It was June 1965 in New York City.

Ten months have passed since the two artists recorded their first album in acoustic with the Columbia Records. It didn’t work as Beatlemania swept the States those weeks and overshadowed everything. Soon the duo was split up; one went to England and pursued a solo career. The other returned to his studies at university.

In that summer’s month, a Columbia Records producer (initials TW) was finishing his recording sessions with Bob Dylan. This was his first full album in electric sound. In his previous recording, Dylan still kept one side of the vinyl with acoustic tracks (Incidentally, on the following month, Dylan appears at the New Port Folk Festival and challenges the fans with a fully amplified band. He is booed down by an angry crowd and is forced to perform the remaining songs in acoustic).

I guess it was an inspiration of the producer. He kept the recording musicians from Dylan’s sessions and picked one song from the duo’s flop acoustic album. He overdubbed it with drums, electric bass and electric guitar. He did not tell the artists. Nor did he inform them that this track was released as a single! It eventually reached No. 1 on Billboard in early 1966. Given this surprise success, the artists were reunited and pursued a highly successful career as recording artists in the years to follow.

One could say that there is a lesson here; that you should not keep your work too close to yourself but let the others put some ideas to it. Equally, such collaboration could end-up in a failure. I have a feeling that there are more cases of the latter than the former. So if you had to choose, which will be your choice?

Finally, here are the quiz.

a) Name the two artists whose single hit the top of the chart.
b) Name the title of this hit single.
c) Can you also name these two albums by Bob Dylan?

Use the column below. I will post the answer in a few days there.

Bookmarks