48 years ago today, Bob Dylan’s Desire hits #1 on the Billboard Top 200, and will remain there for five weeks. My original copy, still in the shrink wrap with the sticker:

While some of Dylan’s most famous songs can be found here, the album has largely been ignored from his live shows since 1976. “One More Cup of Coffee” holds the record with 151 performances, but the last was 15 years ago. “Joey” had some consistent appearances for a while, with the last happening in 2012. Nothing else from the album has appeared since 1978, including the most famous song on the album, “Hurricane.” Dylan didn’t even break it out when The Hurricane movie was in theaters.

Work began in July 1975, with initial sessions featuring upwards of 20+ musicians. Eric Clapton was there (he’d appear uncredited on “Romance In Durango”), the British band Kokomo, Dave Mason’s backing band was there also, along with various New York City session musicians like Vinnie Bell and Dominic Cortese. More than one in attendance described the sessions as chaotic, and no usable takes came out of the time. Clapton himself took Dylan aside and suggested he whittle things down to a small group. A couple of sessions with fewer musicians had slightly better results, but only “Oh, Sister” would be a usable take. During a session on July 30th, Dylan struck gold with Rob Stoner on bass, Scarlet Rivera on violin, Howie Wyeth on drums, and Emmylou Harris on vocals. Five of the nine songs on the album came from this session. Three more the next night. Done.

While Bob had played with other musicians before, the groups were mainly session musicians for albums, or were formed already, most famously The Band. The result of the Desire sessions would be the formation of a band by Dylan himself for the first time. Stoner, Rivera & Wyeth would form the core of his band for both Rolling Thunder Revue tours in ’75 and ’76. Though many of the Desire songs would be performed in ’75, the album would be released in between the tours. By the time of the ’76 shows, the sound of the band had changed dramatically, documented on the live Hard Rain coinciding with Dylan’s TV concert special of the same name (though not with all of the same songs from the album).

Only two of the cuts on Desire were written by Bob alone (“Sara” and “One More Cup of Coffee”). The rest were collaborations with Jacques Levy, Dylan’s first co-writer, and of lyrics to boot. Levy had also co-written Roger McGuinn’s “Chestnut Mare.” “Isis” was their first collaboration, which was so successful, they holed up out in the Hamptons at Dylan’s house for a month and completed the rest of the songs, and a few others like “Rita May,” which Jerry Lee Lewis recorded, and “Abandoned Love” which would be released on Dylan’s Biograph boxed set in ’85. The songs on Desire would be among the most lyrically cinematic of his catalogue. “Joey,” about mobster Joey Gallo, was written following a dinner party at Jerry Orbach’s apartment, when Jerry’s wife Marti told stories about Gallo. “Romance in Durango” was loosely born out of Dylan’s time filming Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid in Durango for Sam Peckinpah. “Hurricane” would undergo several rewrites once CBS lawyers got their hands on the lyrics and changes were demanded.

One performance exists from around the time of the recording, before the revisions came, when Dylan appeared on The World of John Hammond, a 1975 PBS special paying tribute to the man who’d discovered him. He’d also discovered Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Bruce Springsteen, helped Stevie Ray Vaughn to get signed to Epic Records. He’d also had a huge hand in breaking segregation as one of the owners of New York’s Cafe Society. He’d done the same with Benny Goodman’s band, having guitarist Charlie Christian become a member of the group at a show without Benny’s prior knowledge. The introduction in the clip below is by Goddard Lieberson, one time head of Columbia Records. He is backed here by the core band of Stoner/Rivera/Wyeth. Keep an ear out for the “Rubin could take a man out with just one punch” verse @ 07:17, especially the way Dylan sings “jail house”:

A brief aside: in 1984, I was working for a friend of my Dad’s in a liquor store on 57th Street between 8th & 9th in NYC. My first day on the job, the phone rings, “can we get a delivery please?” The address was 309 West 57th. At one time it was Media Sound Studios, a very popular recording studio. But now the address was fo an office. “OK, any room or office number?” “Yes, to the office of Mr. John Hammond.” “I’m sorry, John Hammond. As in THE John Hammond??” I took the delivery myself, and his secretary Mikie Harris brought me in to Mr. Hammond’s office. He welcomed me in, sat me down and we talked about Dylan for a good half hour. The kid from the liquor store and John Hammond. The next day his secretary brought over Hammond’s autobiography On Record, complete with a personal inscription:

One of the best Desire songs has been performed exactly once, on May 25, 1976 in Salt Lake City. The tape of this show has never been circulated, and apparently is not even in Dylan’s own archives. The song is “Black Diamond Bay,” the writing of which was partially influenced by Joseph Conrad’s novel Victory. A sketch of Conrad can be seen in the collage on the album’s back cover. In the book, Black Diamond Bay is a unused coal port on an island in the far east. While it is not a song about the book, various other elements in the book made it to the song: hotel, a volcano, gambling, an enigmatic woman, and continued mentions of the location itself. One of my favorite Bob rhymes is in this song, “white veranda” with “necktie and a.” The story in the song is narrated from two perspectives, though it takes until the final verse for the 2nd narrator to appear. It is described throughout from a hotel on the island, but culminates when the earthquake in Black Diamond Bay is a report being watched on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Brilliant.

That song, along with some others inspired by novels or literary figures, can be found on Today’s Playlist:

A bonus song for you: “Romance In Durango,” performed in London on November 24, 2003, out of nowhere, for the first and only time since May 11, 1976:

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#BobDylan #Desire #JacquesLevy #ScarletRivera #Hurricane #Isis #JohnHammond #JosephConrad