Rock In The Country: Nashville’s Secret History

The song Dylan was writing on the studio and the musician’s dime, says McCoy, was “Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands.” The prevailing wisdom is that Dylan wrote the tune about his wife Sara in the Chelsea Hotel. The song “Sara,” from the album Desire, features the lines: “Stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel/Writin’ ‘Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’ for you.” But as is often the case with Dylan, the facts are never quite clear.

“After a while you’re struggling to stay awake, thinking, ‘Whenever he does come up with a song, we’re gonna have to go in there and nail it,’ ” says McCoy. “And we’re all not feeling that great. And our worst fears were confirmed… a fourteen-minute ballad!”

Whether or not Dylan had come to Nashville to achieve a certain sound, the songwriter came off as an enigma to the other studio musicians. “He seemed to be oblivious to what we were doing,” says McCoy. “So I asked him if it was okay. He said, ‘I don’t know, man. What do you think?’ So I finally quit asking. I told the producer, ‘I’m trying to get some feedback from him, I’m not getting any. So I’m gonna run with my instinct and if it’s not what he wants hopefully he’ll say something.’ ”

“I spent three albums trying to figure it out and I never did figure it out,” McCoy reminisces today, matter-of-factly. “Whether he liked it or not I have no idea, but it was three of the biggest albums of his career.”

McCoy played mostly guitar on the Nashville sessions that became Blonde On Blonde, though he picked up his harmonica for “Obviously Five Believers” and played trumpet on “Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35.”

“In the afternoon, the producer said, ‘Late tonight he wants to record a song and he wants a kind of ‘Salvation Army’-type of feel.’ He said, ‘We may need a trumpet and a trombone.’ And I said, ‘Does it have to be good?’ He said, ‘No.’ And I said, ‘Okay, I can do the trumpet.’ ” McCoy called in Wayne Butler, with whom he’d played in a combo, to play trombone.

“Two takes and that was it. All the noise on the record we’re actually – all the musicians – screaming and hollering. He told us to act like it’s a party. So everybody who didn’t have a horn in his mouth was shouting.”

On John Wesley Harding, recorded the following year, and 1969’s Nashville Skyline, McCoy played bass.

While McCoy won’t speculate whether Dylan wanted to achieve a Nashville sound, he admits that the albums got decidedly country-er the more time Dylan spent in Nashville.

“He changed his style a little too,” says McCoy. “The instrumentation is much more sparse, especially on John Wesley Harding. It was real quick. We did the whole album in nine-and-a-half hours. That was more the real Nashville style of recording.”

By the time Dylan was back in town for Nashville Skyline, he’d enlisted a full band of Nashville’s top-shelf pickers, as well as guys like Norman Blake and Charlie Daniels.

“To me the highlight of that record was the recording of ‘Lay, Lady, Lay,’ ” says McCoy. “If you listen to the drum part, it sounds like there’s two guys playing. Actually there have been bets lost about that. It was Kenny playing it all at once. I was there. I witnessed it with my own eyes.”

“There’s another question mark that I’ve always had,” McCoy says about Dylan’s decision to record those three albums in Nashville. “I’m not sure how the relationship with his producer went and how his manager was plugged into all this. After the huge success of Blonde On Blonde, maybe his manager insisted [that he record again in Nashville]. But I know after Nashville Skyline we never saw him again.”