The 11-Minute Bob Dylan Track He Called the “Best He Ever Wrote” That Confounded His Band in the Studio

The disconnect between what an artist believes to be their best work and what the general public deems as their favorite makes the question of which song a songwriter is most proud of especially interesting. A musician’s favorite work offers a fascinating insight into that particular artist’s mindset. And when that artist is as opaque as Bob Dylan, it makes the answer all the more surprising.

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Of course, it would be reasonable to assume that Dylan’s favorite songs weren’t his radio hits. But considering the personal nature of the song he once cited as his best, Dylan’s go-to pick certainly isn’t the first we would’ve chosen. And maybe that’s exactly why it held such a special place in his heart.

Bob Dylan Cited This Eleven-Minute Track As One of His Best

Folk-rock icon Bob Dylan is no stranger to a lengthy track. In 2020, he released a nearly seventeen-minute track about the JFK assassination called “Murder Most Foul”. His country blues track “Highlands” from the 1997 album Time Out of Mind clocked in at sixteen minutes and thirty seconds. Even three decades earlier, at a time when the under-three-minute radio hit was still king, Dylan was experimenting with double-digit minute markings. His Blonde on Blonde closer, “Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands”, was 11:23 long.

Dylan once told Robert Shelton that “Sad-Eyed Lady” was the “best song [he] ever wrote,” per No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan. “Now that is religious music!” He said to Jules Siegel, per Clinton Heylin’s Dylan: Behind the Shades. “That is religious carnival music. I just got that real old-time religious carnival sound there, didn’t I?” Indeed, it was the songwriter’s admiration for the production that likely kept it from being entirely too embarrassing, as it contained some of the more overt references to his then-wife and mother to his children, Sara, that he had ever written.

But that’s not to say his entire band was on board.

“Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands” Took the Band Down a Deep Valley

In Dylan: Behind the Shades, “Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands” drummer Kenny Buttrey recalled Bob Dylan giving the band a rundown of the arrangement before they hit record. Dylan was expectedly vague, saying he would break up verses with a harmonica interlude and play it by ear. That lack of direction is audible in the final version of the Blonde On Blonde closer, if one knows what to listen for. “We were preparing ourselves dynamically for a basic two-to-three-minute record,” Buttrey explained.

“If you notice that record, that thing after, like, the second chorus starts building and building like crazy, and everybody’s just peaking it up ‘cause we thought, ‘Man, this is it. This is gonna be the last chorus, and we’ve gotta put everything into it we can.’ And he played another harmonica solo and went back down to another verse and the dynamics had to drop back down to a verse kind of feel. After about five, six minutes of this stuff, we start looking at the clock, everyone starts looking at each other. We’d built to the peak of our limit, and bang, [there] goes another harmonica solo.”

“After about ten minutes of this thing, we’re cracking up at each other, at what we were doing,” Buttrey continued. “I mean, we peaked five minutes ago. Where do we go from here?”

Knowing what we do about Dylan, we don’t doubt that the palpable sense of anticipation—and knowing he was in charge of turning those feelings up or down—added to his admiration for “Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands”.

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