The 11-minute epic that Bob Dylan called “the best song I ever wrote”
When considering the magnitude of Bob Dylan’s legacy it is hard to centre in on a particular song that defines everything he has achieved. His work as “the voice of a generation”, emanating a sense of a new society from the smoky coffeehouses of Greenwich Village, all the way through to being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, has seen him pride himself on being an unequivocally mysterious figure.
There are countless moments where, like a musical matador, he has guided the on-rushing bull of fandom, with all its snarling suspicions and pointed questions underneath his red cape and into empty space. In 1964, he rejected the notion of being a folk artist and plugged in his guitar to head towards a new rock horizon, upsetting hordes of fans who then labelled him Judas. Then, when his folk-rock stylings were typified by a nasal vocal that few could emulate, he took to his new record, Nashville Skyline, and turned himself into a crooner. Later, he would find God and bring Christianity into his music without so much as a second thought for his audience, a trick he repeated with every single performance, too.
Whether it is in an interview or on stage, Dylan rarely seems pleased if he hasn’t upset at least one of his fans by being outwardly elusive. Whether through not answering the most tantalising questions, leaving those answers to two or maybe three syllables or simply not playing the songs his audience wants to hear. Dylan’s role has never been one of people-pleasing. It’s why his song ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ is perhaps his defining anthem.
Firstly, the track is unusually long, even for Dylan. An 11-minute epic is not the kind of track one usually finds on a record, and certainly not in 1966 when it was released as the entire fourth side of the first-ever double LP, Blonde on Blonde. At the time, The Beatles and the British invasion groups like them had turned rock and roll into a hit factory, and short, sharp and devastatingly punchy songs were the sound du jour. While the Liverpudlians had begun to trip out with Rubber Soul, their first true trip away from pop music, Revolver was still to come. Essentially, by producing such a meandering track, Dylan was being particularly obtuse.
Another reason the track can be rightly seen as his crystalline moment of creation is the subject matter. Written for his then-wife Sara Lownds, the tune is a deeply rich and almost Byronic love poem. He sings in another ode to his wife, ‘Sara’, “Staying up for nights in the Chelsea Hotel writing ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ for you.” However, Clinton Heylin suggests much of the track was written in an eight-hour session, which concluded when he invited his session musicians at 4am to start work on recording.
The musicians sat down, ran through a first take of the track and were surprised when Dylan was happy to move on. The song, it would seem, resided in a special place of spontaneous love for Dylan. He didn’t need the meticulous detail he would show other tracks here. This was a veracious outpouring of emotion. That’s something that can be ratified by his unwillingness to play the song live.
There is only one noted time that Dylan performed the track for an audience. The Swingin Pig YouTube channel notes that the performance was given in the early hours of the morning following the recording session. Whether he is simply enamoured with his work or is truly in awe of the tune, Dylan prefixes the performance with “This is the best song I ever wrote”. It’s enough to make the unusual outing in a Denver hotel, given just days before he would finish the game-changing album, some serious gravitas.
Of course, after this moment, Dylan would write hundreds more songs, his relationship with Sara Lownds would end and his catalogue of tracks he might consider his best would have grown. However, here is a perfect moment where his “best song” was his most recent one. Today, it simply remains the most easily definable moment of his legacy.