Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide

If Highway 61 Revisited played as a garage rock record, the double-album Blonde on Blonde inverted that sound, blending blues, country, rock, and folk into a wild, careening, and dense sound. Replacing the fiery Michael Bloomfield with the intense, weaving guitar of Robbie Robertson, Bob Dylan led a group comprised of his touring band the Hawks and session musicians through his richest set of songs. Blonde on Blonde is an album of enormous depth, providing endless lyrical and musical revelations on each play. Leavening the edginess of Highway 61 with a sense of the absurd, Blonde on Blonde is comprised entirely of songs driven by inventive, surreal, and witty wordplay, not only on the rockers but also on winding, moving ballads like "Visions of Johanna," "Just Like a Woman," and "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." Throughout the record, the music matches the inventiveness of the songs, filled with cutting guitar riffs, liquid organ riffs, crisp pianos, and even woozy brass bands ("Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"). It's the culmination of Dylan's electric rock & roll period — he would never release a studio record that rocked this hard, or had such bizarre imagery, ever again.

Steven Stolder, Amazon.com

Considered an unprecedented magnum opus when it arrived on two records in May of 1966 (1997's Time out of Mind is actually only about a minute shorter), Blonde on Blonde featured Dylan continuing to demonstrate remarkable powers over the course of 14 new numbers. Working in Nashville with session men and a few conscripted recruits (Al Kooper, Robbie Robertson), Dylan continued to bend minds with his warped lyrics and phrasing. Even dashed-off numbers such as "Obviously 5 Believers" and "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" contribute to the crazed, fun-house ambiance. Dylan will never be this wild again.

Martin Johnson, Barnes & Noble

Arguably one of the greatest rock 'n' roll records ever, BLONDE ON BLONDE came out during a period of great creativity and considerable tumult for Bob Dylan: The 1966 classic followed two other seminal recordings, BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME and HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED, and came at a time when Dylan was playing his first concerts with a plugged-in band. His predominantly folk constituency booed him vociferously at most tour stops, but he was evidently roused by the response. Mostly written in hotel rooms during his tours in '65 and '66, BLONDE ON BLONDE features enduring novelties like "Rainy Day Women #12 and #35" and "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" and bluesy romps such as "I Want You" and "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine," as well as beautiful ballads like "Visions of Johanna," "Just Like a Woman," and "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." Although it was recorded in Nashville, there isn't a pronounced country sound on BLONDE ON BLONDE. However, following a hiatus (reportedly due to a motorcycle accident), Dylan emerged with a more countrified sound on his following recording, JOHN WESLEY HARDING, launching another controversial chapter his career.

Brian Kelly, CD Now

In a 1965 press conference, Bob Dylan defined folk music as a "constitutional replay of mass production." It was a simple quip, saturated with character strains that are markedly Dylan: Evasive, sarcastic, playful, jesting, scathing, meandering, and lyrical. Just the pastiche of elements that suffuse like dendrites from the heart of rock’s first double album: Blonde on Blonde. 
Released in May 1966, Blonde on Blonde is a vibrant tapestry woven from the composite threads of Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. In a sense, this album is the crowning achievement of post-Newport Dylan, and a living testament to the fact that, clearly, Dylan would be governed by only his own whims. 
Gone were the purist demeanor, working-class raiment and political consciousness of the Tin Pan Alley icon. It was a transformation marked by showers of boos and hisses from his staunchest devotees, yet the leather-clad minstrel held fast the looking glass that guided the subjective journey and yielded a harvest of the most prolific and evocative poetry ever to complement music. 
And so the anthology begins like a lunatic parade with the oft-misinterpreted "Rainy Day Women Nos. 12 and 35," the reputed "drug song" with the refrain "everybody must get stoned." This humorous cut is recorded in the same vein as the bluesy "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat," and seems to say: We all get dragged through the mud from time to time, but it’s comforting to know you are not "all alone." 
Other tracks that received considerable airplay include "I Want You" and, more notably, "Just Like a Woman." The latter -- apparently written about model Edie Sedgwick of the Warhol camp -- sparked a rash of feminist criticism about its heroine who fakes, makes love and aches like a woman, but "breaks just like a little girl." 
On a more somber, romantic note are the Nashville stringed "4th Time Around" and the epic finale, "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," a song clearly penned for Sara Lowndes, whom Dylan had married in a secret ceremony some six months prior to the release of Blonde On Blonde. 
And certainly, no discussion or review of this album would be complete without mentioning "Visions of Johanna" or the warbling absurdity of "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again." In fact, "Visions of Johanna" falls just several yards shy of thematically representing the entire album, with its free form, mosaic of emotions and cynicism in the face of love. This lyric tale poses the existential choice between the ever-ready Louise and the archetypal Johanna -- which he aspires to for fulfillment, although in the end, these visions are "all that remain." 
Blonde on Blonde is not only a landmark Dylan album, but a landmark of 20th Century pop music. Almost all 14 takes were recorded in Nashville -- a far cry from Dylan’s cozy Greenwich Village Bohemia -- with a supporting cast that included the likes of Charlie McCoy, Al Kooper, Rick Danko and Robbie Robertson, whose incendiary blues licks provide perfect accompaniment to Dylan’s weightier folk-rock sound. 
It’s been almost 34 years to the day since this album streeted, leaving an indelible mark on the way we approach the written word in music. Alas, its true depth may never be plumbed, but hopefully will be duplicated. Just some things to consider, along with that obvious void in your CD rack.

Personnel: Bob Dylan (vocals, guitar, harmonica); Robbie Robertson (guitar); Charlie McCoy (harmonica); Hargus Robbins (piano); Al Kooper (organ); Kenneth Buttrey (drums); Wayne Moss, Jerry Kennedy, Joe South, Bill Aikins, Henry Strzelecki. Principally recorded at Columbia Recording Studios, Nashville, Tennessee.

Only a year after HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED, Dylan miraculously topped himself with further epigrams of surrealistic poetry and emotional intrigue. The pressure of a punishing touring schedule and high public profile helped drive him to an unbelievable fit of creativity as he spontaneously scribbled these gems in his hotel rooms. We were spoiled with a double album, more Dylan music than we had previously heard, yet still destined to endure. BLONDE ON BLONDE surrounds the folk-rock bard with the likes of Al Kooper, Robbie Robertson, Charlie McCoy and Kenny Buttrey, all seasoned musicians giving this album a relaxed confidence quite unlike the youthful energy of HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED. Decades later this album still rewards and surprises. A gigantic record in every sense.

Dave Rosen, Ink Blot Magazine

For the uninitiated, Blonde On Blonde is both the perfect start-up record and the ultimate challenge in the Dylan catalog. He distills the expansive surrealism he pioneered on the two groundbreaking albums that preceded (Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited) down to a thematic thread that runs throughout the record. As befits Dylan, however, the identity and meaning of this thread are a matter of both speculation and disagreement. You know it's there, you just can't explain it.

The songs defy not only description but interpretation, despite inviting both at every turn. They burrow deep into the grey matter of the listener without detour; they are visceral rather than literal or even symbolic. The positively epic "Visions Of Johanna" has the effect of wrapping the listener in a warm, spangled word-veil of mystical psychedelia, the classic "Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again" is a startling initiation into a shadow world of Dylan's creation, while "Most Likely You Go Your Way And I'll Go Mine" chugs along like a magical train.

Blonde On Blonde was recorded at the peak of one of many controversial periods in Dylan's career. He had recently shocked and alienated the folk audience that claimed him as their messiah by playing with an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival. Although the booing of the crowd was probably greatly exaggerated, the rumors of the reaction proved more than enough inspiration for similar, yet more intense audience response all throughout the 1966 tour. The resulting conflict between performer and audience was physically and mentally taxing for Dylan, but had the effect of galvanizing both his live performances and his recordings.

Ironically, Dylan produced his most cohesive album to date in the midst of a musical power struggle between his artistic alter egos; the folk messiah is here reconciled with the prophet who brought forth the bastard son of his own creation, the folk rocker. The overall sound achieved on Blonde On Blonde is so original and enjoyable that it utterly defies the classification his "fans" attempted to foist upon him (see sidebar) Dylan himself, in a 1978 interview, described the sound of the record in typically mystical fashion as "that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up..." The "wild mercury sound" must be heard to be understood. You won't be sorry.

Scot Waldman, Pop Matters, May 29th 2003

Hold My Hand, Bob Dylan

The percussive pittering of the rain on the attic roof shingles pattered in time with the beats of my heart. A few weeks prior I had donned the black robe, and accepted my college degree, the world's most expensive piece of paper, to the sound of clapping hands. Now, a part of my life had just ended and soon another part would begin, but before it did I had a summer of limbo. Just floating, like Dustin Hoffman in the pool in The Graduate. I was spending the rainy day photographing all the strange corners and objects in my attic room. In the corner my girlfriend of a few months was quietly drawing in the dull, yellow, light of an Indiana afternoon.

When the needle dropped onto the twirling black disc otherwise known as Blonde on Blonde, its crackling was as comfortable as the relief the gray skies were giving us from the heat. Bum. Baaa. Ba. Baaa. "Well they'll stone you when you're tryin' to be so good." What the hell did Bob Dylan mean by that? As unpredictable as he was, was Dylan really the type to write a drug anthem? Maybe he meant an old-fashioned stoning, where people threw rocks at a perpetrator, like they did in the Bible. More likely than that, he kept it vague on purpose; giving us listeners the song, to do with it what we wanted. Blonde on Blonde has so many different voices, faces, places, and sounds it has been relevant to every phase of life I have been in since I first bought it.

Now "Visions of Johanna", that was a drug song. And it was one of the greatest rock songs ever written. "Ain't it just like the night to plaaay tricks when yer tryin to be so quie-yiit / We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it". As a youngster, the first time I really heard that song, I revised my anti-drug policy, and went full fledge into experimentation. I had to see what he was talking about. But what was going on in that room where the heat pipes coughed was a much higher bridge than the one I was willing to jump off. Was Johanna really blood and freshly cooked heroin mixing in a needle and then flowing into a vein? Was this what salvation was like after a while, asked Dylan in the song. For someone not quite 20, a visit to the other, artificial side of reality was a look at salvation. Ah, the folly of youth, with the "gall to be so useless and all."

Even further back than that, when I first got the album as a college freshman, I saw it as dark, enigmatic party music for people who thought that John Keats was a lot more important to human history than Bill Gates. It was a whimsical soundtrack capable of sustaining a room full of inebriated fools in a singalong session with enough merriment and debauchery to be a contemporary twist on The Threepenny Opera. My closest guy friends and I would gather in a dorm room on a Friday night. Slowly, the volume on those boombox speakers would be pushed to the end of the dial. These sessions would eventually reduce those speakers to a quivering, shredded fuzz. For that year though, the speakers got loud when we needed them to. "You know it balances on your head / Like a mattress on a bottle of wine / Your brand new leopard-skin pill box hat". We were newly liberated from our parents and not yet on the rollercoaster of our 20s. Of course, well before we reached our goal of having a wall of forty 40-ounce bottles, the album revealed emotional depths that fell far below the surface scratching of malt liquor.

Back in that attic room, Blonde on Blonde was a love song, about individuals intertwined, and the risks of such an action. As the album played, for the first time I realized I was in love. It might have taken 21 years, but love had definitely reached me. Blonde on Blonde was the rain, and light melodies and persistent, driving rock beats soaked me, gathering into puddles on the floor. And then the camera stopped clicking and the pencil stopped scrawling and for a time two lost souls found each other in their dark caves and helped each other around the rocks they found there.

And later, when love followed those tempting signs that say "Only 100 miles to South of the Border" while I stayed up in the cold North, Blonde on Blonde came back out. It was my therapist that made confusing things a lot clearer and roped in feelings that ran amuck. "And when we meet again, introduced as friends / Please don't let on that you knew me when / I was hungry and it was your world." By that time, the album was so important I would only listen to it on record, and only a few times a year. It was an event, to be alone in my room, laid out on the floor by candlelight, with the vinyl turning next to me. It was an old friend, come to reminisce about other times, to shed light on the present, and to get me excited about what was to come.

And now, in New York City, where the initial recording sessions for the album were held, I lay on the wood floor of my apartment and listen to Dylan as he speaks to me. Blonde on Blonde still illuminates my life in ways that no other piece of art ever has. It's so vast I've managed to fit my life thus far into it, and there seems to be room for quite a bit more. Dylan's Night Watchman in "Visions" asked himself if it was him or them that was really insane. As I am washed on the waves of everyday life with this grooved, black, vinyl life preserver to keep me afloat, I find comfort in the fact that we all are insane and that, for at least the duration of this glorious album, it doesn't matter.

Danny Eccleston, Q Magazine

1966's double, Blonde On Blonde, is an insane rush of ideas carried by what he'd later call "that thin, wild mercury sound" - sound like a cold dagger in the brain. There's heady arrogance and wit blazing through Beatles skit 4th Time Around and the fashion-baiting Leopard-skin Pill-box Hat, and a shimmering presence of something divine above the perfectly built, ever so faintly macho Just Like A Woman. Tunes, tunes, tunes.

© Frank Steven Groen