Country Music Roots and GRAMMY Award-winning ensemble, Old Crow Medicine Show, release their SIXTH album, 50 Years of Blonde on Blonde, today via Columbia Records Nashville. Fifty years ago Bob Dylan released his iconic album Blonde on Blonde, which was recorded partly in Nashville, Tennessee, via Columbia Records. Now, Old Crow Medicine Show is releasing their special recording of the same album via the same record label, Columbia. Ketch Secor talks about walking the line of honoring the songs of Bob Dylan, and yet, still putting the unique musical touch of Old Crow Medicine Show on each track. Ketch mentioned the approach the band took to the iconic hit “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” “We had a lot of fun with this one, we got out the big bass drum, and the timpani, and marched in. It felt a little bit like a jazzy funeral in New Orleans, that was our inspiration for this track.” And while Blonde On Blonde is a revered album in the history of music, Ketch and the boys of Old Crow learned that not all the songs are widely known,“We played ‘Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again’ once in Mobile, Alabama, and man, nobody had ever heard it in their lives, and here we were thinking we were going to get the key to the city…go home with the prettiest girl in Mobile…and she’s like ‘what’s that?’ (laugh).” The 14-track album, 50 Years of Blonde on Blonde, was recorded LIVE at the CMA Theater located inside the historic Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum located in Nashville, TN in May 2016. Beginning next week Old Crow Medicine Show will kick off a special tour, the Old Crow Medicine Show Performing Blonde on Blonde tour in Santa Barbara, CA at the Granada Theatre on May 4th. The band will perform the album in its entirety at each show–for the full schedule of tour date, visit Crow Medicine dot com, or just click HERE
If you’re not that familiar with Old Crow Medicine Show, the band is comprised of members Ketch Secor, Morgan Jahnig, Chance McCoy, Cory Younts, Kevin Hayes and Critter Fuqua. The Country Music Roots band and Grand Ole Opry members have five studio albums to their credit, Old Crow Medicine Show (2004), Big Iron World (2006), Tennessee Pusher (2008), Carry Me Back (2012), Remedy (2014) and appeared on countless albums by other artists. They’ve established a global tour following, received the Americana Music Association Trailblazer Award and shared the stage with artists such as Willie Nelson, Brandi Carlile, Mumford & Sons, The Lumineers, John Prine and The Avett Brothers. The PLATINUM selling band are two-time GRAMMY-winners including Best Folk Album in 2014. On top of all that Darius Rucker‘s number-one block buster song “Wagon Wheel” was a cover of the song original done by Old Crow Medicine Show on their 2004 album Old Crow Medicine Show.
Ketch Secor talks about the songs on Old Crow Medicine Show’s brand new album 50 Years Of Blonde On Blonde.
Track 01 – “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”
“We had a lot of fun with this one, we got out the big bass drum, and the timpani, and marched in. It felt a little bit like a jazzy funeral in New Orleans, that was our inspiration for this track.”
Track 02 – “Pledging My Time”
“’Pledging My Time’ was a tougher one, it’s really slow and it’s a blues kind of ballad. So, we turned it on its head and played it at 78 speed with hillbilly instrumentation.”
Track 03 – “Visions of Johanna”
“The Bob Dylan scholars agree that this one is out in the Bob Dylan stratosphere of song. It was a hard one to memorize because you just get all these places and personalities mixed up. It’s quite a tongue twister, and the recitation of ‘Visions of Johana’ was a real challenge…but I put my fiddle under my chin, and took a deep breath and dove right in.”
Track 04 – “One Of Us Most Know (Sooner Or Later)”
“We had a lot of fun thinking about what do with ‘Sooner Or Later,’ this was a tune that we wanted Critter (Fugua) to sing, and it’s way up in his range. He wasn’t sure if he could hit these high notes. But, you’ll hear when he hits the high notes, and you’ll know that he did it beautifully. It’s got a real sonority up there at the top. We tackled this one with twin fiddles and with a bowed bass. This is the closest that Old Crow can come to approximating a symphonic sound, we get all those strings humming at the same time. Had a little mandolin, and the whole thing sounds kind of like ethereal Daniel Lanois balladree.”
Track 05 – “I Want You”
“I first heard Bob Dylan sing ‘I Want You’ when he was opening up for the Grateful dead. I was at Giants Stadium, I was 15 years old, I was sitting next to Critter Fuqua, who’s singing this track. We were way out of place in Giants Stadium (laugh) in 1994…we hardly belonged, but we were there for Bob. This song always reminds me of the Grateful Dead, and their sort of funny partnership in the 1980s and early 90s when they toured together. Made that great record Dylan and the Dead. I always think about Jerry Garcia when I hear ‘I Want You.’”
Track 06 – “Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again”
“We played ‘Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again’ once in Mobile, Alabama, and man, nobody had ever heard it in their lives, and here we were thinking we were going to get the key to the city…go home with the prettiest girl in Mobile…and she’s like ‘what’s that?’ (laugh)”
Track 07 – “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”
“Ahhh, my favorite song on the record ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.’ Come to think of it, they all have a special place in my heart, but this one is beaten furiously. This is Kevin Hayes doing his sidewalk soiree. This is the jug band version of ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.’ We added a couple of chords…a circle of 5ths they call it. We put Critter on the plectrum banjo, and Morgan bows the bass to make it that ‘woo woo’ kind of jug band sound. This is a street corner rave.”
Track – 08 “Just Like A Woman”
“Well, our version of ‘Just Like A Woman’ on the 50 Years Of Blonde On Blonde record is taken from another live album, a really famous one, called The Concert For Bangladesh. George Harrison organized this in the early 1970s, it was after the Beatles had split and it was a big deal. It was widely attended, and raised millions of dollars for hungry children in Bangladesh. And Bob Dylan made an important appearance at this concert, and he played ‘Just Like A Woman’ and that’s where this version comes from…Ringo Starr on the drums…in this case, we got Critter (Fuqua).”
Track 09 – “Most Likely You Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine”
“Oh, this one was really fun to record. It feels a little bit like the Talking Heads do Old Crow doing Bob Dylan. It’s got a pulse to it that trips me out just to think about it. I hope you all like this one as much as we liked recording it.”
Track 10 – “Temporary Like Achilles”
“At the end of this tune, Critter says ‘Achilles, be yourself.’ We like thinking about Achilles out there on the highways and byways of America cranking up country music, drifting through Nashville, heading down to Texarkana, and points South and West. He’s kind of a proverbial ‘road hero’ getting to know all kinds of trouble, and coming out unscathed but forever changed at the end.”
Track 11 – “Absolutely Sweet Marie”
“This song is a lot of fun. I really love thinking about them making it in Nashville. This guy Wayne Moss was the guitar player on this session, and Wayne just had a really inventive…he has these personality notes, these little sonic hooks that really create a signature out of Bob’s sort of cacophony of language. Think about, like a…surf board hanging out on a crazy crashing wave, that’s like Wayne Moss’ little musical lines amidst the chaos of these Bob Dylan poems turned song.”
Track 12 – “4th Time Around”
“We sung ‘4the Time Around’ as a duet, Chance (McCoy) and I. This one was really fun, it sort of feels like a break-up song in front of a lower East side apartment, gum on your shoe, trying to catch a bus that’s never going to arrive, trash blowing down the streets, cold mid-winter, before all the prices got jacked up and the all tourists moved in.”
Track 13 – “Obviously 5 Believers”
“We took a page from the Doc Watson playbook with ‘Obviously 5 Believers.’ I think we could have done it blues style too, the way that Charlie McCoy kicks it off in the Blonde On Blonde sessions in ’66, but it made sense for us to employ our great skill with hillbilly rave up music, and so we treated this one like it was an old folks song from the Southern Highlands, and we really cut the run with this number.”
Track 14 – “Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands”
“This is the longest song on Blonde On Blonde, and was an entire side on an album in 1966 when this double album came out. Nobody had ever put on a whole album to hear one song before. Bob really broke a lot of ground with this record, but with this song in particular, cause this song on Bob’s record was about 11 and half minutes…crazy long song. We shaved it down just a hair, by upping the tempo a little bit, changing a little bit of the chord structure versus.”