Forty-nine years ago, on January 20, 1966, the fourth session for Bob Dylan’s Blonde ON Blonde took place.

All that was recorded that day was one song. Nineteen takes of a song that on the recording sheet was listed as “Just A Little Glass Of Water,” but which was later titled “She’s Your Love Now.”

A version with some of the Hawks playing made it onto The first Bootleg series set.

But this incredible 8 minute version with Dylan playing piano and singing has not yet been offiicially released.

It’s incredible.

Here’s into that Michael Krogsgaard got off the recording sheet:

Studio A
Columbia Recording Studio
New York City, New York
January 20, 1966, 11:30-2:30 pm

Produced by Bob Johnston/Albert Grossman.
Engineers: Halee and Keyes.

Session cancelled.

Studio A
Columbia Recording Studio
New York City, New York
January 21, 1966, 2:30-5:30, 7-10 pm and 11:30-2:30 am

Produced by Bob Johnston.
Engineers: Halee, Dauria and Keyes.

1. She’s Your Lover Now CO89210 Take 1b
2. She’s Your Lover Now Take 2b
3. She’s Your Lover Now Take 3b
4. She’s Your Lover Now Take 4C
5. She’s Your Lover Now Take 5C
6. She’s Your Lover Now Take 6C
7. She’s Your Lover Now Take 7b
8. She’s Your Lover Now Take 8b
9. She’s Your Lover Now Take 9b
10. She’s Your Lover Now Take 10b
11. She’s Your Lover Now Take 11b
12. She’s Your Lover Now Take 12b
13. She’s Your Lover Now Take 13C
14. She’s Your Lover Now Take 14C
15. She’s Your Lover Now Take 15C
16. She’s Your Lover Now Take 16b
17. She’s Your Lover Now Take 17C
18. She’s Your Lover Now Take 18C
19. She’s Your Lover Now Take 19C
1-19 “Just A Little Glass Of Water” on recording sheet.

Sessions: 2:30 – 5:30pm, 5:45 – 8:45, 9:00 – 12:00pm.

Musicians: Michael John ??, Sandy Konikoff (drums), Garth Hudson (organ), Richard Manuel (piano), Rick Danko (bass) and Robbie Robertson (guitar).

19 released on The Bootleg Series.

If you were out on University Avenue in Berkeley this past Saturday afternoon, and happened to pass Shattuck heading north, you would have soon heard some rather odd sounds coming from a storefront near Ace Hardware.

Those sounds were part of “Hardly Strictly Personal – A Celebration of Post-Beefheart Art,” a two-day mini-festival featuring 26 “projects” and as many as 86 musicians.

Entering the Berkeley Art Space — two adjacent large rooms with high ceilings and little else — I was in another universe, far far from the materialism and slick soulless day-to-day that seems to comprise much of life in the U.S. of A. these days. Yeah, sure you could buy a Hardly Strickly Personal poster for $10, but the money was gong to Earthjustice and The Coalition On Homelessness, as were proceeds from the $12 admission.

Musicians were performing alternately in each room, so that while one combo performed, another could set up.

Perhaps 40 people sat on folding chairs, stood or wandered about. It was free and loose in there. Many of patrons had long hair and beards, as did some of the performers, and in this case long hair and beards seemed symbolic of a time many decades ago when musicians worked hard to break new ground, not top the charts.

While the band Pachuco Cadaver set up in the left-side room, dissonant electronics floated over from the room to the right.

Fronted by the female singer Kitten, Pachuco Cadaver played a horn-dominated set that included a number of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band compositions, culminating with “Alice In Blunderland” and “I’m Gonna Booglarize You Baby” (both off The Spotlight Kid album) and both featuring guest guitarist Henry Kaiser, a master of Magic Band guitar.

Kaiser introduced “Alice In Blunderland” by saying:

“This is the first thing I learned to play on guitar as a kid.”

For his own set Kaiser brought on a band he’d pulled together for the occasion: William Winant, drums; Joshua Allen, tenor sax; and James Aliberti, vocals.

They played two pieces.

The first found Kaiser playing Beefheart and the Magic Band’s “Flavor Bud Living” (off the original Bat Chain Puller album) while Aliberti read Beefheart’s poem, “Sun Dawn Dance.” Then the three musicians went freeform for an extended jam in the style of Beefheart and the Magic Band while Aliberti read Beefheart’s “You should know by the kindness of uh dog the way uh human should be.”

That second piece combined free jazz, an explosive mix of honking sax, combative drums and lunar guitar. Imagine a Jackson Pollack painting as sound and you’ll have a vague sense of it.

Kaiser is an incredible guitarist. There is a hard jagged edge to his playing, as if he’s cut through all the surface nicey-nicey and reached the truth of the matter. It’s impossible to anticipate what sound will emerge next as he works various pedals while attcking the strings.

The electronics-meet-analog instruments (Koto, bass, guitar, clarinet, cello) drone of Cartoon Justice followed, and then while Forward Energy went full-bore free jazz I split.

Fantasic!

Below are the words to the poems Aliberti read.

“Sun Dawn Dance” by Captain Beefheart

Sun showers danced like dye darker green shadows
light on green leaves
played bamboo golden light organ pipes
wooden ‘n’ olden
down finickey halls
shadows leaped like lizards scaling
flower eyes trailing random vines
tales that curl-ee-cued
beans that hung green light berries
butterfly’s grasp upside down
in pain
lovely in their rapture
golden dust
golden winged eels slither apart
bleeding life’s light onto the ground
‘n’ quiver down gloden light
corny yellow horns blew petals stem riddles
bees ride fat honey
legged drips
centers pulp splinters
her flowered eye
uh legend on uh rock she scribbles
uh dew drop pops
up in the Sun Dawn Dance

“You should know by the kindness of uh dog the way uh human should be” by Captain Beefheart

You should know by the kindness of uh dog
The way a human should be
You should feel the wet wood heart of the tree
Wood sap pop like a frog’s eye
Open t’ the fly ‘n the blood of the river
When it ripples ‘n clicks like uh waterbell
‘n the elephant in his beautiful grey leather suit
Though he’s wrinkled he looks smart as hell
‘n the turtle’s eyes carry bags very well
‘n the snake’s in shape
He rattles like uh baby ‘wears his diamonds
Better than uh fine lady’s finger
‘n his fangs are no more dangerous
Than her slow aristocratic poison
And he plays his games on uh grass bed
‘n uh monkey never had uh guilty masturbation
‘n uh monkey wouldn’t shit on another’s creation
And the fatman cries throughout all creation
’cause he’s got uh cold
‘n the icebear dives thru blue zero for uh frozen fish
‘n the eskimo wears his hide ‘n chews his heart
‘n the beautiful grey whale oils some bitches lighter
Someday I’ll have money ‘n I can frame myself
What uh picture I’ll be choppin’ down uh tree

– A Days Of The Crazy-Wild blog post –

Bob Dylan wrote “I Don’t Want To Do It” in 1968 according to Wikipedia, but never recorded it.

George Harrison recorded an acoustic demo during the All Things Must Pass sessions in 1970, but didn’t record a finished version until November 1984 at the Record Plant West in Los Angeles. It was produced by Dave Edmunds.

That version ended up on the “Porky’s Revenge” soundtrack.

“I Don’t Want To Do It”:

“I Don’t Want To Do It” (acoustic demo):

Thanks to Bill Holdship for turning me on to these tracks.

– A Days Of The Crazy-Wild blog post –

Fifty years ago, on January 14, 1965, Bob Dylan returned to Columbia’s Studio A in New York for his second day of sessions for Bringing It All back Home.

Unlike the previous session, this time, Dylan and producer Tom Wilson had assembled a group of musicians to record with Dylan.

On hand were Al Gorgoni (guitar), Kenneth Rankin (guitar), Bruce Langhorne (guitar), Joseph Macho Jr. (bass), William E. Lee (bass), Bobby Gregg (drums), Paul Griffin (piano), John Sebastian (bass) and John Boone (bass).

As photographer Daniel Kramer recalled in his book, “Bob Dylan: A Portrait of the Artist’s Early Years,” “Between takes, Dylan would work individually with the musicians until he was satisfied with what was happening. He was patient with them and they were patient with him. His method of working, the certainty of what he wanted kept things moving. He would listen to the playbacks in the control booth, discuss what was happening with Tom Wilson, and move on to the next number. If he tried something that didn’t go well, he would put if off for another session. In this way, he never bogged down — he just kept on going.”

Eight songs were recorded that day. Five of them — “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Outlaw Blues,” “She Belongs To Me,” and “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” — were used on Bringing It All Back Home. A version of “I’ll Keep It With Mine” was eventually released on Biograph.

While Dylan’s previous albums are amazing — I’ve been listening to them for decades — it was with Bringing It All Back Home that Dylan made his (post-success) move into making what Greil Marcus called “noisy rock ‘n’ roll songs” at the same time his songwriting and lyrics took yet another leap forward. In retrospect, it is incredible that Dylan could record all of the tracks for Bringing It All back Home in two sessions — this one and another on the following day.

In his book, “Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan At The Crossroads,” Marcus summed up side one of Bringing It All Back Home. “It [‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’] was followed on the album by ‘She Belongs To Me,’ ‘Maggie’s Farm,’ ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit,’ ‘Outlaw Blues,’ ‘On the Road Again’ and ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,’ most of them scratchy, clanging, written with flair, sung with glee, Dylan and his backing musicians in moments thrilled at their own new clatter.”

If you have not read Marcus’ book, I suggest you do. Among the many amazing passages are six pages devoted to “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream.”

Marcus says of the song: “It is a protest song about a country that is ridiculous before it is anything else. It is, among other things, a rewrite of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, ‘Invisible Man,’ a comic version of the story Dylan would tell a few months later in ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ and a picture of a life that hasn’t changed — a common, modern story that doesn’t make any more or less sense than it did when it was first told.”

What would be even more mind-blowing than Dylan’s accomplishments with Bringing It All Back Home, during the next seven months he would record both Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde and do significant touring.

And so, in a little over seven months — just 25 actual days in the studio — Bob Dylan recorded three of the greatest albums.

(Check out my other posts on the Bringing It All Back Home sessions: January 13, 1965 and January 15, 1965.)

Below are some of what I believe are outtakes from the January 14 session (let me know if I’m wrong), along with the tracks that ended up on Bringing It All Back Home:

“Love Minus Zero/No Limit” (outtake):

“Love Minus Zero/No Limit” (official release, Bringing It All Back Home):

“Subterranean Homesick Blues” (official release, Bringing It All Back Home):

“Outlaw Blues” (official release, Bringing It All Back Home):

“She Belongs To Me (outtake):

“She Belongs To Me” (official release, Bringing It All Back Home):

“Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” (official release, Bringing It All Back Home):

“On The Road Again” (official release, Bringing It All Back Home):

“I’ll Keep It With Mine” (eventually released on Biograph):

“I’ll Keep It With Mine” (instrumental):

If you liked this post, check out my previous post on the first Bringing It All Back Home sessions here.

Here’s some info about the session from www.bjorner.com:

Studio A
Columbia Recording Studios
New York City, New York
January 14, 1965

The 2nd Bringing It All Back Home recording session, produced by Tom Wilson.

1. Love Minus Zero/No Limit
2. Love Minus Zero/No Limit — used on Bringing It All Back Home .
3. Love Minus Zero/No Limit
4. Subterranean Homesick Blues
5. Subterranean Homesick Blues
6. Subterranean Homesick Blues — used on Bringing It All Back Home .
7. Outlaw Blues
8. Outlaw Blues
9. Outlaw Blues
10. Outlaw Blues — used on Bringing It All Back Home .
11. She Belongs To Me
12. She Belongs To Me — used on Bringing It All Back Home .
13. Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream — intro used on Bringing It All Back Home .
14. Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream — used on Bringing It All Back Home .
15. On The Road Again
16. On The Road Again
17. On The Road Again
18. On The Road Again
19. Love Minus Zero/No Limit
20. I’ll Keep It With Mine — used on Biograph.
21. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
22. Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream
23. She Belongs To Me
24. Subterranean Homesick Blues

1-18 Bob Dylan (guitar, harmonica, vocal), Al Gorgoni (guitar), Kenneth Rankin (guitar), Bruce Langhorne (guitar), Joseph Macho
Jr. (bass), William E. Lee (bass), Bobby Gregg (drums),
Paul Griffin (piano).

19-24 Bob Dylan (guitar, harmonica, vocal), John Hammond Jr. (guitar), Bruce Langhorne (guitar), John Sebastian (bass), John
Boone (bass).

There’s more into here.

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

Fifty years ago, on January 13, 1965, Bob Dylan entered Studio A, the Columbia studio that he favored, and during a three-hour session with Tom Wilson producing, recorded 14 songs.

This session, the first of three for an album, Bringing It All Back Home, that would be his transitional move toward rock music, was pretty much business as usual. On that day Dylan mostly recorded alone (although John Sebastian played bass on a few of the songs), accompanying himself, as he had done for his previous albums, on guitar and piano and harmonica. There are wonderful takes that were recorded that day, but clearly Dylan was ready to try something new, and he did during the sessions that followed.

From Wikipedia:

The first session, held on January 13, 1965 in Columbia’s Studio A in New York, was recorded solo, with Dylan playing piano or acoustic guitar. Ten complete songs and several song sketches were produced, nearly all of which were discarded.

None of the versions recorded that day were used on Bringing It All Back Home.

“I’ll Keep It With Mine” was included on Biograph, and “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Farewell Angelina” are on The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3. One of the “Outlaw Blues” takes was released as an iTunes exclusive in 2005. “California” is on 2009’s NCIS: The Official TV Soundtrack – Vol. 2.

(Check out my other posts on the Bringing It All Back Home sessions: January 14, 1965 and January 15, 1965.)

“I’ll Keep It With Mine” (with Dylan and producer Ton Wilson talking before Dylan plays the song):

“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”(outtake):

“Love Minus Zero/ No Limit” (outtake):

“Subterranean Homesick Blues #10” (outtake):

“Farewell Angelina” (outtake):

“You Don’t Have To Do That” (fragment):

“Outlaw Blues” (outtake):

“California” (outtake):

Here’s some info about the session from www.bjorner.com.

If you liked this post, check on the one I did on the second Bringing It All Back Home session here.

Writer Michael Krogsgaard got access to Sony Records’ archives in New York and has published detailed information online.

Here’s his information about the January 13, 1965 session:

Studio A
Columbia Recording Studio
New York City, New York
January 13, 1965, 7-10 pm

Produced by Tom Wilson.
Engineers: Hallie and Catero.

1. Love Minus Zero/No Limit CO85270 Take 1b
2. Love Minus Zero/No Limit Take 2C

3. I’ll Keep It With Mine CO85271 Take 1C

4. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue CO85272 Take 1C

5. Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream CO85273 Take 1b
6. Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream Take 2C

7. She Belongs To Me CO85274 Take 1C

8. Subterranean Homesick Blues CO85275 Take 1C

9. Sitting On A Barbed Wire Fence CO85276 Take 1C

10. On The Road Again CO85277 Take 1C

11. Farewell Angelina CO85278 Take 1C

12. If You Gotta Go, Go Now CO85279 Take 1C
13. If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Addition) Take 1

14. Bending Down On My Stomick Lookin’ West CO85280 Take 1C

15. Love Minus Zero/No Limit CO85270 Take 3C

16. She Belongs To Me CO85274 Take 2C

17. Outlaw Blues CO85281 Take 1b
18. Outlaw Blues Take 2C
1 and 2 “Dime Store” on recording sheet.
3 “Bank Account Blues” on recording sheet.
5-6 “B. Dylan’s Later Dream” on recording sheet.
7 “Worse Than Money” on recording sheet.
8 “Subterranean Homesick Blues #10” on recording sheet.
9 “Barbwire” on recording sheet, corrected on the tape box to “Sitting On A Barbed Wire Fence”. On the copyright card listed as “Outlaw Blues”.
11 “Alcatraz To The 5th Power” on recording sheet.
12 and 13 “You Gotta Go” on recording sheet.
17 and 18 “Tune X” on recording sheet, corrected to “Key To The Highway” on one tape box and to “Outlaw Blues” on another. This CO number is not listed in the contract cards.
3 released on Biograph.
8 and 11 released on The Bootleg Series.

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

Here’s a song off the upcoming album, Chasing Yesterday, from Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds.

The song is “Ballad Of The Mighty I” and Johnny Marr guests on it.

– A Days Of The Crazy-Wild blog post –

Today a bootleg recording of Nirvana allegedly playing at the Satyricon in Portland on January 12, 1990 was uploaded to YouTube by someone using the tag WY97212.

Here’s what WY97212 wrote on YouTube:

January 12 1990. A band called Nirvana are playing at Portland’s Satyricon. A show with some minor significance as Dale Crover is playing drums. And because Kurt meets someone named Courtney.
I was there. I recorded their set. And I put it away in a box of tapes…
Today marks the 25th anniversary and it seems like the right time to let people hear this. Enjoy and Play Loud.
Recording is raw in accordance with the equipment and tape used at the time.

Set List:

Scoff
Floyd the Barber
Love Buzz
(Shocking Blue cover)
Dive
Polly
Big Cheese
Spank Thru
Sappy
Breed
Molly’s Lips
(The Vaselines cover)
School
Been a Son
Stain
Negative Creep
Blew

-A Days Of The Crazy-Wild blog post –