Reviews – Page 62 – Rock Salted

Suicide – Suicide

Suicide – Suicide Red Star RS 1 (1977)

Displaying a very technical glee, inanimate synthesizers churn out their obvious products while hands and mouths force the onslaught. Suicide could provoke almost any audience to drop all the piss they sloshed in with. A Suicide show likely and intentionally would cause a riot (one documented on the flexidisc 23 Minutes Over Brussels). Hearing them live used involve real mortal danger. Lester Bangs once quoted Alan Vega shouting back at the audience, “What’re you all fuckin’ booin’ for? You’re all gonna die.” The grand mess this suggests wasn’t one Suicide created but one they were cleaning up. Like the poet Arthur Rimbaud suggested, Suicide used pain to become voyants.

This was Suicide’s first album (as opposed to their second album of the same title), recorded in three hours plus mixing time. They had already been performing occasionally over the years in New York. Around ’77 they were fixtures at Max’s Kansas City and the Mercer Arts Center, with some appearances at the “highbrow” CBGB’s. Their influence reached countless bands. Knockoffs may have been more popular, but Suicide was always by far the best.

Martin Rev and Alan Vega, together known as the band/performance art outfit Suicide, had an aggressive, uncompromising attitude. The synthetic sounds mapped personal detours from free jazz and visual arts. Purified angst dribbled out of their few musical machines, collectively dubbed “instrument”. No guitars.

This minimalist approach can evoke a rockabilly snarl in a pristine conceptual stasis with each outbust from Vega. Every delicate melodic statement has a force its own. The power becomes obvious early with “Ghost Rider” and “Rocket USA.” The songs put Rev and Vega’s elegant violence provocatively up front. “Cheree” and “Girl” have Vega’s moaning tuned to a frequency probably outlawed in most states.

Rev and Vega were linked to the streets. That put them on the level of New Yorkers like Thelonious Monk. While committed entirely to sophisticated pursuits, the proximity of the hunger and cold kept their music visceral.

“Frankie Teardrop” was the duo’s signature tune. A song more frightening than a dry read of Hubert Selby, Jr. This contrasts with distracting sideshow tactics. Suicide weren’t con men since they did not lie. They held an essence. Attuning ears to that essence beautifully reveals the solid values driving them. The clarity of their music was necessary to keep it true. Intricacy remained, undiluted.

Suicide anticipate a primitive future more glorious the convoluted one still known today. They make sure “punk” is always associated with confrontation. Suicide clears enough space to remember the forgotten innate beauties relegated to rediscovery among fetid piles of documents, glass, and flesh. Suicide seemed to enter a trance state to convey this from their end. A little bloodshed on the other end is inevitable. They teach fearless listening. It is incalculably more dangerous not to listen.

Suicide is as freaky as it has to be. It is also very cool and surprisingly easy to like. Apparently venom never spoils.

Dolly Parton – Coat of Many Colors

Dolly Parton – Coat of Many Colors RCA Victor LSP 4603 (1971)

Dolly’s big breakthrough as a solo act was Coat of Many Colors, with the opening three songs each becoming hits. However, the album as a whole, while often regarded as finding her at an artistic peak, is deeply contradicted. Her former duet partner Porter Wagoner wrote three of the songs, and they are largely the worst things here, from the creepy swingers song “If I Lose My Mind” to the drab religious tune “The Mystery of the Mystery” they have no heart and simply scrape around for anything that will appeal to a target demographic. The big surprise, though, is Dolly’s songwriting. “My Blue Tears” and “Here I Am” are pretty compelling, with clear lineage to Nashville country music of old but also warm, modern electric instrumentation that slides gracefully into the then-burgeoning singer-songwriter movement on the U.S. West Coast. There aren’t any great surprises in the performances, but they all easily make use of the best contemporary trends with an open mind.

With the title track, it is worth contrasting Dolly to another big country star of the day: Loretta Lynn. Lynn was a bold songwriter, who had a hit in 1970 with “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” an autobiographical song about growing up in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky. Dolly’s song is about compensating for the shame and deprivation of poverty with family ties, while Lynn’s is more about the dignity of subsistence labor. The perspective in Dolly’s song is of a clash of different value systems, one based on monetary wealth (that would buy a new, professionally made coat) and self-improvised utility (making a coat from rags, for lack of alternatives). But while she sings about not understanding why others don’t recognize the “love” that went into making the homemade “coat of many colors,” there is a conceit in pleading for the listener to place what she had above what she lacked, by tacitly accepting the value system of the kids who laughed at the poverty her homemade clothing symbolized. She sings, “One is only poor only if you choose to be,” the classic trope that everything in the world is purely a matter of individual choice rather than choice positioned in a context of constraints that might not be subject to an individual’s control. Lynn’s song envisions something beyond a value system that denigrates the work of a Kentucky coal miner to support a family, and grapples with the concrete ways her family addressed the hardships of poverty. “Coal Miner’s Daughter” looks back on the past, and finds meaning (truth) in what survived (in memories) and lead to where she ended up. “Coat of Many Colors” likewise looks back on the past, but as a sentimental episode confined to the past. Its only relationship to the present seems to that of a distancing effect, by placing deprivation in a bygone era that was somehow overcome (in ways never explained or implied by the song). To put it more simply, Dolly’s song competes within a system that strives to place winners above losers and claims a victory in that terrain, while Lynn’s song calmly rebels against such a system by entertaining the possibility of every humble person living a good life on her own terms without distinguishing between winners and losers. So, even from just the microcosm of these two songs, it is no surprise that Lynn’s persona was that of a feminist icon, with a sassy, “independent woman” demeanor that was at odds with the normally conservative politics behind commercial Nashville music of the day, while Dolly’s was that of a woman succeeding within the confines of a social structure that assigned her to a subordinate status by playing the “Backwoods Barbie Doll” role. Dolly later starred in Hollywood movies, at most in roles in which her character seeks accommodation and satisfaction in unjust scenarios, while a “New Hollywood” movie based on Lynn’s life boldly had non-musician actresses sing — convincingly — songs associated with talented country stars.

Eric Dolphy – ‘Out to Lunch!’

Eric Dolphy – ‘Out to Lunch!’ Blue Note BLP 4163 (1964)

For a long time, my favorite album. I know it so well. These days, I rarely ever listen to it. I carry it with me, in my head, always. So, little need for stereos. Except, the vibrations are good. So every once and a while, I take the time to play it, just to feel it.

It is hard to find words to describe this album. One can only claim to shed some light on its context. Sometimes hailed the greatest jazz recording of the 20th Century, it is certainly a key step through any legitimate jazz listening education.

Eric Dolphy was a star amidst the early “free jazz” movement of the sixties, if there was such title to bestow. He played with most of the key players at one point or another (even La Monte Young in junior high!). A California symphony denied him a seat, likely based on his race. His friend Richard Davis describes Dolphy as “an angel” and said if you heard something from Eric, it was true. His music reflected his personality. It was always reaching, but peaceful and wise.

This music arrives independently at chordal improvisation. It’s not that it begins with a structure. Rather, Dolphy rethinks his entire musical universe and then constructs his own version of what it could be. The result just happens — by chance — to sound like it employs traditional values. New concepts emerge. As much as it touches on traditional values the previous standards fail to address the full scope of this album. The textures and melodic/harmonic interplay create something beyond the music, beyond its context, leading the listener into some shining palace where each moment lingers infinitely as it unfolds its wisdom. The entire point is that it’s not quantifiable. Dolphy seems to say that music should break down limitations. The destination would be unreachable by limited, traditional means (like you can’t get through the gates dragging a set of preconceived notions). All too often there is a disbelief that this album reaches the level it does.

Dolphy’s solos used dramatic intervals and a host of quite unique sounds: honking, buzzing, and anything else that suited the music. A remarkable improviser, Dolphy could give anyone a run for their money (like John Coltrane during their 1961 stand at the Village Vanguard). He was an accomplished multi-instrumentalist. ‘Out to Lunch!’ displays his three primary tools: the bass clarinet, alto saxophone, and flute. His style was remarkably vocal. Evocative and intelligent, Dolphy was an immaculate composer, stylist, instrumentalist, and bandleader.

The group is entirely comprised of superstars, though some were just getting started at the time. Bobby Hutcherson on vibes, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Tony Williams on drums, and Richard Davis on bass provide limitless raw talent while still cooperating from beginning to end. They keep pace with the breakneck rhythms (like 5/4 or 9/4 time) and Dolphy’s explosive solos.

Freddie Hubbard employs his flashy style in full contrast to the more subdued performances by Hutcherson, Davis, and Williams. Richard Davis pulls everything into new territory with his subtle explorations and refusal to hand in a standard performance. Tony Williams, just 18 years old, is loose and explorative. Bobby Hutcherson at times shows his lyrical side, but his brightest moments come through improvisational responses — bangs, clangs, and dribbles all land perfectly.

The songs are each remarkable in many ways. “Hat and Beard,” a homage to Thelonious Monk, portrays the man’s genius and his quirks. “Something Sweet, Something Tender” is exciting and difficult to categorize. “Gazzelloni” (a nod to the flautist) stretches stylistically, while “Out to Lunch” wanders innocently. “Straight Up and Down” is the most comical.

Before Blue Note released this album, Eric Dolphy was dead. Not appreciated in America, he moved to Europe after recording ‘Out to Lunch!’. He died from his diabetes, a condition he never knew he had. This wasn’t the only great album he created. Dolphy contributed as a sideman to countless classics and released many amazing recordings during his lifetime. The posthumous Last Date captures some of his ever-expanding visions of his final weeks in Europe a few months after recording this album. ‘Out to Lunch!’ has beautiful compositions and dazzling performances. It is a document of just what people are capable of. There may be records with seemingly less structure (“freer”) but none with more passion. Dolphy’s flair for life suspends time briefly. For a few minutes, everything that could be, everything that should be, is.

Ultramagnetic MC’s – Critical Beatdown

Ultramagnetic MC’s – Critical Beatdown Next Plateau PL-1013 (1988)

The Ultramagnetic MC’s somehow got lost in the shuffle. While a steady following of fans and critics have sung praise since the beginning, they never quite had the album sales they deserved. Not your typical hip-hop album, Critical Beatdown remains an essential album, one of the best debut albums by a group in any genre.

Hip-hop always was underground, but by 1988 there also was stuff above ground too. Some groups like the Ultramagnetic MC’s stayed underground and laid the groundwork for a movement in the 1990s. Their lyrics were smart, and mixed with complex new beats. After fifteen years hip-hop had a whole new vocabulary, made possible largely through new technology like the sampler. The rhymes are faster more intense. Also, the focus is decidedly urban. The lyrics go beyond the simple themes so common a few years earlier. “Travelling [sic] at the Speed of Thought,” “Kool Keith Housing Things,” and “Give the Drummer Some” are showcases for master genius of rap Kool Keith. He comes in with his “usual” style; he delivers a vocal rhythm that no other MC can duplicate or even match. While his lyrics look simple on paper, his delivery flows backwards. The substance and form is different, but Kool Keith has the same command of words as the beat poets. On “Feelin’ It” it’s easy to miss the line: “but I guess I’m white/ while others are wrong.” All Keith’s lyrics are biting and intelligent. He disses everybody. But why not? With a record like this, the Ultramagnetics were the top game around.

The group’s urban flavor is never bleak. The lyrics simply accept circumstances and pump out great tunes. A subtle shift from merely rhyming about lyrical superiority, the Ultramagnetic MC’s turned that tradition sideways. They explained why their rapping superiority mattered. Hip-hop moved to a higher order of complexity. More than just a necessary mode of oral history, new hip-hop chose to go to the farthest reaches of pure technique. An album like Critical Beatdown just gets better over time.

“Critical Beatdown,” “Ease Back” and “Ego Trippin’” feature the combined assault of all the MC’s, trading rhymes at breakneck speeds. They work together, never letting individual talents work against each other.

What set this record apart in its time was use of the sampler. The sound was fresh, and subsequently overused as a gimmick by lesser groups. Critical Beatdown may have been a continuing experiment with new techniques, but it still works today. These guys even mix in a Mark Hamill line from Star Wars (advising to “go in full-throttle”). Such eccentric samples would be fluff in any other hands. The Ultramagnetics flex their rapping muscle just enough to give us a taste — true masters.

This album is a classic, and never received its due. Hopefully, revisionist history will be kind to the Ultramagnetic MC’s who never got the fame they deserved.

Andrew Hill – Lift Every Voice

Andrew Hill – Lift Every Voice Blue Note BST 84330 (1970)

Andrew Hill is known for his chameleon-like style on piano (like Jaki Byard). Paradoxically, Lift Every Voice is an unusual album because it doesn’t sound unusual. With a great band in tow, Hill is joined by a vocal choir arranged by Marshall Brown (the mastermind behind Pee-Wee Russell‘s late career comeback). The vocals take this very much into the territory of commercial-sounding late-Sixties music — reminiscent of Oliver Nelson‘s output for Hollywood or even the likes of Leonard Feather Presents the Sound of Feeling and the Sound of Oliver Nelson. It is well played, but not particularly moving by Hill’s high standards. The bluesy “Ghetto Lights” is probably the best offering. A 2001 CD reissue adds a number of unreleased songs from the sessions that prove to be more interesting than the originally released material; the bonus material is interesting because it diverges from dated Sixties harmonies far more than what was included on the original album and features a bit less of the vocal choir.

Julius Hemphill – Roi Boyé & the Gotham Minstrels

Julius Hemphill – Roi Boyé & the Gotham Minstrels Sackville 3014/15 (1977)

A one-of-a-kind sound. Supposedly Hemphill’s own Blue Boyé is similar, but I haven’t heard that to compare. The closest music to this I can think of is that of Anthony Braxton, but this is less cerebral and more down-to-Earth. Roi Boyé & the Gotham Minstrels is billed as an “audiodrama”. That’s a good term for it. The music melds a flamboyant dramatic sense from musical theater and vaudeville with the techniques and improvisational choices of free jazz, tinged just slightly with blues and R&B influences. The only performer is Julius Hemphill himself, overdubbed, on saxophone and flute, with some occasional spoken word vocals. The theatrical aspects of this help hold it together, despite a few moments perhaps where meandering “double album syndrome” threatens.

Father John Misty – I Love You, Honeybear

Father John Misty – I Love You, Honeybear Sub Pop SP 1115 (2015)

Arrogant music for arrogant people.

While there are good moments on I Love You, Honeybear, this is music with a definite mean streak and a rather disingenuous, condescending approach to songcraft. First, the songs. The lyrics are blunt, delivered without much poetic lyricism, almost like a monologue. They are deeply cynical, and frequently sarcastic. Big words and references to current events are littered about, but there isn’t much behind them. They are used to contextualize the music, place it in front of people who pay attention to such things, but it doesn’t really run with any of those concepts. It is a rather self-conscious attempt to seem “with it”. (Also, some of the song titles parody famous old songs). Much of the time, though, things veer into misanthropic diatribes. This is were the music becomes arrogant. The words of the songs constantly put down posers and the falsehoods of mass culture. But, really, this is just a device to try to place the singer above it. He constantly takes a superior and derisive tone toward the objects of his scorn (and every song has something to complain about!). And this is why the music is disingenuous. It pretends to be above the subjects being trashed, and yet also depends upon them because it needs something to belittle, to assert superiority over. Occasionally, it works to a point. The opening lines to “The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment” are “Oh, I just love the kind of woman who can walk over a man / I mean like a god damn marching band.” Seems like a feminist anthem, right? Well, the song soon enough devolves into put downs like “I wonder if she even knows what that word means.” It returns to the singer explaining how people adore him and how stupidly this other character acts. This is emblematic of the whole album, which pretends to point out the failings of the world only to seize upon those failings for self-aggrandizement.

Lyrics aside, the instrumental music can be engaging, at times. Building from a base of contemporary “indie” folk, there are plenty of touches that look back to acid rock and psychedelic folk of the past, mostly of the 1960s and early 1970s. The record is well-produced, and it has a good command of all the elements of the past called up to service. Embellished layers and short, shifting resolutions can be catchy, like the driving, distorted electric guitar and pounding piano at the end of “The Ideal Husband” or the smoothly burning guitar soloing on “When You’re Smiling and Astride Me” and “Strange Encounter.” But the songs that are hardly more than an acoustic guitar and maybe a piano for accompaniment are a drag. And the singer (Josh Tillman) doesn’t have a particularly memorable tone of voice. The most interesting parts of this album would have been put to better use elsewhere, with an entirely different lyricist and singer.

Sly and The Family Stone – Ain’t But the One Way

Sly and The Family Stone – Ain’t But the One Way Warner Bros. 23700-1 (1982)

An album that really had more potential than Sly’s previous few efforts, though it still ends up lacking. Snappier horn charts and backing vocals would have gone a long way. Side one hints at early Prince. The side two opener “Who in the Funk Do You Think You Are” features a guitar riff echoed by ZZ Top‘s “Sharp Dressed Man“. It would have been interesting if Sly had expanded upon the short but intriguing “Sylvester”, the one completely unguarded moment when he musters a revealing sense of dejected nostalgia. A whole album like that song might have really been a breakthrough. Instead this is more like Sly’s 70s coke hangover. Still, I would throw “L.O.V.I.N.U.” and “Sylvester” on a best-of disc and not feel bad about it for a second.

Merle Haggard – Back to the Barrooms

Merle Haggard – Back to the Barrooms MCA MCA-5139 (1980)

Merle Haggard had something of a career renaissance in the early 1980s (plus another in the early 2000s). There was a popular duet album with Willie Nelson, Pancho & Lefty (1982), that resonated with the “urban cowboy” set. But it started with Back to the Barrooms. He doesn’t touch the political subject matter that made him notorious a decade before (The Fightin’ Side of Me, Okie From Muskogee). Instead, there are a lot of hard drinking songs, just like in the earliest part of his career (Swinging Doors and the Bottle Let Me Down). But his sound is much different than the early days. There are strings, a saxophone, and a generally lighter touch in both his vocals and the musical accompaniment. This recalls old-fashioned honky tonk — with plenty of single-string solos and Travis-picking on guitar, bouncing country walks on the bass, and echoes of barrel-house strides on the piano — but it also ponders what to do with electronic processing in the studio while remaining authentic country music. It isn’t quite “urban cowboy” yet, because the balance between urbane synthesizer-driven easy listening pop and gruff rural twang leans too much to the latter. But this isn’t dated (like many Chips Moman productions from this era: Flyin’ Shoes, Always on My Mind, Rainbow). It is perfectly comfortable in its sound.

The songs are all about conflict. It is personal conflict. What makes the album so compelling is that it is a battle the singer has with himself. He has temptations, failings, and he knows it. He has his petty excuses, without stooping to make them out to be anything more than that. Depression and substance abuse loom large. Nevertheless, there are really no scapegoats.

The songs oscillate between ways of recounting heartbreak and such, finding each one incomplete but also without hypocritically denouncing the last with the next perspective. The music orbits something that just can’t be conveyed directly. One the one hand, there is some sympathy for the classic working class belief that family is important, more so than career, wealth or acclaim. And (American) families start with romantic relationships. On the other hand, there is the emptiness of career and fame (much like Loretta Lynn‘s early career song “Success,” with the line: “success has made a failure of our home”). Songs like “Leonard” hit on this — the song is about Tommy Collins, but much of it could be about Hag’s own downward spirals and rehabilitations too. The emptiness, though, is a reflection of how ordinary fame seems, that when achieved it has none of the revelatory, transformative qualities presumed beforehand. What we have is a framing of personal conflict that really perfectly suits Haggard at this point in his life. Yes, he had success, but what of it? Is it true that you can “never go home”? There are number of books that deal with people from working class backgrounds going into academia (This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class, Strangers in Paradise: Academics from the Working Class, etc.). Some of the stories in them are remarkably like what emerges from Haggard’s Back to the Barrooms. He is conflicted about his roots, and the milieu of musical celebrity status. Some of the best bits — like “I Don’t Want to Sober Up Tonight” or “Can’t Break the Habit” — are when he just says, “I don’t want to act like things are alright / And I don’t want to change just to make you think I’m happy / And that’s my right, I don’t want to sober up tonight.” This is the tension not just about resisting alcoholism, literally, but also about not wanting to totally give up on your humble roots when you “upclass” to a different social strata. Haggard knows what success is about, and he doesn’t see a place for himself in the “perfect” world of a 1980s country music star. But the modern touches and crooning suggest that he isn’t ready or willing to just go back to his old way of singing, before his biggest successes, to his pre-fame roots. He looks back to the past, which isn’t simply duplicated, but re-enacted with an awareness of more than just the past. He can’t unlearn everything that came in between.

Haggard always had a softer side, and his voice was remarkably versatile. He may have been a pioneer of the Bakersfield Sound, blending rock influences into country, but he could sing tender ballads to match any country crooner. The opener “Misery and Gin” is one of the best examples of what this whole album offers. Haggard’s voice opens the song with smooth crooning, going to a higher pitch than some country singers could, with a little bit of vibrato. But he opens the vibrato up a bit, and he swoops down to a kind of sing-speak rumble. He starts some lines perfectly sweetly (“..to myself” and “but any foo___ol can tell”), then he mixes in clipped, accented pronunciations (“ta-night” not “tonight,” “sittin’ with all my friends” not “sitting with all of my friends,” a hard emphasis on the “HON” and “TON” in the line about “this honky tonk heaven”) and quickly runs through some of the lyrics (“…really makes you…”) like a sly afterthought. It’s like he goes from being (almost) a sweet pop crooner in the style of Bing Crosby to one of his musical heroes, the “singing brakeman” Jimmie Rodgers. If Haggard hadn’t gone beyond his “roots” he would have had no credibility to convey the gap between them and the kind of distant sophistication that goes with poppier and slightly more urban music that was commercially successful at the time. Paradoxically, this is what makes the music authentically personal, by conveying the divided convictions of a guy shifting between two different positions that are too different to be synthesized and who inhabits the no-man’s land between them.

The title track is sequenced second. Its placement after “Misery and Gin” is telling of a pull to return to some sort of earlier state, just as the third track “Make-Up and Faded Blue Jeans,” trading riffs of slick, jazzy electric guitar and light, ’80s soft rock saxophone, returns back to an idea of an urbanized lifestyle that is a requirement to succeed as a professional musician — even as the lyrics speak about relapse and faltering at maintaining a mere image of urban sophistication. “Back to the Barrooms” has a much more solid “country” foundation than the opener. Yet if placed side-by-side with an early Haggard classic (“Please Mr. D.J.,” “Mama Tried,” “Swinging Doors”), the formal similarities in song structure give way to pronounced differences in Hag’s phrasing — he’s holding notes longer, leaving less space between verses, and softening the delivery to avoid the harder rhythmic attack of the past. And the electric guitar and compressed tone of the drums’ sound embrace musical technology (something profoundly urban almost as a matter of course) in a way totally alien to his 1960s and early 70s work. His earlier recordings tended to use prominent electric guitars to emphasize a sturdy toughness on more rocking, up-tempo numbers (“Workin’ Man Blues,” “I’m Bringin’ Home Good News,” “The Fightin’ Side of Me”), and relied more heavily on acoustic instrumentation to support tender, sensitive ballads (“I Started Loving You Again,” “I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am,” “Silver Wings,” and even “If We Make It Through December”). Here, he’s using (then) state-of-the-art technologies to expand upon the ballads and crooning. This is a surprising — and surprisingly effective — reversal of expectations.

There are a lot of reasons to dismiss an album like this. But there are more reasons to dig in and appreciate it as an inspired confluence of supple commercial ambition, gruff obstinance and autobiographical connection. Much of the album takes on multiple layers of meaning. It inscribes the hesitations and burdens of stardom with longing for the past and resigned acceptance of how that past was jettisoned along the way. Haggard always was at his best when his music was straight from the gut and personal. Yet he rarely sounded so consistently wise and vulnerable at the same time as he does here. Back to the Barrooms is a portrait of Haggard as neither a graceful success nor a simple nobody, but rather as somebody in an elusive middle ground scrambling to finding meaning in that place of limbo.

Bob Dylan – The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Live 1975

Bob Dylan – The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Live 1975 – The Rolling Thunder Revue Legacy C2K 87047 (2002)

When Bob Dylan embarked on his “Rolling Thunder Revue” in 1975, it was part of his creative renaissance. It was his second wind after a hum-drum few years at the dawn of the 1970s. The revue traveled by train and included a laundry list of friends and collaborators, new and old. Before The Bootleg Series Vol. 5, Hard Rain had already been released documenting the tour. But Hard Rain was tired and disappointing. Here, Dylan sounds desperate, in the sense of being urged to go on.

This one opens with a blazing “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” (a song debuted on Nashville Skyline). It then drifts into a few rather dated reworkings of old songs. Dylan’s backing band may feature a lot of big names, but they play a kind of music that often suffers from the worst excesses of the era: ornate guitar wankery, hollow, tinny and effect-laden engineering, and a full and claustrophobic sound that lacks space. They are basically just self-indulgent hippie jams. But the end of disc one turns to folk. This highlights much of what was missing on Hard Rain and much of what came next in Dylan’s career. He started as a folkie, and he was a good one! He then went electric, which was what launched him to superstardom. His contentious concerts of that era would feature some acoustic folk and also electric rock. His albums of that era mostly did this too. Later though, particularly from the late 1970s onward, everything was more or less electric. He was far less successful in a purely rock setting. For whatever reason, there was only so much rock music that Dylan could put out at one time. It could be — let’s not forget — that when Dylan went electric it was before the modern rock era. It was only about a decade out from Elvis and other early rock that was not strictly urban. As that kind of stuff was left behind, Dylan didn’t adapt particularly well. Maybe folk seemed equally of the past at times (he did return to it though). But a set like The Bootleg Series Vol. 5 includes the right amount of folk. It’s some of the most consistent material here. For instance, there’s a great “Tangled Up in Blue” here (maybe better than the studio version). The set wraps with more electric material at the end of disc two. The last few electric songs work better on average than much of disc one, settling into a sound comparable to contemporary Grateful Dead. The second disc also features a lot of songs from the not-yet-released Desire, and the whole band seems engaged with the new material.

There is something hard in this music. It looks back more than forward. It is like a reaction to the 1960s. Not everything had gone as planned. Dylan couldn’t have anticipated his celebrity status. He probably wouldn’t have expected his career to start slipping in the 70s. What makes this interesting in how it tries to avoid defeat. But in doing that you can sense that much more than before the possibility of defeat looms larger in Dylan’s consciousness. This was it though. Desire, released a few months later, would be the last truly relevant Dylan album.

[One note about the packaging here. I checked this out from my library, so something might have been missing from the box, but there appears to be no listing of recording dates or personnel for each song. Presumably, this is culled from multiple concerts. It’s quite impossible to tell though.]