The book is slight at only 200 pages, but once Sanders is done setting up the scene, it gets really good. I love books like this that hyper focus on famous recording sessions down to the hour. Sanders writes about every single rehearsal, false start, incomplete take, alternate versions, and keeper cuts with exhaustive detail—it’s fantastic ... That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound gives life and image to the making of Blonde on Blonde, and takes less time to read than listening to the unabridged The Cutting Edge entry in the Bootleg Series. Read this book if you care more about piano trills and studio work than blind speculation on the possible subjects of Dylan’s lyrics.
Sanders’s emphasis on the Nashville cats’ ability to give the right sound to songs that Dylan was literally writing in the studio sheds new light on one of the 20th century’s central cultural artifacts ... One comes away from That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound with an understanding of how privileged an artist Dylan was in 1966 ... it’s a revelation to discover that he sang certain lyrics literally moments after thinking them up. Sanders gets deep into the evolution of many songs’ lyrics ... Sanders’s blow-by-blow reconstruction of the sessions embodies his book’s greatest strength and weakness ... An amateur Dylanologist, I found the book gripping, but for the uninitiated, there’s not necessarily much narrative tension ... An unsympathetic reader might find Sanders’s attention to detail laborious ... Sanders gets priceless details ... Sanders’s recovery of such moments becomes all the more valuable because, incredibly, there are no photographs of them.
In this absorbing account, journalist Sanders provides fascinating details about the songs...but the young yet experienced Nashville musicians who backed Dylan, along with Al Kooper, Robbie Robertson, and producer Bob Johnston, receive almost equal attention ... For anyone interested in Dylan or the music of the 1960s. This title deserves the kind of attention received by Greil Marcus's Like a Rolling Stone.
