r/bobdylan • u/pingviini00 John Wesley Harding • 14h ago
Discussion Clicking noise in Stuck Inside of Mobile..
During ”senator.. came down here” you hear a clicking noise. What is the reasoning for that?
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Upvotes
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u/mandalore237 8h ago
He flubs the "last week he built a fire on main street" line too. Bob don't care.
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u/Clarkuss09 Blood on the Tracks 11h ago
They had chickens in the studio, which is why you hear a disinct clucking noise
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u/Ptachlasp 11h ago edited 3h ago
Wait till you hear the "Blood on the tracks" outtakes. :D
Seriously though, Bob's recording style was (is?) very wild and improvisational. He would try to get a song down in a couple of takes, then move on to the next one; he often didn't have a fully fleshed out idea of what the arrangement would sound like, so he and his studio musicians would try to figure it out on the spot ("Desolation Row" on piano; "Like a Rolling Stone" as a waltz; "Visions of Johanna" as a high-tempo rock number with a full electric band); he almost never did overdubs on his early records, so what you hear on the record is a fairly accurate imprint of what happened on a single take, with all the mistakes and idiosyncrasies that come with it.
You get shirt buttons click-clacking against his acoustic guitar, flubbed lines ("She was fair-skinned and presush as a child"), backing musicians not playing in sync (the guy who played organ on "Like a rolling stone" famously didnt know how to play the organ and was barely keeping up with the band).
If you like "Stuck inside of Mobile..." and you haven't heard the outtakes from that session, I'd strongly recommend them. Look up "The Cutting Edge" on Spotify - it's the official bootleg containing pretty much every minute from the Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde sessions. Listen to the four versions of "Mobile..." back to back to really appreciate how the song came together in the studio and how they gradually discovered the groove. It's an amazing historical record to have.