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That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound
Dylan, Nashville, and the Making of Blonde on Blonde
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Narrated by:
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Graham Halstead
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By:
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Daryl Sanders
About this listen
That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound is the definitive treatment of Bob Dylan's magnum opus, Blonde on Blonde, not only providing the most extensive account of the sessions that produced the trailblazing album but also setting the record straight on much of the misinformation that has surrounded the story of how the masterpiece came to be made. Including many new details and eyewitness accounts, as well as keen insight into the Nashville cats who helped Dylan reach rare artistic heights, it explores the lasting impact of rock's first double album.
Based on exhaustive research and in-depth interviews with the producer, the session musicians, studio personnel, management personnel, and others, Daryl Sanders chronicles the road that took Dylan from New York to Nashville in search of "that thin, wild mercury sound." As Dylan told Playboy in 1978, the closest he ever came to capturing that sound was during the Blonde on Blonde sessions, where the voice of a generation was backed by musicians of the highest order.
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When the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan in 2016, a debate raged. Some celebrated while many others questioned the choice. How could the world's most prestigious book prize be awarded to a famously cantankerous singer-songwriter who wouldn't even deign to attend the medal ceremony? In Why Bob Dylan Matters, Harvard Professor Richard F. Thomas answers this question with magisterial erudition.
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Classical Dylan
- By Buretto on 11-27-17
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Lennon, Dylan, Alice and Jesus
- By: Greg Laurie
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Lennon, Dylan, Alice, and Jesus examines wretched excess, self-absorption and miraculous redemption; the book is a raw, sensitive, and unforgettable journey of sex, drugs, rock and roll, and sweet salvation. Author Greg Laurie traces the lives of rock stars and entertainment figures and legends who wallowed in the decadence of both the high life and low life, as they alternately experienced Heaven and Hell on Earth. He travels with them into their demonic abysses and joyfully chronicles their ultimate ascension to their prodigal moments.
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I wished Greg would of narrated the book.
- By Dennis DeMeis on 06-28-22
By: Greg Laurie
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The Ballad of Bob Dylan
- A Portrait
- By: Daniel Mark Epstein
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 15 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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The Ballad of Bob Dylan is a vivid, full-bodied portrait of one of the most influential artists of the 20th-century - a man widely regarded as the most important lyricist America has ever produced. Acclaimed poet and biographer Daniel Mark Epstein frames Dylan against the backdrop of four seminal concerts - all of which he attended. Beautifully written, The Ballad of Bob Dylan is a unique, eye-opening portrait of an artist who has transformed generations and continues to inspire and surprise today.
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Excellent book, excellent narration
- By L chandler on 12-22-11
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Another Side of Bob Dylan
- A Personal History on the Road and Off the Tracks
- By: Jacob Maymudes, Victor Maymudes
- Narrated by: Jacob Maymudes
- Length: 7 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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During the years they spent together, few people outside of Bob Dylan's immediate family were closer than Victor Maymudes, who was Dylan's tour manager, personal friend, and traveling companion from the 1960s through the late 1990s. Another Side of Bob Dylan recounts landmark events during that time, including Dylan's infamous motorcycle crash; his meeting the Beatles on their first U.S. tour; his marriage to Sara Lownds, as well as his romances with Joan Baez and others....
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Poor narration
- By Adelle Goodrich on 10-23-14
By: Jacob Maymudes, and others
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Chronicles
- Volume One
- By: Bob Dylan
- Narrated by: Sean Penn
- Length: 5 hrs and 3 mins
- Abridged
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Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One explores the critical junctions in his life and career. Through Dylan's eyes and open mind, we see Greenwich Village, circa 1961, when he first arrives in Manhattan. Dylan's New York is a magical city of possibilities: smoky, nightlong parties; literary awakenings; transient loves and unbreakable friendships. Elegiac observations are punctuated by jabs of memories, penetrating and tough.
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Understanding
- By Charles on 11-24-04
By: Bob Dylan
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Small Town Talk
- Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock
- By: Barney Hoskyns
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 13 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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When musicians in the New York folk scene of the 1960s grew tired of city life, they decided to "get it together in the country". They headed for Woodstock - not to the site of the infamous music festival of 1969 but to the Catskills, to Bearsville, to Woodstock proper. Counterculture revolutionaries like Janis Joplin, Richie Havens, and Paul Butterfield got "back to the land", turning the once sleepy hollow into a funky Shangri-La.
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Captured the era - too many mistakes
- By Frank Canino on 04-17-16
By: Barney Hoskyns
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The Philosophy of Modern Song
- By: Bob Dylan
- Narrated by: Bob Dylan, Jeff Bridges, Steve Buscemi, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his insight into the nature of popular music. He writes over sixty essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone. He analyzes what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal. These essays are written in Dylan’s unique prose. And while ostensibly about music, they are really meditations on the human condition.
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Needs chapter headings
- By kaon on 12-22-22
By: Bob Dylan
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Positively 4th Street
- By: David Hajdu
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Positively 4th Street is a mesmerizing account of how four young people (Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina) gave rise to a modern-day bohemia and created the enduring sound and style of the 1960s.
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Lousy reader ruins otherwise interesting history
- By Barbara on 10-20-04
By: David Hajdu
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On the Road with Bob Dylan
- By: Larry "Ratso" Sloman
- Narrated by: Ramiz Monsef
- Length: 15 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1975 as Bob Dylan emerged from eight years of seclusion, he dreamed of putting together a traveling music show that would trek across the country like a psychedelic carnival. The dream became reality, and On the Road with Bob Dylan is the ultimate behind-the-scenes look at what happened when Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Revue took to the streets of America. With the intimate detail of a diary, Larry "Ratso" Sloman’s mesmerizing description of the legendary tour both transports listeners to a celebrated period in rock history and provides them with a vivid snapshot of Dylan during this extraordinary time.
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How to Love this Love-It or Hate-It Book
- By Dubi on 06-06-14
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Listen Up!
- Recording Music with Bob Dylan, Neil Young, U2, R.E.M., The Tragically Hip, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tom Waits
- By: Mark Howard, Chris Howard
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Mark Howard, a record producer/engineer/mixer and a trailblazer in the industry, will take you through the star-studded world of recording and producing Grammy Award-winning artists. Listen Up! is an essential book for anyone interested in music and its making. Along with the inside stories, each chapter gives recording and producing information and tips with expert understanding of the equipment used in making the world's most unforgettable records and explanations of the methods used to get the very best sound.
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Stop doing impressions...
- By SLL on 09-08-19
By: Mark Howard, and others
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Dylan Goes Electric!
- Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties
- By: Elijah Wald
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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On the evening of July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan took the stage at Newport Folk Festival, backed by an electric band, and roared into his new rock hit, "Like a Rolling Stone". The audience of committed folk purists and political activists who had hailed him as their acoustic prophet reacted with a mix of shock, booing, and scattered cheers. It was the shot heard round the world - Dylan's declaration of musical independence, the end of the folk revival, and the birth of rock as the voice of a generation - and one of the defining moments in 20th-century music.
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Great book/Awful narration
- By DB on 01-04-25
By: Elijah Wald
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Tune In
- The Beatles: All These Years
- By: Mark Lewisohn
- Narrated by: Clive Mantle
- Length: 43 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Tune In is the first volume of All These Years - a highly-anticipated, groundbreaking biographical trilogy by the world's leading Beatles historian. Mark Lewisohn uses his unprecedented archival access and hundreds of new interviews to construct the full story of the lives and work of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr.
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Insanely great
- By Tad Davis on 12-17-13
By: Mark Lewisohn
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The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.
- A Biography
- By: Peter Ames Carlin
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 16 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In the spring of 1980, an unexpected group of musical eccentrics came together to play their very first performance at a college party in Athens, Georgia. Within a few short years, they had taken over the world–with smash records like Out of Time, Automatic for the People, Monster and Green. Raw, outrageous, and expressive, R.E.M.’s distinctive musical flair was unmatched, and a string of mega-successes solidified them as generational spokesmen.
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Sometimes good guys win
- By Roger D. Plothow on 11-27-24
What listeners say about That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound
Highly rated for:
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- W. Norman
- 08-28-23
Please forgive the otherwise excellent narrator!
No matter how many books on and by Dylan you’ve read, you’ll learn important new things here. It’s exhaustively researched and brings to life the 70 hours Bob, the producer, and the musicians spent in the Nashville studio recording his game-changing double-LP.
The text is very well read by the narrator, and can be comfortably taken in at x1.5 speed. This is a book for Dylan fans only. And we all have to find a way of getting over the narrator’s one unfortunate bug. The name of the iconic song and it’s central character is pronounced “Joanna” throughout rather than the way it is spelled and sung, “JoHanna”. You can expect to be jarred by this 100 times or more — breaking the spell whereby we imagine the author speaking his own words (even when we know they are different people). Yes, you have to not obsess over the fact that the narrator seems not to have actually listened to the LP he describes over 9 hrs (and clearly not to be a Dylan fan himself).
But get over this you must, because you are a Dylan fan and you will want to know all the details presented within this book. And apart from this one thing, it really is smartly and pleasingly read. If this little flaw ruins it for you — that’s on you, not him. No doubt he has been told and embarrassed by now, and he will never make such a mistake in the future, I’m equally sure. But you, dear Dylan fan, are cool enough to deal with “Visions of Joanna”. Because you know Bob’s reaction (we’re he to learn of it) would be to laugh not fume.
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- Matt
- 04-25-24
NARRATORS READ THIS!!
Do some research before you read your books. Halstead reads in the story how important the song "Visions of Johanna" is and how much meaning it holds to so many musicians and songwriters. What a great song it is and the effect it had on a generation of people. So, why can't he pronounce it correctly? It's infuriating and hard to get past. It isn't "Visions of Joanna". Have you ever listened to the song? If not then why the f**k are you reading the book about Blonde on Blonde? It should at least be a prerequisite that you listen to the album. You don't have to be a Dylan fan but at least listen to the album and do minimal research. It's an absolutely pathetic reading. The book itself is awesome, if you can find it in text, do so.
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- Bruce Neilson
- 02-13-23
So many mispronounced words
I enjoyed this but, as with some other audio books, the amount of mispronounced words is baffling. Really annoying.
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- Brian Lockman
- 05-13-21
Bad pronunciation a distraction
The book was very enjoyable and insightful, but I had a hard time ignoring the reader's bad pronunciation. It is Roy HALL-ee, not Roy Hay-lee, Richard Man-you-ell, not Richard Man-well, Visions of Johanna, not Joanna, and I believe Ouija board is pronounced wee-jee, not wee-gee (with a hard G). Also, the overall feel of the read was smooth and comfortable, the exact opposite of the feel of the album.
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- Buretto
- 12-12-18
Sometimes I forget how great Blonde on Blonde is
I'll admit like most Dylan fans, that my opinion of a favorite Dylan album changes constantly. Street Legal, sentimentally, as the first album that I ever purchased, Blood on the Tracks for its heartbreaking brilliance, Time Out of Mind, for the amazing resurrection of the master storyteller. Not to mention, periods when I feel nothing other than listening to John Wesley Harding on a loop, or Desire, or Infidels. So, it's easy to forget how genius an album Blonde on Blonde is. It's almost too perfect musically, and historically, so I guess I kind of put it aside thoughtlessly.
This book chronicles the Nashville sessions creating Blonde on Blonde, and it's thoroughly enjoyable. I feared an overly technical account of the times (to be fair, it does go a bit Wikipedia in moments). But digressions into speculation on the origins of the songs are kept reasonably limited. A few references are made to Sara, Edie Sedgwick or Nico, and to whom a particular song is directed. But thankfully, not a lot of time is spent on that, more on the music and the musicians.
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- S. Mullins
- 02-02-19
It was great!
I bought the book before I started using audible. I hadn’t read the book yet, but I found it on here and loved it! Some reviewers didn’t like the narrator, but he was good I thought. I don’t regret this purchase and would listen again!
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- Learning everyday
- 08-20-21
For Any Hardcore Dylan Fan or Blonde on Blonde fan
This book is an intimate study of the recording of one of the greatest rock'n'roll albums of all time. The author does a great job of detailing the recording sessions and the players at each session. It shows how Dylan changed personnel to best facilitate the song. A great book about a great album by a great musician; what could be better!
To show how much I like it, I've listened to it many times. If you're a Dylan fan or Blinde on Blonde fan, this is a fascinating exploration of this amazing album's creation.
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- Jeff Levy
- 12-02-18
Great Book...But the Narrator?
Daryl Sanders' book is amazing. He puts you in the moment, a ringside seat at Dylan's mercurial decisions about personnel, lyrics, rhythm, and venues. But why wasn't he hired to narrate his own book? I've heard him talk--he is informed, engaged, with a voice that's authentic. Who is Graham Halstead? Every time he pronounces Johanna as Jo-Anna it's like fingernails across a blackboard. Dude, have you not listened to this song ONCE??? This is an entire book about Blonde on Blonde and I get the distinct impression that you've never listened to the album, that the cuts have no history for you at all. Please, Audible. Let more authors read their own work.
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- Patrick King
- 06-04-19
Loved it with reservations
I loved thinking again about one of my top five all-time favorite albums and learning about the process Dylan used to bring it off. I do have a few criticisms however. First for Mr. Halstead, Darryl Zan-NOOK? Really? You never heard of Darryl Zanuck? You're about to read a 300 page book on the making of a record album and with few exceptions EVERYONE who is going to buy this is nearly obsessed with this record. Would it be too much to expect you to LISTEN to the record? The name of the song, as Dylan makes VERY clear throughout the performance, is Visions of JoHanna, not Visions of Joanna. Every time you called this song Visions of Joanna, and you did it many many times, it was like fingernails on a chalk board. I don't blame you. I blame Audible for not making your criteria for reading this book more explicit.
For Mr. Sanders, you really think that by using the words 'whispering' and 'muttering' Dylan made Visions of Johanna a 'tribute' to T.S. Eliot? Come on! Also on Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, In the chorus: "My warehouse eyes my Arabian Drums. Should I leave them by your gate, or Sad Eyed Lady, should I wait." The singer's eyes are not like warehouses. In this case the word 'eyes' is a verb. He's considering putting his Arabian drums in his storage unit but he'd rather leave them with his girlfriend and while he's over there he's hoping she'll fix him a meal and let him spend the night. Not so obscure after all.
The history of the musicians tapped to be Dylan's band on these sessions, how the songs were composed and why they were recorded in Nashville and the involvement of Al Cooper and Robbie Robertson on these sessions is fascinating info not available anywhere else as far as I know. The impact of the album on Nashville as well as the rest of the world was something I hadn't previously considered. The transition from producer Tom Wilson to Bob Johnston and Johnston's influence on Dylan and his management to record in Nashville was information about this classic album I never heard before.
If, like me, you've been listening to Dylan's outtake album, Cutting Edge, for months, this book offers a lot of insight on the various takes and who plays what. The two products, That Thin Wild Mercury Sound and Cutting Edge, really should be marketed together. That would be a high-priced CD and book package well worth purchasing in hard copy.
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- Bozobob
- 03-28-19
Some good moments overall
Right now, I'm probably 75% finished with this. Overall, if you're a Dylanphile you'll find some interesting stuff I'm sure. However, the choice of reader is questionable. It is clear that he has probably never heard any of the songs he's discussing. Also, the editing in terms of mispronouncing of names and song titles is very substandard. Two quick examples: the author spends a great deal of time discussing the importance of "Visions Of Johanna" to the album. I agree, but the reader says "Joanna" approximately 1000 times I think. Somebody should have caught that. Also, the author says that "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window" was mistakenly released as the B-side to "Positively 4th Street." That's incorrect - it was released AS "Positively 4th Street." I know because I actually have that record. The B-side was "From A Buick 6." That makes me wonder about other "facts" reported in the book. I've certainly read worse books, but in general, I'm kind of disappointed.
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