more and more and more engrossed as it gets more and more hypnotic the longer it goes on.

George Harrison said in his biography I, Me, Mine that The Beatles’ song ‘Long, Long, Long’ had chords influenced by Dylan’s song. 30 years ago, Tom Waits said;

It is like Beowulf and it 'takes me out to the meadow'. This song can make you leave home, work on the railroad or marry a Gypsy. I think of a drifter around a fire with a tin cup under a bridge remembering a woman's hair. The song is a dream, a riddle and a prayer.

You can also hear the influence of Dylan’s vocals in The Walkmen’s ‘What’s In It For Me.’

Dylan himself told journalist Bob Shelton⁶ in March 1966, “This is the best song I ever wrote.” before the end of the decade, he’d say to Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner;

I just sat down at a table and started writing...And I just got carried away with the whole thing...I just started writing and I couldn’t stop. After a period of time, I forgot what it was all about, and I started trying to get back to the beginning [laughs]

By 1978 he was talking about the song in a way that is now seen as the ultimate descriptor of the sound of Blonde on Blonde;

It’s that thin, that wild mercury sound. It’s metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up. That’s my particular sound…Mostly, I’ve been driving at a combination of guitar, harmonica, and organ.

At this point, Dylan had released three albums quickly, all of which feature in Acclaimed Music’s top 100 and, like Kenny Buttrey said, where do we go from here? Only a motorcycle accident that summer was able to slow him down.

1. The whole interview is worth a read; Dylan was at the peak of his powers, about to become a father, finalising Blonde on Blonde and not to know within months, he’ll be recuperating from his motorcycle crash.

2. Though this is a slight rewrite of history, while some of the song may have been sketched out in New York, other people who were there are clear that the bulk of it was written in Tennessee.

3. The recording session in full is on 2015’s 8-disc Collector's Edition of The Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965–1966.

4. Known initially as Shirley Noznisky, Lownds was Sara’s name from her first marriage to photographer Hans Lownds, and ‘Lowlands’ was a song performed regularly by Dylan’s former partner Joan Baez.

5. There is a performance in the “Woman in White” section in 1978's Renaldo & Clara.

6. There is also a recording of the song that Shelton recorded at this interview.