The writer Jon Savage has just recently published his latest book. I am always interested in Jon’s books. His award winning England’s Dreaming (on The Sex Pistols and Punk) in the early 1990s is still rightly regarded as a classic of popular cultural history writing. The subsequent book on the outtakes of his interviews for England’s Dreaming is also superb. Jon was there from the beginning, as a pop music writer following the emergence of the Pistols in 1976/1977. Later, he was our first Visiting Professor in the newly formed Manchester Institute for Popular Culture (MIPC) which I ran with Derek Wynne from 1992-1995. Our students and staff greatly benefited from his wonderful cultural theory of pop modernism whether it was applied to The Who, Joe Meek, Joy Division or Suede. He went on to write the great Joy Division documentary released in 2007 amongst many other projects.The new book is a blast. Entitled 1966: The Year The Decade Exploded, beautifully produced by Faber and Faber with an accompanying CD, it is a riveting read for anyone interested in how pop culture ‘works’. The section on the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol is just sublime. Jon argues that the year 1966 was the high point of pop modernism. He is right in my view.
One writer Jon Savage deliberately leaves out of the 1966 narrative is Bob Dylan. Dylan in 1965-1966 fits Savage’s story perfectly. In 2015 Sony released Volume 12 of The Bootleg Series, including the Collector’s Edition which my wife Professor Tara Brabazon bought me as an early Xmas present. The Collector’s Edition was issued in a strictly limited 5000 pressings at a cost of $600 only available from the digital website bobdylan.com. It was labelled Bob Dylan 1965-1966: The Cutting Edge, with nearly 400 tracks (379 to be precise) from the recordings of three albums Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde in 1965 and 1966 – in fact all musical notes and studio chatter recorded in the studio in those fourteen months on eighteen CDs and linked to a special digital download for the lucky 5000 (which failed at first!). Twenty versions of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ including early waltz version and the actual six minute plus released version, for instance, or alternatively sixteen takes of the legendary but still unreleased ‘She’s Your Lover Now’. And so on. Take your pick. Listen till you drop. The ‘thin, that wild mercury sound, metallic and bright gold’ which Dylan tells us he was searching for in the mid-1960s (especially with instrumentation of harmonica, guitar and organ) was finally achieved with the release of Blonde on Blonde in May 1966. Dylan certainly saw it as a highpoint of his ‘art’, perhaps ‘Pop Art’ as he was hanging out with Andy Warhol and The Factory gang at the time. ‘Queen Jane’ in ‘Queen Jane Approximately’ (seven versions on the Collector’s Edition) from Highway 61 Revisited has been ‘outed’ as Andy Warhol himself. Several Blonde on Blonde songs (‘Just Like a Woman’, ‘Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat’ and ‘I Want You’ among them) are said to be about ill fated Warhol acolyte Edie Sedgwick who Dylan certainly knew at the time. Edie Sedgwick was blonde – as was Rolling Stone Brian Jones who had met her and Dylan around this time. And Nico, who sang with the Velvet Underground Andy Warhol’s musical intervention in the mid-1960s, and knew all the gang. Hence, for some commentators, the title ‘Blonde on Blonde’. Whatever the truth, Blonde on Blonde was another example of the pop modernism which Savage exacavates so comprehensively in his new book. Buy it for someone this Christmas!
