Bob Dylan
“He gave us the grace, the words and meaning, ripping our blinders off, dilating us pupils with the harsh light of the other way of looking at the looniverse.” – Andrew Loog Oldham
“His voice sucks.” – Me, when I was in middle school and a complete fucking moron
“Pssst…over here: It’s the words, man.” – Capn Marvel
Albums Reviewed:
The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Live 1964 – Concert At Philharmonic Hall
The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: Live 1966 – The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert
The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7: No Direction Home – The Soundtrack
The Bootleg Series, Vol. 5: Live 1975 – The Rolling Thunder Revue
The Bootleg Series, Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs – Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006
Bob Dylan stands as proof that sometimes it helps to be an asshole, because he is, and he wouldn’t have accomplished anything close what he has in the last forty-plus years without being one. Now, when I call Bob an “asshole,” this does not necessarily mean he actively antagonized people or went out of his way to, you know, be an asshole (though he occasionally did, ofcourse). Nope, I call Bob an asshole, and I think this asshole quality was one of the most important factors in his becoming one of the greatest artistic figures of the twentieth century (and if you think that’s a bold statement to make…well, no shit it is, but he was), because, simply put, he did not give a shit. Robert Zimmerman did exactly what he wanted, when he wanted, and cared not one iota if this pissed off friends, fans, critics, anyone. If he wanted to play a dirty rock version of “Maggie’s Farm” in front of thousands of Joan Baez-wannabes who had paid good money to see their favorite folk poet, so be it. If he wanted to completely disregard the idea of “protest music” less than a year after being anointed the de-facto leader of the “protest music movement,” so be it. If he wanted to slyly rip into his fans while on stage, so be it. If he wanted to mock every question he ever got from every journalist he ever saw in the mid-sixties, so be it. If he wanted to verbally berate an inexperienced reporter sent backstage to interview him just because he thought he was a doofus (which, if you’ve seen D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back, he does pretty brutally), so be it. If he wanted to release a 25-minute useless country throwaway album, or a Christian album, or a disco album, or maybe not even try to make a decent album for twenty years, so be it. If he wanted to do a two-hour show without playing a single song from between 1963 and 1966 and spend that time rearranging tunes from Street Legal or Planet Waves or Infidels into reggae or something, well, so be it, because he’s Bob Dylan and he doesn’t give a shit.
Needless to say, once Bob’s creative and competitive juices stopped flowing, this makes him one of the most frustrating and inconsistent artists I’ve ever reviewed on this site, but for the first 15 or so years there he was usually great, and for the first five he was one of the greatest musicians of all time. He started off as just an exceptionally talented hillbilly folk cover artist, but morphed into the greatest folk songwriter to ever live within a year. After a colossally disappointing protest album (one of the few times he gave a shit what other people thought, and a mistake he rarely made again), he disregarded folk entirely a year or two later to make what are probably the most historically important trio of rock and roll albums of all time before crashing his motorcycle and going into a coma, after which he was never the same. He’s the only artist I can think of who evolved stylistically even quicker than the Beatles (Christ, he went from hayseed covers to “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” in a year, then it only took him two more to go from that to “Like a Rolling Stone”). He’s undoubtedly the greatest lyricist who ever lived if you don’t mind wacky imagery, dense references, and clever wordplay in lieu of something that can be easily understood at first glance (but it’s not prose, see? It’s poetry, so it doesn’t have to be easily understood. That’s the whole damn point). When he “plugged in” in 1965, he became the first musician to combine dense, artsy, poetic lyrics with rock and roll music, thus making side 1 of Bringing it all Back Home the decisive moment when rock and roll became a viable art form instead of just two-minute singles about how cute my baby is. The steps the Beatles et al. made in 1966-67 would not have been possible if Bob hadn’t released Bringing it all Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited in 1965, and The White Album in 1968 wouldn’t have been possible had Bob not first popped rock’s double-album cherry with Blonde on Blonde in 1966 (Note: I completely forgot for the longest time that Frank Zappa actually did this with his debut Freak Out!, but considering Bob was a megastar by this point and Frank was just some weird freak in LA, my point remains). Bob Dylan was the best folk songwriter the world has ever seen and the most important figure of all time in developing of the idea rock and roll as art. That’s not bad.
The five year period between Bob’s debut album and his motorcycle crash in 1966 has deservedly been beaten into the ground in every form of media imaginable, culminating in the four-hour Martin Scorsese documentary on PBS last fall, but, although his output became very spotty and at times horrific afterwards, he never stopped being interesting. He went hardcore country for a while, then stopped trying for about five years, subsequently fading off the radar screen before a huge blowout tour with the Band in 1974 followed by the completely unexpected release of one of the best albums of his career a year later. He kept this second career peak going for a couple years before finally jumping the shark officially in the late seventies, at which time he proceeded to suck hard for a long time before his second completely unexpected career renaissance in the late nineties. In the meantime he became a hardcore born-again Christian, then a hardcore Jew, then a slick eighties disco-rocker, then a washed-up old fart who couldn’t write a good song to save his life (this period of his lasted a good decade or so), then, completely out of the blue, a traditional folk cover artist again before reappearing in the public consciousness with the excellent Time Out of Mind. He didn’t release a single live album until the mid-seventies, but then flooded the market with them once he wasn’t any good. And through it all, he continued to be an asshole, and he continued to not give a shit.
Bob Dylan’s flaws are obvious. His voice, on an objective, note-hitting, pretty-sounding basis, sucks (but Joan Baez’s is excellent on the same basis, and I despise her, so there you go). He was a good acoustic guitar player, though his harmonica playing is rudimentary and occasionally even annoying (and often mixed far too high). He also works exclusively in “traditional folk/blues/rock and roll formats,” whatever that means, which I suppose is why you never get anything resembling “Close to the Edge” from the guy, and he does have a tendency to ramble sometimes. His backing bands, especially during his 1965-66 peak, were often outstanding, though, and his songwriting is beyond reproach, both of which, combined with the atmosphere he’s able to generative via his lyrics and voice (which is nasal and whiney objectively, but fantastic at all the intangibles a rock/pop vocalist needs), more than make up for his flaws, at least when he’s writing good material. When he’s not, though…some of his records, most of which you can find in eighties, are just gawd-awful. I’ll say it again: he sucked hard for a long time. How long, you ask? Well, the nadir of his recorded output occurred nearly a decade after his born-again Christian period.
That’s Bob, though. If he wants to make Blonde on Blonde, he will, and if he wants to hastily throw together a bunch of ass covers with horrid eighties production and call it an album, he will do that as well. He does not care what you or I or Joan Baez thinks. He’s also someone you grow into. I had my Zeppelin phase in high school, my Beatles phase in college, and my Dylan phase right after I graduated. I don’t think I’m alone in that.
And, onto the reviews!
ddickson@rice.edu writes:
WHEEE-DOO! CELEBRATE
GOOD TIMES (come on) (Jimi Hendrix, copyright 1968))!!!
Yep, I gotta admit, the number of times I was considering a WHERE'S BOB
DYLAN YOU USELESS PRICK over the last year and a half cannot (and should
not) be counted. But now we have gold at bradreviews. And it's GOOD
as
Gould. Gould, good--God. You see my point. Thanks-a-plenty
for becoming a
Bob Dylan fan already and gracing us with your evaluation of his amazingness.
This guy I don't dig for his lyrics as much as everybody else, even though,
I must admit, they ARE some very, very tasty icing on the cake. The way
he
phrases certain words, draws out others, and dumps so many syllables on top
of the musical pile really take the place of so-called "hooks" in the
"thing
that makes this guy so special" slot of his musical layout.
What makes 'im special fer ME, to tell the truth, is his thorough MASTERY of
the roots-rock genre and all its myriad facets. He's got a greater
quantity
of great, resonant, not-necessarily-hooky-but
rootsy tootsy timeless bootsy melodies--and the emotional heft to back them
up--then any other artist I'VE listened to over the last five years. I've
actually heard that
regard, but I wouldn't know and/or care one way or the mother.
Springsteen? He peaked with The E Street Shuffle. Everything else
was an
attempt to beat that one.
Yessir, Bob Dylan, a shoots-hock grandmaster. Kicks the Rolling Stones in
the rear all over the '60's maelstrom on that count and then some. And I
dare say, even more talented than either Lennon or McCartney on their prime
(though not more so than both of them put together. Put DOWN that gun,
Jethro)
Haven't heard any of his sucky albums, but hopefully thou wilt like the
Basement Tapes much more than general popular opinion (though not critical
opinion) does. It's a redneck, true, but so's Kelly Clarkson.
megatug@gmail.com writes:
Man, I just don't understand
Dylan, at all. I bought Highway 61 Revisited some time ago and thought it was a
big stinky turd, maybe it's the voice?? I've just never been able to figure out
why he was so beloved, the melodies and hooks are nearly non-existent, the
lyrics may be fantastic, but surely an artist can't exist on lyrics alone, even
Elvis Costello with his poo poo voice wrote some killer melodies to his killer
lyrics. I guess when I start my own record reviewing site I'll have more room
to complain but ehh.to each his own.
Bob Dylan (1962)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “House Of
The Risin’ Sun”
Although probably the Bob Dylan album
with the smallest amount of objective “artistic merit” before he just totally
stopped trying in the early seventies, this ramshackle, unprofessional
collection of traditional folk covers and other assorted countrified doohickies
is just too goshdarned fun to receive
anything less than an 8. And while the
argument that I would most likely not have heard
of this album, let alone listened to it 20 times, had it not been recorded by
Bob Dylan may be absolutely 100% true…I mean, so what? It’s BOB DYLAN. If I’m gonna listen to a guy with a whiney,
nasally voice play bare-ass acoustic guitar/harmonica covers of songs from 1850
on a two-track for half an hour, that guy better
damn well be Bob Dylan. The dude can
create charm, humor, darkness…whatever atmosphere he wants, really, just from
plucking a few acoustic notes and hardening up his 20-year-old shitpile whine
of a voice a little bit. Freewheelin’ only came out a year after this, and it’s not like
something that good could come from nowhere,
you know?
Anyway, even the most
musically retarted douchebag faggety-ass blooch will have heard at least a few of these songs (since they’re
“standards” and all), if only from movies and/or those Roger Daltrey-hosted
“Best of the 60’s!” compilation infomercials that come on Comedy Central at
4am. If you’ve seen Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? (EXCELLENT movie, by the way, bona fide
even), you’ve heard “Man of Constant Sorrow,” albeit in a more fleshed-out,
lyrically different version with a pomade-greased George Clooney on lead
lip-sync. And that big Animals hit
“House of the Rising Sun” is here, too, albeit minus the church organ and
overriding atmosphere of doom (not that the one here is cheery or anything,
just “less” doom-filled). And for
Zeppelin-o-philes who haven’t yet had the time to delve into the early sixties
folk scene, what you know as the eleven-minute crushing electric blues “In My
Time of Dying” is done here in two and a half minutes of acoustic guitar,
harmonica, and Bob. These are the only
one’s I’ve heard outside of this
album, but I’m sure there are others you can find on a Woody Guthrie 7”
somewhere (for instance, apparently Simon and Garfunkel do a version of “Pretty
Peggy-O,” though I’ve been too busy listening to hyper-complex 2nd-rate
prog music lately to give much of a shit).
Anyway, the point is that this isn’t just an album of “covers,” its an
album of “traditional folk covers,” meaning that a lot of these songs had no doubt been floating around the “folk
scene” for years or were just adapted spirituals from a long time before 1962, meaning the album rating up above is due,
for the most part, to the gigantic talent of Mr. Dylan to make these songs
fresh, exciting, and fun, and very little else.
Christ, though, a lot of it sure sounds samey. I love the good-time hoedown tune “Pretty Peggy-O,” but what’s to separate it from “You’re No Good” or “Gospel Plow” or “Freight Train Blues” besides different lyrics and maybe one different guitar chord? They’re fun, but they’re so lightweight, and thinking of a Bob Dylan album pre-motorcycle crash as “lightweight” is not normally something you can do. Ofcourse, Bob balances that out by including a whole bunch of dark, foreboding songs about death and such like “In My Time of Dying” and “Highway 51 Blues,” but all of these songs sound strikingly similar, too (not to mention the closing “See that My Grave is Kept Clean,” which actively sucks and bores me to death). I guess the contrast is nice, and I suppose that old-school, hyper-traditional folk covers didn’t really deal with too many topics beyond “that girl’s sure purty,” “I’m poor,” and “death is all around us,” but eh. I enjoy the two originals here (the “talking blues” “Talkin’ New York” and the melancholy “Song to Woody”) because you can see them as sort of nascent versions of the brilliance that would show up one album later, but it’s also easy to see them as inferior precisely because of what we’d all see one year later.
The song most people pick as the highlight here is the 5+-minute (very lengthy for this record) version of “House of the Risin’ Sun,” and this is not something I’m gonna disagree with. The Animals were actually attempting to cover this version back in 1964, not whatever original scratchy 1920’s version Bob was working off, and it’s easy to see why. The vocals in this song are fantastic. Someone doesn’t have to be an objectively good singer to be a good singer, you know? It just takes skillful use of what one has, and considering Bob’s age at this time (he looks about fifteen on the album cover), the power he’s able to slowly build to and then release on the “to ENNNNNNND MY LIIIIIFE” line near the end is remarkable. Dude had his shit going on early.
I suppose that, at its heart, a lot of this is just country hick music, but remember that it’s Bob Dylan performing country hick music, and the parts that aren’t country hick music (especially “House of the Risin’ Sun”) are real good as well. Everything here (vocals, guitar, and harmonica…and that is everything) is objectively rudimentary, but it’s so full of verve and spunk and personality that it’s just a ball to listen to. As a work of “art,” it’s worth something just south of bullshit, but it’s certainly more entertaining than, say, Another side of, to take the other early Dylan folk album I rate as an 8. It’s early, and it’s half-assed, and it’s disturbingly bare-bones…but it’s Dylan, it’s the sixties, and he’s having fun, which is really all you should need.
Live At The Gaslight 1962 (2005)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “A Hard
Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”
So I think it’s pretty much settled now that I’ll give any pre-motorcycle accident Bob Dylan release not called The Times They are A-Changin’ a score of at least 8 because I’m a completely biased Dylan fanboy. But, I mean, he’s Bob Dylan, so it’s not like I’m alone in my worshipping here. And this release is so fascinating! In my Live 1964 review I believe I make some remark about wanting a live album of “a scratchy concert from some Greenwich village dive in 1961” and how cool it would be to hear that, and, gosh darnit, that’s exactly what this is! Granted, it’s taken from two shows in the fall of 1962, not 1961, but considering Bob hadn’t put out Freewheelin’ yet and only sings like two or three originals the entire time, I think this is early enough to qualify.
Musically, I don’t have to tell you what this sounds like. Bob, still a young whelp, alone, with an acoustic guitar, singing traditional folk songs. He doesn’t even have a harmonica here, so we’re talking real bare-bones. The liner notes make it seem like the recording quality is gonna be absolutely atrocious, but it’s really not that bad (or at least it’s been cleaned up a lot), and I struggle to hear the cabbies and pedestrians outside the Gaslight I’m supposed to be hearing. I hear chairs creaking and people walking around and putting down their cups of pinko-commie elitist bohemian coffee, but I actually think that adds to the atmosphere (like I’m actually there!). Most of the songs cut off abruptly at the end (“West Texas” cuts off before it even finishes) and there’s no applause whatsoever, so that sucks, and a few tracks are a bit “fuzzier” than others (witness “The Cuckoo”), and there’s a moment in “Don’t Think Twice, it’s Alright” where the mix like waffles around and gets stuck in your right headphone for a second or two, but nothing’s intolerable like that borderline unlistenable Television live album (which, ofcourse, due to Television’s ruling such a ridiculous amount of ass, I gave an 8 anyway).
The point is that the sound of this, while obviously not ultra-awesome, is certainly fine and dandy considering the circumstances, so how much you enjoy this record will probably be determined by your tolerance for acoustic folk music so rudimentary that it makes Bob’s debut album seem thick and overproduced. Me? I dig it! Honestly I’d give it an 8 only for the historical value of the first three tunes, the only three Bob originals here (though to call “Rocks and Gravel” an “original” is probably pushing it). Anyway, I dig to all get out the opening “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and how the patrons enthusiastically sing along during the chorus and everything (there are like ten people in the café, and it just sounds so cool. Oh, to have been at the Gaslight to see the man back then! And yeah, I’m seeing him myself in less than a week and that’s totally fucking awesome (EEEEEEE!!!!!!!), but he’s like 1,000 years old now and I’m seeing him at the Forum in Inglewood, otherwise known as “where the Lakers used to play before they got an arena actually in Los Angeles,” so I doubt it’ll be quite as cool as this…by the way, like that massive parenthesis? I’m awesome). I also eat up how Bob like hums half the lines in “Don’t Think Twice, it’s Alright” and how the crowd listens in a hushed silence, indicating he hadn’t finished the tune yet and it wasn’t at this point one of his “staples,” and witness how “Rocks and Gravel” (and, yes, annoying “Take some rocks nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn gravel baby!” line duly noted) lyrically previews “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, it Takes a Train to Cry” from Highway 61 three years later. “Don’t the clouds look lonesome shining across the sea? Don’t my gal look good when she’s coming after me?” Hmmmm? HMMMMMMM????
Historical interest aside, this is still a mighty enjoyable little live record even during all the traditional folk covers. “Moonshiner” is dark and harrowing, “Handsome Molly” is fun and playful, “Cocaine” is great, and “Barbara Allen” is gorgeous. And it’s just one random dude with a beat-up acoustic guitar doing this! Bob Dylan! Yeah, the closer “West Texas” uses two total chords, is slower than molasses, and totally sucks ass except for a few cool vocal bits, so it’s not like every song here is a winner…but it’s just one random dude with a beat-up acoustic guitar, so it’s OK. It’s a good album! I guess it goes without saying that, if you’re not a Dylan fan already, there’s absolutely no reason to get this, and it’s really more historically interesting than “objectively great” for us fans (kinda like that No Direction Home thing, which probably made Dylanographers cream themselves when it came out), but it’s still the greatest folk singer of all time singing folk songs, and it’s not called The Times They are A-Changin’, so you know it’s gonna be good. Bob Dylan!
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963)
Rating: 10
Best Song: “Don’t
Think Twice, It’s Alright”
It’s funny how the Bob Dylan album that sounds the most “timeless” to me is an acoustic guitar ‘n’ harmonica straight folk album from 1963. Perhaps it’s because half of these songs have been covered by as many artists as times Scott Stapp has checked himself into rehab, but every time I listen to Freewheelin’ it feels like this album could have been made last week, except that no one around nowadays could possibly write all these wonderful songs (and Bob was 22 when he made this record. Twenty-two). And it’s not just the instruments on display. Sure, it’s true that the production of electric guitars and drums can sound dated to the sixties or seventies or eighties or whatever decade you want, and this isn’t so true of acoustic guitars and harmonicas, but then why does Bob Dylan sound like a goofball hillbilly artifact and The Times They Are A-Changin’ sound like a half-assed mid-sixties boring protest folk crap album?
Simple. It’s the songs. On this album they’re stupendous. While it’s not like I’m a connoisseur of the traditional folk music scene Bob was quickly taking over at this point and thus can’t say for sure that Woody Guthrie doesn’t have a better album lying around, I think it’s a pretty safe bet, and I dare you to find a bare-bones guitar/harmonica folk album with better, more affecting, and more thematically and emotionally diverse songs than this one. “Blowin’ in the Wind” is perhaps the most covered song in the man’s catalog (though it’s not like I’m privy to any statistics on that), and it’s true that the song’s lyrics are a cliché by this point…but for something to become a cliché the original source usually has to be pretty fucking good, right? After all, you can’t blame a song for being a cliché when it created the cliché in the first place.
Elsewhere
on this record, assuming you don’t mind fifty minutes of a guy without a
traditional singing voice strumming an acoustic guitar and occasionally blowing
on a harmonica boring (because musically that’s all this album is, and the
vocals are mixed really high), you’ll
find more gorgeous, brilliant, alternately harrowing and hilarious songs than
you can even count. This little Jewish
whelp had only been in
Don’t think
this album is all serious protest songs and laments for loves lost,
though. A good chunk is downright hilarious (Bob can be a fucking funny
guy when he wants to), and I’ll freely admit that a handful of these tracks are
throwaways of the first order, but you need
that stuff to balance out the serious side, you know? No one wants this stone-faced serious folk
singer shtick for fifty straight minutes.
I’ve always been a big fan of Bob’s “talking blues” songs, and the duo
of “Bob Dylan’s Blues” and “Talking World War III Blues” are two of the highest
order. Bob doesn’t really sing on these things. He talks
(hence the genre title I made up), delivering seemingly-nonsensical monologues
that may (“Talking World War III Blues”) or may not (the brilliant closer “I
Shall Be Free,” which is more of a novelty goof hayseed track than a talking
blues, but fits into my discussion of Bob’s sense of humor too well to mention
it somewhere else) be thinly veiled political commentary. And beyond that, you’ve got tracks like “
To understand Bob Dylan’s greatness, you have to compare him to his contemporaries. In 1963, most other folkies were playing the same stuff Bob goofed around with on his debut, the Beatles made Please Please Me, the Beach Boys were releasing a new 25-minute, artistically-bereft glorified single every three months, and the Stones hadn’t recorded an album yet. Think about that, then listen to this record. Though his mid-sixties electric work was incredibly influential on the development of rock and roll music as an art form, one could make the argument that this is Bob’s most historically important record. No one had attached poetic, artsy lyrics to loud, electric rock music before Bringing it all Back Home, but no one had attached lyrics this wonderfully-constructed (and equally brilliant at being both serious and absurdist) to popular music, period, before this album, and it’s not often that a record can be held up without much dissent as the pinnacle of two different genres (folk music and “singer-songwriter” music, which was spawned by this album and this album alone). I simply cannot recommend this record highly enough. It’s an utterly timeless classic that balances the silly and fun with the deep and meaningful better than just about anything I’ve heard. It’s disarmingly simple musically, but layered and complex enough on other levels (mood, atmosphere, lyrics, etc.) that every listen strikes me in a slightly different way. Bob certainly made more entertaining records, but he might not have made a better one.
ddickson@rice.edu writes:
Great for its time, and
three-quarters of the songs on here kick some
hayseed. But am I the only one who thinks the last two songs on here SUCK
OUT LOUD? Yes. Yes, I am.
The rest don't suck. I'm particularly fond of the one-two-three-four
ballad
combo "Hard Rain" "Don't Think Twice" "Bob Dylan's
Dream" and "
Of course, one might say "Hey man! That's 11 out of 13! Round
it up to a
ten, man! Order of magnitude, dude! BE a physics major!"
God I've been at
Rice too friggin long.
But I give a wag of the finger at Bob for doing that. Putting the worst
two
songs squarely at the end? This is NOT the Clash's Sandinista!.
Still, I gotta give the guy credit. For the record (vinyl), the reason he
turned out a sophomore album so incredibly consistent was the fact that he
was, crazily enough, a young nervous nit-picking perfectionist at the time.
He saw the quality of all the Seegers and Baezesesssses (*wheeze, pant
pant*) around him in Tinpan Alley, got nervous, and resolved to come out
with a comparably creative songwriting muse or die in the attempt. So he
took almost nine months to write the songs for this record--an eternity by
the standards of the day. Reportedly, the tunes on here represent a bare
fraction of his output of 1963--I would conjecture that most of the rest of
them probably sucked (see Times are a-Changin for evidence)
Personally, I think Bob's finding himself here. He's already an original
genius (O.G., yo), but if you compare this to Another Side, he's still a
LITTLE bit derivative in the melodic construction and SLIGHTLY tied to
traditional folk/country/blues chutes and ladders (though not song
construction. He's already a rambling sumbitch.)
I give this an 8 1/2. And I give to Chris Bell's campaign. We might
have a
Democrat in the governor's office in
believe it? (No.)
P.S.: By the way, someone
around nowadays CAN write songs this wonderful (and
DOES.) Beck, circa Sea Change. Crap, that's not nowadays, is it?
That's
three and a half years ago. I hate time.
The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964)
Rating: 5
Best Song: “The Times
They Are A-Changin’”
Yet another one of those gigantic missteps early in a great artist’s career about which, after reading countless negative reviews, I think to myself “it couldn’t be that bad, could it?” before first listening to it myself. But yes, folks, it is that bad. While it’s still young Bob Dylan playing real atmospheric folk songs on acoustic guitar and harmonica in the sixties (i.e. the exact same formula we found just a year prior on Freewheelin’), this album is a giant step backwards and at times is not only a boring disappointment, but an out-and-out shitty record.
Although it’s hard to believe Bob could put out such a crappy album in the middle of such a brilliant creative period, upon further investigation the uselessness of this one at least begins to make a little bit of sense. See, Freewheelin’ made Bob one of the leaders of the “folk music scene,” a scene Bob had just about outgrown before he even finished recording Freewheelin’ but which, at this time, I figure he still felt some kind of attachment to. And since all the folkies in the early-mid sixties were making their songs as political as possible and trying to cure racial injustice and all that stuff (which is noble, ofcourse, but sometimes didn’t lead to the most exciting music in the world), Bob committed musical sin #1 when recording this bad boy: making music for others, not for yourself. So no longer do we have the teenage country dirtball on the cover of the debut or the goofy beat poet we saw ambling down the street on the cover of Freewheelin’. Nope, instead we have the humorless, gaunt protest singer you see above, the kind of guy who would never be caught dead writing something as ridiculous as “I Shall Be Free.” In short, we have what folkies wanted Bob Dylan to be, not Bob Dylan. And that sucks.
Half the songs on this thing sound like “Masters of War,” only slower and with worse lyrics. I honestly have no idea why the moment Bob decided to write an album’s worth of protest songs he forgot how to make anything he wrote interesting, but that’s apparently what happened. I mean, sure, there are a handful of good songs on here (usually the ones that aren’t protest songs), including the hyper-quiet Freewheelin’-sound-a-like “One Too Many Mornings” and “When the Ship Comes In,” which sounds like early hoedown Bob and is the only song here with any kind of a pulse. The title track is a classic as well and proves that it was possible for Bob to write good protest songs (not that the protest songs on Freewheelin’ didn’t prove this, ofcourse), and I used to enjoy “Boots of Spanish Leather” until I listened to this record back-to-back with Freewheelin’ one day and realized that it’s basically “Girl From the North Country” with different lyrics. It has the same melody, tempo, and chord sequence…I mean, what the hell? Did he think no one would notice? He never thought much of his audience, sure, but that seems a little extreme.
I can’t say I enjoy anything else here, though not all of it is atrocious. Just boring. The problem isn’t the lyrics, however (which are still good, though I do like vague, poetic Bob more than literal, obvious Bob). It’s the music, which isn’t bad, per se, but only because it’s tough for music to be bad when there isn’t any music to speak of. This album’s emphasis is skewed so far toward Bob’s words that I don’t think Bob spent more than 30 seconds coming up with the guitar parts to like half of these songs. Whatever he’s plucking in the background of “North Country Blues” is so quiet I can’t even hear it, and the moment that strumming two guitar chords at an absurdly slow tempo and with no rhythm or structure becomes acceptable as a “musical background” is the day I support Tom DeLay for President of the ACLU. Some of these tracks can barely be called songs. “With God on Our Side” and “Only a Pawn in Their Game” sound like protest poetry written without any thought to melody or song structure, as Bob rambles haphazardly through the five-page theses that constitute their lyrics while strumming his guitar at random intervals when he gets bored. On the closing “Restless Farewell,” Bob doesn’t even deem it necessary to strum anything and instead decides to tune his guitar in the background, though he does actually “sing” the lyrics, which is nice (he doesn’t sing them to a “melody,” ofcourse, but I’ll take what I can get). There is no energy, melody, structure, passion…anything in some of these songs. You can tell Bob didn’t even like half of the material here. In a year’s time he’d setting existentialist beat poetry to fast boogie rock. You think he gave a shit about “The Ballad of Hollis Brown?” Even when he was writing it? The only songs I hear on this album that sound like Bob cares are the title track, “One Too Many Mornings,” and “When the Ship Comes In,” i.e. by far the three best songs on the album. This stuff is slow, languid, musically skimpy, uninteresting, boring, ponderous, and long. “With God on Our Side” is the same length as “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” but feels about five times longer, for instance. At least “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” has actual singing and that cool “YOUUUUUU WHOOOOOO philosophiiiiiize” part, so it’s tolerable, but it still feels like it’s twice as long as it is. “Restless Farewell” feels like it goes on fucking forever.
I don’t like this album, and I’m not alone in this. The rating is as high as it is because Bob’s voice still sounds fantastic (at least on the songs where he actually decides to sing), and his guitar playing sounds great the handful of times he breaks a sweat. Hell, the sound of this album is still great (it sounds just like Freewheelin’!!!). It’s just what Bob does with that sound that’s drastically worse, and even the lowest moments (like “With God On Our Side”) sound like Blonde on Blonde compared to the worst of his eighties atrocities. It still blows, though, especially compared to the godlike records surrounding it. Bob Dylan should never listen to anyone but himself.
ddickson@rice.edu writes:
You get to keep your Harvard
account?? Lucky. They boot US off right after
graduation.
Yeah, this one blows (in comparison). But not too terribly much.
Keep in
mind, I pay little attention to lyrics, and I have a soft spot for acoustic
folk/cuuuuntry music, so take my 7 rating with a large grain of tofu and
amphetamines. (Public Image Ltd.'s staple diet)
The problem with this one, in my estimation, is that there's just too many
songs that just sit and stare at the window, don't rule, don't suck, just
SIT. The sucky ones? "Boots of Spanish Leather" (we've heard
this one
before) and "Only a Pawn", almost certainly his worst song of the
'60's.
That song is just BAD. Bad bad bad bad. Not just the lyrics, but
the
annoying structure, annoying melody, annoying everything. It's like
something he wrote AND recorded on the crapper when he really just wanted to
read Suze's sister the riot act, drink a white Russian, and hit the sack.
But crazily enough, I actually LIKE "With God on Our Side".
Everyone
regards it as the worst song on here--the hell? It's the BEST song on
here,
dagnavvit. The rambling, rhythmless strumming DOES take some getting used
to, true, but it contains the only vocal melody I actually REMEMBER by the
end of the album. And the lyrics--just forget it's Bob Dylan reciting
them,
a'ight? If it were anyone else, I'd wager, people would say "Oh
yeah. Good
message, man. Yeeaaaahh. Keep it up, kid" Too bad it's
been abused so
much as to become meaningless, but the final line "If God's on our
side/He'll stop the next war" gets me every time. Along with the
Judas
line. Yikes.
And thanks for not echoing the usual "time's haven't a-changed a damn bit
since 1964" bullshit. Too bad we don't have a time machine for
proof. . .
Another Side Of Bob Dylan (1964)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “My Back
Pages”
Yes, Bob Dylan, not Woodbobby Guthrylan or whatever “side” wrote the last album. This record marks the point where Bob decided to let his romantic beat poetry, absurdist wordplay, and random, meandering narratives be the focal point of his lyrics in lieu of the boring protest dogma that he splattered all over Times. The only “protest song” here is the lengthy “Chimes of Freedom,” but even that one is lovely and melodic instead of dull and poor, thus sounding like it belongs next to “Blowin’ in the Wind” or “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” instead of “Only a Pawn in their Game.” Musically, with the exception of the boogie barroom piano throwaway “Black Crow Blues” (which turned out to be less of a throwaway than a preview of how Bob would irrevocably change the landscape of popular music over the next two years, but I’m sure most of the folkies didn’t realize this at the time), this is still just Bob sitting and strumming an acoustic guitar with occasional bursts of harmonica, which therefore makes it a straight, traditional folk album except for Bob’s totally original sense of lyricism. Some have made the argument that much of this record consists of pop/rock songs disguised behind folk instrumentation (thus making this THE LEAP instead of Bringing it all Back Home), and while maybe I’ll buy that for a song or two (“It Ain’t Me Babe” for sure, maybe “I Don’t Believe You” as well), on the whole I find the evidence supporting such claims a bit skimpy. The most rock ‘n’ roll song on the album is actually played on a boogie piano, for god sakes. This is Bob’s lyrical leap, not his musical one. That’d come soon enough, though.
Long stretches of this album are actually just as minimalist and “uneventful” as Times, which makes it easily the toughest nut to crack of Bob’s three early folk albums that don’t suck. The difference, though, is that Bob’s lyrics are often astounding, and that he’s putting these lyrics to actual hummable melodies again, which, while they’re not as lovely or immediately pleasing as those on Freewheelin’ (although, I mean, what folk songs could be as lovely as those?), are certainly appreciated and accounted for. I think Bob’s voice is mixed the loudest it’s ever been, too, and sometimes the nasality can be a bit annoying (“All I Really Want to Do,” maybe), but the man has so much goddamn personality that it’s OK. The long, slow, languid excursions on this record (bar possibly the eight-minute “Ballad in Plain D” that everyone shits on so much and is kinda boring) are generally quite good, from “Chimes of Freedom” to…oh, wait, that and “Ballad in Plain D” are the only songs over five minutes! Maybe that’s why this record is so much more enjoyable than Times. Would “My Back Pages” start to drag if it were 8 or 9 minutes long? Possibly, but at four minutes it’s just about perfect, and the “but I was so much ooooolder then, I’m younger than that….noooooowwwww” line has got to be one of the best lyrics Bob ever penned. Nothing you’ll find on this record is quite as strong as the best tracks on Freewheelin’, but the bulk of the material makes it clear Bob knew Times wasn’t any good and also knew exactly why it wasn’t any good. I also maintain he knew it wasn’t any good while he was making it, but, ofcourse, that’s a debatable point.
The gorgeous romantic songs and goofball narrative excursions that made Freewheelin’ such a wonderfully diverse album and whose absence made Times so singularly boring are back as well. Stuff like “Spanish Harlem Incident” and “To Ramona” lags behind roughly analogous tracks like “Don’t Think Twice, it’s Alright,” if only because Bob’s guitar style is still halfway stuck in the slow strumming suckitude of the last album, but they’re certainly pretty, which is more than I can say for, for instance, “Restless Farewell.” The non-singing comedy excursions are just as good as their counterparts on Freewheelin’, though (notice how I keep comparing this record to Freewheelin’ and not to Times? It’s like Times never happened, either that or that Bob got shot with some sort of “boring” arrow in early 1964 and was only halfway recovered when he made this album, enough to remember what kinds of songs made Freewheelin’ so fantastic, but not enough to make them quite as good). “I Shall Be Free, No. 10” is the first Bob Dylan song about absolutely nothing in particular, with references to Cassius Clay, Russians, Barry Goldwater, and a fictional pet monkey, and Bob even admits as much at the end (“Now you’re probably wondering by now just what this song is all about…it’s nothing, it’s something I learned over in England”). “Motorpsycho Nitemare” is a goofball narrative poem a la “I Shall Be Free” from Freewheelin’, only MORE hilarious, as Bob references Fidel Castro (combine that with Barry Goldwater and the Russians from the other song, and it’s admittedly pretty easy to date this album to the mid-sixties) and La Dolce Vita while frantically attempting to avoid being shot by a conservative farmer for being a pinko commie sympathizer. It’s great.
I suppose the one area in which this album improves on Freewheelin’ is the throwaway nothing tracks, as “Black Crow Blues,” “I Don’t Believe You,” and “It Ain’t Me Babe” are actually three of the best songs on the album, albeit still not really in the ballpark of the best tracks on Freewheelin’. For the most part, it’s either a weaker analogue of Freewheelin’ or a carbon copy of Freewheelin’ with a dash of Times boring crappiness tossed in. Which way you look at it depends on whether or not you choose to acknowledge the existence of Times. As Freewheelin’ basically does what this album does better and Bob Dylan is more stupidly fun (if not as objectively good, and much less “deep”), I don’t usually listen to this album all that much, but every time I do it pleases me just fine. From the newfound lyricism to the totally great boogie piano track to the fact that the toss-off poppish songs are almost always the best tracks here, though, it’s clear that by this point Bob’s songwriting, though only two years removed from his cover-laden hillbilly debut, had progressed far beyond the boundaries of folk music. Hell, that was clear on Freewheelin’ two albums ago. So go forth, young man, and bringeth thy rock.
ddickson@rice.edu writes:
You kiddin', son? These
melodies are BETTER than the ones on Freewheelin'!
Maybe it just seems that way because they mixed his voice louder, but I tap
me toe, nod me head, and sing along a lot more often on this one than on the
one with his girlfriend on the cover. Plus he doesn't end the album with
two sucky throwaways. AND it's sequenced perfectly from start to finish.
AND this is the album that pioneers his trademark "whiny"
"off-putting" "non-
Woody" "too much tar" vox. Where can ya go wrong?
Well, only on "Spanish Harlem Incident," which is just too damned
short,
and "Black Crow Blues", which is too much an obvious showcase for
just how
much experience Bob has at this point in playing the friggin' piano. And,
possibly, the amount of gin in his system. Other than that, it's all
classic. Plus the bad songs get out of the way early, and he has the rest
of the 50 minutes to blow our heads off (with his big, bad-ass acoustic
guitar and TUBULAR dime-store mouth pipe).
I actually enjoy "Ballad in Plain D" more than anything else here,
for some
crazy reason. Maybe it's because it's the only time Bob is actually
laying
some genuine sadness on tape for us, and he lays it on thick and copious, in
sharp contrast to the absurdity and poppiness he lays on everywhere else.
Anywho, this is his best folk album, and the only COMPLETELY solo album I've
ever heard that I would call a masterpiece. 9 1/2 (out of ONE. It's
that
bonus).
The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Live 1964 – Concert At Philharmonic Hall (2004)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Don’t Think
Twice, It’s Alright”
Now I like Bob Dylan’s early
folkie period as much as the next guy, but even I’m gonna admit that an hour and forty minutes consecutive of this stuff is a little much to take, and unless you
worship Freewheelin’ like I do you’ll
probably find this thing just about unlistenable near the end after listening
to so much of it (hell, I find it
unlistenable near the end, but that’s just because Bob brings Joan Baez out
because he figures the show hasn’t sucked yet).
That being said, though, there has yet to be a release from this
“Bootleg Series” thing that isn’t very
worthwhile for the Dylan enthusiast, and as the only widely available (and legitimate) live document of early folk
Bob, this here double splurge of whiney vocals and lowly-mixed acoustic
strumming is certainly a fine and important document. It’d be cool to get like a scratchy concert
from some
Thankfully, Bob is still young enough that he hasn’t buried his fantastic sense of humor yet, and his between-song quips and little games with the audience are a welcome respite between a six-minute version of “To Ramona” and an eleven minute version of “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” or whatever song he feels like dragging out really slowly to a ridiculous length this time. Dig how he introduces “Who Killed Davey Moore?” by giggling “it’s got nothin’ to do with nothin’” and responds to a fan’s chant for “Mary Had a Little Lamb” by remarking “Did I record that? Is that a protest song?”, the latter of which is just hiiiiiiiiiii-larious and (along with basically everything he says, really) shows again that, just a year after recording Times, Bob already hated it, and was already taking every opportunity to mock his “topical” “protest” image by generally acting like an arrogant, giggly goof. Hell, he only plays three songs from that album (the title track, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” and “With God On Our Side,” the last of which is during that oh-so-listenable Joan Baez duet set). God, he was so done with that shit.
Musically, I shouldn’t have to tell you what this album sounds like. Bob is in fine vocal form, meaning he’s wheezing like an old man but with craploads of personality and verve and humor and whatnot. His guitar is mixed too low and his harmonica is mixed too high, but that’s the case on every one of his studio folk albums, too. The songs mostly come from Freewheelin’ and Another Side of (and, again, NOT Times). He previews 75% of the acoustic side of Bringing it All Back Home (leaving off “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” which is the best of the four, which makes Bob a douche) and tosses on a bunch of non-LP songs like the hilarious pinko-commie bastard talking blues “Talkin John Birch Paranoid Blues” and the just plain hilarious “If You Gotta Go, Go Now.” Whatever the appropriate mood for a song is, he’s able to convey it accurately (funny, sad, death-ish). I especially dig how Bob loudly belts out the introductory lines to “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” in a way diametrically opposed to, but just as effective as, the subtle quietude of the Freewheelin’ original. It’s all a grand old time for someone who likes this kind of stuff, albeit a little much to take in one sitting, at least until Bob trots Joan Baez out at the end for a four-song set that BLOWS OUT LOUD because Joan’s technically-perfect vocals have slightly less emotional range than a refrigerator magnet. And she’s not even good-looking, either. No wonder Bob dumped her for a model.
Your enjoyment of this album will be based solely on your tolerance for this type of music. I don’t have to tell you that the songs here are classics, but if you don’t like Bob Dylan’s voice or want to hear more instrumental variety than guitar/harmonica/Joan Baez killing a cow over the course of nearly two hours, perhaps you should pick up a different Robert Zimmerman live record. May I suggest Live 1975? That thing owns.
Bringing It All Back Home (1965)
Rating: 9
Best Song: “It’s All
Over Now, Baby Blue”
As I take a short break from literally killing myself to do everything possible to get two exceptional, once-every-ten-years students into the most competitive high school Classics program in the country simultaneously despite the fact that there’s probably only one spot at this school open for the two of them to compete over, let alone this program (which SUCKS, by the way. Behind my bitter sarcasm and belligerent liberal persona is actually, I’d like to think, a really dedicated teacher, and if by some miracle they both got in I think I’d be happier than either one of them), I come to the realization that Bob Dylan probably stopped liking folk music about the time he made his first record. You know that there were actually a bunch of tracks he recorded for Freewheelin’ with a full band in them? No shit! I think I read it on a bumper sticker somewhere. And you could tell he actually hated Times as he was recording the damn thing. How often, bar possibly Mick Jagger’s obvious (and wildly successful) attempts to ruin Dirty Work by continuously vomiting into his microphone, do you get that feeling from a record? I tell you, Bob Dylan’s fascinating as a person, let alone as a musician, and by 1965 he had clearly had enough of the narrow-minded Peter, Paul, and Mary fans who knew every lyric to every song on Times and thought “Black Crow Blues” was just a silly throwaway Bob did on a bet from Pete Seeger or something (including my mother, who still listens to Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul, and Mary on a regular basis, thank you very much). So Bob decided the best way to stop being The Messiah was to put out a side of messy, sloppy, loose barroom rock music with nonsensical gibberish lyrics, and, considering the death threats he eventually received from some people (seriously), it certainly worked. Ofcourse, this only made him The Messiah to an even larger and (debatably) more moronic group of people, but I suppose he couldn’t have seen that coming at the time.
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of the first side of this album on the development of rock music. The Beatles were still releasing stuff like Help! at the time this thing came out, for instance, and never before had someone merged basic four-on-the-floor dirty, ballsy rock music with the kind of lyricism Bob was gallivanting around with. One could legitimately say that the idea of rock music as art started with this album, and that is one mighty big statement to make. That being said, though, although I certainly love the thing and find it one of Bob’s best releases, I can’t help but be a little underwhelmed at times, especially when one considers its historical significance. The band on side 1 works up a good lather of kick-ass loosey-goosey rock music for sure, but the thing that (at least to a degree) dooms it to me is its lack of variety. Lyrically, the stuff on display here is fascinating, if about absolutely nothing concrete, which is actually alright with me (what the hell is “Subterranean Homesick Blues” supposed to be about, for instance, beyond a bunch of rhyming lines that sound really cool when placed next to each other and delivered in that unmistakable Dylan whine? Nothing! But it sure sounds cool, don’t it?). No, the flaw I find in side 1 of this album is that so many of these songs, musically, sound way too similar. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Maggie’s Farm” are both lyrical tours-de-force and two of Bob’s most justifiably famous songs, but why has no one commented on the fact that they have exactly the same arrangement? I hear the intro to “Maggie’s Farm” and I think my CD accidentally skipped back to track 1 or something. I’m not saying any of this material is tiresome (far from it; the music on display is consistently fresh and invigorating). I’m just saying that I don’t think Bob took much time to think about the arrangements of the rock side beyond having a rock band in the first place, and that he was almost using it as a practice run for his next album (a theory supported by the fact that side 2 consists entirely of acoustic folk music). I find a similar similarity (like that two word combo? God, I suck at writing) between “She Belongs to Me” and “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” though individually both songs are absolutely fantastic at doing the slower, more romantic Bob thing we’d see perfected on stuff like “Just Like a Woman.” I also don’t remember a damn thing about “Outlaw Blues” or “On the Road Again,” though the talking blues-meets-barroom boogie rock “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” is breathtaking and gut-bustingly funny and might be my favorite song on the rock side. Dig the subtle organ touches and guitar stabs. Captain Arab’s the man.
As I’m sure you all know, and as I’ve alluded to and/or explicitly mentioned numerous times in this review, side 2 of this bad boy is all acoustic and presents folkie Bob’s symbolism-drenched, exceedingly dense poetical excursions taken to their logical extreme (kinda funny how that works out, don’t it? I can’t see Bob taking his folk stuff any further than side 2, and side 1 is obviously a half-assed dress rehearsal for what would come later; rarely are albums this blatantly “transitional”). Lovers of Bob the poet will want to dig into “Gates of Eden” and especially “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” which might as well not have a musical backing at all, so obviously is it just beat poetry (but what beat poetry. Lyrically, it might be Bob’s best song ever, outside of maybe “Desolation Row”). Lovers of Bob the poet at the expense of Bob the songwriter and performer would have probably given Another Side of a rating higher than 8, though, and so I’m gonna go ahead and dig into the lovely “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” the latter of which is probably my favorite-ever acoustic Bob track (outside, again, of “Desolation Row”…that’s not a bad song, that one is). I love how, in both of these songs, there’s this subtle little backing electric guitar mixed so low you can’t even hear it unless you’ve got the kind of far-too-expensive headphones I’m sporting right now. “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” is just about the perfect ending to the idea of Bob as acoustic folkie. It’s indescribably gorgeous, and Bob gives possibly his ever best vocal performance before he morphed into a beatnik rock and roll prophet on his next two albums. Who says Bob Dylan can’t sing? He can vocalize, bee-atch.
So this album, especially the middle section of side 1, isn’t quite all it’s cracked up to be, though it’s still excellent. I just feel that, if I want to hear electric Bob, I can get it better on Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde, and if I want to hear acoustic Bob, I can get it just as well, and certainly warmer and more intimate, on Freewheelin’ (hell, I’m not even sure I like “Gates of Eden” much at all, and that’s a quarter of side 2 right there). I’ve also never been one for any kind of “hard side, slow side” or “rock side, soft side” thing (hence my feeling that Tattoo You could be improved a whole lot if someone just sequenced the damn thing in a non-retarded manner), so that doesn’t help my enjoyment of this here record-album, either. Usually, I want either electric Bob or acoustic Bob, you know? Not 20 minutes of one, then 20 minutes of the other. But a Bob Dylan collection without Bringing it all Back Home (and thus without “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “She Belongs to Me,” “Maggie’s Farm,” “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”) is obviously no Bob Dylan collection at all, so please get it today. But if the rock stuff seems a little half-assed to you, he’d do it better. Just wait.
ddickson@rice.edu writes:
Uh? You kiddin', son?
(HAL is typing this.) The ACOUSTIC side seems half-
assed to me! At least "Gates of Eden". It CAN be gotten
used to after a
while, but that melody is uuuuuuuuggly. Good lyrics, but overall the
whole
song seems uninviting and cold, in sharp contrast to. . . oh, say, "It
Ain't
Me Babe." And when THAT comparison is made, you KNOW you've got
kinks in
der system.
Ditto for "It's All Over Now Baby Blue", if only for that irritating
annoying asscrapping scraping degraping yuckingly HATEABLE dissonant lead
guitar that keeps sprinkling in out-of-place soft solos at exactly the wrong
moments. In sharp contrast to "Desolation Row", which rules
even more than
this one disappoints.
The rest is Excel, Ent. "Tambourine Man"--just as good as its
Byrds cover,
but drastically different from its Byrds cover. More timeless and rootsy
and country-y and worn-out. And about three times as long. I agree
with
your assessment of "It's Alright Ma"'s lyrics. I also agree
that Donald
Rumsfeld is a geriatric, meddling, power-hungry idiot who should retire to
Wyoming RIGHT NOW. It's a far better place to live than D.C. anyway.
The ELECTRIC side, though, now THAT'S good stooooff (
Auto III). I don't agree that Dylan revolutionized rock COMPLETELY with
it--
the song structures (with the very large exception of the
"Motopsycho"-with-
different-lyrics-rewrite "115th Dream", which Dylan didn't even
intend to
put on the album originally anyway, nor did he intend to record it in an
electric arrangement, nor did he probably intend to record it, PERIOD--see
the Scorcese doc for evidence) are still pretty conventional. It's just
the
lyrics that are different than normal rock stuff (my baby loves me/yeah yeah
yeah/gonna get in my T-Bird and surf/oh bleah). And songs 1-6 are all
potential hits, weird lyrics or no. If anything, he just proved that he
could do rock and roll better than the "normal" rockers--he was
certainly
doing it better than the Beatles did on Help! anyway.
In conclusion, Sasha Cohen kicks mucho ass. With skates on. Ouch.
naterules1991@aol.com writes:
I really liked your Bob Dylan
reviews. I agreed with most of your
reviews, but the one thing that irked me the most was that you and
other reviewers and this ddickinson fellow don't like "Gates of
Eden".
I mean what the hell. That's gotta be my favorite song on "Bringing It
All Back Home". The imagery is better and more direct than on any of
the other side two songs. I love that melody a lot too. It might be a
little strange, but "ugly" (in the words of our dear and ever-present
Bob Dylan enthusiest ddickenson@rice.edu)
it is certainly not. The feel
is really kind of dark and almost menacing, sort of like "It's Alright
Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" (my other favorite), but without that cool
melody. I mean, how can you prefer "All your seasick sailors, they are
rowing home. All your reindeer armies, are all going home" to "The
motorcycle black madonna two-wheeled gypsy queen. And her
silver-studded phantom cause the gray flannel dwarf to scream". That's
some impressive beat poetry. Anyway, I know it's a small thing to
obsess over, but I just really like that song. Otherwise, great
reviews.
Highway 61 Revisited (1965)
Rating: 10
Best Song:
“Desolation Row”
I hate to keep harping on this on every review page for anyone even mildly “classic,” but why can’t bands put out an album in less than two or three years’ time nowadays? Is that really that hard? To write forty minutes of new material? I mean, I couldn’t do it, but I’m not a songwriter (though I suppose you could technically call me a musician, if by “musician” you mean “mediocre drummer in cover band that rehearses once every three months”). I mean, Tool’s great and all, and Maynard’s in like five bands at the same time and I understand this, but they’ve put out three albums in like thirty-five years or however long they’ve been together. It’s ludicrous. Back in the sixties bands would record three albums during their lunch break, and this one came out five months after Bringing it all Back Home. Five goddamn months. Are you kidding me? I don’t know if, outside of the Beatles’ streak from ’66-’69 or so, there’s ever been a creative burst in rock history as consistently excellent and prolific as what Bob was in the middle of these couple of years. I’ve heard stories of how he would be finishing songs’ lyrics like five minutes before recording them, like scribbling the fifth verse to “Tombstone Blues” on a napkin or some crap. What’s it like to be that creative? Haven’t you ever wondered? Good christ.
Ofcourse, all this talk about how quickly Bob was writing and progressing at this point would be pointless if he wasn’t coming up with good material, and boy was he. Like I said before, if the first side of Bringing it all Back Home was like the dress rehearsal, Highway 61 shows Bob, just half a year after first attempting to write rock music, and along with a wonderful band led by Mike Bloomfield (of the Mrs. Butterworth Blues Band), having somehow made the jump from the best folk songwriter of all time to producing some of the freshest, most exciting rock music ever created. It’s not quite as loose as the material from the last album, but that’s to be expected since half of those “rock songs” sounded like random jamming and/or rehearsal tapes. Bob knew exactly what he wanted to do this time, so the music is a whole lot more planned and focused and whatnot, but its spontaneity is still the best part. “Like a Rolling Stone” is absolutely everything its supposed to be (and four or five years ago I didn’t even like the tune that much…just goes to show how you grow into Dylan), but my favorite part is how for the first verse or two Al Kooper’s organ comes in two steps late on every chord change because he didn’t know the song’s chord sequence when they were recording the damn thing. How fucking great is that? That Bob just kept the organ in there (he even asked that it be turned up in the final mix) despite the fact that anyone with half a brain could tell the organist had no idea what he was doing? I’m all for studio trickery and manipulation when appropriate…it’s just not always appropriate. Music labored over for months can’t be as bright, colorful, and invigorating as this. It just can’t.
“Like a
Rolling Stone” is (justifiably) one of the most famous songs of all time, but
the rest of the album is just as exquisite, both musically and lyrically. How many Bob Dylan songs book it as
energetically as “Tombstone Blues” or are as heartbreaking as “It Takes a lot
to Laugh, it Takes a Train to Cry?” Dig
the organ and constant guitar soloing on “
And then there’s “Desolation Row,” which probably serves as a great test of how much you’ll like Dylan. It’s over eleven minutes long, it has no chorus beyond a two-word phrase and a three-second acoustic guitar pattern, Bob’s lyrics are at their most dense and symbolic, it’s admittedly meandering, and it has no instrumentation beyond the main acoustic pattern and a second overdubbed plucked guitar (also acoustic). I personally find it monumentally gorgeous, Bob’s finest song ever, and one of the five or ten finest songs ever written. I don’t know what the song’s about as a whole (hell, I don’t know what most of the songs on this album are about as a whole…but how much does that really matter?), but every verse contains one or two couplets that just hit me as genius, like “Everybody is making love, or else expecting rain” or “Her profession’s her religion, her sin is her lifelessness” or the part about Bette Davis or whatever that line about Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot is. Maybe it’s the Classicist in me who’s just won over by clever wordplay and imagery (like the Classics professor/Vergil expert at Harvard who teaches a freshman seminar on Bob Dylan’s lyrics…by the way, how fucking badass is that), or maybe it’s just that Bob Dylan is one of the greatest songwriters to ever live. All I know is that when the acoustic guitars pick up and strum with some extra vigor the last two or three minutes and Bob ends his eleventh, twelfth, whatever verse with “…in Desolation Roooooow,” that’s about as close to musical heaven as I can get.
Hell, my favorite lyric on this album isn’t even from “Desolation Row” (that’d be “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’ Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on’” from the title track, which is just hilarious and fits that kazoo noisemaker thing to a tee), and I’ve been able to type all this gibberish without having to focus on “Like a Rolling Stone,” about which I could probably write a thesis if I wanted. This record is fantastic. Brilliant, original, fresh, diverse, loose, and bright rock and roll music with some of the densest, deepest, most literate, and occasionally most hilarious lyrics you’ll ever find. I’ve listened to it too many times to count, and I always find something new, from a piano lick in the background of “Like a Rolling Stone” to the fifteenth acoustic guitar in “Tombstone Blues” to a couplet buried deep within minute #7 or #8 of “Desolation Row” I hadn’t thought about before. It’s music recorded almost spontaneously that’s deeper and richer than the most worked-over and micromanaged studio creations. So yes, it gets a 10.
ddickson@rice.edu writes:
Oooohhhhh yeah.
It all started one fine day beck in 2001, about three weeks after the
about zydeco, capoeira, Congo-music, and other funky stuff. Then a group
decided to do their whole mid-term project on Bob Dylan. It was
stimulating, but slightly excruciating--I was already developing
my "overbearing egghead" resentment complex. They played
"Like a Rolling
Stone" and I didn't like it, mainly because the chord DIDN'T CHANGE AT ALL
after the "didn't yooooooou" line. I'd never heard Dylan music
before, but
I WAS determined to get all the best albums in the world following my
exposure to
Mm-hmm.
Look here you, if that was a joke, I would be laughing. Laughing my pants
off, I tell you. Pants pants pants.
Well, whaddaya know. I'M NOT LAUGHING THEM OFF.
AND TOM DELAY LIVES UP TO HIS SURNAME. GRRRR.
Whew. Where were we? Ah, of course. I was pretty bummed out
(still), I
wanted to look all "smart" and "down-wit-the-intellectual
this album on sale NEW for $7.99. The stars were aligned. Since I
had
heard "Like a Rolling Stone" already and disliked it, I knew I wasn't
going
to be mighty impressed, but I figured it would be calming background music
to get me through the war on terror and college. And it WAS calming for
the
first three weeks or so I had it and listened to it on a semi-regular
basis. Grungey, bluesy, and loose, but I remember this album being very
relaxing back in 2001. Intellectual and not-very-catchy, maybe, but
listenable and at least pleasant. Amen.
To this day I wonder if maybe I would never have gotten into Dylan and
perhaps regarded him as somewhere on the same level as the Rolling Stones
and the Doors (no kidding) if I hadn't been in the mood to listen to Highway
61 Revisited about two dozen times as background music. It was about the
two-dozenth-plus-oneth time, on an unseasonably warm day in November, where
it struck me: We got ourselves a masterpiece here.
Every song (bar "Tom Thumb") is a potential classic, hit, standard,
what
have you. Every song has a fantastic chord sequence, classic melody,
timeless twist (not to be confused with the "Mindless Twist" of 1962
fame),
or wondrous riff, fill, and solo stew. A great band, working at the peak
of
its inspiration, with the peak of singer-songwriters at the helm. This
here
album may have been written, arranged, rehearsed, and recorded in LESS THAN
A WEEK OH MY GOD HOW DID THEY DO THAT.
It sure as FUCK don't sound like it, anyway. As you said, it blows away
almost any meticulously constructed record you can name.
. . not Def Leppard's Hysteria, though.
Look here you, if that was a joke, I would be crapping. Crapping my pants
off, I tell you. Pants pants pants. (crap)
. . but I digress. Pop metal 5-ever.
Your assessment of "Desolation Row" was right on the money--the best
song of
Dylan's career, hands down. But I think you're a little hard on
"From a
Buick 6"--like the songs on Bringing it All Back, that's a hit there.
Puts
the Animals in their place, it does.
Ditto on the 10.
Blonde On Blonde (1966)
Rating: 10
Best Song: “One Of Us
Must Know (Sooner Or Later)”
On a purely objective, nitpicky, asshole-ish song-by-song basis, maybe Highway 61 Revisited is better than this album. Maybe. But if albums were graded like that I’d be forced to give The White Album a 9 because “Revolution #9” is one of the worst things ever recorded, and so I’m here to tell you that, despite the unmitigated brilliance of Bob’s last album, and despite the fact that I’d probably recommend that aforementioned last one as the best starting point for Mr. Zimmerman, this one here is my favorite Bob experience. Maybe the lyrics aren’t as dense as his last few albums, and maybe only a couple songs here crack me up, and maybe it’s not as diverse as Highway 61, but, goddammit, who cares. As a unified piece of work, this is Bob’s peak. Musically he’s at his loosest and most spontaneous (sometimes this thing makes Highway 61 sound like Dark Side of the Moon…it was recorded in, what, three days? And it’s over seventy minutes long? My lord), lyrically he’s still at his best, if not his most ridiculous, everything is warmer and more inviting than anything we’ve heard before from the guy…and there’s more of it! The first rock and roll double album ever. In the mid-sixties, more Dylan was better Dylan. He was that good.
This is much more of a “mood” album than the last few, to the point where I couldn’t tell you half the running order if I tried and I still can’t remember much about a bunch of disc 2. The only two songs that really stick out as “different” are “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” because it has tubas and talks about getting “stoned” and “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” because it’s like 45 minutes long. But, at least until some of the unrecognizability on disc 2 shows up, not a single song on this album is less than fantastic. Maybe a couple of them start out kinda slow, but if someone finds a weak link on disc 1 anywhere, they’re obviously listening to the wrong album. The soft, insistent drums, quiet organs, active pianos, multiple interesting guitars (none of which are doing anything obvious, but all of which are often brilliant (which is code for “you should listen to this thing on headphones”))…and you can tell they’re often just making up some of the parts as they go along! Listen to the piano in “One of us Must Know (Sooner or Later)” or the electric guitar in “I Want You” and tell me it isn’t the product of the country session guy going “hmmmm…this might sound cool here” during the take. How electrifying must it have been to be part of these sessions anyway? Every three hours Bob shows up with a new song that after some jamming turns into “Visions of Johanna” or “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” or something else ridiculous. I continue to have been born in the wrong decade.
This also might be one of the best vocal albums I’ve ever heard. Remember I mentioned in the last review how much better Bob’s vocalizing was getting with each album? He reached his apex as a vocalist here, and he never came close afterwards either (not that he had the chance to, ofcourse). Bob’s vocals on this record are some of the most consistently charismatic and invigorating ever, and the funny part is that he might give less thought to melody lines and actually hitting notes than ever before. God, his vocalizing is insane here. He’s light and peppy on “I Want You,” soft and sensitive on “Just Like a Woman,” totally goofball on “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” and raucous on “Rainy Day Women.” If you can show me a singer whose confidence comes across better on record without having him seem like a dick than Bob Dylan on Blonde on Blonde…well, either you’re wrong, or you don’t think Axl Rose is a dick. I think, vocally, my favorite song here is “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” a tune Bob singlehandedly turns from random, rote blues-rocker into an instant classic piece of ridiculous comedy-rock that might be the funniest song he ever recorded. “Well, I see you got a new boyfriend. You know, I never seen him before. Well, I saw you making loooooove to him; you forgot to clooooose the garage dooooooor! You might think he loves you for your money, but…I know what he really loves you for! It’s you brand new leopard-skin pill box haaaaaaaaaat.” No, it’s not “Desolation Row,” but neither is “But I would not feeeeeel so all alooooooone! EVERYBODY MUST GET STOOOOONED!” and I like “Rainy Day Women” just fine. Imagine some random singer belting out these lines (and I don’t even mean someone shitty like Scott Stapp or Geddy Lee…just someone average, like Phil Collins maybe), and think of how retarded they’d sound. In Bob Dylan’s hands, “jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule” sounds profound, and even “Yeeeeeees, I want you!” sounds like poetry.
I’ll
briefly talk about a few of the specific songs now, I suppose. “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)” is my
personal favorite, mainly due to the big buildup to the giant flapping piano
chorus and more expert Bob vocalizing (“one of us must KNOOOOOOOOOOOOW!”), but
it’s not like how “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Desolation Row” stand out from everything
else on Highway 61. “Rainy Day Women” might be the most absurdly
invigorating opener ever, and it’s great to contrast its overt silliness (I love the ten guys in the background
yelling “WOO-HOO!” and whatnot throughout the entire thing, like everyone in
the studio was so excited by this song they couldn’t hold it in) to the
relative seriousness of “Like a Rolling Stone,” the last opener. “Visions of Johanna” and “Just Like a Woman”
are absolutely gorgeous, and everything left unmentioned in this paragraph on
disc 1 is just brilliant boogie-rock or blues-rock fun from the master at his
peak. As I’ve alluded a few times, disc
2 is clearly the weaker of the two. In
particular “Temporary Like Achilles,” which sounds suspiciously like “Just Like
Tom Thumb’s Blues,” and the random rocker “Obviously 5 Believers” bring very
little to the table. A lot of the
standard-length songs on disc 2 end up sounding like re-writes of material from
either disc 1 or Highway 61, although
the rollicking “Absolutely Sweet Marie” is fantastic. And then “Sad-Eyed Lady of the
So yeah, disc 2 of the thing by itself is definitely not as good as Highway 61, and it probably wouldn’t even get a 10. However, combine it with the album’s first half and listen to the whole thing in one sitting…and you have the finest album Bob Dylan ever recorded. As with all great albums, I can never listen to just part of it. Despite its length, once the opening drums and horns of “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” kick in, I have to see it out to its conclusion, to those final, dragged-out verses of “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” The rest of my comments here would be strikingly similar to those I made for Highway 61 Revisited (only with “but it’s sorta slower and more samey, but better!” added), so I’ll stop this review posthaste. Just get this damn album.
ddickson@rice.edu writes:
14 songs, every one (bar the final
track) as good as "Like a Rolling
Stone". "Absolutely Sweet Marie" is a cut above the rest.
"Stuck Inside
song ever. "Pledging My Time"'s harmonica goes apeshit.
Dylan's voice
sucks harder than ever.
14 songs, all spicier than buffalo chicken pizza. Only Blood on the
Tracks
comes close. This is a 10, a masterpiece, a landmark in good shit, and
I'll
shut up already.
The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: Live 1966 – The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert (1998)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Like A
Rolling Stone”
Formerly ultra-mega-uber-famous bootleg that since 1998 has served as ample proof that Bob Dylan is a jackass, Live 1966 is more interesting than good (I’d listen to Live 1964 or Live 1975 in second before this one, for the most part), but it’s still plenty good anyhow. The most fascinating part of this is to see the transformation in Bob’s personality from the goofball on Live 1964 who made all those hilariously witty comments to the funny folk fans to the arrogant, anti-social douche who plays this album’s acoustic set so morosely it’s hard to tell anyone’s even there and actively jaws with the audience (unfortunately comprised of the same funny folk fans as the last live album…which, considering Bob had put out three albums of rock and roll in the meantime, is fucktarded) during the balls-out rock half. You know he doesn’t even play any songs from his first four albums during the folk set, and then submits a bunch of stuff from those very albums to the hard rock boogie treatment during the second half? Thus alienating both the narrow-minded folkies he was no doubt attempting to alienate in the first place as well as the new fans he had gotten from his last couple records? Apparently the concept of “arrangement” is as fluid to Bob as Anne Heche’s sexual preference, as is the concept of “not being a prick.”
OK, so the acoustic set is interesting if boring (want to hear “Desolation Row” without the interesting second guitar? Or maybe three songs from Blonde on Blonde set to acoustic arrangements straight off Times? No? Well, tough, because that’s what you’re gonna hear), but the rock set is interesting and exciting. Bob’s backed by The Hawks (later to be renamed “The Band,” and then “Who is this Robbie Robertson guy and why is he on VH1 so much?”), and (Brad proceeds to make the same point that every reviewer of this album ever has made) while you wouldn’t know it from their bloated silliness on Before the Flood eight years hence, at this point in time the Hawks kicked some serious hoochy-moochy. Dig how they somehow turn the early acoustic folkie obscurities “”I Don’t Believe You,” “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” and “One Too Many Mornings” into convincing, ass-rocking rewrites of every fast song on Highway 61 Revisited, as well as turning “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” from slightly boring on that very same Highway 61 Revisited into a lovely slice of raunchy, organ-heavy blues-rock shenanigans. There’s even a previously unreleased song on an album here! And “Tell Me, Momma” is a honkin’ good time as well. I don’t know if most of the selections from this rock half (at least the ones that were rock in the first place…it’s kind of tough to compare “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” to its original) are better than their studio counterparts…but what they certainly are is angrier. Everyone knows the fan that yells out “Judas!” at Bob, followed by Bob’s very deliberately responding “I don’t belieeeeeeeeeeeve” you and exhorting his bandmates to “play fucking loud!” before absolutely tearing everyone’s face off with their version of “Like a Rolling Stone” (which owns here), but the way he slooooooooowly announces the title of “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” or mumbles to himself for 30 seconds before sarcastically jawing “if…if you only wouldn’t clap so hard” is just as telling. Viewing the whole thing from afar, I think it’s hilarious how Bob doesn’t give a shit about his audience, plays rock songs in a deathly slow acoustic setting, plays deathly slow acoustic songs in an ear-splitting rock setting, etc. (and it’s not like this whole “random rearrangements” thing is an isolated incident; actually, the fact that he played all his songs straight without fucking with them on Live 1964 is the isolated incident), but I can see how going to his concerts might piss some people off. It’s a dicey proposition, a Bob concert. It’s not like Paul McCartney, anyhow, where you can set your watch to when he and his fat Samoan drummer play “Band on the Run.”
To get an idea of “the kind of guy Bob really is,” this is probably your best bet for his live albums. In terms of just “great music,” the two Bootleg series entries released directly after this are better bets (especially Vol. 5, that Live 1975 thing I’ve been harping on). At the time it came out, though, due to the paucity of live albums released by Bob when he was actually good (as compared to how many he put out once he started to suck…ugh…), it was probably the shit, and it remains the only place you can find live Bob during his 1965-66 peak. So sure, pick it up. Why not?
The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7: No Direction Home – The Soundtrack (2005)
Rating: 9
Best Song: “Maggie’s
Farm”
Either historically essential or a complete waste of time, depending on how much you think you need to hear two and a half hours of alternate and/or live takes of a bunch of songs you’ve already heard two or three times apiece, this “soundtrack” (term used loosely) to Martin Scorsese’s four-hour video PBS blowjob treatment of Bob’s career before he splattered his head on a stretch of pavement in upstate New York (which was actually a great documentary with some fascinating interviews…but it was a blowjob) is something I find really, really cool and entertaining despite the fact that there’s nearly no reason for me to ever listen to it. Just like the live album I just got done talking about, it neatly splits Bob’s up-thru-1966 career up into “acoustic” and “electric” sections, although it actually sequences itself chronologically instead of playing “Visions of Johanna” as a whiney folk song and rearranging half of Another Side of to melt your face. So in that way, it’s pretty cool. The first disc is of a fuckload more historical value, since there’s all these rare live takes and scratchy home recordings from when Bob was a teenager (one song here dates from 1959!) that sound so old you’ll swear Robert Johnson was in the waiting room getting ready to record something. In don’t see why they felt it necessary to include the album version of “Song to Woody” (one of only two out of twenty-eight tracks that’s not “previously unreleased,” the other being the “Judas” version of “Like a Rolling Stone” that previously appeared on Live 1966 and was the centerpiece of the movie), but whatever. The home recording of some early folk cover obscurity called “Dink’s Song” is fantazmo, and I find it cool how we don’t even get anything post-Bob Dylan until track 8 or 9 or something, and then it’s mostly live versions, most of which are balls. “This Land is Your Land” is a moronic song no matter who’s playing it or where it’s being played, and the Ramblin’ Jack Elliott backing vocals on the alternate studio take of “Mr. Tambourine” are dumb, but otherwise, disc 1 is just real good stuff all around.
Disc 2 is
less historically interesting considering most of it consists of slightly
inferior alternate takes of songs from Highway
61 and Blonde on Blonde, but it’s
still fun to listen to all these mega-classic songs played just a little bit off. “It Takes a
Ah hell, you’re not paying money for this thing unless you’re a huge Bob fanatic, right? Right. And it’s lovingly packaged with all sorts of super photos and a rambling story from Andrew Loog Oldham and like ten pages of little gold nuggets about the Blonde on Blonde sessions from Al Kooper (like how the band would have four-to-five hour ping-pong sessions while Bob was holed up in some nether-region of the Nashville studio they recorded in writing the “jewels and binoculars” line from “Visions of Johanna”). It’s a huge bonanza for us Dylanophiles, but unless you enjoy scratchy home recordings of 50-year-old spirituals by a teenage hayseed or takes of songs from really famous albums without the musical ingredients that made them classics in the first place (I mean, seriously, how could you have “Highway 61 Revisited” without the horn noisemaker thingy? How?), there’s no reason for you to get this. It’s fascinating as hell, though.
The Basement Tapes (1975)
Rating: 6
Best Song: “Million
Dollar Bash”
So in July of 1966 Bob crashed
his motorcycle up at his house in
Problem is that these are half-assed un-produced hackwork recordings never meant for release. The only reason they became as famous as they did is because, due to their bootleg status, they were “mysterious” and “rare,” plus they did represent the first stuff Bob recorded after his accident (and thus a pseudo-follow-up to Blonde on Blonde, I suppose). Thing is, except for a handful of admittedly great songs strewn about the twenty-plus tracks on here, this is just mediocre, half-formed, generic stuff. Not particularly bad or offensive…just not any good, you know? You’ve got recluse Bob sitting in a basement with the Band (who were never that great in the first place) recording 10 songs a say for shits…and this is gonna be as good as Blonde on Blonde? My ass. I enjoy “Odds and Ends,” the energetic “Yazoo Street Scandal,” the fun “Million Dollar Bash” (the only song from this thing I’ve ever had stuck in my head, by the way), the pretty “Bessie Smith,” the goofy “Ain’t No More Cane”…a few others on disc 2, I suppose (maybe the fun roots-rock “Don’t Ya Tell Henry”), but my inability to tell any of this apart from itself is ridiculous. Everyone seems to fellate “Tears of Rage” and call it one of Bob’s best-ever songs, but I just don’t see it. The backing Band vocals don’t help. I don’t know anyone’s name in the Band besides Robbie Robertson (and I have a bunch of their albums, too, so don’t call me a Band ignoramus for this lack of knowledge), but the fact that half of these songs are sung either solo by a Band guy or as a duet with a Band guy and Bob is a big flaw, since Bob’s voice is still in full-on uber-charismatic form, even if it’s singing songs tossed off in thirty seconds. Still, “Bessie Smith” and “Don’t Ya Tell Henry” have Band vocals, and they’re two of my favorite songs here (hell, so do “Yazoo Street Scandal” and “Ain’t No More Cane”), so I guess I have no point.
This album
is perfectly pleasant and fun background music…but that’s all it is, and I’m
pretty sure that’s all it was intended to be.
If Bob thought this stuff was top-shelf, why didn’t he want it released? What do you think this is, the
mid-eighties? Does anyone really need to hear “Nothing Was
Delivered” in their lifetime? Or
“Clothesline Saga?” Or “Tiny
David Dickson (ddickso2@uccs.edu) writes:
I wrote a comment a few
months or years ago that I don't remember much
of but I do recall sucked, so here's take two:
Half-assed, unfinished hackwork? Well. Everybody has their own
definition, I guess. Come to think of it, The Basement Tapes was
recorded less than six months after the first and nearly best double
album in rock history, which just happened to have some of the best
musicians in the world, some of the most complicated lyrics in the
world, and some of the longest, most winding songs in the MEGAVERSE
EVER on it, so I guess I can understand everybody and their brother's
characterization of this thing as half-assed, unfinished
yaddladdlaldladde and so on in that context. Come to think of it,
I've never listened to this album back to back with Blonde on Blonde.
Maybe if I did, I'd hold the correct opinion.
Then again, all of that first paragraph WOULD make sense. . . except
for the 9 or 10 you and everyone else in the universe gives to John
Wesley Harding. If anything, THAT album seems even simpler than the
Basement Tapes--there's only half the number of musicians playing on
it! Heck, the songs are even shorter. AND faster.
Is it the lyrics? That's it--gotta be the lyrics. JWH has some
pretty poetic, timely, meticulously-hammered-out words to its
simplistic minimally bard-like noodlings, this does not--a bunch of
un-inventive ramblings about. . . um, sugarcane, Katy, Betty, the
Band's rural musings, hick-bashes, midget dancers, and maybe a burning
tire every now and then.
That's my problem, I guess. I don't listen to Dylan for his lyrics.
I don't listen to anyone for their lyrics. I might listen for the
shape and tonal quality of the syllables that MAKE UP the lyrics, but
as far as the left-brained aspects of them go, no dice, buddy. So
quality of lyrics and complicated who-haw has no impact on my
enjoyment of Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde, or Blood (onthetracks).
Should it?? That's a question for us all to ponder.
But why do I like THIS album so much? Its fuller band arrangements?
Not bloody likely--I think Another Side of Bob Dylan is just as good
as this, drunken girlfriend bitchings and all. Its rootsy tootsy
grungey bootsiness, which is the reason most (paid) critics drool over
it and then have to wipe their drool off the disc?? Not bloody
likely--Rolling Stones are pretty tootsy AND bootsy, but they ain't
exactly my cup of "Beatles Runner Up" java. So why do you like
it,
Kevin Spacey? WHY, in the name of real estate??
("Because I. . . DON'T. . . LIKE YOU." --Kevin Spacey with
trademark
deadpan sadistic glee, Glengarry GlenRoss, 1992)
No, seriously. It took me a while to figure out myself. Then I
realized, it's because of something surprisingly low-brow: (sigh)
catchy choruses. Dylan's not normally known for such a thing, but
here he goes and does it. At least 16 of the 24 refrains on here are
hummable and resonatable into the next month and beyond. Especially
if you're a hick. JWH, on the other hand, has no catchy choruses--in
fact, it doesn't have any choruses at all. And that's why I guess I
just can't get into that one. Well, that and the insanely up-tempo
vibe and short songs. Speed without testosterone or catchiness--not a
fan. Yeah, the lyrics are better on that album, but what're you gonna
do.
So I guess on a pure short-song-roots-rock basis, it's difficult for
me to understand your characterization of this as "unfinished generic
hackity hack." It doesn't sound like that musically to me, not with
the catchy choruses thing and all. Lyrically, maybe. To be sure,
it's much hickier and less bohemian than Dylan would normally allow
himself at his prime. Individually, each song is just a slight,
rootsy, albeit catchy, throwaway, but put all 24 together and you have
a behemoth that challenges Exile on
statement*)
John Wesley Harding (1967)
Rating: 9
Best Song: “The
Ballad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest”
Bob’s first official post-serious head trauma release is even more of a jarring left turn from the trajectory he’d been on than the unreleased nothing goof tracks he recorded with the Band in their basement. To follow up Blonde on Blonde with this, even considering the admittedly unique circumstances…I mean, what exactly was it supposed to be? A bunch of short, quiet, understated old-school-sounding dark folk/country tunes with mostly simple, straightforward lyrics? Where’s the latest double-album mind-blowing splurge? Where’s Bigger and Blonder? I’m supposed to get by with rudimentary country acoustic guitar and harmonica playing, an understated rhythm section, and rambling stories about backwoods country hicks, outlaws, beggars, and immigrants? Where’s “Stuck Inside of Nashville With the Stoned New Orleans Jazz Ensemble Who’s Having Visions of Maggie’s Farm Over By Desolation Row?” “I Pity the Poor Immigrant?” Fneh?
Hell, it’s great anyway, and easily my favorite Dylan record after Freewheelin’, the ’65-’66 threesome, and Blood on the Tracks (which therefore makes it #6, but remember Bob’s released 872 albums). As you might have gathered from that first paragraph, though, if you’re expecting an exhilarating, face-melting rock experience like Highway 61 Revisited, you’ll be sorely disappointed. This album is so quiet and understated that it only works if you’re giving it your undivided attention or just letting it sit there as background music. Anything between those two extremes will lead you to think it’s just boring country music, especially if you’re comparing it to the couple of albums that came before it (which is asinine, considering what happened to the man in the meantime). Bob’s able to create an atmosphere here almost as wonderful as Blonde on Blonde or Highway 61, just totally different. I’ve seen it described as “what 1800’s music probably sounded like” and other variations on that, but considering no one actually knows what 1800’s music sounded like, that’s kind of a retarded thing to say if you ask me, so I’ll just cop out and say it sounds “traditional” and “old-school,” definitely backward-looking, for sure.
That can be a good thing, though, and it’s ludicrous to think Bob’s songwriting could have completely left him in the year and a half since Blonde on Blonde. It changed, sure. Changed a lot. But it’s still top-notch. I know I’ve already said this album is “rudimentary” and “quiet” and “understated” a whole bunch of times, but the difference in sheer force and volume between Bob’s ’65-’66 material and this album is gonna be shocking to you no matter how many times I tell you. Musically, it’s either one acoustic guitar or one piano playing absurdly simple country licks, plus Bob’s harmonica and a rhythm section that’s admirable snappy at times but cares not for volume, pace, etc. Hell, Bob’s reined his voice in a helluva lot too, to this subtle country whine that fits the overall tone of the album very well. It’s very calm music, even if the down-to-earth character-study lyrics sometimes carry a far-different sentiment. It took Jimi Hendrix’s wanton electric guitar shenanigans to ratchet up “All Along the Watchtower” to its full glory (and if you scoff at that assessment...well, Bob likes Jimi’s version better too, so nyah nyah nyah), but it’s a highlight here as well (relatively…this album is very even), and the quiet atmosphere gives the song a subtlety and a mystery that Jimi’s rock god cover could never hope to match (not that it mattered, since it melted faces). Then all these cool, upbeat-sounding character narratives like “John Wesley Harding” and “Drifter Escape” or slower, first-person soliloquies like “Dear Landlord,” “I Am a Lonesome Hobo,” and “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” (all three of which come in a row, by the way, which was certainly not random chance) are just fascinating if you really take time to dig into the lyrics and the atmosphere. It’s almost like a concept album about some old-west dirt town, and Bob’s describing either an inhabitant or a conflict or something else within the town in each song. The centerpiece of the record for me is the five-minute (absurdly long for this record) “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,” essentially a long, chorus-less (there aren’t many choruses on this album to speak of at all, actually) narrative poem about its two main title characters, something like you’d find on Another Side of, maybe, except it’s in the third person instead of the first, and the actions, while certainly not mundane, are devoid of any references to Fidel Castro or anything else political. Plus it has a rhythm section and it’s actually an old-time country song.
It’s not like every song on here holds up, obviously. The album begins to lag a little at the end with decently jumpy but unspectacular “The Wicked Messenger” and the downright mediocre “Down Along the Cove,” for instance, though the country closer “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” is absolutely lovely and points not-so-subtly at where Bob would be heading for his next album. Outside of Times, this is probably Bob’s least “entertaining” album of the sixties, but it’s got a fantastic, quiet, subtle charm. Just great, understated, unpretentious, old-sounding folk/country music. The lyrics are great, too, if uncommonly straightforward for Bob. You’ll dig hearing about the adventures of John Wesley Harding and Judas Priest and the drifter, and you’ll feel for the tenant and the immigrant in this small, dirt town Bob’s created. Nothing else in Bob’s catalog sounds quite like this.
David Dickson (ddickso2@uccs.edu) writes:
I'd just like to point out
that Mr. T should one day do a spoken-word
"cover" of track 9 on this album. Also, I give it an 8 for the
title
track, "Down Along the Cove," "Frankie Lee and Judas
Priest" and
aforementioned track 9. I give Mr. Dylan two slaps for "I'll Be Your
Etc." (which does NOT make up for the last 15 years in country music,
thank you very much) and the straight-up re-write of the title track
entitled "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine." In addition,
Hendrix's
version of you-know-what kicks the original into the ground. The end.
Nashville
Rating: 8
Best Song: “To Be
Alone With You”
The first album (of many) on
which it’s not abundantly clear whether Bob’s actually trying, if John Wesley Harding was “country-rock”
(and thus the beginning of the “country-rock movement,” which means Bob has
started about five or six genres and/or movements by now), Nashville Skyline is pure, hardcore, unadulterated country music. So if your nose curls up at the thought of
generic hick
OK, sure, it’s lightweight. In fact it’s so lightweight it makes Bob’s hillbilly cover debut album look like The Wall by comparison. But good christ is this a fun little record. It’s like he’s come full circle, from a goofy fun debut to his music-changing masterpieces in the mid-sixties down to the relaxed John Wesley Harding down to another goofy, fun toss-off, except that musically this record (just like his last one) sounds nothing like anything Bob’s produced before. Beyond the obvious fact that he hadn’t made a hardcore country album with pedal steel guitar and country piano tinkling and other traditional C&W Nashville trappings before, Bob’s suddenly discovered this lightweight crooner voice that sounds as much like his old nasal whelping as Pat Boone. This makes the opening live duet with Johnny Cash of “Girl From the North Country” sound admittedly odd, but after that this new, Hilton Airport Lounge Dylan fits the toss-off professional goofy fun country hick music of this album quite well, thank you. The ballads like “I Threw it All Away” and “Lay Lady Lay” (the big hit from this album) work real well as traditional-sounding country numbers, if maybe they’re a little corny here and there, and much the same can be said of the more upbeat numbers, like the throwaway “Peggy Day,” the ninety-second throwaway “Country Pie,” and the fantastic throwaway “To Be Alone With You.” Get it? Every song on this album, bar possibly “Lay Lady Lay,” is a throwaway and was intended as such. Sometimes I think the most musically interesting song on album is the three-minute hoedown instrumental “Nashville Skyline Rag.” Everything sounds roughly the same, and the lyrics are about as meaningful as any throwaway country album from whatever contemporary Nashville Grand Ol’ Opry artist you care to name. Like Dolly Parton or something. But it’s very well-written, well-played, and fun, despite being so “artistically bereft.”
A lot of people see this as the first album where Bob was consciously trying to shed the giant audience of annoying dirty hippies he’d acquired in the mid-sixties, and considering both the music you’ll find here what he put out next, that’s a pretty easy claim to make. The question is whether Bob just felt like making a hardcore country throwaway nothing album and didn’t care whether he lost all his fans from it or whether he decided to shed all his fans and figured the best way to do it was record a hardcore country throwaway album. My guess is it’s probably somewhere in the middle, though the fact that the record is good and people liked it means he probably just felt like making a hick toss-off album and wasn’t consciously trying to piss his fans off, or at least wasn’t consciously trying to piss them off much. Regardless, this record has as much artistic merit as a rerun of “Full House,” and it will actually take you longer to watch that rerun than it will to listen to the album in its entirely…but it’s fun. Real, real fun. So, as long as you’re comfortable with getting twenty-five minutes of toss-off generic country music from the guy that wrote “Desolation Row” just four years before, dig in.
Mike Noto (thepublicimage79@hotmail.com) writes:
Apparently Bob found his new
country-croonmeister voice (which sent me into
fits of disbelieving laughter the first time I heard it - I was literally
saying to myself, "This CAN'T be Bob Dylan...") after quitting
cigarettes.
Gee...so Bob must have been on a four-pack-a-day-unfiltered habit right
around "Blonde On Blonde," I guess. Or maybe that was the speed.
Anyway, I haven't heard much of this, but "Lay Lady Lay" is a good
song.
Self Portrait (1970)
Rating: 5
Best Song: “The
Mighty Quinn (Quinn The Eskimo)”
The still-baffling 24-song
double album that nearly ruined Bob’s career and definitely cost him a huge
chunk of his audience, Self Portrait
is probably discussed nowadays a lot more than it deserves, especially
considering how little effort it seems Bob put into most of the material. There seem to be two dominant schools of
thought on this ridiculous collection of amateurish covers, semi-produced
leftovers, and feather-light, haphazardly written country ditties. A lot of people, including most critics of
the day, hated it and still do, and
it’s not hard to see why. Compared to
everything Bob had put out before (including Times, since you can at least see what Bob was trying to do on that
one), this album is a joke. The songs
are taken from all over the place (something you can tell from the different
timbres of Bob’s voice; compare the Basement
Tapes-whine of “Day’s of ‘49” with the Nashville
Skyline Reno croon of “I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know”), half of them
are covers (most of which are atrocious; I think Not Exactly (coming to a
high-school graduation party near you!!!!) could do a better job with “The
Boxer” and “Blue Moon”), two of them are hickball country live tracks of
classic ’65 material without any balls, a couple originals are played twice,
three or four are string-filled Vegas instrumentals…I could keep going, but I
think you get the picture. Anyone who
thinks Bob wasn’t capable of far, far
better than this at the time has their head up their ass, and it’s hard to
imagine people finding tons to dig into here, especially if they’re still
looking for Blonde on Blonde II after
patiently waiting through Bob’s dark country-folk-rock excursion and Grand Ol’
Opry tryout goof record. Contrary to
this, however, there seems to be a recent movement, especially within Russian
linguists and their followers in the Web Reviewing Community, that asserts this
record is not only not bad, but in
fact very good! Like “equal to Nashville Skyline” good! They’re both “simple”
Needless to say, I believe that is bullshit, though I can’t say I hate this album either (this may only be because I’ve heard the rest of Bob’s catalog and thus have something much worse to compare it to, however). I don’t know how, but this album both bores me and fascinates me at the same time. It bores me because…well, it’s boring and skimpy and retarded, but it fascinates me because, I mean, what the hell was Bob thinking? The popular school of thought, continuing from what I said at the end of the last review, is that this was Bob’s real attempt to get his massive cult following to hate him and leave him the hell alone. For the most part, I buy that. It seems unconscionable that Bob unintentionally would fuck up this badly when he still had so much gas left in the tank unless he wasn’t trying and/or wanted people to hate it. It’s that ridiculous. And why make this monstrosity a double album and then call it fucking Self Portrait if he wasn’t trying to fuck with people by serving them this crap? So there’s pretty strong evidence that it was a deliberate fuck-up…but then why did New Morning come out so quickly afterwards it almost seemed like an apology? And why are some parts of this so overproduced? Why the gloppy strings on stuff like “Belle Isle” and “Wigwam?” What the hell? I’m still completely baffled one way or the other, so I’m gonna end this discussion and move on to why the record isn’t really that atrocious.
Large chunks of this, even the most objectively bad sections (like every song with that Nashville Skyline Vegas voice or a retard backing orchestra), are fun almost in a perverse way. “Living the Blues,” with its generic female country backing singers going “Doo doo! Doo doo!” and whatnot, is a hoot, for instance, as is the ridiculous “Copper Kettle (The Pale Moonlight).” Hell, a bunch of the more un-produced ramshackle boogie tracks are actually enjoyable, like the second “Little Sadie” song, “Days of ’49,” “Gotta Travel On” (even with the backup singers), and especially the obvious Basement Tapes leftover (by the way, I’m probably wrong about that) “The Mighty Quinn (Quinn the Eskimo),” which actually rocks pretty hard and is the only tune on here that comes close to recapturing that old “Dylan magic,” whatever that’s supposed to be. Whoever’s doing the backing vocals needs to STAND SOMEWHERE NEAR THE MICROPHONE next time, and it would be nice if the guitar solo didn’t feed back and make a horrible squeak noise in the middle (again, why wouldn’t Bob correct that unless a) he didn’t give a shit or b) he wanted the album to suck? It’s baffling!), but the song is damned entertaining almost in spite of itself. It’s followed by a preposterous overweening country ballad called “Take Me as I am (or Let me Go)” that sounds like Nashville Skyline for complete retard lounge acts, sure, but we can’t have everything, I suppose.
We know Bob knew this album sucked, or at least we know Bob knew he wasn’t writing material up to his usual standards at the time (witness the “How am I supposed to get any riding done?” with riding sounding a heapload like writing in the opening “All the Tired Horses”). Plus (and correct me if I’m wrong here), although I obviously can’t recall every track on every one of the innumerable live albums Bob put out in the seventies and eighties, I can’t think of a time he played a single one of these songs on any of them. But the question that remains, and has remained for twenty-five years now, is not whether the album sucks or even whether Bob knew it sucked. It’s what Bob’s motivation was in making such a poor, haphazard, ramshackle, ridiculous mess of an album. And you know what? Who cares. Unless you’re writing a biography on the man, listen to it once to see what all the fuss is about, and forget about it. It doesn’t matter. He’s doing whatever the fuck he wants, just like always.
New Morning (1970)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “The Man
In Me”
The rushed follow-up to Self Portrait (it only came out four months afterward! Yow!) that hastily attempts to undo the damage caused to Bob’s reputation by the massive failure of its predecessor, and after which Bob didn’t release another proper studio album of songs for four more years (which probably didn’t help his reputation much either), New Morning is the first album that sounds like “seventies Dylan,” which means he’s not trying to be difficult or different anymore…just pleasant-sounding. The whole thing is very tame compared to his quiet yet forceful folk material, his white-hot blazing mid-sixties rock material, his subtly dark post-motorcycle crash excursion, and his slapdash silly schmaltz period of Nashville Skyline and Self Portrait. There’s lots of piano and organ as well as delicately-recorded acoustic guitar, and all of it is produced in a smooth, agreeable manner as to be palatable to middle-aged people that have wine cellars. Female backup singers are present a handful of times, but they’re never very high in the mix. Bob’s given up the Vegas ass croon he employed on his last two albums, but he’s retained a low-key, personality-deficient, on-key pseudo-whine as his new vocal style, the most “agreeable” and “pleasant” and “generic” voice he’s yet employed, in lieu of the uber-charismatic crazy man approach he took in the mid-sixties. In short, it’s the first non-hardcore country Dylan album without any “rough edges,” so to speak, and it might’ve been a hit had it not been released just months after the catastrophe that was Self Portrait.
As you could have probably guessed, it also continues the tradition started by Nashville Skyline of Bob’s not trying real hard. Some of the songs are superb and sound worked-over, but certainly not close to all of them, and the album ends up an interesting little mix of a handful of great tunes, some failed experiments at being a hip, older man (I mean…jazz? Come on), and a whole bunch of stuff that sounds like it was written, arranged, and recorded in an afternoon. It ends up being decent mostly because Bob hasn’t yet lost his songwriting mojo; nope, he’s just not trying very hard, so he can only fire off a handful “If Not For You”’s or “One More Weekend”’s per record, and has to leave the rest for underdeveloped piano meandering like “Sign on the Window” and totally unfinished wanking around like “Time Passes Slowly.” Now, I actually like “Sign on the Window” despite its lack of a lot of relatively important things (like an “interesting arrangement”), but why has no one commented on the fact that the backing band completely loses their sense of rhythm only halfway through “Time Passes Slowly?” The last minute is just the piano player hitting random chords while the drummer tippity-tippity-taps like a drunk Carl Palmer. It’s crap, it is, and “Three Angels,” which consists of an organ playing three chords, an acoustic guitar doing nothing original, and Bob mumbling something that might sound cool if it was given a melody and sung over the backing from “Tombstone Blues” instead of spoken over this crap background, isn’t much better. Love the dramatic chorus at the end that serves no purpose at all, too. Great stuff, that.
The worst moments of this album, with few exceptions, are always tolerable, however, because everything is produced in that aforementioned “agreeable” fashion. It’s rare that I turn up my nose at anything from this thing, and a handful of songs really are very good. “One More Weekend” is a great little raunchy blues number that provides at least a tentative link to when Bob totally ruled ass four years ago, but the remaining good material, for the most part, is just well-performed, nice-sounding, melodic seventies pop/rock. The title track, “If Not For You,” “Day of the Locusts,” “The Man in Me”…not much to separate these songs, is there? I suppose “Went to See the Gypsy” has a bit of boogie in it, but it’s still really tame compared to what Bob had done before. It’s hard to kick ass, you know? It’s easier to be pleasant and nice and agreeable and generally very pleasantly agreeably nice. The super pop song “The Man in Me” and its wonderful “la la la la la la!” refrain might be familiar to you, but unless you’ve heard George Harrison’s superb cover of “If Not For You” on All Things Must Pass, it’s not like you’re gonna recognize much else of this stuff. No one gives a shit about this period of Bob’s career. It’s sandwiched between two periods of brilliance, and it’s not bad enough to be interesting. Perhaps it would have been bad enough had Bob included more ridiculous missteps like the odd waltz “Winterlude” or the talking beat poetry jazz excursion that Joni Mitchell probably dug “If Dogs Run Free,” but he had to go mucking it up with song after song of agreeable seventies pleasantness. Damn that Bob…
So, this is the first Bob album about which there’s not that much interesting to say. It sounds very nice, and the songs that aren’t goofball experiments or obviously left unfinished are generally good. Bob obviously tossed it off without a second thought beyond “make something listenable as quickly as possible so I won’t lose my entire audience,” so it’s probably right for you to do the same thing. It’s not bad, though.
Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid (1973)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “Billy 1”
I find it kind of funny that the one time between 1967 and 1975 Bob decided to actually put effort into an album was for the soundtrack to a Hollywood western he starred in with James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson, and at that a soundtrack with a total of two original songs on it, but what the hey? It’s Bob’s best album between Nashville Skyline and Blood on the Tracks, too, even though most of it is slow, relaxed country instrumentals that sound awfully similar to each other. Maybe Bob wanted to prove he was as much of a musician as a songwriter, or maybe he actually gave a shit about this movie and didn’t want the soundtrack to suck. Either way, it’s quite good. Not great, and realllllllly samey, but outstandingly pleasant and chill on a breezy spring day. Lots of lovely acoustic strumming and soloing, subtle bass work, no real drums to speak of beyond a bongo or something here and there…campfire music, you know? Real pretty. If it only had a couple more actual songs on it (this is a soundtrack in the Jaws or Star Wars sense, not the Saturday Night Fever or Moulin Rouge sense, although with quiet country instrumentals instead of booming orchestral themes), I’d seriously consider giving it an 8.
To give you an example of what I mean by “instrumental soundtrack music,” five of the ten tracks here are called, in order, “Main Title Theme,” “Cantina Theme,” “Bunkhouse Theme,” “River Theme,” and “Final Theme.” Then three of the five left are called “Billy” and one is called “Turkey Chase” (a fun piece of banjo/fiddle hoedown hibbity-jibbity I can only assume played in the background of some sort of silly scene involving wild fowl running around), leaving the mega-famous “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” as the only song on this record that could ever exist outside of the context of the movie. And you know what? I think it’s overrated. Sure, it’s good, but it’s like two minutes long and it seems like it fades out halfway through. It’s just a nice song, you know? Nothing more, nothing less. I actually like “Billy 1” (not to be confused with “Billy 4” (the same song with different lyrics) or “Billy 7” (the same song but in an instrumental version)) more as a song, just because I like trying to picture myself in the movie, or picture what the movie might’ve looked like (no, I haven’t seen it), and the lyrics about mesas and haciendas to me paint a great picture of the time and place this whole thing’s taking place at. Plus I haven’t heard Bob’s harmonica since John Wesley Harding and I didn’t realize how much I missed the damn thing.
The “theme” songs are all grand, but grand in a “slow, relaxed, chill country instrumental you can sit around a fire and drink some beers to” kinda way rather than a “wow, this song fucking rules!” kinda way. Only “Final Theme” and its flute melody really sounds any different from the rest, but all of it’s very, very pretty. The acoustic guitars are really lovely here as they swirl in and around your headphones. I suppose “Main Title Theme” is the most interesting and worked over of what’s left, and the “la la” chorus in “River Theme” is a nice touch, but except for “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” this whole album tends to blend together into one big, samey, pretty country mush. It’s lovely stuff, but about as far from earth-shattering as you can get, and by the end (and third “Billy” tune, all of which really do employ the exact same melody) I’m occasionally a little tired of the sameyness, but it really is extremely pretty, so there’s not much to complain about here. If you want proof Bob could still be fun without his famous lyrics, look no further than this little thing.
Dylan (1973)
Rating: 3
Best Song: “Lily Of
The West”
Chronologically this should
actually go right after Self Portrait,
but in terms of release date it goes here, although considering it’s been out
of print since a week after it came out and it’s atrocious I doubt anyone would
even care if I stuck it between Highway
61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. Back story: in late 1973, Bob had a little
spat with Columbia Records and briefly jumped ship for a little fledgling label
run by some nobody named David Geffen.
Columbia, justifiably angry at Bob if only because he hadn’t put any
effort into an album that wasn’t a movie soundtrack in six years, but certainly
not happy about this whole Geffen thing either, responded by culling together
nine awful covers recorded during the sessions for Self Portrait totaling a little over half an hour (which, by the
way, makes it about five minutes longer than Nashville Skyline) and releasing them under the title Dylan despite Bob’s protestations that
the tracks sucked and he didn’t want them released. Shortly thereafter, Bob returned to
The All Music Guide calls this “a collection of covers that are poorly performed on purpose,” and while it’s always dicey to claim you know an artist’s intent when they were making an album, that’s just about right. This thing is comically bad. The opener “Lily of the West” has some spunk and is actually kinda fun, but after that it takes a sharp left turn into shitsville and doesn’t come back. I don’t really want to rip it, though…it’s too ridiculous, and it’s totally unavailable on CD, so unless you want to pay $200 for a bootleg of some sort you can’t even find it (I downloaded it off a surely illegal Russian mp3 site, and I don’t really want to know how they got their hands on it). It’s hilarious, and I don’t know how many people even know it exists. The production on every song is either total blasting organ-related cheese or bare bones, and quite often a jarring amalgamation of the two. The swooning country female backup singers on every song (and I mean every song, even “Big Yellow Taxi” and other things where they have no business being around) are idiotic. Standout examples of stupidity include “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” and “Mary Ann,” but really everything outside of the strangely acceptable “Lily of the West.” I don’t even think most reviewers listen to this more than once, since they all talk about Bob uses his “Nashville Skyline croon voice” the whole time, when he only really breaks it out on “A Fool Such as I” and “Spanish is the Loving Tongue” (the latter of which turns into the soundtrack for a bad, low-budget Ecuadorian Zorro remake starring Antonio Banderas’s gardener by the end), preferring instead an off-putting and off-key wheeze the rest of the time. There’s one original here, too (“Sarah Jane”), but it sucks and sounds even more un-produced than most of the stuff on The Basement Tapes.
Just to
make it clear: this is an album of really bad covers released out of spite by a
record company after one of its stars got all pissy and decided to jump
ship. Bob thought it was awful and
didn’t want it released, and
Planet Waves (1974)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “Tough
Mama”
So Bob follows a half-assed rush-job released only a few months after the worst P.R. disaster of his career by not releasing an album that’s not an instrumental movie soundtrack for four years, and then the album he finally comes up with is another half-assed rush job, only this time with the by-now famous (actually, borderline washed-up) Band coming back down from Cripple Creek to help him out for the four days it took to write and record the damn thing. Is it any wonder Bob’s popularity had fallen so far by the mid-seventies? Hell, he didn’t even give a shit about making this album at all. Both he and the Band had seen their respective commercial cache turn to shit the last few years (in Bob’s case, ofcourse, it would’ve helped to, you know, release an album), so they decided to launch a giant blow-out tour with the Band backing Bob like in the old days, mixing up “The Weight” and “Up on Cripple Creek” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” as well as the numerous Band songs that no one gives a crap about, with Bob’s old classics from back in the day when he was a musical deity…but Bob had no album to tour behind! Unless the crowd wanted to hear country instrumentals with the word “theme” in them, that is. But they didn’t, so they threw together this disturbingly polished roots-rock affair in a weekend and then thought so much of it they didn’t play any of its songs on the tour. Fantastic.
Just like the last few toss-offs, though, the album somehow turns out to be pretty good. It’s sort of like a weird, ultra-relaxed cross between New Morning’s polished seventies pop half-assed-ness and The Basement Tapes’ rowdy, rootsy, Band-inspired, underdeveloped half-assed-ness. It’s a very light listen, almost sprightly, if it’s even possible to describe a band as “sprightly” without sounding like a total jackass. Like every single album Bob’s put out since John Wesley Harding, it has as much artistic worth as low-budget porno film, but it’s fun and it’s entertaining and Bob’s mojo is still working to the point that he has to actively try to make an album suck for it to actually suck. Granted, the “memorability” factor is at an all-time Bob low here, but it’s all just very loose and relaxing. The Band is still loose and fun, though eight years of becoming famous and then becoming bloated dinosaurs have taken some of the raucousness out of their salad and replaced it with well-produced seventies sheen. The keyboards, for instance, are dominated by very clean organ sounds that wouldn’t really fit on The Basement Tapes, and Robbie Robertson’s guitar playing is a lot more subdued then before. A bunch of the songs (“Forever Young,” which rules, “Dirge” and “Wedding Song,” which don’t rule so much) are either ballads or very ballad-like, and have the kind of “play me on the radio right now!” clean, sparkling production sheen that The Basement Tapes wouldn’t have touched with a 10-foot pool but that New Morning slathered all over itself like hot melted butter. Hence the pseudo-combination of those two records I claimed this one was like a full paragraph ago.
A little more than half of this album consists of knee-slappin’ good time hoedown shenanigans with organs a-blastin’ and Bob a-wheezin’ in a voice that sounds like he cares not a whit what’s going on behind him. “On a Night Like This” sounds a lot like something from New Morning, actually, due to the light little accordion and shuffling drum figure, but the rest isn’t that obviously similar. “Tough Mama” is a track no one mentions at all when reviewing this album, but I find it to be my favorite tune here. It boogies! A lot of this album is very “light” and “rootsy,” but I don’t know how much else of it really boogies. The guitar lines are especially funky here. I’m not looking to this record for anything close to a “moving experience,” see, so the songs like “Dirge” that people tend to cite as highlights just aren’t my favorites. Give me the light, funky boogie rock, man. Bob’s mailing it in and the Band ain’t what they used to be (back when they were the Hawks, they could really kick ass if they wanted to…now the best they can do is boogie down a little bit occasionally), but they can still work up a nice lather sometimes, you know? So I’ll take “Tough Mama” and “On a Night Like This” and “You Angel You” and the second version of “Forever Young” (yup, the two-minute throwaway goof version marked “Forever Young (Continued)” that comes directly after the first one in a genius sequencing move) over most of the ballad-type songs (though I’ll stand by my original assertion that the first version of “Forever Young” does in fact rule). It’s not like any of these songs are gonna change anyone’s life, so why not go for the dumb fun ones? Because, when it wants to be, this album can be damn fun.
So, another half-effort from Bob, but, like Nashville Skyline and New Morning, it’s a pretty entertaining half-effort, so why not. Compare this to Bob’s classic mid-sixties material, and it comes up really lacking. Compare it to what he was doing, say, ten years hence (hell, five years hence; after he decided to blow his creative wad again in ’75-’76 he lost it almost as quick as Creedence Bloochwater Revival), though, and it looks like genius. It’s just decent fun, you know?
Before The Flood (1974)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “Like A
Rolling Stone”
The double live extravaganza souvenir from the massively successful career-resurrecting tour I spoke about in the last review, this album has become exceedingly overrated over time for a handful of reasons. First, it was the first live Bob album ever released, and until the Bootleg Series thing started there in the late nineties, it was just about the best live Dylan you could get. Second, the idea of these two buddy-buddy artists reuniting after all those years apart and having so much fun together (to the point that Bob’s songwriting actually got a shot in the arm and for a year or two afterwards) makes a nice back story, and people like nice back stories. Third, the Band are really just pretty good as a band, but because of their Dylan connection and that Last Waltz movie thing they’ve acquired a status far exceeding their actual musical acumen, so the combination of Bob and the Band, on paper, according to the general reputations of both principals involved, is mighty damn fine. So you add all that together and it looks like this album should rule, and it’d be so much cooler if it did rule, so everyone just writes that it rules.
Unfortunately,
it doesn’t. It’s pretty good, though,
and certainly an extremely entertaining listen.
Its quality isn’t necessarily due to the musical precision or even
general quality of playing on hand, though.
Every Dylan song, bar the seemingly perfunctory brief acoustic solo set
and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (which is played pretty straight), is played in
the same loose, boogie-rock manner, no matter if its “Lay Lady Lay” or “It
Ain’t Me Babe” or “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” or anything, so a bunch of songs get a complete stylistic makeover to
fit in with what was apparently the only way the Band could play in 1974. You might, however, say “Hey, when Bob and
the Band played boogie rock on stage together in 1966, it sounded
fantastic! And even The Basement Tapes was at least fun and rocking, if the songs were
admittedly barely even songs. What’s the
problem here?” Au contraire! The problem is that this is 1974, not 1966, and the intervening eight
years had turned the Band from an ass-kicking loosey-goosey fun-times
roots-rock band of winners to a fat, steaming, keyboard-dominated pile of adult
boogie-rock blooches. Like I said in
some other review you’ll eventually find if you scroll up a little bit, the
only guy in this band I can name is Robbie Robertson, so I’ll just say that
Unnamed Keyboardist Man had turned to absolute
shit by the time this record came out.
He leaves his own group’s songs alone, mostly (oh, right, about a third of this thing is Band songs, and
over half of them aren’t any good.
Hooray! And you know what? He doesn’t leave them alone either. At all.
So forget the first half of this sentence), but he splatters so many
keyboards over all of the Dylan songs that the whole group sounds less like an
ensemble and more like Rick Wakeman totally inappropriately sitting in with Bob
Dylan and his loosey roots-rock friends and attempting to dominate every single song. It’s not like organ and piano have been completely replaced by the kind of
keyboard sounds that make a lot of people understandably avoid seventies
prog-rock like the plague, but for every tasty piano lick there are about five
keyboards piled on top that sound like they’ve been directly lifted from either
Brain Salad Surgery or Tormato.
Why do we need Tormato-synths
in an arrangement of “It Ain’t Me Babe” or those fake trumpet blast sounds that
I HATE WITH WHITE HOT PASSION plinking their way through “Ballad of a Thin
Man?” It’s absurd. At least the douche kept that awesome
faux-funk low-pitched doinky tone in “Up on
So, with all this negativity, why a 7? Two reasons: Bob and the songs. The only post-accident songs that get played are “Lay Lady Lay,” “All Along the Watchtower,” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” i.e. his biggest hits (either his own or Jimi Hendrix’s) since he had split his head open on that fateful stretch of pavement upstate, and outside of that you basically get most of the really famous songs from Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde, with only “It Ain’t Me Babe” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” tossed in as curveballs (and with both ofcourse rearranged to sound like “Absolutely Sweet Marie”). The acoustic set is fine but not superb (although “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” is excellent), but, again, the songs are absolutely brilliant to begin with. And the Band songs are…well, they’re there. “Up on Cripple Creek,” “The Weight,” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” are fucking outstanding, ofcourse, but if I never hear “Stage Fright” or “The Shape I’m In” again, I think I’ll live. Whatever emphysema-ridden ass sings “I Shall Be Released” ruins the damn thing by croaking like Kermit the Frog trying to sing a falsetto with Alan Colmes trapped in his throat. Still, though, the songs themselves, outside of the keyboards and the fact that this isn’t 1966 anymore, are performed fine, and in terms of quality they range from at-least-listenable to godlike.
But really it’s all Bob. It’s not like he’s vocalizing as well as he did back in the day or anything, but he is having so much fucking fun up on stage that it’s palpable and it totally saves all the Bob songs the Band tries to fuck up by playing Tarkus in the background. Since Self Portrait bombed so spectacularly, Bob had been in gigantic rut, both publicly and artistically, and you can tell he needed this. He shouts every song with so much tenacity and so much fucking fun that I really wish I were there, even if on an objective level this concert is flawed beyond belief. Listen to “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I Go Mine)” or “It Ain’t Me Babe” or “Highway 61 Revisited” or especially “Like a Rolling Stone” (which is sometimes transcendent even though it’s not even played that well) and tell me Bob had ever had this much fun before. It’s tough to have tons of fun playing quiet acoustic folk music, and I doubt Bob had tons of fun on those tours in ’66 when everyone was booing him and he was openly jawing with the audience the whole time. Then he didn’t tour for a while and made half-assed albums he never played any songs from the handful of times he did play live…but now he’s up on stage with his buddies playing all these old songs everyone in the audience knows by heart, and playing them really loud and shouting really loud and having a whole lot of fucking fun. Even the Band’s in on it! The three awesome Band songs here are totally better than their studio versions, and it’s all because of the energy and fun and happiness and good vibes of the event. But the only reason they’re on this fucking massive insano-blowout tour is that Bob asked them to come, so really it’s still all Bob.
If you’re looking for Bob at his live best, avoid this, and actually avoid every live Bob album whose title doesn’t start with the phrase “The Bootleg Series.” The playing is fun and loose but lacks rockability, the keyboards are atrocious, and a third of the songs aren’t even Bob’s, for god sakes. If you wanna hear Bob having a good time and “letting it all hang out,” though, so to speak (by retards), you could do a hell of a lot worse. Not at all what it’s supposed to be, but still a good time for different reasons altogether. Plus, I doubt we’d have Blood on the Tracks without it.
Blood On The Tracks (1975)
Rating: 10
Best Song: “Lily,
Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts”
Finally inspired to try real hard again after his giant tour with the Band in 1974 and the painful dissolution of his marriage, after years of fucking around and half-efforts Bob reclaimed his status as musical icon in 1975 with this, his last truly timeless album. This is also a lot of people’s favorite Dylan record. Its production is total relaxed seventies singer-songwriter cleanly-produced hibbity-jibbity but detailed and thoughtful (unlike, say, some of the other seventies records Bob’s been spewing out), with multiple acoustic guitars sparkling around lowly-mixed but insistent organs, and nothing sounds in any way “off” or like it might hurt someone’s ears. In short, if not as intimate as Freewheelin’ or as electrifying as Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde, it’s probably the Bob album that sounds the most objectively “good.” On top of that, this is also the first time Bob put real effort into his lyrics since, what, John Wesley Harding? Something like that, yeah, and they’re as well-written and poetic as anything he’s ever done, but on top of that they’re relatable. They’re not obscure country narratives or absurdist beat poetry or nonsensical wordplay or folkie propaganda. They’re about love and love lost and bitter breakups and all the stuff Bob was probably feeling at the time after his marriage crashed into the pavement like his face had nine years earlier. So Bob’s putting 100% effort into both his production and his lyrics, his production is clean, sparkling, shimmery yet wonderfully tasteful seventies radio fodder, and his lyrics are ultra-personal and relatable to anyone who’s ever had a relationship dissolve. Like I said, this is a lot of people’s favorite Dylan record.
It’s fantastic, though, and the personal lyrics and glittery production values are attached to the most diverse and thought-out set of songs Bob’s done since Blonde on Blonde (I’m telling you; this record is just as good as his mid-sixties masterpieces). There’s all types here. The gorgeous opener “Tangled up in Blue” looks back on his relationship with a sort of sad, resigned confusion (“We always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different view…”), while “Idiot Wind” looks back with pure, bile-spewing hatred (“You’re an idiot, babe, it’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe!”), but they both work equally well, and it goes without saying that the melody, musical backing, atmosphere, and all else are nearly flawless. Sometimes the detailed production goes away for a bit and you’re left with only Bob and his guitar, just like old times (“Simple Twist of Fate,” “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” “Buckets of Rain”), and Bob and his voice still sound as good as they did way back in 1963. “Meet Me in the Morning” is a wonderful yet subtle blues romp that has perhaps the most memorable and well-placed electric guitar solo in the entire Bob catalog (and it’s the only song on the album with any electric guitar at all…that’s what I call thoughtful production). For those who miss absurdist Bob extendo-tracks, we’ve got the outstanding, jaunty “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” which this album’s few detractors tend to cite as boring slop but is my favorite song on the whole damn thing, thank you very much. It might not fit in thematically all that well (although knowing Bob’s superior skills with allegory, I might just be a moron in thinking that), but I find all nine minutes and two chords and one bass line nearly flawless. It feels like it fits, you know? Even if it really doesn’t. And kudos to Capn Marvel for noticing the strategic placement of “If You See Her, Say Hello” (where Bob finally accepts the breakup and thinks fondly of his ex) and “Shelter From the Storm” (where Bob might well be meeting some new love). I don’t really have a thematic explanation for the closer “Buckets of Rain,” but neither did the Capn, so it’s OK. It’s real good and stuff.
This is a superb album that even Bob Dylan non-fans will love because the production has no rough edges and Bob goes out of his way to actually hit the correct notes when he sings. It doesn’t quite get my gander up like Bob could do back in the sixties, but the effort, skill, and detail involved here are outstanding. It’s like Bob was saying to all the singer-songwriter blooches he helped spawn, “You think you’re all hot shit? Try matching this.” And, I mean, no one could. James Taylor? Jackson Browne? My ass. Only Bob could so perfectly express the emotions he was feeling due to his breakup without any cliché whatsoever, then match those exquisite lyrics to such an unparalleled set of songs. If nothing else, this proves Bob, as a songwriter, was on par with anyone when he put in his max effort, and he could get by without being groundbreaking. This album didn’t break any new musical ground at all. It was just better than everyone else. And sure, Bob lost it wholesale pretty soon after this one, and maybe the effort he put into it had something to do with that, but I’m sure glad he took the time to make this record. It’s a masterpiece.
David Dickson (ddickso2@uccs.edu) writes:
This is perhaps the only
review of Blood on the Tracks in the history
of historical historiography which I totally and 100% Grade-A Number
One, Super Cool, Awesome, Totally, Bodaciously, Whole-Brainedly, and
in Every Way, Shape, and Writing Form AGREE WITH. Way to go, sir.
Yaaaaayyyyy.
Not because we both rate it a masterpiece, which everyone of course
does, but because we both rate LILY ROSEMARY AND THE JACK OF HEARTS
THE BEST SONG!^%$ WITH HABANERO SAUCE!!! A-FRICKIN'-WOMAN!!
Gosh. Who am I, Pedro Andino? But it's true, one can do no wrong as
far as nine-minute repetitive country shuffles go with a song like
that. It really functions as the essential contrast to the gloom on
the album. And the story is kinda gripping in a
Shane-meets-Attila-the-Hun sense. If I were to cover a single tune
off here, I'd cover this one. It really separates the men from the
boys (in Hicktown).
I used to think this album was Bob's best, but I've seen the light and
reconsidered. Although Blood may be technically more perfect, Blonde
just makes a bigger impression. Ditto on the 10 number three.
The Bootleg Series, Vol. 5: Live 1975 – The Rolling Thunder Revue (2002)
Rating: 9
Best Song: “A Hard
Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”
So after Blood on the Tracks hit Bob cobbled together 50 of his closest musician friends and launched the Rolling Thunder Revue, in which Bob and his friends, including but not limited to Roger McGuinn, Joan Baez, Mick Ronson, and David Bowie’s haircut from that awful live album where he turns all his old glam-rock classics into piss-poor D-level soul shitcans, played ultra-loose, rump-defiling rock versions of all of Bob’s classics, whatever style they may have been written in originally. I’m sure it was a kickass concert, and it’s now Reason #4,593 why I was born in the wrong decade, but its historical goodness has been hurt somewhat by the fact that the half-assed, poorly-mixed single-disc Hard Rain, recorded after everyone had been going at it for like a year and wanted to kill each other, was until recently the only officially released live piece from it. Leave it to those good Bootleg Series people to rectify that, though, as this 100-minute, double-disc extravaganza taken from the early part of the tour when everyone wanted to be there is easily the best live Dylan you can find. If not for the fact that Joan Baez is prominently involved AGAIN, I’d even considering giving it a 10, which is absurd because the only live album I’ve ever slapped a 10 on is by Led Zeppelin and I only did that because I’m a Jimmy Page-fellating ultra-biased moron. Did you know the lead guitarist in the cover band for which I play the drums with consummate skill and professionalism has the exact same mannerisms as Jimmy Page when he’s playing? It’s true! He totally does. You can check it out when we’re tearing people a new asshole with our mind-expanding deconstruction of “Gold Digger” at a Foxboro High graduation party in a few months.
Except for the acoustic parts that don’t rock at all and the time Bob and Ms. Baez duet on “The Water is Wide” for some reason and suck horse cock, this album often rocks viciously. The band backing up Bob has more members than the New York Philharmonic and everyone’s in full-on “rock” mode, so the concert ends up sounding like the best tracks from Before the Flood, only twice as kick-ass and without the Band’s keyboardist channeling Keith EMERSON every third song. Just fantastic stuff all-around, and (again, except for the acoustic section, which is fine but doesn’t make me forget about Live 1964 or Live 1966) what’s great about it is how everything is played at this kick-ass rock tempo. Two of the first couple tracks on disc 1 are “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” cranked up and knocked out with full rock power, and the quality of these face-melting versions of super-oldie popular, slow, meandering Bob folk classics (or, in the case of “Hattie Carroll,” a slow, boring shitheap surrounded by other slow, boring shitheaps on Times) is astounding. You know I actually get more enjoyment out of this rollicking version of “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” than I do the original Freewheelin’ album version? I mean, I know that’s sacrilege…but ROCK, man! And “Hattie Carroll” totally rules here, which might be even more astounding considering that I’ve listened to Times fifteen times and can’t recall a damn thing about the original version. And how about a vaguely reggae-ish rock-out version of “It Ain’t Me Babe?” Or the band kicking ass on Nashville Skyline randomness like “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You?” Or the (Mick Ronson?) guitars on “Just Like a Woman?” Or the “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” version that sounds exactly like the fantastic alternate take on the No Direction Home soundtrack I’m on record above as saying I prefer to the one that made it onto Highway 61 Revisited? Bob has about five-hundred pounds of solid, USDA approved, Grade A Rock and Roll Band behind him, and he uses all of it. When placed alongside the rest of Bob’s live recordings, the best half of this record is so good it almost feels out of place. Yowza.
Weirdly, considering when Bob put this tour together, there’s barely any representation from Blood on the Tracks, just “Simply Twist of Fate” and “Tangled Up in Blue,” both of which are done by Bob alone with his acoustic, mouth harp, and whatever that jizz he put all over his face was supposed to represent. We do get two-thirds of Blood on the Tracks’ eventual followup Desire, though, so that should be helpful if you’re reading these reviews out of order and already know what I think about “Romance in Durango” or “One More Cup of Coffee” (later covered by…the White Stripes!). The Desire songs are also done relatively straight, as it seems Bob left his “at all costs, we must melt people’s faces on every song” ethos in his other suit when he moved onto his more recent material. Desire’s a real good album, though, so the songs taken from it are all a grand ol’ time and for the most part superior and more energetic than their studio counterparts. “One More Cup of Coffee” is superbly mysterious and “Hurricane” rocks especially hard, all 8+ minutes of it. Totally destroys the studio version. Annihilates it. Bob’s vocals are fantastic, and I don’t even mind that violin lady that seems to show up on every song released on a Bob Dylan album in 1976. And the acoustic section is nice but perfunctory. And the Joan Baez section isn’t as bad as the Joan Baez section on Live 1964 but it’s still bad, except for that version of “The Water is Wide” I mentioned earlier that’s atrocious. Why the hell did they sing that retarded song? Bloochtastic.
This is without a doubt the definitive live Dylan album. Only Live 1964 comes even reasonably close, but that’s all acoustic and doesn’t have anything post-acoustic side of Bringing it all Back Home on it. I’d be shocked if the Bootleg Series vaults spew forth a live album better than this one any time soon. Bob has way too many live albums to count, but most of them aren’t that worthwhile. This one, though, you need to get today.
Desire (1976)
Rating: 8
Best Song:
“Hurricane”
Bob’s follow-up to career-defining peak #3 (counting the whole Bringing it all Back Home/Highway 61 Revisited/Blonde on Blonde thing as one continuous splurge) sounds nothing at all like Blood on the Tracks and confident as hell, the only album in his catalog to rival Blonde on Blonde for sheer confidence, if not quality. It’s still a damn good record, though, and probably what everyone should’ve expected from Bob while he was riding that no-doubt-exhilarating Blood on the Tracks/Rolling Thunder Revue wave of godlike popularity (Bob hated being a messiah back in the day, but there’s nothing like completely losing your stature to make you realize how sweet a deal it really is, eh?) in that it rocks pretty hard when it wants, though it doesn’t usually want, it tries a bunch of new styles, and it features a bunch of the performers Bob took along with him on the Rolling Thunder Revue, like the Emmylou Harris backing vocals on half the songs and the admittedly overdone violin screeching of someone apparently named Scarlet Riviera and some guy on an according too or something. Bob’s got a big band backing him up! But they aren’t flailing around all loosey-goosey like back in the sixties or even on the Rolling Thunder Revue live shows. Nope, they’re professional! So, notwithstanding the violin that’s everywhere, the arrangements are well-thought-out and there are added percussion implements (for “variety”) and sometimes it sounds very over-wrought and big band-ish, but it’s OK because the songs are still great and Bob’s voice is in remarkable form. Which is good, because this is his last good studio album for a long time.
But enough about how Bob Dylan would soon suck harder than Billy Corgan’s solo career. He’s still the tops for now. Have you heard “Hurricane?” Yeah. Great one, that, and it’s good to see Bob taking a stand against Denzel Washington’s being in jail (the man’s made some good movies). What’s odd about the song in the grand scheme of Bob is how goddamn straightforward it is, though. He narrates the events of the day, calls the cops bigots, drops the “n” word ironically once or twice…I’m not saying anyone could have written these lyrics, ofcourse, but since when did Bob turn into John Lennon? It’s very topical for Bob, just like the similarly straightforward “Joey,” although I have no idea who that one’s actually about. Good thing, too, since it’s eleven minutes long and probably shouldn’t be. “Hurricane,” though, uses all of its eight and a half minutes to quite good effect, and the topical lyrics actually make Bob’s singing sound more energetic and passionate. Its tough to sound angry singing “the sun’s not yellow…it’s CHICKEN!!!”, you know? Not that he was trying to sound angry, there, but I hope you see my poorly-thought-out point. And both the backing vocals and violin work real well in this one, too. It still can’t touch the version on Live 1975 (which is FANTASTIC), but then again none of these studio tracks can touch the white-hot high voltage rock of the two thirds of that record that’s not acoustic and/or featuring Joan Baez. It’s so good they made up a movie based on it 23 years later.
A lot of
this album’s got a real worldly, mysterious vibe as well that’s unique among
Bob’s albums. It’s neither acoustic
folkie stuff nor country nor boogie rock at all. It’s just neat. Like the jazzy, rambling “Isis” (which
totally rules) and the truly dark, mystery-filled “One More Cup of Coffee,”
which is so good Jack White totally fucked it up twenty-five years later and
their version still turned out
well. The backup vocals work well on
there, too. The only real throwaway is
the fun, lighthearted “
He didn’t leave his wife completely off this record, either, as the slow, lovely “Sara” closes the saga detailed so intensely on Blood on the Tracks in a very classy manner. He describes her as, among other things, “Scorpio Sphinx in a calico dress” and “Glamorous nymph with an arrow and bow,” so it’s nice to see he’s still got his lyrical skill, and I think it’s great how he details writing “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” for her in one of the verses in there. Great stuff, and, as I said before, a fitting end to the whole breakup thing, as well as a fitting end to a very strong record album. I wouldn’t go quite so far as to call it unequivocally “great,” but it’s still very, very good, and compared to the next, oh, fifteen albums I have to review, it sounds like heaven (so look forward to those fifteen albums! Hee!). As a companion piece to his last true masterpiece and a final shot of quality before his mojo left him nearly for good, it’s damn fine.
Hard Rain (1976)
Rating: 6
Best Song: “Stuck
Inside Of
The first in a loooong line of listenable and basically okay but weakly pieced-together and essentially useless live albums Bob started churning out once the Rolling Thunder Revue burned him out (by the way, let me again say how wonderful it was of Bob to not release any live albums at all during his good years, then too many count during his sucky years. Thanks, Bob!), Hard Rain documents the dark side of the Rolling Thunder Revue, the laziness and sluggishness that inevitably set in once those first few electrifying months (heard on Live 1975) passed by. It’s one of those live albums that sounds perfectly fine after one listen, but whose sub-standard quality becomes apparent if you listen to it a lot in a short amount of time. It’s basically the same thing as Live 1975, Bob leading his big, unwieldy band of rock through big, loud versions of a bunch of his old sixties songs with some a couple newer ones sprinkled in (a third of the songs are actually from Blood on the Tracks, which is nice, though I have to wonder why “Oh, Sister” from Desire keeps showing up on these damn things), except, you know, not. The huge band that kicked ass and took names and sounded invigorating on Live 1975 just sounds plodding and slow and schmaltzy and, well, big here. Prime live Bob this is not.
The song selection is again an interesting mix of the predictable (“Maggie’s Farm,” “Lay Lady Lay”) and the random (“Stuck Inside of Mobile,” “One Too Many Mornings,” “I Threw it All Away”), and while it’s still interesting how Bob turns lazy Times album tracks and croon-happy Nashville Skyline ballads into heaping big rock band testicle whomps, as I said before, the quality of the playing and the energy on hand is just nowhere near that on Live 1975. The recording quality is crap, too, real muffled (and what’s that ringing sound I hear? The hell couldn’t they get rid of that?), but I’ve certainly heard worse (that Television live album, for instance). Compared to Music in general and not the first half of Bob Dylan’s catalog, though, it’s certainly acceptable. “Maggie’s Farm” and “Idiot Wind” and what-have-you are definitely listenable, just sloppy and poorly recorded. “Stuck Inside of Mobile” actually has a fair amount of spunk behind it, although I still dislike “Oh, Sister” and have yet to hear a version that will change my mind. The violin lady is way more up-front in the mix than on Live 1975, but that may just be because the band behind her isn’t ripping it up like they do on that one. Either way, she’s annoying. “Lay Lady Lay” is turned into schmaltzy mediocrity despite the cool country guitar licks and “You’re a Big Girl Now” has a bunch of gay horns in it. “Shelter From the Storm” has a neat little guitar run that wasn’t on the quiet version on Blood on the Tracks, so that one’s a relative winner, I guess.
I don’t know, there’s so little to recommend here, but very little of it is really bad, the band sounds OK, if lazy, and Bob’s voice is still in its Live 1975 form (if not as energetic). It’s not gonna offend anyone’s ears, the songs are all good (even the one from Times)…it’s fine! It’s not bad. It’s just useless in the grand scheme of things, since nothing on here is anywhere near revelatory in relation to its studio counterpart and you can hear live material from this same tour with the same band that’s about 100 times better on Live 1975, which you should still get right now.
Street Legal (1978)
Rating: 5
Best Song: “Changing
Of The Guards”
Bob had a pretty long lull between his mid-sixties and mid-seventies peaks there, sure, but this is where the wheels start coming off for good. I mean, except for Self Portrait, which may or may not have been a joke in the first place, everything released with Bob’s permission between John Wesley Harding and Blood on the Tracks maintained at least a minimum level of goodness, and there were always a few tracks of real quality on there you could sink your teeth into. By the late seventies, though, Bob’s well had dried up, and this one provides the lowest level of inspiration or memorability of any Bob album to date (not counting Dylan, ofcourse, due to its being a sick joke released out of spite and all). Hell, even the album cover and title are utterly nondescript and un-Dylan. What does Street Legal even mean, anyway? And what’s he doing there, trying to hail a cab? How much do you wanna bet Bob didn’t even see the album art until the thing was in stores? Blooch.
Yup, this is the first certifiably “random” Bob Dylan album, the kind of album 1,000 other mediocre, talentless hacks could have produced if given the necessary time and recording budget. The triple-threat of Blood on the Tracks, Desire, and the Rolling Thunder Revue apparently saw Bob shoot his last creative wad, and whatever juices he had been using for even Planet Waves and New Morning and all that stuff are mostly, if not totally, gone. And not only is the songwriting mediocre, but the whole album is stuffed full of AM radio trappings the likes of which Bob had just never lowered himself to before. There are enough arbitrary horns, lowly-mixed, unnecessary bongo drums, and generic overweight black female backup singers repeating every line Bob sings in every song on this thing to make a man lose his lunch, and it’s only the handful of times the songwriting is up to snuff (and by “snuff,” I mean Planet Waves, not Highway 61 Revisited) that they don’t bother me very much. For instance, I actually like the first two tracks quite a bit. “Changing of the Guards” doesn’t sound much different from the rest of the album in terms of production, but fuck me if there isn’t a real nice melody in there, probably the only real top-shelf one on the album. I can get down with this song. I can sing along with it, I can enjoy it, and I can even appreciate the horn additions, since they’re playing some pretty catchy lines in there instead of just blathering like a functional retard or adding “emphasis” where no emphasis is really needed. I don’t even realize the thing’s six and a half minutes long, either. The following “New Pony,” then, is actually a pretty dirty little blues-rocker that sounds not at all like the rest of the record, and it’s only an actual melody and the subtraction of those horrible backup singers away from being a true Bob classic. Nice, suitably filthy guitar riff, and again the horns are used to good effect, as a total rock and roll rumbling tenor sax solo makes a welcome appearance at the end. So Bob had enough juice left for two good songs. Good for him.
The rest of the album defines the term “forgettable.” I honestly hate no song on here. Sure, I hate parts or features of a lot of these things, feel a number of them go on far too long (for instance, why the hell does “No Time to Think” need to be eight and a half minutes? How many musical ideas are in there, one? Two? Did Bob really think that violin line was good enough to warrant being repeated 20 times? Because it’s NOT), and am utterly bored by the vast majority of tracks 3-9, but I’m not gonna sit here and tell you anything is soul-suckingly awful or anything. It sucks and it’s boring, sure, but let’s just say it’s not offensive and it could certainly suck worse. The jumbled, messy production doesn’t help, and the only things I can usually make out individually are an occasional bad horn solo and those fucking backup singers who SUCK SO FUCKING HARD and are still in EVERY FUCKING SONG and whom I FUCKING HATE. I can’t even remember anything about half of it. I suppose the closing “Where Are You Tonight?” is decent, but that’s all I can recall about it…that it’s decent. I can’t tell you why it’s decent, but I can safely and with a high degree of certainty inform you that every time I listen to this record I remember thinking the last song isn’t so bad. So there’s that. “Is Your Love in Vain?” has far too many wanky horns and organs to be anything other than annoying. “Baby Stop Crying” repeats the title of the song enough times that I sometimes wonder if Bob wrote the lyrics to this entire album during an especially large deuce. It’s probably the worst song on the album, too. That sax that sounded so cool on “New Pony” just sucks total ass this time. It sounds like it should be on a bad ballad from a bad eighties movie. There’s a song here called “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)” that attempts to be Spanish-flavored by having the trumpet player play a melody line straight from page 1 of the Bad Mexican Movie Soundtrack Music handbook while Bob whines about as nasally as Billy Corgan circa Machina. Oh, yes, his voice is back to sounding mediocre. Fantastic.
I have nothing more to say about this record. It’s probably the most decidedly mediocre and forgettable album Bob’s ever put out, and its total lack of inspiration points the way toward the massive piles of manure Bob would start foisting on us pretty soon. You know Bob couldn’t even match this in the studio for over another decade? Yikes.
At Budokan (1979)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “All I
Really Wanna Do”
Bob goes Vegas! A completely ridiculous double live album and the first universally-derided entry in the Bob canon since the equally ridiculous Self Portrait, At Budokan provides the ultimate proof that Bob cares about as much about playing his classics “faithfully” as George Bush does about his approval rating in Cambridge, MA or Berkeley, CA. For his tour supporting the massive quintuple-platinum worldwide smash hit Street Legal, Bob put together for himself a massive backing band full of brass and saxes and flutes and strings and backup singers and keyboards and any other instrument you care to mention that might figure in a Wayne Newton or Neil Diamond show at one point or another, and then set about rearranging about half his back catalog into versions completely unrecognizable to all but the most educated listener. If you might be offended by a big band version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” or a pseudo-metal horn-drenched version of “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” you can probably leave this one alone. Like I said, most critics did as soon as they heard the reggae version of “Don’t Think Twice (It’s Alright)” (I’m serious), but I personally find the thing a big, heaping mess of a good time, and probably Bob’s best live album that doesn’t have The Bootleg Series attached to its title somewhere.
OK, it is probably more “fun” than really “good.” I’ll admit that. Hence the 7. And, with very few exceptions, it’s not like most of these versions are any better or even as good as their original studio counterparts, but it’s not like they’re badly played or lacking energy or anything. Touche! This is probably the most solidly professional and well-played live document you’ll find in the entire Dylan catalog (more so than any of the Bootleg Series ones even). All the rearrangements are thought-out to the most minute detail (like the little descending keyboard/flute/string line in the jumpy-soft-rock version of “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” which is ace) and rehearsed until everything is absolutely note-perfect. It’s like the anti-Dylan live album. There’s little-to-no spontaneity, Bob’s agreeable and on a very even keel, the playing is tight as hell, and the production/recording quality is outstanding (I can hear every insignificant bongo hit and sax riff). The crux of the thing is just whether you can deal with the rearrangements of all the songs, and I’ll grant that a bunch of them aren’t the hottest things in town. The reggae version of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” isn’t the best, for instance, and that almost-metal version of “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” is a farce as far as I’m concerned. “I Want You” is for some reason played without any rhythm or speed whatsoever, like an echoey goth meditation or some crap, and it’s really, really bad. Then there’s the one song taken from Street Legal, “Is Your Love in Vain?”, which, while actually played completely straight, is just a shitty song, and the two taken from Planet Waves (“Going, Going, Gone” and “Forever Young”) should probably have stayed home too.
For every misstep, though, probably two of these songs work. I for one really like the silly reggae goof take on “Don’t Think Twice (It’s Alright),” and I’ve also finally found a version of “Oh, Sister” I can enjoy (as it’s turned into some kind of low-key mood piece midway through disc 2). “Like a Rolling Stone” is played slow and melancholy-like with only two chords and the little organ riff at the end of every line in chorus is played by a screeching saxophone, but I think it turns out pretty well. I swear “One More Cup of Coffee” is turned into a tango (at least that’s what it sounds like to me), and I just can’t get enough of the super-bouncey AM radio seventies pop stylings of this version of “All I Really Wanna Do,” which you may recall as the verbose, goofball acoustic opener to Another Side of Bob Dylan and which in this arrangement (note: point first made by Mark Prindle) sounds like it should be on Band on the Run. There are plenty of others, but I think you get the point. As long as you go in expecting exactly what you wouldn’t expect, you’ll be fine.
You know how much balls it probably took to do what Bob did to some of this shit? I haven’t even mentioned how every song sounds like it has the E Street Band backing it up, featuring Clarence Clemons on hyperactive super-loud saxophone and twenty female backup singers left really really high in the mix. But the thing, in general, works. If you’re a Dylan purist, maybe this is sacrilege, but hell, this is what Bob wanted to do, and for me the real surprise is how well recorded and put-together it is. I’m used to slapdash, pasted-together live albums like Hard Rain and Real Live from the man. So half the time he sounds like a Vegas Lounge act, albeit with better songs. So what? It’s very well-done. That’s all I care about.
Slow Train Coming (1979)
Rating: 3
Best Song: “Precious
Angel”
Bob answers the question “What’s the most out-of-the-blue thing Dylan could do to totally alienate all his fans?” by going Christian. Hardcore Jerry Falwell psychopath fucking born-again Christian. You could obviously chalk it up to another example of “Bob doing whatever the fuck he wants” (like when he went electric, or went hardcore country, or made Self Portrait, or turned his live show into a Neil Diamond Vegas concert), and that’s clearly what you have to do here…but seriously, a sudden head-first dive into Fundamentalist Born-Again Christianity from the guy who made Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde? You have to be kidding me.
And yes, I’m a pretty militant atheist myself, so this kind of ultra-blatant proselytize-rock (the lyrics make Creed look impressively subtle) is obviously not gonna be my cup of tea no matter what it sounds like, but what it makes it doubly depressing is that the music underlying the horrific lyrics (which I’ll get to in a minute) is just not any good at all. It sounds like a late-period Dire Straits record after a massive overdose of Valium. Indescribably boring, sterile, and uneventful. I almost feel like I should be wearing hospital scrubs and washing my hands before I listen to it. Lots of very 1980-type AM pop keyboards played so uneventfully you hardly even notice them despite their being undoubtedly the dominant instrument in the mix. Every now and then Mark Knopfler (hence the Dire Straits sound, I suppose) has a mildly interesting guitar line, but he (like everything on the entire album) is neutered and buried so much in the mix that you have to pay real close attention to hear him. The rhythm section is slow and unobtrusive and doesn’t do anything interesting either. The whole damn thing is ultra-professional smoothed-out nothingness. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it muzak or something that wouldn’t sound out of place in a dentist’s office or an elevator (it’s more eventful than that), but I only grant it that much because it at least tries to have some stylistic diversity, like the horns and funk keyboards that pop up in “When You Gonna Wake Up” or the cowbell and wannabe dirty guitar licks in “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking” or the light little plucking in the background of the sprightly “Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others)” (no, seriously; that’s the actual song title). However, it’s tough to applaud an album for having “stylistic diversity” when the songs to which one would have to point to support this are such warmed-over piles of shit. Maybe the attempted style of each song is technically different, but when produced as lifelessly as this, everything sounds identical. I mean, except for the melody-deficient dreck asspile that is the piano-ballad closer “When He Returns” (Guess who “He” is? Yee-hah!), none of this is all that annoying. It’s just. So. Bad. I like “Precious Angel” because it sounds enough like relaxed country-rock with organs and all that gunk that the glossed-over hyper-pleasant nothingness of the whole album kind of fits it. Lyrically it’s debatably the worst song here and it sounds at times like Bob’s cheerfully expecting the rapture, but musically it sounds godlike compared to the rest of this shit, which, despite not annoying me or making me turn away in disgust at all, is just really, really bad.
And then there are the lyrics, which, to be blunt, are an abomination. If I want to hear a Fundamentalist Christian whine about how his beliefs are constantly mocked by everyone around him, I’ll watch Fox News. I don’t go to Bob Dylan for that kind of shit. And the whole idea behind “Gotta Serve Somebody” is probably the thing that pisses off me and every other “non-believer” in the whole fucking world more than anything, the notion that “it may be the devil or it may be the lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.” Like there are only two fucking options. I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in anything, be it god, Buddha, Mohammed, Satan, Zeus, L. Ron Hubbard, whatever. Anything. I know Capn Marvel said this, too, but what about your friends and family, Bob? Can’t I “serve” them? When I give one of my students extra help or toss grounders at them for an extra ten minutes, aren’t I “serving” them? And the rest of this song’s lyrics, even outside of the asinine chorus, are just as atrociously written. “You may be a construction worker working on a home, you may be living in a mansion or you might live in a dome, you might own guns and you might even own tanks, you might be somebody’s landlord, you might even own banks, but you’re gonna have to seeeeeeeeerve somebody!” WTF!!!!??? Bob Fucking Dylan wrote that verse. That sounds like something a fifth-grader would write. I mean, “you might live in a dome?” Are you absolutely serious? You were that hard-up for something that rhymed with “home?” And it rarely gets any less retarded than that. “Man Gave Names to All the Animals” is another winner, with such poetic stanzas as “He saw an animal that liked to growl, big furry paws and he liked to howl, great big furry back and furry hair, ‘Ah, I think I’ll call it a bear!’” Yes, it’s “cute” and harmless, but it also sounds like a fucking Pre-K coloring book, and a grossly inaccurate one at that. First off, bears do not “howl.” Second, Bob said the word “furry” three times in like a line and a half. And third, FURRY HAIR!!!!!????
OK, enough of that paragraph. Yeesh. Suffice to say the lyrics never rise above “gawd-awful,” with lots of preaching about how everyone hates Bob now that he’s finally seen the light and Jesus is great and the god created everything on the earth and “waking up” to the lord and how we all have to prepare for “His” return and yadda yadda yadda yadda. If you only know Bob from his sixties beatnik days, I can’t think of an album that would be more shocking to you. It’s so hyper-clean and sanitized and lacking in any emotional spark whatsoever. Bob’s voice sounds crappy and weak, to the point where I think I enjoy the female backup singers (who are on every album from back on Street Legal up until the early nineties, so you should probably go and get used to them) more than Bob, which really shouldn’t happen. A lot of people, even as they trash the lyrical motifs of this album, tend to defend its musical merits, especially coming on the heels of the sloppy and annoying Street Legal, but I find any attempt to defend this album a heaping pile of bullshit. Yes, Street Legal was messy and directionless and quite honestly not good at all, but at least it had a heart. You could sense Dylan in there somewhere, however buried he was beneath the backup singers and ham-handed production and mediocre songwriting. This record sounds like Pat Robertson took over Bob’s body and sang a bunch of Christian Coalition-vetted “lyrics” over music approved by the Pentagon so as not to promote any dangerous “activities” by our fine nation’s impressionable youth. No heavy petting here, Jimmy and Bobby Sue! This music is sanitized for your protection! Lyrically, this is probably Bob’s nadir. The only good thing I can say about this is that, musically, it could be far, far worse.
Saved (1980)
Rating: 3
Best Song: “Saved”
The second installment of Bob’s
Christian Trilogy is usually the one that gets shat on at the expense of the
other two and routinely receives scores like 2 or even 1. While I’m certainly not
gonna dispute the notion that this album sucks donkey balls, I am gonna dispute the notion that it’s
perceptibly and obviously worse than the other nutsoid Billy Graham albums Bob
recorded at the start of the ten-year period he spent with his head firmly
implanted up his own ass. Hell, I think
I dislike this one less than I
dislike Slow Train Coming even. The lyrics are still made-to-order
ultra-religious nonsense from one of those mega-churches in the
This album provides the smallest amount of stuff to recommend of any Dylan product to date (even Dylan is more fun than this). There is not a single memorable lyric, musical passage, melody, or rhythm on the entire thing. With the exception of the title track, which at least has a little bit of speed and wouldn’t sound all that out of place in one of those fun, uplifting black churches you see in Whoopi Goldberg movies, the whole thing passes by without so much as a whimper. It’s all played on acoustic drums and pianos and pretty nice-sounding organs and the occasional guitar, so that’s all well and good, but I don’t think anyone involved in its production was under the impression that what they were making didn’t blow. It’s all so perfunctory. Even the production, which is just sloppy. The most basic, generic drum patterns and piano lines and organ riffs and guitar passages you could possibly think of are in every song on the album. No one broke a sweat at any time on coming up with these slow, gloppy, unmemorable backing tracks to the melodyless pseudo-spiritual mumbo-jumbo crap Bob was passing off at the time. Hell, Bob doesn’t even give a shit, as the energy-deficient crap backing tracks manage to swallow his atrociously uninspired, weak, and off-key vocals wholesale. His singing is so bad the producer had to hire five or six extra generic fat black female backup singers to go “YEEEEAAHHHHHH!!!” every line of every song and sound really, really bad. So the singing, both lead and backup, is bad. The music isn’t offensive in any way, and it’s not over-produced or sanitized or whatever, but it’s so generic and uninspired that by track three you just start hating your life and wondering how much more of this dreck Bob could’ve made. Outside of the title track I already mentioned, I can’t even differentiate between any of the songs here. They’re all the same tempo, same arrangement, same melody (none), same everything. Just forty minutes of egregiously poor gospel music. The only thing left is the lyrics, random samples of which provide such nuggets as “I’ve been saved by the blood of the lamb,” “You have given everything to me, what can I do for you?”, “I put all my confidence in him, my sole protection is the saving grace that’s over me,” and “Are you ready to meet Jesus?” Right. So much for that.
If you want a Bob Dylan album to make atheists belligerent, get Slow Train Coming. If you want a Bob Dylan album that atheists will look at and go “wow, poor Bob, what happened to him?”, get Saved. I don’t think anyone likes this album. Chances are I tolerate it more than you would, and I gave it a 3. Becoming a born-again Christian was not the best career move Bob Dylan has ever made.
Shot Of Love (1981)
Rating: 4
Best Song: “Heart Of
Mine”
Yup, Bob certainly still likes Jesus and wants to tell us all about it (except for the melancholy ballad on here about Lenny Bruce…the hell did that come from?). I guess this one’s better than the other two JesusBob records, but not by all that much. Like Saved, it mostly refrains from pissing me off like Slow Train Coming did, which is good. It’s similar to Saved in its “gospel-rock” inclinations, as well, but most of songs on this one lean more toward “rock” than “gospel,” which is also good. Ofcourse there’s also a song on here called “Property of Jesus,” so I guess we can’t have everything.
No, really, this album’s not as awful as the last two. In fact, it’s his best studio album since Street Legal!!!!! Yeah! It’s not any good, though. If Saved had been a smidge less religious and made a few token efforts at stylistic diversity and actual rock and roll music, it would be this album, and truth be told the two of them often blend together for me into some sort of poorly-written, sloppy gospel-rock mush with bad vocals. But hell, we’ve got a few decent tracks this time, I guess. “Heart of Mine” is the first genuinely entertaining song Bob’s released on one of these Pat Robertson albums, and it attains its goodness by adding some reggae to the mix! So it’s lighthearted, slightly goofy gospel-reggae-rock. Sounds weird, yes, but I’ve gotten so damn sick of stone-faced preacher Bob the last two albums that the slightest hint of fun, whether or not the song is really just OK and probably couldn’t even crack Desire’s tracklist, is a big thing, you see. And although “Property of Jesus” has the worst lyrics on the album and plays up the gospel influences possibly more than anything else on either of these last two albums, you know what it has? A melody! A slightly catchy one! The chorus here is actually kinda memorable (if realllllly overdone), and I think I hear the first genuine rock guitar solo in a Bob Dylan song for a while. The horns are alright, too. Not like “wow, cool horn line!” or anything. More like “hey, there are some saxes in there that take my attention away from those heinous backup singers. Tolerable!” They aren’t an anomaly, either. Besides the slightly improved tempos, both horns and guitars have reclaimed their spots alongside the pianos and organs that totally dominated everything on Saved, thus creating what is known as “rock instrumentation” and thus leading to the general impression that Shot of Love is more gospel-ROCK than GOSPEL-rock.
But what am I doing praising this album, anyway? It sucks! The title track is overweening silliness that I frankly can do without (“I need….a SHOT OF LOVE!!!!!”), the random piano ballad about Lenny Bruce (I mean, seriously, what the fuck?) barely even registers in my consciousness, and the second half of the record is just a bunch of poorly-written gospel-rock songs that may not be as angering as Slow Train Coming or pathetic as Saved, but are still far from “good music.” “Watered Down Love” tries to be bouncy and cheery but ends up sounding stupid, “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” is a reallllly sloppy and haphazard blues song, “Dead Man, Dead Man” shows that two attempts at pseudo-reggae was one too many, and “Trouble” might be worse than anything on Saved even. It’s got a cowbell and some dirty guitar licks but sounds way too much like the depressingly generic eighties crap-rock Bob would start turning out once he realized Fundamentalist Christianity was idiotic. God, this song is annoying. The keyboards give me a headache, the guitars are horribly played, and the backup singers are at their worst. I can tolerate both “In the Summertime” and “Every Grain of Sand” because they’re slow and quiet and unobtrusive, but neither is all that memorable. Ho-hum.
The best things you can say about this album are “Bob isn’t as in-your-face Christian as he was before” and “on a few songs, his songwriting actually seems competent.” I suppose that’s what one would call “damning with faint praise.” He’s starting to come out of his Jerry Falwell haze, but he still sucks. Blah blah blah.
Infidels (1983)
Rating: 4
Best Song: “Jokerman”
So Bob’s finally done with all that silly Christianity stuff but (say it with me now!) he still sucks, which is really depressing because now he doesn’t even suck in interesting ways, which at least made reviewing his disco-slop-rock Pat Robertson albums kinda fun in a perverse way. Nope, the man that Christianity shat out after it was done with him is just a boring old fart piece of crap who can write a good song only sporadically but tries to cover up this fact with layers and layers of reverb and slick, easily-dated eighties sheen. JUST LIKE EVERY WASHED-UP SIXTIES ROCKER IN THE EIGHTIES! Like the Rolling Stones, for instance. They were pretty damn poor in the mid-eighties, weren’t they? Bob was worse, though. I mean, somehow, this album is actually not that awful compared to some of the other crap he put out. It’s also better than the trio of Born Again manure that precedes it. You know that makes it, technically, the 2nd best studio album Bob released between 1978 and 1989? And he released a whole bunch in that time frame, too. And this album SUCKS! Gah!
OK, so what makes this album lyrically intriguing (thought not necessarily good) is that after turning his back on Fundamentalist Christianity Bob decided to embrace his Jewish roots and become some kind of hard-right Zionist psychopath. So the middle of the album has two direct attacks at Yasser Arafat and the PLO (“Neighborhood Bully” and “Man of Peace”) as well as a Tom Tancredo-esque xenophobic piece of trash called “Union Sundown” with such clever lyrics as “The car I drive is a Chevrolet, it was put together down in Argentina by a guy making 30 cents a day” and “I can see the day comin’ when even your home garden is gonna be against the law” (which might go a little far, doncha think, Bob?). So Bob’s exchanged his devotion to the lord and warnings to non-believers for hatred of foreigners, which is just fantastic. I wouldn’t even mind it so much if the music were that good or even eventful, but it’s not. “Neighborhood Bully” is a clumsy rocker with a two-chord riff that sounds asinine and “Man of Peace” tries to be some kind of bouncy, jaunty, country thing with a banjo and organ and whatnot, but the whole idea is counteracted by the fact that all these lovely hoedown instruments are mixed ultra-low and buried under the massive, overpowering eighties snare reverb that’s all over the damn record. I suppose the nasty slide-guitar rocking atmosphere of “Union Sundown” at least fits the lyrics, but the riff is just ugly and sounds like ass. Pure motherfucking ass. Ass.
That’s an anomaly, though. Very little of the music on this record is good by any means, but the annoying/ugly/sloppy/pissing-Brad-off factor is honestly not that high. Most of it is just kind of “there.” If not for the snare drum going *THWAP!!!!* every second it’d be tough to tell there’s a music album playing half the time. When the album does ballad, it either sounds like the soundtrack to a bad eighties Don Johnson movie (“I and I,” “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight”) or, failing that, doesn’t actually exist (“License to Kill”). You know those “atmospheric,” pleasingly generic backing keyboards that sound so fantastic on all those massive eighties hits that don’t suck at all (I swear)? They’re here! Whee! I suppose the generic fat black female backup singers (except for briefly popping up in “Union Sundown” and thus just making it more annoying) are absent, which is a big help, but I can’t help but feel like I’m getting so damn little from this thing. I was getting plenty of stuff from those Christian albums, and while most of that stuff was bad, at least it was stuff, right?
OK, finally, the good, of which there is at least some. The leadoff track “Jokerman” is a nice, light, airy, bad-eighties-reggae-type tune that’s probably Bob’s best song since the first two tracks on Street Legal that I compared favorably to the album tracks on Planet Waves (Yay!), and I suppose “Sweetheart Like You” is a nice, unpretentious love song and doesn’t sound so bad. Bob’s voice is actually in pretty decent form (not outstanding and still whiney, but he’s got eons more force than he did on, say, Saved), he breaks out the harmonica for a number of tracks (which is nice to see), and Mark Knopfler’s sleepy, ultra-professional guitar licks sound pretty tasty next to this reverbed eighties pseudo-muzak. So the album’s certainly not worthless, and at least one song is definitely good, but it’s still just another in the long line of thoroughly weak and half-assed entries in the Bob canon that we’re smack-dab in the middle of right now. It’s not even bad enough to be interesting! Blooch!
Real Live (1984)
Rating: 6
Best Song: “Tangled
Up In Blue”
Yet another listenable but forgettable Bob live album I’m just gonna slap a 6 on without thinking too hard about it. Are the songs good? Ofcourse! He’s already abandoned his Christian period and throws just two Infidels songs (neither of which are “Jokerman,” which therefore means they both suck) on, leaving the rest for the sixties and Blood on the Tracks like everyone wants him to. I suppose this one is interesting because Bob ditches the giganto-band idea he had been building up since all the way back in 1974 that reached its peak on the silly Budokan album to go back to a basic rock setup and basic rock arrangements, therefore making it sound like one of his live shows from 1965 or something except he’s decrepit, the backing band isn’t that great, and his voice is whiney and sucks. He hauls Mick Taylor along with him to play lead guitar, and his contributions make a lot of the rock material at least decently interesting. He can twiddle real good, y’know?
My favorite
part of the album is actually the acoustic tracks. Bob’s voice may be in poor form, but he at
least sounds energetic on “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Girl
from the
This is the shortest review ever, but, I mean, what the hell do you say about this thing? It sounds fine if weak. The recording quality and playing are neither good enough nor bad enough to comment on. The songs he plays aren’t the most surprising in the world (“Ooooh, ‘Maggie’s Farm’ and ‘Ballad of a Thin Man!!!!!’ Didn’t see those coming!!!!!”), though I suppose it’s nice to see “Tombstone Blues” on here (that was always one of my favorites from Highway 61). Except for the so-forgettable-they’re-noteworthy-in-how-forgettable-they-are Infidels songs, “Masters of War” is the only song here that sucks, but that’s because Bob decides to turn it into a rock song despite its having no real melody originally and his backing band’s having less energy than the guy on the couch in Half Baked. Perfectly acceptable, very unexciting, ultimately useless. Hooray for live mid-eighties Bob!
Empire Burlesque (1985)
Rating: 5
Best Song: “Dark
Eyes”
It wholly sucks ass that the one time between Desire and Time Out of Mind that Bob got his songwriting mojo working even the tiniest bit had to coincide with that time in the mid-eighties when every album released by a major artist had to have the worst production in the history of the world. I mean, for the love of god, look at that album cover! Look at the jacket Bob’s wearing on that fucking thing! Are you serious? I think some of the fonts and graphics were stolen from (or for) the Clash’s ultra-mega-fantastic Cut the Crap album, released the same year, and which remains the worst record to ever be reviewed on this website. The production on this record, especially on the shit numbers in its second half, is quite often so embarrassingly fake and eighties that it starts to overshadow the fact that there are some honest-to-goodness quality compositions on this, the kind you wouldn’t expect to come from someone wearing such a ridiculous jacket.
For instance,
start with the opening “Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My
Love)”…and yes, that’s the song’s actual title.
The snare reverb is huge and unnecessary, the accordion-sounding backing
keyboards are silly, that one horn-keyboard thing that comes in during the
chorus is retarded, and the number of generic black female backup singers
employed in the chorus is probably more than the population of
However, half of this album is about as poor as the album cover suggests, and it should come as no surprise to anyone that the ballads on this thing are just bad news. “I’ll Remember You,” “Never Gonna Be the Same,” “Emotionally Yours,” and “Something’s Burning, Baby”…well, yeah. What can I say? They suck dick! Lots of emotional, overwrought eighties keyboard arrangements, huge choruses of backup singers drowning out Bob’s patented shit-whine eighties voice, sluggish tempos, and general badness all around. They sound like the ballads on Infidels, only worse, because Bob’s wandered even farther into the wilderness that is slick eighties overproduction in the intervening two years. The songs blend together so much I don’t even have anything to say about them individually, except to thank the lord none are as bad as the horrid, seven-plus minute “When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky,” in which every computerized eighties production mistake you can imagine is smooshed into the same pile of amazingly horrible atrociousness. It’s so awful I can’t even rationally discuss it. And I’m sick of reviewing these shitty Bob Dylan albums anyway, so fuck it. New paragraph.
I suppose “Trust Yourself” is a decent, relatively unmolested piece of boogie I can endorse, especially in relation to the songs and albums around it, and also let me say kudos to Bob for leaving at least one song alone and returning to his acoustic roots on the excellent closer “Dark Eyes.” The song is so quiet it’s barely even there, but after forty minutes of embarrassingly overproduced eighties fakeness (which makes even the good songs on this album, which are really no more than “OK,” start to blow after a while), quiet is good. Quiet is very good. It’s a very gentle, delicate song, with the best lyrics Bob has penned since (let’s hear it again!) all the way back in 1976. Real, real good little tune that I bet nobody even knows exists, seeing how its tacked onto the end of an album stuck right in the middle of Bob’s shit streak full of crap eighties horns and synthesizers. But it’s there, and it’s good. Makes you wonder why Bob bothered with all this synthesized silliness when he could still bring it sitting along with his guitar and harmonica. It’s hard to say that this kind of production suits anybody, but it certainly doesn’t suit Bob, and I find it funny that the best album Bob put out between 1978 and 1989 has induced me to use the word “embarrass” so many times in this review. If this is what happened in the mid-eighties when Bob tried, I’d hate to see what happened when he didn’t…
Knocked Out Loaded (1986)
Rating: 2
Best Song: “Got My
Mind Made Up”
Far and away Bob’s nadir, and that’s really saying something considering the other piles of shit Bob’s foisted on us so far. If Dylan was perversely enjoyable in a sick kinda way, and the Christian albums at least had real musicians and felt like Bob gave a shit, and Infidels wasn’t really all that awful if you think about it, Knocked out Loaded is the album where it becomes clear just how far Bob had fallen. Most of this thing is so bad there’s actually a song on here I like and I still gave the album a 2. It’s an embarrassment.
This record is so awful you almost have to hear it to believe it. Picture the eighties production-isms Bob’s been toying with over the last few albums, right? OK, now multiply them by about 100. And add more female backup singers than in any other Bob Dylan album ever. And add songwriting a few steps below even that found on Saved. And pretend it’s not bad gospel music but instead horrendous wannabe-slick eighties rock, but it’s so sloppy you can’t believe anyone actually thought it might be a good idea to release it. Can you do all that? You can? Good. You’re on your way to knowing what this album sounds like, although I stand by my claim that the damn thing has to be heard to be believed (not that I’d ever want anyone to hear this, though…Dylan and some of the Christian stuff is almost funny; this is just pathetic and depressing). “You Wanna Ramble,” I suppose, is this album’s idea of “boogie-rock,” but not only does it neither boogie nor rock in any meaningful way, and not only is it dominated by a computerized snare beat that sounds like Johnny Fairplay’s taking a dump (it honestly doesn’t sound like this album had a live drummer at all, and that’s just sad on so many levels), and not only is the “guitar” riff sloppy, horribly-played, and poorly-mixed, and not only do the generic female black backup singers sing more than Bob does, and not only does Bob’s voice suck more dick than it has at any time since Saved (and it’s probably worse than on that one), but the actual skeleton of the song is an UNHOLY PIECE OF SHIT. Is “you wanna ramble…’til the break of dawn” the only lyric? Because it sure seems like it, and great job repeating the same non-melody and non-riff ten-thousand times during the song! And attempting a guitar solo so half-assedly it sounds like whoever the guitarist was just gave up halfway through after realizing he sucked? That’s genius! Ha!
Then it gets worse. “They Killed Him” is apparently about Gandhi, but I’m too distracted by the horrible sax riff, computerized bass drum thumpings, and massive chorus of 8,000 women fatter than Oprah to notice too much of what Bob’s talking about. If you think the fat black women belting out “MY GOD THEY KILLED HIM!!!!!” is the worst thing you’re gonna hear, just wait for the chorus of little elementary schoolers. That sounds fantastic. “Driftin’ Too Far From the Shore” is synthesized eighties dance-rock at its most heinous, and I agree with Capn Marvel’s assessment of the hyperactive computerized snare sound in this song as the worst thing in the history of mankind, but it’s not like the instantly dateable synths are any better. And the guitar solo sounds like shit! And the backup singers are going “OOOOOOOOO!!” THE WHOLE MOTHERFUCKING SONG!!!!! Who in their right mind greenlighted this crap? Are you serious? Christ, “Precious Memories” is REGGAE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Seriously! Reggae! On this album! The best part is hearing what an eighties synth thinks Jamaican kettle drums sound like mixed with the generic computerized bass drum and snare sounds that make the rest of the album so wonderful. “Maybe Someday” thinks no one will notice that it has no intro, and by the time this unlistenable mess of synth-snare hits, lowly-mixed synth-horns, guitars so high and chimey they give me a headache, and (again) an entire chorus of Star Jones look-alikes completely dominating Bob’s weak-ass croak of a voice is over, well, I guess it was right. I forget that it has no intro. The closing “Under Your Spell” is the “moody, adult contemporary pseudo-ballad” and is as bad as you’d expect (it could probably be a Michael Bolton song without changing too much) and “Brownsville Girl” is eleven minutes long!!!!! On a 35-minute album!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And it’s atrocious! I don’t know what this meandering, melodyless, musically-retarded mess of a “song” is supposed to be, but all I know is that I tire of it after 20 seconds, which is fantastic because at that point I’ve got more than ten and a half minutes left to go. The album crosses the 35-minute barrier by just a few seconds, which means the most likely purpose of this monstrosity’s absurd length was just to take up space and make the record longer than an EP, thus enabling Bob’s record company to charge full price for this massive ripoff of an album. This thing is a joke.
Finally, the song I like. Bob collaborates with Tom Petty pretty damn nicely on the fun, spunky, boogie-skiffle-rock piece “Got My Mind Made Up,” which has A REAL DRUMMER and GUITAR RIFFS THAT SOUND GOOD and BOB ACTUALLY TRYING TO SING LIKE A HUMAN BEING and THE CHORUS OF BACKUP SINGERS MOSTLY STAYING IN THE BACKGROUND and COOL LAP STEEL GUITAR and A TOTALLY ROCKIN’ BREAK WHERE EVERYONE GOES “WHOOO!” and ENERGY and, most important, EVIDENCE THAT PEOPLE WITH DECENT TASTE IN MUSIC ACTUALLY LISTENED TO IT BEFORE PUTTING IT ON THE ALBUM. I’m not even kidding; this song is good. It might be Bob’s best song since most of the material on Desire. Good thing it’s the shortest song on the album.
The fact that such a nice, fun, rocking throwaway tune was included at the end (directly after the eleven minute turd that is “Brownsville Girl”) just illuminates even better how the rest of this album is an almost unfathomably horrible pile of trash. Trust me, next to this record, Bob’s Christian period sounds like Blonde on Blonde. Bob’s released over 40 albums in his career. Many are bad. This is BY FAR the worst.
Down In The Groove (1988)
Rating: 3
Best Song: “Let’s
Stick Together”
Points for having organic drums and fewer female backup singers than the last few albums, but points again reduced for being really, really bad, Down and Out and in Absolutely No Groove Whatsoever really isn’t any better than Knocked out Loaded With Shitty Music from a songwriting point of view, and occasionally it’s worse. It’s simply less offensively rotten and only produced badly, not horrendously. Like the last one, it has one song I like, the fun, unpretentious, organic rocker “Let’s Stick Together,” which is placed right at the start to make you think Bob might have rebounded massively from his pathetic career nadir. Unfortunately, however, there are nine more songs.
I don’t even feel like reviewing this album since I hate kicking a man when he’s down. Knocked Out Loaded was almost historically poor, so that one deserved my time and energy, but this one is as bad as Dylan or Saved without being interesting to talk about because it wasn’t put out by Bob’s record company out of spite and Bob’s not lost in his ridiculous born-again Christian period. Nope, right now he’s just lost, to the point where he doesn’t even know (or care, maybe) what kind of music he was putting out. How else do you explain following the aforementioned out-of-place kickbutt rocking opener “Let’s Stay Together” with something as absurdly rotten as “When Did You Leave Heaven?”, possibly the worst Bob Dylan song I’ve ever heard? You know a song’s in trouble when it doesn’t even have a beat, let alone a melody (not that I’m asking for that from Mr. Bob right about now). I’ve listened to all two minutes of this song (wow, lots of effort there…) like fifteen times and I still can’t tell what time signature the computerized snare drum is in. It’s just hitting at random times! And there are Top Gun-ballad synths underneath! And that’s the whole song! Gah!
I wish I could say this record gets any better after that monstrosity, but it just doesn’t. There are a handful of throwaway rockers that I bet everyone involved thought would be just as cool as “Let’s Stick Together,” but for the most part they’re just annoying and poorly produced. “Sally Sue Brown” is not fun. It sucks. “Had a Dream About You Baby” sucks. And “Ugliest Girl in the World” was probably supposed to be the “funny ha-ha” song that Bob puts on all of his albums because he used to have a fantastic sense of humor TWENTY YEARS AGO, but it’s not. Because it sucks. And what’s with “Death is Not the End?” It’s tastefully produced, sure, but does it really have to be that quiet? It barely exists! It has one fucking lyric in the whole song and no discernable structure beyond Bob’s saying “just remember…that death is not the end” more times than Stuart Scott says “BOO-YEAH!” in an average LeBron James highlight (Kid’s got mad skills, son! Holla at yo’ boy!). The backup singers are mixed low enough to not be annoying in theory, but somehow they’re annoying anyway. Neat trick.
I’m frankly tired of listening to this album. If it were as bad as Knocked Out Loaded I’d listen to it some more, but this, for the most part, isn’t even bad in an offensive way. It’s just such hackwork. The ballads are so bad they’re not even listenable. The rockers, except for “Let’s Stick Together,” are all the same annoying song and all suck. The whole thing just sucks. It’s fucking bad. And it’s just barely half an hour long, meaning Bob didn’t even give enough of a crap to lengthen one of these shitpiles unnecessarily and get the record to 35 minutes. The remaining songs include two more confusingly beat-less ballads, another clueless rocker, and some sort of gospel/mandolin piece called “Shenandoah” that I can at least respect a little for trying something different, but I can’t respect much more than that because the backup singers are back in full force. That, and that song sucks. Fuck this album. Go buy Blonde on Blonde.
Dylan & The Dead (1989)
Rating: 4
Best Song: “I Want
You”
So Bob follows up the two worst studio albums of his career by teaming his old, washed-up self up with the old, washed-up Grateful Dead for a tour that resulted in the worst live album of his career. Good times. And I know the tour was supposedly not all that bad and certainly better than the majority of this record, but don’t people say that about every shitty live album? Wasn’t that tour with the Band supposed to be the best thing ever? Then why is my 7 a higher rating than what my more-experienced web reviewer colleagues are willing to give it? Ofcourse, the Rolling Thunder Revue kicked ass and people without access or inclination to bootlegs who hadn’t been at the shows had no idea until like 25 years later when the Bootleg Series thing came out, since Hard Rain wasn’t very hot and all. You know what? I have no point. Let’s move on.
Whoever
selected the tracks to include on this record is either retarded or Pat
Robertson. Why, ten years after the
fact, do two songs on this come from Slow
Train Coming? And it’s not like
they’re the good songs, either (er…good song? Half
a song?). Nope, track 1 on this album is
“Slow Train” and track 3 is “Gotta Serve Somebody,” for which I have no
explanation whatsoever. Didn’t he
already put out a live album between then and now? Why didn’t that have any Christian songs on it? Oh, right, he was in his ultra-Zionist Jew
phase then (it’s tough to keep so many crappy albums and phases straight,
y’know?). Whatever, it doesn’t
matter. I’m shocked he even played these songs on this tour, let
alone grant two spots on a live album with only seven tracks to them. And if
you think the once-in-a-lifetime combination of Bob and the Dead would render
these songs otherworldly masterpieces of musical inspiration…then you’d be
wrong. Everyone on stage is old and fat
and lazy and sluggish and messy and suffice to say that when they play shitty
songs the songs remain shitty. And
considering the collective energy and drive of everyone on stage, I can’t think
of a worse song for them to play than the plodding ten-minute “Joey” from all
the way back on Desire, which is
fantastic because THEY PLAY IT ANYWAY!
Yee-hah! That’s half the album
I’ve just summarized there! Where’s my
publishing deal?
The half of the album where
Bob and the Dead play good songs is better than the half when they don’t, if
only because, you know, they’re playing good songs, and as awful a state as
Bob’s voice is in (shockingly, he hasn’t rebounded to his Blonde on Blonde mega-charismatic self in the months since Down in the Groove and retains that
disinterested, off-key whine we’ve all grown not to love at all the last ten
years) and as messy and sluggish some of these performances are, it’s hard for
a band as talented as the Grateful Dead to turn them to shit, although I will say they do a pretty good job of
just that on the aggressively boring and mundane “Queen Jane
Approximately.” “I Want You” and “All
Along the Watchtower” are both pretty good, though, if for different reasons. “I Want You,” despite Bob’s sounding like
he’s about to die, maintains such a nice and bouncy tempo that the original Blonde
on Blonde version doesn’t totally annihilate it, and the sort of light,
soft, sloppy style of a lot of this concert has actually fits the tone “I Want
You” is supposed to have. It’s a light,
fun, goofy, sloppy song! So it sounds OK
here. The vocal parts of “All Along the
Watchtower,” then, are nothing to write home about, but watch out for some
truly kick-ass guitar soloing over the song’s second half, probably the best few
minutes of music on the entire album.
And the closing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” sounds fine too, I
guess. Sure.
The most apt thing I can about this album is that I just spend the last ten minutes trying to come up with a closing paragraph and thought of absolutely nothing. It’s a bad, haphazardly put-together live album taken from the nadir of Bob’s career. It’s mildly interesting because he joined with the Dead, I suppose, but it’s not like they were any good in 1988, either. Please pass this by.
Oh Mercy (1989)
Rating: 5
Best Song:
“Everything Is Broken”
The first of several “comeback albums” for Bob, and the first one since Infidels that critics fell over themselves rushing to splooge over, but still not an album that’s really any good by a long shot. I’ll come right out and admit that, yes, this album is the best Bob offering since Desire, and for that Bob deserves some praise. He clearly gave a shit here, and the thing sounds very serious and deep and not at all tossed-off like his last few. He even hired Daniel Lanois (the Joshua Tree guy!) to come in and produce it and give it so much lovely atmosphere you might not notice that Bob’s songwriting is still barely competent. So yes, this album sounds fantastic. In terms of pure “sound” and production values, it’s probably better than Desire even. The subtle, echoey guitars and ORGANIC bass and drum tracks, along with the pounds and pounds of tremolo-ey echo and “spaceyness” and whatnot that Lanois loves to use, provide this record with a sound totally unique in Bob’s catalog, and (like I said before) it sounds good. Bob’s changed his voice to a kind of smokey old-man wheeze too, which actually sounds pretty decent, especially compared to the weak-ass vocals he’s been providing the last decade or so. It’s also missing those horrible female backup singers! That’s the first album since 1976 without those stupid bitches! So let’s all congratulate Bob for making his first album a long time I can’t make fun of for either lack of effort or horrible production values. Good for him.
Problem is he lost his songwriting mojo around 1978 and hasn’t gotten it back yet. I count two songs on here on which the songwriting talent we all got used to seeing in the sixties is anywhere close to apparent. “Most of the Time” is the only one of the seemingly eight-zillion slow, moody, atmospheric, mushy, and meandering ballads that has the melody to back up its production. It’s lovely, and the guitar and synth overdubs in the background are fantastic. Plus it actually has a percussion part with a beat, which is nice. Second, “Everything is Broken” and its laid-back slide-guitar/bongo blues boogie tastiness doesn’t fit the general tenor of this album at all, but since I’m giving a 5 to a record whose production I fully admit is fantastic, that’s a good thing. What a fun little song! Definitely the man’s best since Desire, and while I know this isn’t the first time I’ve said that about a song, this time I really, really mean it. I swear. It’s fast and peppy and fun and there’s a break with a harmonica and horns and stuff! Yeah, it has the mass o’ echo that everything here does, but it’s not so overdone as some of the ballads, and Bob needs to write more of these fun little rockers, goddammit. Not throwaway rockers, mind you (the man’s songwriting is no longer at the level where a throwaway anything will be any good). Just fun rockers. Well-done, thought-over, fun rockers. Like “Got My Mind Made Up” and “Let’s Stick Together” from his last two crappy albums. Unless one per record is just the man’s quota for the second half of the eighties, in which case I suppose I’ll just take what I can get.
One complaint that I have about this album is its overwhelming sameyness. Despite the praise I’ve been heaping on it for its lovely production, the number of flat-out shitty ballads with the same echoey background and nonexistent melody on this thing is way, way too high. The last three songs in particular are just a giant black hole where interesting musical ideas go to die. “Disease of Conceit” is so melody-deficient it’s actually memorable for sucking so heinously, and the last two tracks…christ, I can’t remember a damn thing about them. To say this album “ends with a whimper” would be a massive understatement. I’m sure they sound lovely, but what’s the use of pretty production if your songs have no memorability? At least “What Good Am I?” has a melody, but it’s slow, cloying, and almost powerfully humdrum. The first half of the album is better than the first, but I don’t find the melancholy shuffle “Where Teardrops Fall” or the piano ballad “Ring Them Bells” all that great, just decent and made so by the great production. And while the opener “Political World” is the only song here besides “Everything is Broken” where it sounds like the record has a pulse to go along with all the echo, “Man in the Long Black Coat” borders on the annoying. Once again, fantastic, throughtful, lovely production, but songs that just don’t measure up. Call it the opposite of Empire Burlesque, maybe.
Anyway, I’m encouraged that Bob’s paying attention to how his album sounds again and hiring quality producers and everything, and that’s definitely the first step toward rehabilitation, but the degree to which his songwriting sunk the last few years is still crippling the man, and no amount of Lanois atmosphere can hide that. I’m happier he’s dressing up his half-assed songs in pretty trimmings now instead of letting them wallow in their own filth, but I’d be happier if he had better songs to dress up.
Under The Red Sky (1990)
Rating: 6
Best Song: “2 X 2”
I might be the only person in the history of the world to rate this one higher than Oh Mercy, but so be it. It’s not like I’m comparing Highway 61 to Blonde on Blonde here, just the last two albums of Bob’s suck period, in which he finally climbed back up to mediocrity again (by the way, good for him!). While Oh Mercy sounded like it was labored over to a fault (which, as I’m making my way through Bob’s Chronicles book right now, it was…and let me say thumbs down to Bob for devoting a full fifth of that book to the trials and tribulations associated with making that thing, although I find it interesting that Lanois wanted to leave “Everything is Broken” off the album, which would have been retarded), Under the Red Sky finds Bob returning to his tried and tested eighties method of writing a bunch of random throwaway songs and knocking out a half-assed album in a week that no one will buy. Thus, my relative affection for this record (highest rating for a studio product in sixteen years! Yee-hah!) is probably just another example of my generally low intellect, but, christ, it’s not that bad! It may not be anything more than a bunch of half-decent, fun, throwaway songs, but that’s more than can be said about everything Bob’s put out the last decade and a half, isn’t it?
As you may have guessed, this is one of those “good because it sucks” albums, where a guy goes into the studio with no intention of making a good album, so he just fools around, has some fun, and throws together a bunch of the goofball rockers he’s been tossing around recently. Were it made four or five years previously, I have no doubt that it would have been a massive pile of shit, but by 1990 Bob apparently gave up on the idea of trying to modernize his production, and thus there are no computerized, echo-drenched eighties snare hits, no fat black female backup singers, and generally no examples of the kind of horrid eighties badness that totally knocked Down in the Groove and Knocked Out Loaded down a few points (notice I didn’t say “ruined,” because if something is “ruined,” that implies it might have been good in the first place). Nope, it’s a bunch of short little unpretentious rockers and blues things with standard guitars/bass/drums/organ instrumentation, and while it’s hard to say any of them are very strong, I have trouble finding anything too weak either. Bob’s singing is back to sucking, ofcourse (would you expect it any other way?), but at least he’s not engulfed by the horrid production and backup singers. He’s lazily sliding along like everyone else involved. I suppose “Wiggle Wiggle” isn’t the hottest example of a basic rocker I’ve ever heard and is objectively kind of ridiculous in the grand scheme of things, but it’s over in two minutes! Who cares? And the title track has some of the worst singing I’ve ever heard, but who can deny how nice the accordion and piano sound? Hell, the first half of the album ain’t so hot anyway, so let’s not even talk about it. Side 2 is where this album’s whole fun, laid-back, who-gives-a-crap vibe starts to shine. I dig “2 X 2” a bunch, especially the organs, and random, toss-off rockers don’t come much more “hey, I suppose that’s not awful!” than “God Knows,” “Handy Dandy” and “Cat’s in the Well.” Very good? Certainly not. But acceptable, especially after what we’ve been getting recently? Ofcourse.
It goes without saying that I don’t recommend this album by any means, but at least it’s the first one since Desire I don’t feel the need to rip into (not that it’s anywhere near that album’s quality, ofcourse). A total throwaway, but a fun throwaway, with no horrid production crimes to speak of. Yes, this album has certainly never shot anyone’s dog, and for that I say “good job!”
Good As I Been To You (1992)
Rating: 7
Best Song:
“Canadee-I-O”
Easily the best thing Bob could’ve done. See, despite his last, oh, fifteen years of recorded material, Bob’s a smart man. And while it may have taken him a while to realize it, it’s not like he was blind to how far his songwriting skills had fallen. Perhaps it was Oh Mercy, which had great production and lots off effort on Bob’s part but still sucked, that made him finally see how crap he was, but he did regardless. The cliché thing to do when you’ve lost your creative spark is to “get back to your roots,” which usually means just writing a bunch of songs as crappy as the ones you were writing anyway, but giving them more “rootsy” or “country” production. This is not the approach Bob took, because his “roots” are unlike all of his contemporaries’ roots. Bob’s roots are old-school, you know? Cracked, fuzzy folk records from back in the fifties, forties, thirties, etc., traditional folk covers that had in some cases been around since before there were records. That’s what Bob’s roots were. It was how he played and learned and soaked up hundreds of these songs and records for years that made him such a fantastic songwriter when he finally decided to write his own stuff. You think it’s a coincidence all those godlike sixties songwriters started out as cover bands? They absorbed their influences to such a degree that they were actually able to improve on them instead of just aping them. So, to regain his songwriting mojo, Bob decided to take a few albums off from songwriting, instead digging up old, obscure folk covers and playing them as well and faithfully as he could, just like thirty years ago.
I can’t tell you how nice it is to finally listen to a Bob studio album and get pure, unabashed enjoyment out of it. This is the first one since Desire to let me do that! That’s a long damn time! After the morass that was his eighties catalog, you also have no idea how fantastic it is to hear Bob’s returning to the vox/acoustic/harmonica school of instrumentation. You’d think the man would have lost some of his skill or charisma in the three decades since his debut, but he hasn’t. His guitar playing sounds great, and while his voice isn’t as fun as it was back then, the man’s fifty now, so it’s not like you should expect that. Play this album side by side with Bob Dylan and, except for the couple more years you can sense on Bob’s voice and the (unfortunately) consistently serious tone of this one (compared to the at-times goofball lighthearted tone of the debut), you’d be hard-pressed to find much of a difference, and you sure as hell wouldn’t guess there’s a thirty year gap between them. It’s just classy, classic stuff, and I’m gonna keep reiterating how wonderful it is to hear Bob back doing what he’s best at, and doing it well.
The reasons for the 7 rating up there are that it’s too uniformly slow and gloomy, and after nearly an hour of this stuff it starts to sound so samey that it makes Bob Dylan sound like a hallmark of diversity. Taken in small doses, it’s great. The blues workout “Sittin’ on Top of the World” is a fantastic time, and the more melodic numbers (like “Jim Jones” and “Canadee-I-O”) never fail to impress. Unless you’re one of the folkie enthusiasts Bob was borrowing records from in the late fifties, chances are you’ve heard at most a couple and likely none of these songs (myself, I’ve heard “Froggie Went A-Courtin’” and that’s it), but that doesn’t matter. Before he was anything else, Bob was a dedicated, almost obsessed folkie. His first original composition was dedicated to Woody Guthrie, for chrissakes! There’s no one else I’d rather listen to play obscure folk covers no one’s heard of. His taste in the genre is impeccable. Maybe he doesn’t know what he’s doing when surrounded with slick eighties keyboards, but put him in a room of old folk 45’s and he’s in his element. It’s like a lecture from an old professor, only with a guitar. Good job, Bob (again).
World Gone Wrong (1993)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “World
Gone Wrong”
I know I made a similar statement two albums ago, but I believe I’m the only person to ever live to give this record a higher rating than the previous one. Why? Because it’s the exact same album! Bob digs through his dusty old folk records some more and comes up with another set of slow, haunting winners. If you like the last one, you’ll like this one. If you don’t, you won’t. They sound exactly the same in all areas, including but not limited to vocals, guitar playing, production, and background tape hiss. The only obvious difference is that this one has a better album cover.
I think I’m giving it a higher rating because it’s fifteen minutes shorter. At least that’s my current theory. An hour of this stuff can wear thin, but 45 minutes is about right. I suppose I also like how “Jack-A-Roe” has a little spunk and how the title track has been stuck in my head for weeks, two things I can say about none of the songs on the last one. “Della” is superb in a sad way, and while the whole last album was slow, it was never so slow it was sad (in a good way), so that’s another plus for this one. Really, though, I think it boils down to length. I’m not a patient man. I’m in my mid-twenties. That’s the ADD Generation. My roommate sits in his room and starts playing a new song by a new artist every 90 seconds, i.e. before the previous song he picked is even finished. He also once thought it would be a good idea to move to the downstairs apartment in our building once the tenants there vacated because the baby in the attic apartment cries too much, even though we both knew we’d be moving out of the building altogether in June, meaning we’d be moving all our stuff, canceling internet/gas/etc. accounts and opening new ones just to live 20 feet lower for THREE MONTHS. He’d probably love one of these albums if it was 2 minutes. Turn off “World Gone Wrong” halfway through and put on Eminem or something, followed by the intro to “Queen Bitch,” at which point he’d become bored and Foreman-grill 10 chicken thighs to eat along with a full block of Extra Sharp Cheddar CHEE!!!!
So yeah, Bob the old folkie is still going strong and “rediscovering his roots” in order to get his mojo back, and I still wholeheartedly endorse the idea considering he hasn’t released two albums this good back to back since the mid-seventies, and he hadn’t done it before that since John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline way back in the late sixties. Like most artists, Bob Dylan is generally more enjoyable when he doesn’t suck.
MTV Unplugged (1995)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “Rainy Day
Women #12 & 35”
The rehabilitation continues. After releasing two altogether mighty enjoyable little records of dusty old folk covers and (presumably) starting down the road to reacquiring his mojo, Bob dolls himself up all nice for the MTV generation for a little reputation amelioration. To call this “unplugged” is pretty absurd, since there are electric organs in every song and those slide guitars sure don’t sound acoustic to me, but I suppose we can forgive the man, since the only Unplugged show I’ve ever heard that actually sounds “unplugged” is the Nirvana one. Plus he’s Bob Dylan. He wrote The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Bringing it all Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks and Shot of Love. I’ll allow him this one liberty.
The show
itself is just about what you’d expect to be.
Since he’s trying to whore himself and become recognizable in a good way again, all the expected hits
are here, so you’ve got your “Like a Rolling Stone” and “All Along the
Watchtower” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and “The Times They Are A-Changim’”
and “Desolation Row” and what-have-you (although the audience’s neglecting to
clap for “Desolation Row” until he finally gets to the first chorus two minutes into the song means maybe
that one’s not as recognizable among these morons as it should be). However, since he’s Bob Dylan, he couldn’t go
through an entire live show without throwing any curveballs, so for some reason he inserts the mediocre Oh Mercy album track “Shooting Star”
into the setlist (although, shockingly, the rearrangement here, including a
fair amount of aforementioned and decidedly plugged
slide guitar tastiness, makes the song almost immeasurably better than the
studio version), as well as the surprisingly strong Oh Mercy outtake “Dignity” (which the blooch spent like fifteen
pages talking about in his Chronicles
book only to summarily dismiss by saying “we never went back to that one.” WHY
again did you devote an entire fifth of the book to that record, Bob? Was
This “relaxed and professional” tone carries over to every selection, too, not just the ones with re-done arrangements. The only song that feels like it’s really moving is “Rainy Day Women,” which is played straight but with guitars playing the horn parts and without everyone involved in the proceedings’ being drunk. Bob wanted to pull in as many fans as possible with this, which means it lacks the sloppiness and crap production of many of his previous live albums (Real Live, Hard Rain, that horrible one with the Dead), but also lacks the spark and spontaneity of his best ones (anything with the words “Bootleg Series” in it). The closest analogy I can make in terms of energy, production, and tightness is At Budokan, but that one’s his “crazy Vegas rearrangement album,” which certainly makes it more interesting than the record being discussed here, even if the enjoyment found in them is about equal. Bob’s voice also sounds like crap (forgot to mention that…where did the cool rasp on the folk cover albums go?), but certainly not as crap as it sounded most of the eighties…so call it tolerable crap, I suppose.
I dunno, what else do I say about this? It sounds fine, it’s played and produced flawlessly, and it’s been fully sanitized for mass consumption. Due to the professionalism and sheer quality of the songs, it’s obviously a good time while it’s playing, but big Bob fans have little or no reason to get it beyond being able to lie and say they were there like the 50,000 people that were apparently at Nirvana’s unplugged set. This album is fine. It’s not at all embarrassing, which is still a success coming from Bob at this point.
Time Out Of Mind (1997)
Rating: 9
Best Song: “Cold
Irons Bound”
And the rehabilitation is complete. While Bob’s last two studio albums were both pretty nice, the fact remains that they were both cover albums, and the last record of original material the man had put out was the “masterpiece” Under the Red Sky, whose mediocre quality made the fact that I gave it the highest rating of any Bob studio album from Desire to that point absolutely pathetic. Since that excellent 1976 offering, Bob’s studio albums had received the ratings of, in order: 5, 3, 3, 4, 5, 2, 3, 5. Then came the lofty 6 I slapped on Under the Red Sky, which is probably more than it deserves, to be honest (a few days after last listening to the damn thing, I can’t recall a single thing about it beyond not actively hating it). That’s nine studio albums and fifteen years without an album I would even characterize as “good,” and a whole host I would describe as “really fucking bad.” When you add in the last seven years of covers albums and whore-out MTV live shows, that’s over two decades since Bob had produced a studio album worth hearing. To be that in perspective, the time between Desire and Time Out of Mind is SEVEN YEARS LONGER than the time between Bob’s hayseed debut album and Desire. That’s a long fucking time to suck.
Fortunately, somehow, against all odds, as of 1997 Bob was back, with an album that’s actually better that Desire and certainly the best thing he’s put out since Blood on the Tracks. And to steal a point from Capn Marvel for the 50th time just on this page, it looks like Bob wasn’t all that satisfied with how Oh Mercy had gone (evidence for which can be found in how he, as I have mentioned profusely, spent an entire fifth of his Chronicles book explaining the insignificant minutiae of how it was made and going over every disappointment and failure of the recording process as if anyone cared), so he got Mr. Lanois back and tried again. The production is quite different this time, however. Both albums are slow and dark and gloomy and feature Bob singing about how old he is, and that’s fantastic and everything, but the thing I love about this one’s production as opposed to that of Oh Mercy is that it sounds timeless, not easily dated to a time period in the late eighties when Lanois wanted to add so much echo to every band he produced that they all ended up sounding like U2. So the echo fascination is gone, which, despite Oh Mercy’s production’s being by far the best on a Bob album between Desire and this one, is a good thing. I don’t want Bob to sound like U2, you know? And it’s not just because I have a personal vendetta against U2. It’s because Bob’s too classy for that. Bob shouldn’t sound like other artists. Other artists should sound like Bob, and I for one cannot easily pinpoint an artist or era that this record sounds like. It’s enthralling despite being almost self-consciously organic, mellow, and low-key. It has a murkiness, almost a dustiness that belies its no-doubt extremely pricey production values. The percussion, bass, guitars, and organs…none of them jump out at you. Ever. But they all mix together to form this wonderful, groovy, timeless, infinitely classy stew, over which Bob’s voice crackles like a withered old bluesman in easily the best vocal performance he’s given since Blood on the Tracks. Everything is distinct yet fits perfectly together. Whatever musicians Lanois hired to back Bob up on this record are superb. It sounds like it could have been made in the seventies, sixties, fifties…hell, the thirties, even! It takes serious talent and serious technology to make something sound this spontaneous and wonderful.
Song-wise, we’ve got a lot of blues songs and ballads about general blues and ballad topics, like women and getting old and stuff. Nothing particularly earth-shattering, not that anyone should expect Bob to return to his absurdist mid-sixties ways, especially considering it’s been over thirty years since then. It’s not like any of these songs are gonna go down as classics in the Bob canon like the best tracks on Blood on the Tracks and his sixties records, if only because this album flows so evenly it’s nearly impossible to pick out the best tracks (I could make an argument for everything but the absurdly overlong closer “Highlands” as the best song on the album, really). The atmosphere and production are almost the best of any Dylan album ever, though (I’m dead serious), so that’s what carries it. The groovier blues tracks like “Dirt Road Blues,” ‘Til I Fell in Love With You,” and the superb “Cold Irons Bound” are as muted as the ballads like “Standing in the Doorway” and “Not Dark Yet,” and the piano piece “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” is excellent. I don’t know, it’s hard to talk about individual songs with this thing, the atmosphere is so pervasive. And while Bob always wrote great songs, that atmosphere is how you can tell he’s back, you know? No matter how out-there he got, he was always just reworking old rock/blues/country formulas and adding his own twist on top. So “his own twist” now is this dank murkiness instead of the rock explosion of Highway 61 Revisited. So what? It sounds great! At least he has his own twist now. I don’t think he was thinking too much about putting his own timeless mark of genius on Knocked Out Loaded.
So Bob’s back making top-notch albums again and I’m happy. I guess those seven years he took off to re-charge and “get back to his roots” really paid off, eh? This record really is fantastic. Due to its consistently gloomy, almost dirge-like, atmosphere, I can’t say it would be everyone’s cup of tea, and it obviously doesn’t match his top 4 or 5 or so albums, but it definitely cracks his top 10. And considering the kind of crap he’s been delivering since 1976, who in their right mind expected that? Great job, Bob.
Love And Theft (2001)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Lonesome
Day Blues”
FUCK! It’s another really good album! I guess Bob really is back, or maybe he’s realized he has to take half a decade between albums at this point in his career to rebuild enough mojo (notice he hasn’t followed this one up yet?). Either way, it feels great to finally wrap up this marathon Dylan experience on a positive note, especially such an easily enjoyable one. See, Time Out of Mind is slow and gloomy and tough to enjoy on first listen. Sure, it’s fantastic and deep and provides endless layers of quality on repeated aural exposure, but in today’s modern world, who has time for that? Enter Love and Theft! After successfully going back to his original folk cover roots, then successfully re-doing Oh Mercy for some reason, Bob is back in his mid-sixties roots-rockin’ groove, and it’s great. This is a very light, fun listen, but unlike so many of his “light, fun” throwaways in both the seventies and eighties, this one a) clearly had a lot of effort put into it and b) is great! To hear Bob and his rugged old bluesman voice successfully pulling off the kind of hard, butt-kicking blues-rock tracks he hasn’t been able to do in THIRTY-FIVE YEARS (I’m looking at “Lonesome Day Blues” here, which is just fucking amazing) is really something.
So yes, blues-rock, roots-rock, boogie-rock, and all that jazz. Organic, too, though by 2001 that’s more to be expected instead of necessarily applauded. As everyone who has ever written a review of this thing has rightfully said, the real key to the quality here is Bob’s backing band, who are able to pull off a whole array of old-school styles with consistency and groove. Half of these songs sound like they could be on the Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, and one (“Summer Days”) sounds like a good version of that Brian Setzer rockabilly-swing nonsense and rules! Back in the sixties, Bob was looking back to classic fifties rock and roll. Now, in the naughties, he’s looking back to depression-era and pre-depression era music, and I for one fully support his decision. “High Water (For Charley Patton)” is a foot-stompin’ banjo rocker that sounds fresh and exciting despite being based on a musical style from the twenties, and how about the walking jazz songs? Didn’t he have one of those on one of his seventies half-efforts? New Morning, I think. Yeah, that’s where it was. Forget what it was called, though (I’m sure I mention it in the review I wrote months ago…scroll up if you’re interested). That song sucked, right? Right! So how is he able to pull off that same type of musical style now, thirty years later? It’s flabbergasting! It’s not like “Bye and Bye” or “Floater (Too Much to Ask)” or “Moonlight” are really great songs by any means (and, to be honest, including three of these songs on one album was probably overkill, and you could debate that “Po’ Boy” is a fourth), but, again, I’m just impressed he can pull this shit off at the age he is now. Look at that album cover! He is OLD! Very, very old. He looks like shit, too. I mean, he’s always looked like shit, if you think about it, but now he looks decrepit. And he’s able to write music as rocking and alive and classic as this? It’s ridiculous, it really is.
OK, so obviously this album isn’t one of his all-time best. If it were I’d have given it a higher rating. It’s probably about equal to Desire. A highly enjoyable and consistent 8, but nothing earth-shattering. It’s a little too long, too, and a few songs at the end start to drift by without leaving much of an impression (the slow closer “Sugar Baby” doesn’t fit at all, for instance, and cries out desperately for the production Time Out of Mind had). But heck, the man sounds confident again. Some have made a comparison between this record’s album cover and that of Blonde on Blonde, specifically the similarity between the facial expressions Bob wears on the two of them. While I highly doubt Bob’s confidence is as high now as he was when he wrote that in 1966 (I also highly doubt anyone has ever been as confident as Bob was back then), it’s sure as hell higher than it’s been in a long, long time. He’s writing good lyrics, he’s got a great backing band, and he’s completely on top of his craft again. He’s not gonna release a work of genius every six months like he could forty years ago (shit, that’s a long time, isn’t it?), but if he resurfaces in 2008 or so with another high quality album like this, I’ll be happy. He’s been too busy with his memoirs and that PBS special and everything lately anyway. Bob Dylan is, and was, one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century,, and as I finally finish up this page and listen to something else for the first time since the winter, I want to thank him for making all my eager little Latin students think their teacher is insane because all he ever listens to is that crusty old fart, Mr. Robert Zimmerman.
Modern Times (2006)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Thunder
On The Mountain”
Considering Bob Dylan is the
most important musical figure of the 20th century not from
So yeah,
that’s what went on in my head.
Unfortunately, I live in Los Angeles now, not Cambridge or Huntington
Village (which I’ll admit I enjoyed to a degree, despite its being located on
Long Island), so it’s not like there was a used CD shop down the street from me
(unless I’m doing my laundry or have a hankering for Chinese food and donuts at the same time, I have to drive everywhere now, which is fantastic
because my car’s dented from a hit-and-run that occurred within a week of my
arriving here and covered in gross smog dust I haven’t gotten washed off yet
because I’m from the northeast and therefore used to it actually raining every now and then and my consequently having no
need to ever pay to get my car washed…not that I’m complaining about the total
lack of inclement weather here, ofcourse).
Also, to my surprise, there isn’t one near USC’s campus either (not even
in that quaint little undergraduate-geared mall across the street that fits the
area about as well as the Shrine Auditorium down the street that’s like 100
feet from the graffiti-covered 110 overpass), and so, finding it sold out at
the nearest Best Buy and thinking of a trip all the way up to Amoeba during
rush hour to buy a single CD and leave without browsing as a total waste, I
ordered the damn thing online and waited an extra week, which sucked total ass. And I know I’ve now spent two paragraphs
talking about the not-that-interesting-at-all process by which I obtained this
record, but I’m not used to this, goddammit!
But then I walk around the USC campus for ten minutes and gawk at all
the women that make the average “hot” girl from
And now, to the album at hand. It’s good. I know you probably could have guessed that considering the quality of Bob’s last two releases and the five year gap between Love and Theft and this one, but I felt I’d say it anyway. So yes, it’s good. It’s probably the weakest of the three “comeback albums” Bob’s recorded now (not that you can call this a comeback anymore, since Time Out of Mind came out a decade ago), and it’s more of a “low 8” than the “solid 8” that Love and Theft was, but if you’re disappointed in that then you obviously haven’t heard everything Bob put out in the eighties. The production and playing on the album is immaculate, and the band Bob’s working with here (his touring band, I’m led to believe) is smooth, supple, and classy. The album continues in the “hyper-old-school” vein of Love and Theft, about which no one should really be surprised, and about which I continue to be very happy, ofcourse. If you liked Love and Theft, there’s simply no way you won’t like this one, too, considering it’s completely the same formula. Bob creaking along in his old, beat-up bluesman voice, singing fifties-ish classy rockers and re-worked traditional blues material even older than that (“Rollin’ and Tumblin’”, “The Levee’s Gonna Break”) as well as tossing in some light, jaunty, slightly jazzy ballads that reek of relaxed cool, all with his totally awesome, uber-tasteful backing band. Ofcourse it’s good.
There are small problems, though. It’s a bit monotonous, for instance, compared to the lovely variety of Love and Theft, and sometimes it seems as if there are really only three songs here (the “cool, relaxed rocker,” i.e. “Someday Baby,” the song from the iPod commercial, the “cool, jaunty, supple ballad,” i.e. “Beyond the Horizon,” and the “cool, classy, dark ballad,” i.e. the closing “Ain’t Talkin’”). The fact that I used the adjective “cool” to describe all three kinds of generic Modern Times tracks obviously means that this lack of variety isn’t a major crime against humanity, but we don’t have any real “dirty, mean” blues-rockers or ballads that are anything but “quiet” and/or “relaxing.” This whole “light, relaxed” feel is made more potent by the fact that there are actually more ballads here than rockers (6 to 4), and one of the “rockers,” “The Levee’s Gonna Break,” might be “lighter” than any of the ballads (“When the Levee Breaks” it’s clearly not). The only rocker that really approaches the level of volume at which I don’t feel silly calling it a rocker is “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” and “Thunder on the Mountain” and “Someday Baby” are more chilled-out, relaxing fun than anything else (with “Someday Baby” having the added bonus of Bob’s voice totally cracking and losing the melody every time during the chorus, which is great because, in a genius move, that’s the part they used on the iPod commercial).
They are fun, though. Especially “Thunder on the Mountain,” which is notable for its totally raunchy atmosphere and often hilarious lyrics about Alicia Keys, porkchops, and pies (Don’t forget, Bob’s a funny dude). They’re all basic blues songs in structure, but the subtle drums, supple bass, and tasteful guitar/piano/organ/fiddle/whatnot parts by Bob’s band are, as I said before, just fantastic. The same is true of pretty much all the ballads, too, really. The brushed-snare drums all over this album are just great, for instance. These ballads are moving along at about 10 mph, yet they never seem to drag at all, so expert, practiced, and tight is the band behind our man Bob. They’re so tight they actually sound incredibly loose in their grooves, which is really hard to do. I freely admit that were you to re-do this album with mid-eighties synthesized crap production it probably wouldn’t even meet minimum standards of goodness, but so what? So this album’s a product of great ensemble work and superb, sensitive, organic production (by Bob himself! Er, “Jack Frost”) rather than a batch of mind-blowing songs. It’s still good, right? Bob’s like 65 now, for god sakes. Let’s just be happy he still has full control of his bowels.
This thing’s obviously not gonna touch the best stuff Bob put out in the sixties, but that’s fine. Except Blood on the Tracks, nothing after say, John Wesley Harding, can compete with what he was doing in his prime, and to compare records made forty years apart is an ultimately useless exercise anyway. It’s Bob Dylan, man.
The Bootleg Series, Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs – Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006 (2008)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “High
Water (For Charley Patton) (Live)”
A staggeringly large amount of music (2 cd’s each totaling somewhere in the range of 75 minutes apiece) with little or no payoff if you’re looking to this for some sort of insight into how Bob Dylan resurrected himself over the last decade and became awesome again. I’ve actually managed to get through all of it five or six times by this point and I still have very little to say about it except that it’s a shitload of music that sounds like Bob Dylan. It probably goes without saying that this is for big-time fans (like myself) only, unless I’m underestimating the number of people who’d like to sit through two and a half hours of alternate takes, rarities, and live tracks culled from the last twenty years of Bob’s career (and not, for instance, from the first ten or fifteen).
By the way, that bit about “the
last twenty years” is unfortunately
accurate: this isn’t the collection of alternate tracks from the last three
(great) albums that I figured it would be when I bought (downloaded for free)
it (which means apparently I can’t read, since it’s right there in the title). Remember I talked about how I read his Chronicles book and I was all annoyed
because he spent like half of the damn thing talking about why Oh Mercy didn’t turn out how he wanted? Something I could have told him myself after
listening to the album twice? Well
apparently he really did spend a lot
of time on that fucking thing, because alternate tracks and non-album tracks
from the Oh Mercy sessions are all
over this. I mean, I’m fine with
“Everything is Broken” and I like that song and all, but do we really need like
eight other tracks from those sessions? I
don’t know, the alternate takes in general on this just kind of make me
shrug. OK, so what? Two alternate versions of “
There’s also a bunch of songs that either really are unreleased or at least are on a soundtrack from a movie no one saw (e.g. Gods and Generals) and thus might as well be unreleased. In discussing these I will concur with the hack All Music Guide review and nominate the Robert Johnson acoustic blues cover as the tops, but it’s not like this should be a surprise: it’s a Robert Johnson cover from the sessions for the covers album (World Gone Wrong) that totally rules almost as much as his early covers stuff. You know it’s gonna be good. The one thing this album does make me wish Bob would do is put out a kick-ass rocking live album that dates to the last five or ten years like the Rolling Thunder Revue Bootleg Series one that just completely owns. Some of the live tracks here really do open up some serious rock, like the Love and Theft tracks “Lonesome Day Blues” and (especially) “High Water (For Charley Patton).” I saw Bob live two years ago and the new stuff he played didn’t have near this ass-kicking energy, but that was supporting Modern Times. So maybe a Bootleg Series from the Love and Theft tour or something? I’d buy it. Then again if Bob farted into a microphone for an hour I’d buy it. And if it turns out those farts pre-date his motorcycle accident (and are not all protest farts) I’d give it at least an 8. So maybe I’m not the best one to ask here.
I’d have more to say about this stuff individually if there weren’t so fucking much of it. It’s slow, old-man rootsy stuff that sounds like recent Bob with his croak-voice and his ever-present (at least if you discount about 15-20 years in the middle there) sense of taste (even the Oh Mercy stuff generally sounds pretty good, since these outtakes and alternate versions don’t have the bright sheen that kind of messed up that record for me). I like to listen this and have a nice time when I do, but I’m not gonna pretend that I can name even a third of the tracks on it yet. If you have an opinion of Bob Dylan similar to the one I do, then you should get this. If not, though, you and your severely incorrect taste in music probably don’t need to.