Record Reviews
📝 2096 reviews| Artist | Title | Review |
|---|---|---|
| Bob Dylan | VD Waltz | |
| Bob Dylan | Self Portrait | <p>There has never been a clearer attempt to shed an audience than Self-Portrait. At least, that's one way of looking at this baffling double album, a deliberately sprawling affair that runs the gamut from self-portrait to self-parody, touching on operatic pop, rowdy Basement Tapes leftovers, slight whimsy, and covers of wannabe Dylans from Paul Simon to Gordon Lightfoot. To say the least, it's confusing, especially arriving at the end of a decade of unmitigated brilliance, and while the years have made it easier to listen to, it still remains inscrutable, an impossible record to unlock. It may not be worth the effort, either, since this isn't a matter of deciphering cryptic lyrics or interpreting lyrics, it's all about discerning intent, figuring out what the hell Dylan was thinking when he was recording -- not trying to decode a song. There are times where it's quite clearly played for a laugh -- if his shambling version of "The Boxer" isn't a pointed parody of Paul Simon, there was no reason to cut it -- but he's poker-faced elsewhere, and the songs (apart from such earthed gems as "Mighty Quinn," which aren't presented in their best versions) are simply not worth much consideration. But, in a strange way, Self Portrait is, because decades have passed and it still doesn't make much sense, even for Dylanphiles. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's worth the time to figure it out -- you're not going to find an answer, anyway -- but it's sort of fascinating all the same.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Self Portrait | <p>There has never been a clearer attempt to shed an audience than Self-Portrait. At least, that's one way of looking at this baffling double album, a deliberately sprawling affair that runs the gamut from self-portrait to self-parody, touching on operatic pop, rowdy Basement Tapes leftovers, slight whimsy, and covers of wannabe Dylans from Paul Simon to Gordon Lightfoot. To say the least, it's confusing, especially arriving at the end of a decade of unmitigated brilliance, and while the years have made it easier to listen to, it still remains inscrutable, an impossible record to unlock. It may not be worth the effort, either, since this isn't a matter of deciphering cryptic lyrics or interpreting lyrics, it's all about discerning intent, figuring out what the hell Dylan was thinking when he was recording -- not trying to decode a song. There are times where it's quite clearly played for a laugh -- if his shambling version of "The Boxer" isn't a pointed parody of Paul Simon, there was no reason to cut it -- but he's poker-faced elsewhere, and the songs (apart from such earthed gems as "Mighty Quinn," which aren't presented in their best versions) are simply not worth much consideration. But, in a strange way, Self Portrait is, because decades have passed and it still doesn't make much sense, even for Dylanphiles. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's worth the time to figure it out -- you're not going to find an answer, anyway -- but it's sort of fascinating all the same.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | New Morning | <p>Dylan rushed out <i>New Morning</i> in the wake of the commercial and critical disaster <i>Self Portrait</i>, and the difference between the two albums suggests that its legendary failed predecessor was intentionally flawed. <i>New Morning</i> expands on the laid-back country-rock of <i>John Wesley Harding</i> and <i>Nashville Skyline</i> by adding a more pronounced rock & roll edge. While there are only a couple of genuine classics on the record ("If Not for You," "One More Weekend"), the overall quality is quite high, and many of the songs explore idiosyncratic routes Dylan had previously left untouched, whether it's the jazzy experiments of "Sign on the Window" and "Winterlude," the rambling spoken word piece "If Dogs Run Free" or the Elvis parable "Went to See the Gypsy." Such offbeat songs make New Morning a charming, endearing record.</p>— <b>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</b> |
| Bob Dylan | Another Self Portrait | <p>Another Self Portrait, the tenth volume in Bob Dylan's official bootleg series, assembles a slew of unreleased tracks, un-and over-dubbed alternate takes, and demos, mostly from 1970's Self Portrait and New Morning sessions —they were recorded simultaneously and released within months of one another —and other material. Dylan restlessly dug into the fakebook of folk, blues, and country tunes that nourished him from the beginning. The few original songs are minor ones. Twenty-six of these 35 selections were recorded between March and June. Dylan is in fine voice and he tries on many: some raspy, others crystal clear, all of them bold. The interconnected nature of these albums is revealed with the opening demo for "Went to See the Gypsy" (used on NM). It's just Dylan and guitarist David Bromberg. (Another take recorded three months later features just Dylan on electric piano.) There are two undubbed takes of "Little Sadie" at different tempos; two of "Time Passes Slowly" —the first a basic folk-rock read, the latter an aggressive one with Al Kooper's B-3 swelling to a crescendo from the jump. Dylan and Bromberg, with Kooper on piano, deliver a haunted, undubbed "Days of 49." Many of the unreleased tunes are gems. "Pretty Saro" —with Dylan in his cleanest Nashville Skyline croon displaying a real range —and the vocal and piano read of "Spanish Is the Loving Tongue" are deeply moving love songs. "House Carpenter" is a high lonesome blues. The skeletal "Alberta #3" puts the versions from SP to shame. Eric Andersen's "Thirsty Boots" has Bromberg's spidery guitar weaving a separate lyric through Dylan's vocal. A demo of "When I Paint My Masterpiece" from 1971, contains slightly different (better) lyrics. The stripped-down "Copper Kettle" stands out when contrasted with its released version. Dylan was impatiently experimenting with arrangements on both records, particularly the latter, and some don't work. "If Not for You" features a violin instead of George Harrison's guitar. The unreleased "Working on a Guru" is almost a throwaway, but Harrison's blues-rock guitar playing smokes. The alternate "New Morning," with a brassy, Stax-style horn arrangement, is great, but the full orchestral overdub on "Sign on a Window" —complete with harp —fails, as does the spoken word with female gospel backing chorus on "If Dogs Run Free." Arguably, of the NM material, Dylan made the right choices for the finished album, which doesn't make what's here less interesting. The remainder of these tracks includes "Minstrel Boy," an unreleased Basement Tapes number, and two tunes from the Isle of Wight with the Band, some alternates of Nashville Skyline, and others from 1971. Another Self Portrait asks many questions, but there is one that hounds because it's unanswerable, especially in regard to its namesake: why did Dylan record all this material, in this way, and then release something entirely different? It doesn't matter. For fans, this is more than a curiosity, it's an indispensable addition to the catalog.</p><p>—<strong>Thom Jurek</strong></p><hr/><p>Bob Dylan (re)paints a masterpiece for the 10th edition of his Bootleg Series</p><p>I misheard Bob Dylan back in 1970 as I lay back on the single bed in my room at my folks suburban home in Marin County and listened again and again to Dylan's then-new and controversial album, Self Portrait, as it played on my shit Zenith portable stereo. There were no lyrics included with the album; no liner notes. Just a very long list of musicians who had played on it. Dylan sure wasn't offering any help in figuring out what he was up to, but then had he ever?</p><p>Self Portrait seemed confusing at first, a two-record set dominated by covers of other people's songs. Other people's songs? What the goddamn was the man who had intellectualized rock songwriting doing singing "Blue Moon" and 'The Boxer' for God's sake?</p><p>It's fitting that I start this column with the word "I," and that I'm telling you about my experience, the experience of one middle class 17-year-old boy who was ignorant of the history behind many of the songs Dylan covered on Self Portrait.</p><p>I didn't know B. Bryant, the writer of "Take Me As I Am (Or Let Me Go)," nor F. Bryant, who along with B. Bryant wrote "Take A Message To Mary," (both songs included on Self Portrait) were famous Nashville songwriters Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who wrote hits for the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison, George Jones and many others. Or that "Little Sadie," which Dylan claimed to have written, had been recorded almost 40 years earlier by Clarence Ashley. Hell, I'd not yet heard of Clarence Ashley. And who were the Lomax's, who along with F. Warner, were credited with writing the gold rush ballad "Days of 49"?</p><p>I was 17. What the bejesus did I know?</p><p>Dylan often sang in the first person. Nineteen-sixty-three's "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" begins with the line, "I was riding on the Mayflower when I thought I spied some land." His 1965 single, "Positively 4th Street," begins, "You've got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend." The opening track on Dylan's new album, The Bootleg Series Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait (1969-1971), is a demo of New Morning's "Went To See the Gypsy" that begins, "I went to see the gypsy, staying in a big hotel, he smiled when he saw me coming, and wished me well."</p><p>I, he, he, me and me – in the very first line.</p><p>"I use I and me and you," Dylan told Allen Ginsberg during an interview in 1977. "It's personal."</p><p>It's personal. Maybe that's what drew me to Dylan when I heard "Like A Rolling Stone" on the radio in 1965 and flipped out. There was the voice and the music of course, but the way he sang so directly to the girl. This was between the singer and "Miss. Lonely." And it was on the radio!</p><p>So personal.</p><p>There are many layers to Bob Dylan.</p><p>But I digress and I owe you more regards what I misheard.</p><p>The original Self Portrait starts with a line I heard as "All the tired horses in the sun, how am I gonna get any writing done."</p><p>Yes, I thought in 1970 as I tried to make sense of all those new Dylan recordings (24 tracks), after what Dylan's been through (the infamous motorcycle accident, the wall of hateful boos that greeted his switch to rock 'n' roll, and all he'd accomplished including the recording of nine mind-blowing albums — most of them filled with his own idiosyncratic compositions), how was Bob Dylan going to write more songs? How could he top himself? Well he couldn't, of course. Yes I misheard, but what I thought was sung sounded like the truth. And if he was too tired to write new songs, well what else could he do?</p><p>What follows that song (which is sung by his backup singers – no Dylan vocal) is an album of Dylan singing mostly other people's songs. There are old songs ("Days of '49"), pop songs ("Blue Moon"), a few by his contemporaries ("The Boxer," "Early Mornin' Rain") and a few of his own oldies but goodies (including "Like A Rolling Stone" and "She Belongs To Me," as played at the Isle of Wight in August 1969).</p><p>Self Portrait was an album of songs Dylan liked, and to some degree, songs that had influenced or impacted him. Self Portrait was Dylan as reflected through the mirror of his taste. But with Dylan, nothing is ever as it seems, so at the same time he was sharing a bit of himself, he was also fucking with us. Or was he?</p><p>In his memoir "Chronicles," Dylan said he was tired of being "the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent, Kaiser of Apostasy, Archbishop of Anarchy, the Big Cheese." He wanted to escape an image the media and the public had imposed on him. So, he writes, he did what he could to shake things up, including the release in 1969 of Nashville Skyline, an album of simple country songs sung in a smooth country croon we'd never heard before.</p><p>And he followed up little over a year later with Self Portrait. "I released one album (a double one)," he wrote in "Chronicles," where I just threw everything I could think of at the wall and whatever stuck, released it, and then went back and scooped up everything that didn't stick and released that, too."</p><p>Only that wasn't true. Another Self Portrait is evidence that there were many other songs Dylan didn't release, plus alternate takes and demos. And while there's no reason to think Dylan wasn't trying to escape the 'voice of a generation' straightjacket, the songs he recorded were no joke. This was no duck and cover operation. Critics and some of the public didn't get it, but so what?</p><p>In 1969, even before the commercial success of his country turn, Nashville Skyline (which reached #3 helped by the pop hit "Lay Lady Lay"), Dylan was continuing to experiment with country music, but was also looking back to the old folk music (always a source of inspiration), perhaps searching for a new direction — recording old songs as he did when he and The Band recorded The Basement Tapes at Big Pink in 1967.</p><p>Dylan first recorded 11 songs during three days of sessions in the spring of 1969 in Nashville. Then over three days in March of 1970 he cut over 30 more songs in New York with musicians including David Bromberg (guitar/dobro) and Al Kooper (organ, piano). What is hard to believe, but apparently true, Dylan sent the New York tapes to Nashville for overdubs by Charlie McCoy (bass) and Kenneth Buttrey (drums) and a bunch of other Nashville cats. "He [Dylan] wasn't even there," Buttrey is quoted as saying in Clinton Heylin's "Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions."</p><p>Self Portrait was released in June of 1970 and the critical response was deafening.</p><p>With that one album it seemed at the time that Dylan instantly lost all the credibility he'd earned the previous decade. His staunchest defenders turned on him. "What is this shit?" Greil Marcus wrote in Rolling Stone.</p><p>But not me. I wrote a review praising Self Portrait that ran in the first (and only) issue of a magazine I co-published and co-edited, Hard Road (published in July 1970). I ended that review like this:</p><p>"Bob Dylan (Robert Zimmerman) has gone through many changes and this album is another change, another mood. Many people will dislike it because it sounds different than the Dylan they're used to. That's all right though because a few people will have moved along with Dylan and will really dig it."</p><p>Yes, I liked it then and I like it now.</p><p>Oh but things might have been so different if the recordings on Another Self Portrait had been released in Self Portrait's place. Though I still dig Self Portrait, the new album blows it away. Listening to Another Self Portrait is a revelation. Remember the first time you heard Blonde On Blonde, or John Wesley Harding?</p><p>Yeah, that kind of mindblower.</p><p>It's a joy to listen to the album. Each song, as it plays, feels like a wondrous and unexpected gift, followed by an equally wondrous and unexpected gift.</p><p>Dylan's voice is in your face from the first song. And you remember how there was a time when he could really sing. Once he had a voice as distinctive as the one Salinger used to narrate "The Catcher in the Rye." Dylan used many voices in the '60s and '70s – he moved from Okie folkie to sarcasm-dosed rocker to Nashville crooner. All those voices are wonderful, so full of emotion — and they all sound uniquely Bob Dylan. Those voices, as much as his words and music, are why he is such an important figure in 20th Century music.</p><p>All of those great voices and more are on Another Self Portrait.</p><p>With Another Self Portrait we get a mix of the original Dylan songs that ended up on New Morning and his distinctive covers. Most of the 35 songs on the two CDs (there is a four CD version that also includes Dylan and The Band's entire August 1969 Isle of Wight performance, and a remastered Self Portrait) were recorded in 1970 during the sessions for Self Portrait and New Morning. There are also a few alternative takes from the Nashville Skyline sessions of early 1969, one from The Basement Tapes, two from the Isle of Wight performance, and two previously unreleased versions of songs recorded in 1971 for Greatest Hits Vol. II.</p><p>There are demos and alternative takes, but just as impactful are seven recordings stripped of the Nashville overdubs. Those songs (two versions of "Little Sadie," "All the Tired Horses," "Wigwam," "Days of 49," "Copper Kettle" and "Belle Isle") are heard here as they were recorded with only David Bromberg, and occasionally Al Kooper accompanying Dylan.</p><p>If I had to pick out one song to sum up Another Self Portrait, it's the here-to-fore unheard "Pretty Saro," a video of which appeared online two weeks before the album's August 27, 2013 release date. "Pretty Saro" began life as an English ballad. The words to Dylan's version are similar to those recorded in the early-to-mid '60s by Judy Collins, Pete Seeger and Jean Ritchie, but the music is different, and so is the melody that Dylan sings with his Nashville croon. The song lasts just over two minutes, and it is as mysterious and all-consuming as the Basement Tapes' recording, "I'm Not There."</p><p>It is a story old as love itself that Dylan sings to us. Down in a lone valley somewhere, "a sad lonesome place," the singer is bidding farewell to pretty Saro, who he dreams of "wherever I go." Pretty Saro won't have the singer because he has neither a big house nor the silver and gold he would need to win her love. Still, he tells us that if only he were "a poet and could write a fine hand," that he'd write her a letter and she'd understand. "But I dream of pretty Saro," he ends the song. "Wherever I go."</p><p>The lyrics are beautiful and haunting, but it's not those borrowed words that have me listening again and again. It's those minor chords that Dylan has added, and the beautiful flights his voice takes. Dylan doesn't just deliver the words, he sings them, and there is an ache in his voice containing all of life's defeats. A red rose that has been stepped on, that's the lonesome sound of Dylan's voice.</p><p>If you liked the Dylan of The Basement Tapes and John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline and New Morning, you'll like Another Self Portrait. If you are of a certain age, it may remind you of how you felt listening to the above albums when they were first released. I remember the relief I felt when in early 1968 I listened to "Down Along the Cove" and "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight," the final tracks on John Wesley Harding. Dylan up in Woodstock; Dylan looking like a country gentleman on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post; Dylan making laid-back country music. It felt right, and I too wanted to get back to the country, even though I had no country to get back to having lived my whole life in that house in Marin. Oh to have a cabin in the woods, a creek nearby, and maybe an old rusting pickup to get around in. The other records that followed – Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, New Morning – contained music to accompany sitting on the front porch of that imaginary cabin.</p><p>At the time Dylan's country voice was reassuring, a retreat from the craziness of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde or an advance past that craziness. The songs on Another Self Portrait, and the way they are sung brings back the comfort I felt listening to those albums way back then. I guess it could be nostalgia, which I'm no fan of, but I think it's something else.</p><p>What I think Dylan accomplished on his post-Blonde On Blonde, pre-Planet Waves albums was twofold. Not only did he change his voice and give up (temporarily) the rock 'n' roll he'd been playing since '65, but he simplified his songwriting. It isn't that the songs are simplistic – mostly they're as sophisticated, maybe more sophisticated, than his previous writing, but he dispensed with the surrealism, and the layers and layers of wild assets/images. According to Clinton Heylin, not long after his motorcycle accident Dylan told Allen Ginsberg "he was writing shorter lines, with every line meaning something."</p><p>Dylan's own writing became more like the old songs. On Another Self Portrait we get to hear "Went to See the Gypsy" followed by "Little Sadie." A bunch of Dylan songs — "Time Passes Slowly," "Only A Hobo," "Minstrel Boy" and "I Threw It All Away" — are set among public domain songs and more recent covers including "Spanish Is the Loving Tongue," Tom Paxton's "Annie's Going To Sing Her Song," "Railroad Bill" and "House Carpenter."</p><p>Mixing it up as he does, we experience Dylan as part of the American folk tradition. Where once he sat at Woody Guthrie's feet, now he's Woody's equal. "Only A Hobo" is as sturdy a song as "In Search of Little Sadie" (which, by the way, is the better of the two versions of "Little Sadie" that Dylan recorded).</p><p>There are some fun ones here such as "Working On A Guru" which he recorded with George Harrison on guitar, and a version of "Time Passes Slowly" with Dylan and Harrison singing la la la la las. And as I keep listening, other favorites emerge including "This Evening So Soon," which Dylan learned from Bob Gibson, who recorded it by it's real title, "Tell Old Bill," in 1958, and "House Carpenter," which Dylan probably heard performed by Clarence Ashley on Henry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music.</p><p>Another Self Portrait ends with a terrific version of "When I Paint My Masterpiece." It's a solo recording with Dylan accompanying himself on piano. He sings a verse we haven't heard before: "Sailin' around the world in a dirty gondola/ Sure wish I hadn't sold my old Victrola/ Ain't nothin' like that good ol' rock 'n' rolla!"</p><p>Yeah baby!</p><p>When I misheard the lyric of "All the Tired Horses" all those years ago, I guess I misunderstood. Dylan hadn't run out of ideas. He had plenty more songs to write, and write them he did. He's still writing them. And even so late in the game, I wouldn't think of giving up on him. Plenty of people have been wrong about Dylan in the past, as Another Self Portrait conclusively proves.</p><p>— <strong>Michael Goldberg</strong></p><p>It's a little hard for those of us who weren't there to understand the critical reaction to Bob Dylan's 10th album, 1970's Self Portrait. First, let's pause a moment to reflect on the fact that there was a 10th album already at that point, only eight years and a few months after Dylan released his self-titled debut. It was a busy time: he wrote and performed, culture was churning ahead and changing at what was then an unprecedented pace, and some people in the music world thought of him as a sort of leader of a new consciousness. Into this world he released an album called Self Portrait. One imagines seeing that title and expecting something deeper, heavier, some kind of reckoning with what has gone before. But what the listening public got instead was a mish-mash—a few original songs, a few live cuts, lots of covers, and a generally disjointed sound. It seemed slapdash. And it caused Greil Marcus, Dylan's best critic, to begin his review of the double album in Rolling Stone with the words "What is this shit?"</p><p>The latest entry in Dylan's Bootleg Series provides a new opportunity to evaluate the music of this period. Calling this volume Another Self Portrait, including liner notes by Marcus, and offering up a new painting by Bob Dylan as a cover image, is a sly and gutsy move. By most accounts, Dylan was hurt by the initial savaging of Self Portrait, and rushed out its 1970 follow-up, New Morning, to put the album in the rearview as quickly as possible. Later, there was a sense that he wanted to scrub it from his own history. In interviews, Dylan sometimes suggested that Self Portrait was deliberately bad, thrown together as a way to confuse his audience or provoke the media into moving on to someone else so that he could have more privacy in raising his family.</p><p>Though we'll never know exactly what he was thinking, the idea of Dylan making a poor album on purpose never made sense. He worked with too many top-shelf musicians that he cared about, and had friends and colleagues investing too much time, to make something that would embarrass them. It seems more likely that the "intentionally bad" storyline was a defense mechanism for a mysterious artist who did, after all, have a pretty hefty ego and was deeply aware of his own talent. So it's reasonable to conclude that Self Portrait was a strange and all-over-the-place album because, for one reason or another, that's the kind of album Dylan wanted to make at that time.</p><p>Another Self Portrait complicates the narrative. Considering the strength of these alternate takes, demos, stripped-down mixes, and live cuts, it's a little hard to believe that these were the cast-offs from what was perceived to be an artist's worst album. Many of the songs come from the sessions for New Morning, but there were no clear lines between Self Portrait and New Morning sessions in 1969 and 1970. Akin to Neil Young's later method, Dylan at the end of the 60s seems to have been about recording songs first, lots of them, and figuring out how they fit into an album later.</p><p>There was a marked shift in Dylan's music at the end of the 60s. "For sure my lyrics had struck nerves that had never been struck before," he wrote of this time in Chronicles Volume One, "but if my songs were just about the words, then what was Duane Eddy, the great rock'n'roll guitarist, doing recording an album full of instrumental melodies of my songs? Musicians have always known that my songs were more than just words, but most people are not musicians." This passage provides a good framework for understanding the music here. After the word-drunk work he'd created in the mid-60s, and following the mysterious motorcycle accident that laid him up in 1966, his music became simpler and more tuneful. Drawing on his longstanding interest in country music, standards, and any well-constructed song, he began to write and perform songs that felt universal.</p><p>That is where the deep and immense pleasure of this set resides: hearing melodies—some new, some old, some borrowed—performed by a distinctive singer at the height of his powers. The two discs are arranged for flow, with songs roughly split along two lines. Disc one is mostly songs recorded prior to Self Portrait, and is heavy on alternate versions of Dylan tunes and renditions of traditional songs. This "Time Passes Slowly" and the demo of "Went to See the Gypsy" don't supplant better-known takes, but they're different enough in feel and arrangement to make the songs sound new. Other differences, like the alternate version of Nashville Skyline's "I Threw It All Away", are more subtle, and the appeal is in hearing the song tinted by a new setting.</p><p>But the real revelations on the first disc are the unreleased versions of songs from the public domain. It's now accepted that Dylan returned to relevance late in his career when he released two albums of traditional songs, 1992's Good as I Been to You and 1993's World Gone Wrong. The idea being that, in times of trouble, when he's not sure where else to go, the songs Dylan grew up with and studied were there for him. The versions here of "Railroad Bill", "Little Sadie", "Pretty Saro", and the especially powerful "This Evening So Soon" are brilliant showcases of his ability to inhabit old material and make it his own. And they benefit from the generally spare and acoustic sound. Dylan started his career singing traditional folk songs, but his understanding of them eight years later was far richer.</p><p>The second disc is heavier on versions of Dylan originals, with roughly equal smatterings of alternate takes from Self Portrait, New Morning, and Nashville Skyline and live cuts from Dylan and the Band's 1969 Isle of Wight Festival performance. Some of the differences in these versions are striking. The radically altered take of "If Not For You" is performed by Dylan with piano and violin, making the song sound even more tender and vulnerable. There's an alternate version of the funky Nashville Skyline trifle "Country Pie" that, when it breaks down, shows just how in-the-pocket his session pros were when playing live in the studio. There's a version of "New Morning" with a shimmering horn section, giving it an even more buoyant and joyous cast. "Wigwam", the instrumental that was given a bombastic treatment on the Self Portrait album, is heard without orchestration, revealing it as an effortlessly tuneful cowboy tune (the countrypolitan near-instrumental "All the Tired Horses" is heard in a similarly lean version).</p><p>Most of the music is heard in versions with minimal instrumentation: Dylan's guitar, a second guitar adding fills, sometimes piano. Which makes the set oddly cohesive and album-like, ironically more so than the Self Portrait album itself. The outliers in this regard were also some of the stranger inclusions on the original album—the in-concert tracks with the Band. Given that neither Dylan nor the Band played live during this period, the fact that they came together for a massive festival was surely big news, so the set is obviously of historical importance. That is doubly true since by this time the recordings they made together in Woodstock were leaking out on bootlegs like The Great White Wonder, so the desire for Dylan/Band collaborations was high. But plucking random numbers from that Isle of Wight set didn't make much sense on the original album, and it doesn't make much sense on Another Self Portrait either. The deluxe version of this set includes a disc with the full set, which is welcome—it has a ragtag charm, Dylan mostly sings in his Nashville Skyline voice, and the song selection is ace. But there's still a weird distance to it all, a lack of intensity that is hard to put a finger on, with laid back versions of familiar tunes that don't really probe for any new meanings.</p><p>The deluxe version also includes a remastered version of the Self Portrait album proper. Returning to it, it's hard for those of us a generation or two younger to understand the reaction to it not because it paled in comparison to the greatness that came before, because it obviously did. If you've spent any time listening to Bob Dylan's 1960s catalog, you are still trying to wrap your head around the thought that one person wrote the 56 songs on Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, and Nashville Skyline between 1965 and 1969. Self Portrait, next to these records, in that moment, must have seemed like a joke. But later generations hear it differently. We've discovered Self Portrait in the used bins, torrent downloads, and streaming services alongside records like Street Legal, Saved, Empire Burlesque, Down in the Groove, and Under the Red Sky. And in this broader context, it sounds quite good, another weird and sloppy record from a guy who released a lot of them. And hearing it again with all the fantastic music that surrounded it, music that further cements Dylan's Bootleg Series as one of the most important archival projects in modern pop history, it remains a beguiling artifact.</p><p>— <strong>Mark Richardson, Pitchfork</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Dylan | <p>Commonly regarded as the worst album in Bob Dylan's catalog, Dylan is a collection of nine outtakes from the Self Portrait album Columbia assembled after the singer briefly jumped ship for David Geffen's fledgling Asylum Records. Dylan didn't want the record to be released, and it's easy to see why -- the album is a collection of covers that are poorly performed on purpose. Tackling both contemporary writers (Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi," Jerry Jeff Walker's "Mr. Bojangles"), pop songs ("Can't Help Falling in Love," "A Fool Such as I"), and traditional numbers ("The Ballad of Ira Hayes," "Spanish Is the Loving Tongue"), Dylan attempts to sabotage each number, but none of the results is quite so shocking, or funny, as the deconstructions on Self Portrait. While Dylan is indeed a negligible album, it isn't unlistenable -- it has a pleasant pop/rock sheen and Dylan sings in his Nashville Skyline croon. Nevertheless, it adds nothing to his canon, and only die-hard fans with a perverse sense of humor will find the record worth a listen.</p><p>— <strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid | <p>This album was unusual on several counts. For starters, it was a soundtrack (for Sam Peckinpah's movie of the same title), a first venture of its kind for Bob Dylan. For another, it was Dylan's first new LP in three years -- he hadn't been heard from in any form other than the single "George Jackson," his appearance at the Bangladesh benefit concert in 1971, in all of that time. Finally, it came out at an odd moment of juxtaposition in pop culture history, appearing in July 1973 on the same date as the release of Paul McCartney's own first prominent venture into film music, on the Live and Let Die soundtrack (the Beatles bassist had previously scored The Family Way, a British project overlooked amid the frenzy of the Beatles' success). Interestingly, each effort reunited the artist with a significant musician/collaborator from his respective past: McCartney with producer George Martin and Dylan with guitarist Bruce Langhorne, who'd played with him on his early albums up to Bringing It All Back Home, before being supplanted by Mike Bloomfield, et al. But that was where the similarities between the two projects ended -- apart from the title song, Live and Let Die was Martin's project rather than McCartney's, whereas Dylan was all over Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid as a composer, musician, etc. Additionally, whereas McCartney's work was a piece of pure pop-oriented rock in connection with a crowd-pleasing action-fantasy film, Dylan's work comprised an entire LP, and the resulting album was a beautifully simple, sometimes rough-at-the-edges and sometimes gently refined piece of country- and folk-influenced rock, devised to underscore a very serious historical film by one of the movies' great directorial stylists. It was also as strong as any of his recent albums, featuring not just Langhorne but also such luminaries as Booker T. Jones, Roger McGuinn, and Byron Berline. "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" was the obvious hit off the album, and helped drive the sales, but "Billy 1," "Billy 4," and "Billy 7" were good songs, too -- had any of them shown up on bootlegs, they'd have kept the Dylan semiologists and hagiographers busy for years working over them. The instrumentals surrounding them were also worth hearing as manifestations of Dylan's music-making; "Bunkhouse Theme" was downright gorgeous. It was the first time since New Morning, in 1970, that Dylan had released more than five minutes of new music at once, and it was a gift to fans as well as to Peckinpah -- little did anyone realize at the time that it heralded a period of new recording and a national tour (with the Band), along with a brief label switch, and Dylan's greatest period of sustained musical visibility since 1966. This record also proved that Dylan could shoehorn his music within the requirements of a movie score without compromising its content or quality, something that only the Beatles, unique among rock artists, had really managed to do up to that time, and that was in their own movie, A Hard Day's Night. "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" may have been the biggest hit to come out of a Western in at least 21 years, since Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington had given "High Noon" to Tex Ritter to sing in Fred Zinnemann's High Noon in 1952 (and Katy Jurado was in both movies), and he'd also outdone Ritter on two counts, writing the music -- a full score, to boot -- and getting a cameo appearance in the film. The album was later kind of overlooked and neglected in the wake of the tour that followed and the imposing musical attributes of, say, Blood on the Tracks and Desire, but heard on its own terms it holds up 30-plus years later.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Before The Flood | <p>Bob Dylan and the Band both needed the celebrated reunion tour of 1974, since Dylan's fortunes had been floundering since Self Portrait and the Band stumbled with 1971's Cahoots. The tour, with its attendant publicity, definitely returned both artists to center stage, and it definitely succeeded, breaking box office records and earning great reviews. Before the Flood, a double-album souvenir of the tour, suggests that these were generally dynamic shows, but not because they were reveling in the past, but because Dylan was fighting the nostalgia of his audience -- nostalgia, it must be noted, that was promoted as the very reason behind these shows. Yet that's what gives this music such kick -- Dylan reworks, rearranges, reinterprets these songs in ways that are still disarming, years after its initial release. He could only have performed interpretations this radical with a group as sympathetic, knowing of his traits as the band, whose own recordings here are respites from the storm. And this is a storm -- the sound of a great rocker, surprising his band and audience by tearing through his greatest songs in a manner that might not be comforting, but it guarantees it to be one of the best live albums of its time. Ever, maybe.</p>— <b>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</b> |
| Bob Dylan | Planet Waves | <p>Reteaming with the Band, Bob Dylan winds up with an album that recalls New Morning more than The Basement Tapes, since Planet Waves is given to a relaxed intimate tone -- all the more appropriate for a collection of modest songs about domestic life. As such, it may seem a little anticlimactic since it has none of the wildness of the best Dylan and Band music of the '60s -- just an approximation of the homespun rusticness. Considering that the record was knocked out in the course of three days, its unassuming nature shouldn't be a surprise, and sometimes it's as much a flaw as a virtue, since there are several cuts that float into the ether. Still, it is a virtue in places, as there are moments -- "On a Night Like This," "Something There Is About You," the lovely "Forever Young" -- where it just gels, almost making the diffuse nature of the rest of the record acceptable.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | St Valentines Day Massacre | |
| Bob Dylan | Blood On The Tracks | <p>Following on the heels of an album where he repudiated his past with his greatest backing band, Blood on the Tracks finds Bob Dylan, in a way, retreating to the past, recording a largely quiet, acoustic-based album. But this is hardly nostalgia -- this is the sound of an artist returning to his strengths, what feels most familiar, as he accepts a traumatic situation, namely the breakdown of his marriage. This is an album alternately bitter, sorrowful, regretful, and peaceful, easily the closest he ever came to wearing his emotions on his sleeve. That's not to say that it's an explicitly confessional record, since many songs are riddles or allegories, yet the warmth of the music makes it feel that way. The original version of the album was even quieter -- first takes of "Idiot Wind" and "Tangled Up in Blue," available on The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3, are hushed and quiet (excised verses are quoted in the liner notes, but not heard on the record) -- but Blood on the Tracks remains an intimate, revealing affair since these harsher takes let his anger surface the way his sadness does elsewhere. As such, it's an affecting, unbearably poignant record, not because it's a glimpse into his soul, but because the songs are remarkably clear-eyed and sentimental, lovely and melancholy at once. And, in a way, it's best that he was backed with studio musicians here, since the professional, understated backing lets the songs and emotion stand at the forefront. Dylan made albums more influential than this, but he never made one better.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p><hr/><p>One doesn't have to be a broken-hearted straight male (or even a Nobel Prize voter) to fall in love with Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, but it might help. Filled with open-ended and often gender-specific pronouns, the yous, hers, hes, shes, and theys remain unnamed on all but one of the 10 songs on the moody 1975 epic, each a glowing invitation for listeners to fill in the blanks with their own nearest available emotional devastations. Often referred to as Dylan's "breakup album," it's likewise become just that for many listeners, both expressing and absorbing great aloneness. Dylan himself professed confusion about the album's popularity. "It's hard for me to relate to that," he said the year Blood on the Tracks was released. "I mean, people enjoying that kind of pain."</p><p>But as plenty have pointed out in the wake of Dylan's Nobel for Literature, his music is about far more than just his lyrics, and Blood on the Tracks is a prime example of just what that more constitutes. Beyond the emotional wreckage, Blood on the Tracks might be Dylan's most welcoming LP, its music projecting an undeniable warmth. The disc-opening "Tangled Up in Blue" uncorks the feels via an experimental narrative that fights conventional linearity, but the reasons to keep listening are contained in the first 11 seconds of forward motion before Dylan's voice enters. Only after that do lyrics even matter, and (on Blood on the Tracks, anyway) he is pretty fantastic at both.</p><p>Blood on the Tracks is pleasing and complete enough to visit repeatedly, until the syllables become words, the words resolve into meanings, and all of it becomes internalized, a space accessible even without the presence of the album. Perhaps the least dated of Dylan's recordings, there is a nakedness to everything. Untainted by the politics and cool of the '60s or the gated drums and overdubbed productions of the '80s, Blood on the Tracks hits with the same immediacy in the 21st century as it did in 1975.</p><p>Just as much as Pink Floyd or any other mid-'70s LP-minded artist, Dylan uses the studio to create and sustain a mood on Blood on the Tracks, and this mood is what survives. Drawing from two sets of sessions and at least three configurations of not-fully-identified musicians to capture a singular batch of songs, the album is a full package of writing, performance, and atmosphere. Withdrawing an early version of the album on the eve of release, musicians from sessions in New York disappeared into the credit of "Eric Weissberg and Deliverance," and musicians recorded later in Minneapolis received no credit at all. Though he received no separate title on the album itself, it is also the first album on which Dylan himself served as sole producer, assembling musicians on his own, sometimes to confusing effect. While staying within the parameters of folk-rock, Dylan finds a rich array of approaches, moving between the vivid brightness of "Tangled Up in Blue" and "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go," the soft-voiced late-night guitar/bass duets of "Shelter From the Storm" and "Buckets of Rain," and the pained autumnal crispness of "Idiot Wind."</p><p>"Nobody sings Dylan like Dylan" ran one of Columbia Records' '60s advertising campaigns, but by the early '70s consumers were deluged with multiple generations of New Dylans, each expanding from territory that once belonged almost exclusively to Dylan, from Joni Mitchell to Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen to Patti Smith. After a few years in the wilderness, when Dylan recorded for David Geffen's Asylum Records (and Columbia released Dylan, scraping up unissued sessions without his consent), Blood on the Tracks might be seen as Dylan's own assertion that nobody wrote Dylan like Dylan, either. For fans at the time, it was a revelation, both a few notches less cryptic than his '60s surrealism, but no less mystical, folding in techniques of his old finger-pointin' ("Idiot Wind"), blues-strummin' ("Meet Me in the Morning"), vision-havin' ("Shelter From the Storm"), and story-tellin' ("Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts") self, all while tapping into powerful new realms of vulnerability.</p><p>As a writer, Dylan had been through about three lightly overlapping phases over the previous 15 years—young and Woody (1960-1963), young and visionary (1964-1968), and young and happy (1969-1973), and Blood on the Tracks built on them while promising something more. Officially retired and raising children during the early '70s, Dylan had deliberately downshifted into a less complex lyric style beginning with 1969's Nashville Skyline, in part hoping to shake some of the obsessive global audience he'd attracted. New Morning and other country-pop sessions from the period found Dylan playing with some of the brighter textures he would employ on Blood on the Tracks, but his reluctance to write in the symbolism-laden voice of his earliest years soon resulted in a period when he "more or less had amnesia," as he later told an interviewer. Returning to active songwriting in 1973 and the road in 1974 with the Band for Planet Waves, many of his latest songs seemed to lack the all-seeing perspective of his earlier work.</p><p>Dylan would say Blood on the Tracks was influenced by lecture classes he took with painter Norman Raeben in New York in early 1974. "You've got yesterday, today, and tomorrow all in the same room," he said of the new lyric writing approach that resulted. Heard most vividly in the long-arc narratives of "Tangled Up in Blue" and "Simple Twist of Fate," verses and lines present assets/images like shuffled postcards connected by what Dylan referred to as a "code." It is here that thinking of Blood on the Tracks as a "breakup album" becomes reductive, missing out on much of what the collection of songs has to offer, the "breakup" as much a concept as the bandshell concert loosely framing Sgt. Pepper's. Just as much as relationships are about more than their breakups, breakup albums are about more than their relationships.</p><p>Though the disintegration of Dylan's marriage might easily be spotted in nearly every song on the album, there are also meditations on the ineffable passage of time ("Tangled Up in Blue"), a transitory love affair in the present tense ("You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go") and media jackyldom and other bummers ("Idiot Wind"). For that matter, a full third of the LP's second side is concerned with "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts," a nine-minute 16-verse ballad that bucks the album's signature themes of time regained, implacable loves, and unnamed names. Though remaining convincingly jaunty throughout with a light melody that catches the details in forensic clarity, its drawn-out story is a chore to decipher. Unlike the ambient emotional narratives of the rest of the album, the linear ballad requires a full and present attention, a reminder of one of the ways that music consumption is different than reading. Reportedly once considered for a film adaptation, the screen may've suited its stage-directed characters better than folk-rock. Further separating it from the rest, the blood spilled on this particular track doesn't seem to be Dylan's own, detracting from the album's bigger picture and only underscoring the unifying power of the other nine songs.</p><p>Drawing on a range of songwriting tricks (including an open "E" tuning that assures that very few will play Dylan like Dylan, either), Blood on the Tracks emphasizes a feeling of raw expression. Singing live in the studio (with the exception of the overdubbed "Meet Me in the Morning"), Dylan placed his usual focus on capturing in-the-moment performances. And though his reputation for studio and onstage spontaneity is well-deserved, Blood on the Tracks also presents songs that he had spent almost all of 1974 writing and reworking. Personal, perhaps, the songs easily transcend their would-be biographies. If Dylan's attitudes towards his partners sometimes stand out as patronizing—"You're a Big Girl Now" acting as an equally infantilizing bookend to 1966's "Just Like a Woman"—they reveal more about the nature of hurt than anything useful about the songwriter.</p><p>One glimpse into the making of the album comes through the version that Dylan very nearly released, scrapping it at the last moment, after jackets and test pressings had already been made. Playing an advance copy at a family gathering in Minnesota in over the holidays, Dylan—at the behest of his brother—decided he wanted a brighter sound, less of a downer. Flexing his superstar muscle and anticipating Neil Young, Kanye West, and others, he had the album recalled, pulling together a band of local folkies in the days after Christmas 1974 to rerecord half of the songs. The New York acetate (most recently offered in 2015 for $12,000) is all late night atmospherics, mostly just Dylan and bassist Tony Brown, the sound of the former's coat-buttons brushing against his guitar strings. Though tracks have come out via various box sets, bootlegs of the New York sessions—sourced warmly from the acetate—are every bit as magical as the final product, a classic all its own, minus a clunkier "Lily, Rosemary, the Jack of Hearts."</p><p>In Minneapolis, Dylan brightened up the sound (changing keys on "Tangled Up in Blue," striking a lighter keynote) and toned down some of the crueler lyrics (especially on "If You See Her, Say Hello"). If atmosphere was lost (and it was, especially without the pedal steel-drenched "You're A Big Girl Now"), then accessibility was gained. Charting at #1 on its January 1975 release, Blood on the Tracks is arguably the last Dylan album on which a majority of the songs became standards of their own, part of the invisible canon shared at coffee houses, college campuses, or anywhere bright-eyed young pickers might congregate. In that way, it is also maybe Dylan's last album of originals to qualify as "folk music" in both senses of the phrase: the popular genre defined by the presence of idioms and acoustic instruments, but also the great shared body of songs with lives and language that exist apart from their studio recordings and original performers. With the Byrds and many others achieving their own hits with his tunes and Dylan himself often circulating unrecorded work via folk music zines and songwriting demos, this had long been the expected fate of Dylan's songs.</p><p>Imagining Dylan as a simple songwriter, the template of Blood on the Tracks—sad boy with an acoustic guitar and a handful of chords—might seem basic, until one tries to replicate anything about it, or even just strum the songs at home. Blood on the Tracks lives alone in Dylan's catalog, that open "E" tuning (which Dylan refused to explain to his musicians) often preventing the songs from sounding exactly right in the hands of others. It lives on in its own peculiar way. Dylan has seemed to keep "Tangled Up In Blue" in particular to himself, rewriting the song several times, both casually (playing fast and loose with the pronouns), and more formally, including a near-total rework released on 1984's Real Live. One of the few older songs Dylan has performed consistently in recent years, even newer verses have emerged over the past half-decade. Nobody covers Dylan like Dylan either, apparently.</p><p>Though the albums on either side of Blood on the Tracks both made it to #1 and contained hints of the same songwriting territory, via Planet Waves' "Going, Going, Gone" and Desire's "Sara," especially, they were only just hints. Some of Dylan's Blood on the Tracks persona remained visible via the two legs of the Rolling Thunder Revue, but the original open tuning never returned, and Dylan would soon bury his vulnerability, too. The surrealism would resurface in full force for 1978's Street-Legal, but the musical appeal didn't. It took another few decades for Dylan even to return to the warm string-band sound of Blood on the Tracks, coming closest on his two 21st century albums of standards, Shadows in the Night and Fallen Angels. For a restless musician, it was a combination of factors that only came together once, locking together to transmit themselves through the years.</p><p>Even roughly 40 years later, Blood on the Tracks broadcasts hurt and longing so boldly it has become a stand-in, the type of shorthand a song licensor would deploy at the push of a button if it wasn't so expensive and maybe too predictable. It manages a balance of old pain resolved and wounds so fresh they seem as if they might never heal, brutal personal assessment and doubt, unnecessary cruelties and real-time self-flagellation. While Blood on the Tracks can be a constant companion to listeners during periods of initial discovery, it (and Dylan's whole catalog) has also become something to be lived with over a long period and put away for special occasions. Functioning like a literal album, the density of the passed time and pressed memories in "Tangled Up in Blue" grow richer with each passing year. As with the narratives of the songs themselves, Blood on the Tracks continues to absorb yesterday, today, and tomorrow, promising it can sustain new listeners as much as new meanings, should it ever have to be called back into service.</p><p>—<strong>Jesse Jarnow, Pitchfork</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Before The Flood | <p>Bob Dylan and the Band both needed the celebrated reunion tour of 1974, since Dylan's fortunes had been floundering since Self Portrait and the Band stumbled with 1971's Cahoots. The tour, with its attendant publicity, definitely returned both artists to center stage, and it definitely succeeded, breaking box office records and earning great reviews. Before the Flood, a double-album souvenir of the tour, suggests that these were generally dynamic shows, but not because they were reveling in the past, but because Dylan was fighting the nostalgia of his audience -- nostalgia, it must be noted, that was promoted as the very reason behind these shows. Yet that's what gives this music such kick -- Dylan reworks, rearranges, reinterprets these songs in ways that are still disarming, years after its initial release. He could only have performed interpretations this radical with a group as sympathetic, knowing of his traits as the band, whose own recordings here are respites from the storm. And this is a storm -- the sound of a great rocker, surprising his band and audience by tearing through his greatest songs in a manner that might not be comforting, but it guarantees it to be one of the best live albums of its time. Ever, maybe.</p>— <b>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</b> |
| Bob Dylan | Planet Waves | <p>Back to the starting point! The kickoff, Hebrew letters on the wall, Victor Hugo's house in Paris, NYC in early autumn, leaves flying in the park, the clock strikes eight. Bong -- I dropped a double brandy & tried to recall the events... beer halls & pin balls, polkabands, bar bwire & thrashing clowns, objects, headwinds& snowstorms, family outings with strangers -- Furious gals with garters & smeared lips on bar stools that stank from sweating pussy -- doing the Hula -- perfect priests in overhauls, glassy eyed insomnia! Space guys off duty with big dicks & duck tails all wired up & voting for Eisenhower, waving flags & jumping off fire engines, getting killed on motorcycles whatever -- we sensedeach other beneath the mask, pitched a tent in the street & joined the traveling circus, love at first sight! History became alive! The sideshow took over -- what a sight! the threshold of the modern Bomb, Temples of the Pawnee, the cowboy saint, the Arapahoe, snapshots of Apache poets searching thru the ruins for a glimpse of Buddha -- I lit out for parts unknown. Found Jacob's ladder up against an adobe wall & bought a serpent from a passingangel -- Yeah the ole days are gone forever and the new ones aren't far behind, the laughter is fading away, echoes of a stampof energy vampires in the bone world going Wild! Drinking the blood of innocent people, Innocent lambs! The wretched of the earth! My brothers of the flood, cities of the flesh -- Milwaukee, Ann...Arbor, Chicago, Bismark, South...Dakota, Duluth -- where Baudelaire lived & Goya cashed in his chips. Where Joshua brought the house down! From there it was straight up -- a little jolt ofMexico, and some good luck, & more brandy & the teeth of a lion& a compass</p><hr /><p>Reteaming with the Band, Bob Dylan winds up with an album that recalls New Morning more than The Basement Tapes, since Planet Waves is given to a relaxed intimate tone -- all the more appropriate for a collection of modest songs about domestic life. As such, it may seem a little anticlimactic since it has none of the wildness of the best Dylan and Band music of the '60s -- just an approximation of the homespun rusticness. Considering that the record was knocked out in the course of three days, its unassuming nature shouldn't be a surprise, and sometimes it's as much a flaw as a virtue, since there are several cuts that float into the ether. Still, it is a virtue in places, as there are moments -- "On a Night Like This," "Something There Is About You," the lovely "Forever Young" -- where it just gels, almost making the diffuse nature of the rest of the record acceptable.</p>— <b>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</b> |
| Bob Dylan | Blood On The Tracks - New York Sessions | <P>This incredible CD is the original New York session recordings taken directly from a mint condition test pressing of the intended release. While most tracks are the actual released versions, four on this CD were thrown away in favor of the Minneapolis versions. While the official BOTT is an impossibly ludicrous standard of comparison for non-released material.... this lone CD is a contender. While we are generally not tolerant of pirated material, as long as one owns the official BOTT, this CD can be forgiven. Hearing all tracks together as they were intended is pure magic. Listen in amazement to what, but for a simple twist of fate, would have been the official CBS release. Packaged very nicely with original graphics, period photos, and a fold out with the award winning Pete Hamill essay from the original back cover. Read essay For this release, the label took not only the name of the studio, but the logo as well. The A&R on the back is the same logo that appears on the test pressing from which this material was taken. The disc itself is a mock up of an A&R test press label. Also released in 2001 by OMR. <BR></P><P><HR></P><P><FONT color=#660000><BR>Pete Hamill essay from the original back cover of Blood On The Tracks</FONT> <BR><FONT color=#660000></FONT> </P><P>In the end, the plague touched us all. It was not confined to the Oran of Camus. No. It turned up again in America, breeding in-a-compost of greed and uselessness and murder, in those places where statesmen and generals stash the bodies of the forever young. The plague ran in the blood of men in sharkskin suits, who ran for President promising life and delivering death. The infected young men machine-gunned babies in Asian ditches; they marshalled metal death through the mighty clouds, up above God's green earth, released it in silent streams, and moved on, while the hospitals exploded and green fields were churned to mud. <P>And here at home, something died. The bacillus moved among us, slaying that old America where the immigrants lit a million dreams in the shadows of the bridges, killing the great brawling country of barnstormers and wobblies and home-run hitters, the place of Betty Grable and Carl Furillo and heavyweight champions of the world. And through the fog of the plague, most art withered into journalism. Painters lift the easel to scrawl their innocence on walls and manifestos. Symphonies died on crowded roads. Novels served as furnished rooms for ideology. <P>And as the evidence piled up, as the rock was pushed back to reveal the worms, many retreated into that past that never was, the place of balcony dreams in Loew's Met, fair women and honorable men, where we browned ourselves in the Creamsicle summers, only faintly hearing the young men march to the troopships, while Jo Stafford gladly promised her fidelity. Poor America. Tossed on a pilgrim tide. Land where the poets died. <P>Except for Dylan. <P>He had remained, in front of us, or writing from the north country, and remained true. He was not the only one, of course; he is not the only one now. But of all the poets, Dylan is the one who has most clearly taken the rolled sea and put it in a glass. <P>Early on, he warned us, he gave many of us voice, he told us about the hard rain that was going to fall, and how it would carry plague. In the teargas in 1968 Chicago, they hurled Dylan at the walls of the great hotels, where the infected drew the blinds, and their butlers ordered up the bayonets. Most of them are gone now. Dylan remains. <P>So forget the clenched young scholars who analyze his rhymes into dust. Remember that he gave us voice, When our innocence died forever, Bob Dylan made that moment into art. The wonder is that he survived. <P>That is no small thing. We live in the smoky landscape now, as the exhausted troops seek the roads home. The signposts have been smashed; the maps are blurred. There is no politician anywhere who can move anyone to hope; the plague recedes, but it is not dead, and the statesmen are as irrelevant as the tarnished statues in the public parks. We live with a callous on the heart. Only the artists can remove it. Only the artists can help the poor land again to feel. <P>And here is Dylan, bringing feeling back home. In this album, he is as personal and as universal as Yeats or Blake; speaking for himself, risking that dangerous opening of the veins, he speaks for us all. The words, the music, the tones of voice speak of regret, melancholy, a sense of inevitable farewell, mixed with sly humor, some rage, and a sense of simple joy. They are the poems of a survivor. The warning voice of the innocent boy is no longer here, because Dylan has chosen not to remain a boy. It is not his voice that has grown richer, stronger, more certain; it is Dylan himself. And his poetry, his troubadour's traveling art, seems to me to be more meaningful than ever. I thought, listening to these songs, of the words of Yeats, walker of the roads of Ireland: "We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." <P>Dylan is now looking at the quarrel of the self. The crowds have moved back off the stage of history; we are left with the solitary human, a single hair on the skin of the earth. Dylan speaks now for that single hair. <P>If you see her, <BR>Say hello. <BR>She might be in Tangiers...* <P>So begins one of these poems, as light as a slide on ice, and as dangerous. Dylan doesn't fall in. Instead, he tells us the essentials; a woman once lived, gone off, vanished into the wild places of the earth, still loved. <P>If you're makin' love to her, <BR>Kiss her for the kid. <BR>Who always has respected her, <BR>for doin' what she did...* <P>It is a simple love song, of course, which is the proper territory of poets, but is about love filled with honor, and a kind of dignity, the generosity that so few people can summon when another has become a parenthesis in a life. That song, and some of the other love poems in this collection, seem to me absolutely right, in this moment at the end of wars, as all of us, old, young, middle-aged, men and women, are searching for some simple things to believe in. Dylan here tips his hat to Rimbaud and Verlaine, knowing all about the seasons in hell, but he insists on his right to speak of love, that human emotion that still exists, in Faulkner's phrase, in spite of, not because. <P>And yes, there is humor here too, a small grin pasted over the hurt, delivered almost casually, as if the poet could control the chaos of feeling with a few simply chosen words: <P>Life is sad <BR>Life is a bust. <BR>All ya can do. <BR>Is do what you must. <BR>You do what you must do, <BR>And ya do it will. <BR>I'll do it for you, <BR>Ah, honey baby, can't ya tell?** <P>A simple song. Not Dante's Inferno, and not intended to be. But a song which conjures up the American road, all the busted dreams of open places, boxcars, the Big Dipper pricking the velvet night. And it made me think of Ginsberg and Corso and Ferlinghetti, and most of all, Kerouac, racing Deam Mariarty across the country in the Fifties, embracing wind and night, passing Huck Finn on the riverbanks, bouncing against the Coast, and heading back again, with Kerouac dreaming his songs of the railroad earth. Music drove them; they always knew they were near New York when they picked up Symphony Sid on the radio. In San Francisco they declared a Renaissance and read poetry to jazz, trying to make Mallarme's dream flourish in the soil of America. They failed, as artist generally do, but in some ways Dylan has kept their promise. <P>Now he has moved past them, driving harder into self. Listen to "Idiot Wind." It is a hard, cold-blooded poem about the survivor's anger, as personal as anything ever committed to a record. And yet is can also stand as the anthem for all who feel invaded, handled, bottled, packaged; all who spent themselves in combat with the plague; all who ever walked into the knives of humiliation or hatred. The idiot wind trivialized lives into gossip, celebrates fad and fashion, glorifies the dismal glitter of celebrity. Its products live on the covers of magazines, in all of television, if the poisoned air and dead grey lakes. But most of all, it blows through the human heart. Dylan knows that such a wind is the deadliest enemy of art. And when the artists die, we all die with them. <P>Or listen to the long narrative poem called "Lily, Rosemary And The Jack of Hearts." It should not be reduced to notes, or taken out of context; it should be experienced in full. The compression of story is masterful, but its real wonder is in the spaces, in what the artist left out of his painting. To me, that has always been the key to Dylan's art. To state things plainly is the function of journalism; but Dylan sings a more fugitive song: allusive, symbolic, full of imagery and ellipses, and by leaving things out, he allows us the grand privilege of creating along with him. His song becomes our song because we live in those spaces. If we listen, if we work at it, we fill up the mystery, we expand and inhabit the work of art. It is the most democratic form of creation. <P>Totalitarian art tells us what to feel. Dylan's art feels, and invites us to join him. <P>That quality is in all the work in this collection, the long, major works, the casual drawings and etchings. There are some who attack Dylan because he will not rewrite "Like a Rolling Stone" or "Gates of Eden." They are fools because they are cheating themselves of a shot at wonder. Every artist owns a vision of the world, and he shouts his protest when he sees evil mangling that vision. But he must also tell us the vision. Now we are getting Dylan's vision, rich and loamy, against which the world moved so darkly. To enter that envisioned world, is like plunging deep into a mountain pool, where the rocks are clear and smooth at the bottom. <P>So forget the Dylan whose image was eaten at by the mongers of the idiot wind. Don't mistake him for Isaiah, or a magazine cover, or a leader of guitar armies. He is only a troubadour, blood brother of Villon, a son of Provence, and he has survived the plague. Look: he has just walked into the courtyard, padding across the flagstones, strumming a guitar. The words are about "flowers on the hillside bloomin' crazy/Crickets talkin' back and forth in rhyme..." A girl, red-haired and melancholy, begins to smile. Listen: the poet sings to all of us: <P>But I'll see you in the sky above, <BR>In the tall grass, <BR>In the ones I love. <BR>You're gonna make me lonesome when you go.*** <BR>-- Pete Hamill, New York, 1974 <BR> <P>*from "If You See Her, Say Hello," ©1974 Ram's Horn Music. Used by Permission. All rights reserved. <BR>**from "Buckets of Rain," ©1974 Ram's Horn Music. Used by Permission. All rights reserved. <BR>***from "You're Gonna Make Me Lonseome When You Go," ©1974 Ram's Horn Music. Used by Permission. All rights reserved. <BR> </P> |
| Bob Dylan | Live 1975 | <p>The biggest criticism of The Bootleg Series, Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975 -- the third installment in Columbia/Legacy's excavation of the exhaustive Bob Dylan vaults (the first was a box set, containing three volumes) -- is that it's a compilation of highlights from his Rolling Thunder Revue of 1975, one that doesn't set out to replicate a set list but instead offers two discs and 22 tracks from this fabled tour. Apart from that, there's very little to complain about on this superlative set, which offers the first official release of Rolling Thunder material. Yes, this had been heavily bootlegged over the decades, plus it was documented on Dylan's notoriously unwatchable film Renaldo & Clara and there was Hard Rain, a collection culled from the post-Thunder 1976 tour that was similar but sour and nowhere near as good the 1975 material, as this superb set illustrates. Hearing this is a revelation, even for serious Dylan watchers -- those so serious to own several bootlegs, even a full shelf of Dylan, but not as obsessive as those who track Bob's every move -- and those who aren't as dedicated, yet still harbor a serious interest, will find this equally absorbing, since this is simply tremendous. It has become legend that Dylan will change arrangements and switch lyrics at the drop of a hat, which was evident on his jaunt with the Band in 1974, preserved for posterity on Before the Flood. Even so, he's looser, wilder, and more alive in this careening, thrilling album, a record where "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" gallops along as if it were "Leopard Skin Pill-Box Hat." As that suggests, the wildest thing about this is the electric cuts, where an unwieldy band turns out an overpowering sound that sounds inevitable, as if it's the only way these songs could be played, even when you've heard these songs countless times before in other arrangements. The acoustic moments don't pack the same charge, nor do they contain many of his duets with Joan Baez, yet they're intimate, passionate versions of the songs. In fact, there's not a bad moment here, and if it doesn't replicate the Rolling Thunder tour list to the letter, it does indeed capture the essence of this legendary stint, which is why it's necessary for every serious fan.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Desire | <p>If Blood on the Tracks was an unapologetically intimate affair, Desire is unwieldy and messy, the deliberate work of a collective. And while Bob Dylan directly addresses his crumbling relationship with his wife, Sara, on the final track, Desire is hardly as personal as its predecessor, finding Dylan returning to topical songwriting and folk tales for the core of the record. It's all over the map, as far as songwriting goes, and so is it musically, capturing Dylan at the beginning of the Rolling Thunder Revue era, which was more notable for its chaos than its music. And, so it's only fitting that Desire fits that description as well, as it careens between surging folk-rock, Mideastern dirges, skipping pop, and epic narratives. It's little surprise that Desire doesn't quite gel, yet it retains its own character -- really, there's no other place where Dylan tried as many different styles, as many weird detours, as he does here. And, there's something to be said for its rambling, sprawling character, which has a charm of its own. Even so, the record would have been assisted by a more consistent set of songs; there are some masterpieces here, though: "Hurricane" is the best-known, but the effervescent "Mozambique" is Dylan at his breeziest, "Sara" at his most nakedly emotional, and "Isis" is one of his very best songs of the '70s, a hypnotic, contemporized spin on a classic fable. This may not add up to a masterpiece, but it does result in one of his most fascinating records of the '70s and '80s -- more intriguing, lyrically and musically, than most of his latter-day affairs.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Desire | <p>If Blood on the Tracks was an unapologetically intimate affair, Desire is unwieldy and messy, the deliberate work of a collective. And while Bob Dylan directly addresses his crumbling relationship with his wife, Sara, on the final track, Desire is hardly as personal as its predecessor, finding Dylan returning to topical songwriting and folk tales for the core of the record. It's all over the map, as far as songwriting goes, and so is it musically, capturing Dylan at the beginning of the Rolling Thunder Revue era, which was more notable for its chaos than its music. And, so it's only fitting that Desire fits that description as well, as it careens between surging folk-rock, Mideastern dirges, skipping pop, and epic narratives. It's little surprise that Desire doesn't quite gel, yet it retains its own character -- really, there's no other place where Dylan tried as many different styles, as many weird detours, as he does here. And, there's something to be said for its rambling, sprawling character, which has a charm of its own. Even so, the record would have been assisted by a more consistent set of songs; there are some masterpieces here, though: "Hurricane" is the best-known, but the effervescent "Mozambique" is Dylan at his breeziest, "Sara" at his most nakedly emotional, and "Isis" is one of his very best songs of the '70s, a hypnotic, contemporized spin on a classic fable. This may not add up to a masterpiece, but it does result in one of his most fascinating records of the '70s and '80s -- more intriguing, lyrically and musically, than most of his latter-day affairs.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Hard Rain | <p>Hard Rain is a snapshot of Bob Dylan's fabled Rolling Thunder Revue, a traveling circus that was more notable for its excess and character than the music. There are some new interpretations along the lines of what appeared on Before the Flood. A few of the new versions hit home and Dylan is generally spirited throughout.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Hard Rain | <p>Hard Rain is a snapshot of Bob Dylan's fabled Rolling Thunder Revue, a traveling circus that was more notable for its excess and character than the music. There are some new interpretations along the lines of what appeared on Before the Flood. A few of the new versions hit home and Dylan is generally spirited throughout.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Street Legal | <p>Arriving after the twin peaks of Blood on the Tracks and Desire, Street Legal seemed like a disappointment upon its 1978 release, and it still seems a little subpar years after its release. Perhaps that's because Bob Dylan was uncertain himself, not just writing a set of songs with no connecting themes, but replacing the sprawl of the Rolling Thunder Revue with a slick, professional big band, featuring a horn section and several backing vocalists. The interesting thing about this is that the music and slick production don't jibe with the songs, which are as dense as anything Dylan had written since before his motorcycle accident. So, Street Legal becomes an interesting dichotomy, filled with songs that deserve close attention but recorded in arrangements that discourage such listening. As such, Street Legal is fascinating just for that reason -- in another setting, these are songs that would have been hailed as near-masterpieces, but covered in gloss, they seem strange. Consequentially, it's not surprising that there are factions of Dylanphiles that find this worth the time, while just as many consider it a missed opportunity.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
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