The photo on the cover of Bob Dylan’s upcoming album, “Rough and Rowdy Ways” was captured more than five decades ago by a man who, Dylan admitted, he didn’t know.
The upcoming LP, “Rough and Rowdy Ways” features a cover photo from a long-defunct club in London, England.
He doesn’t remember anything about it or what music that the couple was dancing when he snapped the moment, but he does recall being close to the woman.
“I’ve always been very into women,” he says. “I’ve been married three times. The lady had a good figure. And I liked the juxtaposition with the jukebox.”
15 to 20 minutes later of photo takings, the bouncers in the club had enough of him and asked him to leave. “There were crates of beer bottles near the entrance and people started throwing beer bottles at me, so I left,” he says. “It’s something that happens a lot to photographers in different parts of the world, but I think it’s the only time it happened in England to me.”
Just now, Berry’s vast archive is managed by Magnum Photos which recently made a deal with Dylan’s camp for Davidson’s 1959 photograph of a young couple making out inside a car, appearing as the cover on 2009’s “Together Through Life.” Dylan never used a photograph of himself on an album cover since his, Love and Theft album, released in 2001.
Magnum Photos set the deal for the upcoming LP as well but reached out to Berry for finalization. “It was originally a black and white picture, obviously, and they wanted to check if it was okay by me to put a color tint on it,” he says. “I didn’t mind at all.”
However, Berry is not familiar of Dylan’s music, but his wife was a big fan. “She’s more enthusiastic than I am [about the cover],” he says. “But of course I’ve regularly listened to ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ and so forth, but they are her records rather than mine. I like the sort of singers where I can actually hear the words, people like Joan Armatrading or Joan Baez.”