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Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat

"Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat"
Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat (Bob Dylan single - cover art).jpg
Single by Bob Dylan
from the album Blonde on Blonde
B-side "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine"
Released March 1967
Format 7"
Recorded March 10, 1966
Genre Electric blues
Length 3:58
2:20 (single edit)
Label Columbia
Writer(s) Bob Dylan
Producer(s) Bob Johnston
Bob Dylan singles chronology
"Just Like a Woman"
(1966)
"Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat"
(1967)
"If You Gotta Go, Go Now"
(1967)
Blonde on Blonde track listing

"Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" is a song by Bob Dylan, from his 1966 album Blonde on Blonde. Like many other Dylan songs of the 1965–1966 period, the song features a surreal, playful lyric set to an electric blues accompaniment.

Dylan's lyrics affectionately ridicule a female "fashion victim" who wears a leopard-skin pillbox hat. The pillbox hat was a fashionable ladies' hat in the United States in the early to mid-1960s, most famously worn by Jacqueline Kennedy. Dylan satirically crosses this accessory's high-fashion image with leopard-skin material, perceived as more downmarket and vulgar. The song was also written and released after pillbox hats had been at the height of fashion.

Some journalists and Dylan biographers have speculated that the song was inspired by Edie Sedgwick, an actress and model associated with Andy Warhol. It has been suggested that Sedgwick was an inspiration for other Dylan songs of the time as well, particularly some from Blonde on Blonde.

The song melodically and lyrically resembles Lightnin' Hopkins's "Automobile Blues", with Dylan's opening line of "Well, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat," echoing Hopkins's "I saw you riding 'round in your brand new automobile," and the repeated line of "...brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat," melodically descending in the same manner of the Hopkins refrain "...in your brand new fast car". The Dylan reference to "the garage door" in the final verse of "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" may also be an allusion to the automobile of Hopkins's song.

Dylan began to include "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" in his live concerts with the Hawks in late 1965, and the song was one of the first compositions attempted by Dylan and the Hawks when in January 1966 they went into Columbia recording studios in New York City to record material for the Blonde On Blonde album. The song was attempted on January 25 (2 takes) and January 27 (4 takes), but no recording was deemed satisfactory. One of the takes from January 25 was released in 2005 on The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack.


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