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50 Years On – Pet Sounds and Blonde On Blonde

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On the old blog I wrote a long piece about seeing Bob Dylan live in Sheffield in 1966. After the Afterword site went down the Dylan piece was subsequently picked up by a couple of blog sites and attracted interest from far and wide.

Then I was approached by the BBC to take part in a Radio 4 documentary about the day in question May 16, 1966. It seems that both Blonde and Blonde and Pet Sounds were released on that date.

The documentary goes to air next week.

So Pet Sounds and Blonde On Blonde are half a century old next week. Which one has aged better?

http://i.imgur.com/Za0pxEN.jpg
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b079pqct

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Comments

  5. Pet Sounds, always. It’s the arrangements for me basically. And the singing. Nothing has sounded quite like Pet Sounds before or since. It’s a magnificent evocation of a period of life, the sensitive teen, that never sounds childish and that never belittles how you felt when young. It’s not dewy eyed either.

    Blonde on Blonde, in comparison with Pet Sounds anyway, is just long. Bob Dylan is obviously great, but he’s never been God Only Knows great.

    • Having seen Love and Mercy (superb) I dived into Pet Sounds once again. Been my favourite album for about 25 yrs off and on, I Just Wasn’t Made for these Times stood out as the pinnacle of the pinnacle.

      BoB is great too though.

  6. If I want rock ‘n’ roll, I don’t go to Dylan, I go to…..erm…..rock ‘n’ roll.
    As such, I simply couldn’t have heard ‘Blonde on Blonde’ for at least 10 years (I’ve heard the group Blonde on Blonde more recently!) but ‘Pet Sounds’, on CD in mono, gets 5 or 6 straight airings every two or three months.
    So I’d say ‘Pet Sounds’.

    (note – ‘Blonde on Blonde’ still p****s on anything post-60s).

    • Thanks MB.

      There’s an awful lot of superstition, old wives tales and general mumbo-jumbo surrounding the ancient art of harmonica playing. I guess because they are one of the most intimate musical instruments readily available to the man/woman in the street – you literally put the thing in your mouth after all – players have all kinds of rituals they believe will get the best out of their harps.

      Harmonicas/harps tend to get bunged up with all manner of gunk (spit, mostly) and keeping the reeds clear of blockages is a full-time job. With only 10 holes (totalling 20 notes) available to the player, you can imagine the results if even one of these became blocked.

      So, to answer your question, Dylan kept his harps in a glass of water because he believed it stopped the reeds from getting blocked. It almost certainly wasn’t very good for them in the long term, but then he probably bought a new set (all in different keys) every few weeks.

      • Back in that time, all harps had a wooden “comb” (the bit that the reed plates are pinned to, and also the exposed part that you blow into. Soaking the harps in water would cause the wood to expand, thus increasing the size of the chambers, and increasing the volume. It also made bends easier, though Dylan was not really that kind of harp player. The side effect of cleaning out gunk was also beneficial.

        Some players still do it, though there is little advantage if you have a metal or plastic comb of course.

        Old blues guys used to soak their harps in various alcoholic beverages, supposedly.

        • Yes, good point. I remember that soaking often caused the wood used to swell and expand beyond the front of the harp leaving an uneven surface, making it very painful to run your mouth up and down.

  9. Neither, actually. The standout tracks on each are colossi, without question, but quality control had yet to be invented, and so each have songs of dull old guff and filler. (Strange, the one useful thing Donovan could have invented would have been having more than a few decent songs per long player, but he went the other way, of course.) So BoB is a superb single record and PS an EP.

  10. I’m in the fortunate position of loving both albums equally for wildly different reasons. I don’t have to choose – neither one displaces or negates the other. I listen to both regularly and they sound as vital and contemporary – to me – as they ever did. I wrote a long piece for Ugly Things a while back on Pet Sounds (don’t look for it, it’s not there any more) which I can’t be arsed to replicate here, you’ll be relieved to hear.

  11. The Radio 4 documentary is titled simply 16 5 66 (here’s the link in case you missed it in the OP: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b079pqct) because that’s the date both Blonde On Blonde and Pet Sounds were supposedly released.

    It’s also the date of the 1966 Dylan concert in Sheffield.

    I don’t remember Blonde On Blonde being available until weeks after the concert however, and there seems to be some dispute about that release date. Dylan did perform four songs from the unreleased album on the ’66 tour (4th Time Around, Visions Of Johanna, Just Like A Woman and Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat) so it was the very time time anyone in the audience had heard them.

  12. I listen to Pet Sounds more- who objects to Pet Sounds being put on? But, whenever I put on Blonde on Blonde, I’m always chuckling at a particularly clever line or the superb playing of the band.

    I think Caroline No is up there with God Only Knows …but who nose.

    • Yes, see above. I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times. Album is just perfection even including Sloop John B. BoB is my favourite Dylan album and probably in my personal top 10

  15. Standing the test of time?

    If I was a young teenager, confused and conflicted about girls, I think I could still relate to the beauty and cloying suffocation of Pet Sounds in 2016. After all, I only started listening to it ten years after it was released. The practicalities of Wouldn’t It Be Nice are dated but the unfulfilled desire is timeless.

    Blonde On Blonde remains tremendous. It’s funny, it’s dynamic, it’s weird and it stands repeated listening, many, many times over (provided you have a decent copy – Bob didn’t seem to care about CDs). It benefits for a reduction in the lyrical intensity of his previous albums. It’s the sound of Bob Dylan enjoying being a rock star and the drugs that come with the role.

    However, neither can hold a candle to Revolver.

    *Runs away*

  16. Even through years of Word/Afterword regular discussions and mentions of it, I’ve yet to listen to Pet Sounds. Every time I hear a Beach Boys song I like it, but there is something about them as a band that fails to raise my curiosity. I don’t know why.
    But at this point, my non-curiosity about Pet Sounds has accumulated into a brick wall of disinterest, so I predict I won’t bother in my years ahead either.
    My loss, I know.
    I love Bob. And BoB.

  17. I love Blonde On Blonde, but Pet Sounds is simply my favourite album of all time – its brilliance will never fade. I still remember fondly the first time I played the stereo mix from the box set (on headphones) – the moment the first vocals came in on Wouldn’t It Be Nice brought a tear to this cynical old eye.

  18. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s misunderstood or just plainly not liked, but I’ve got about 8 second-hand copies of ‘Pet Sounds’ compared to, say, my 3 or 4 ‘Forever Changes’, or the solitary copy of ‘Blonde on Blonde’.

    Maybe that’s why I’m always playing it, it’s always close to hand!

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