Bob Dylan – Page 3 – Rock Salted

Bob Dylan – Time Out of Mind

Bob Dylan – Time Out of Mind Columbia CK 68556 (1997)

I have to admit I’m not sold on the idea of this being one of Dylan’s all-time best albums. Though it certainly is one of the better ones of the last part of his career. This is certainly more consistent that most of what Dylan had done in the 1980s. He basically takes the best elements he had experimented with since Oh Mercy and combines them into a unified package, courtesy of producer Daniel Lanois. Probably the main reasons that this one succeeds is that Dylan actually tries and he lets his producer do his job without much interference. The result is a testament to the new, more “professional” Bob Dylan, who proved much more likeable than the erratic, boozy, incoherent, bratty Dylan that had overstayed his welcome for the last few decades like a weekend house guest still lingering around a week later.

Bob Dylan – Blood on the Tracks

Bob Dylan – Blood on the Tracks Columbia PC 33235 (1975)

In a way, isn’t this album everything that New Morning failed to be? What I mean is that New Morning always seemed like Dylan trying to sound contemporary and relevant by making overtures to the California singer-songwriter movement. The problem was Dylan didn’t really fit well into that genre (even if he had moved to Malibu). Blood on the Tracks turned things around and had a more bitter and angry tone, more stripped down instrumentation, more of a narrative lyrical approach, and less demands on Dylan’s limited vocal abilities. The newer approach suits Dylan a whole lot better. One thing that is striking when comparing these two albums is that New Morning seems like it is trying to be personal, while Blood on the Tracks seems like it can’t help being personal. The latter is far more compelling.

Dylan’s marriage was headed for divorce when this album was recorded. That says volumes about the subject matter. These are break-up songs. The protagonists seem hurt, recently, and still hurting. These songs speak from a place too close to the pain to be past or above it. Was the whole relationship wrong from the beginning? Who caused it to go wrong? Who was to blame? Him? What will he do know? Dylan had relocated to California a year earlier, but this music was a return, or sorts, to the kind he had made back in New York, before the move, before things kind of fell apart. He’s looking back to make sense of the past before moving on into the future. There is catharsis at work here.

This isn’t the kind of album that makes for easy listening, at least not on any kind of regular basis. It’s rather surprising it was so popular. But it is a success, and perhaps the last really great album Dylan would make. One of the essentials of his storied career.

Bob Dylan – Dylan

Bob Dylan – Dylan Columbia PC 32747 (1973)

Bob Dylan briefly jumped from Columbia Records to the fledgling Asylum Records in the early 1970s. After he departed, Columbia took outtakes from Self Portrait and New Morning, and, without his knowledge, released them as Dylan. Most likely due to Dylan’s lack of input in the project, the album was never reissued in the United States. It is frequently maligned as the very worst Dylan album. Can it be? No, not really. But the reason that the Dylan fundamentalists dismiss this is precisely because they are tedious bores. There is a large contingent of Dylan fans who love his songwriting so much that they outright dismiss any of his albums that are not built upon it. Dylan is a collection of cover tunes, without a single original Dylan composition. The thing is, this is much more focused than Self Portrait and has fewer head-scratchers than New Morning. Dylan may be purposefully stepping out of character here, but the results are respectable, even if by no means too impressive. Side one in particular is pretty decent all the way through. Side two slouches some more, with Joni Mitchell‘s “Big Yellow Taxi” too self-consciously tethered to an awkward new rhythm, and with much of the backing vocals seemingly under-rehearsed. But you have to admit that Dylan’s singing is generally stronger here than on New Morning. While this is no lost classic, it’s a better album than its reputation suggests. There is no doubt in my mind that Down in the Groove is a worse album, as are Self Portrait and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid.

How Many Roads: Black America Sings Bob Dylan

Various Artists – How Many Roads: Black America Sings Bob Dylan Ace CDCHD 1278 (2010)

Bob Dylan biographer Howard Sounes made the claim that black America was largely unaware of Dylan. The compilation How Many Roads: Black America Sings Bob Dylan seems intended to disprove Sounes’ statement. Yet, in the end, it probably lends support to Sounes’s position. Most of these tracks are soul and R&B covers, particularly from the 1960s and 70s (though tracks are from as recent as 1990). But a careful examination shows many of these to be B-sides and filler album tracks. In other words, it often feels like some of these artists are covering Dylan not out of a sense of connection, but perhaps to garner crossover appeal to white audiences. Of course, there are exceptions. Solomon Burke does a kick-ass rendition of “Maggie’s Farm” with a lot of guts. But probably the highlight here is a stunning a cappella doo-wop rendition of “The Man in Me” by the one-and-only Persuasions (who released an entire album of Dylan covers, Knockin’ on Bob’s Door).

Bob Dylan’s Greenwich Village: Sounds From the Scene in 1961

Various Artists – Bob Dylan’s Greenwich Village: Sounds From the Scene in 1961 Chrome Dreams CDCD5074 (2011)

Although it’s become fashionable for certain contrarian Millennials to bash Bob Dylan as “talentless” or make some other snarky comment about him, attempting to position themselves as distinctly beyond whatever he represented, almost anyone with a pulse knows him as one of the major icons of 20th Century pop music. So, this collection is an attempt to portray the sounds already circulating in his slice of New York City in 1961 when he first arrived fresh-faced from Minnesota and tried to make it as a musician. There is a lot of music packed into these two discs. But some themes draw themselves out. From this evidence, the urban folk revival seemed a lot like an attempt to find authenticity. It was a break from the big, orchestrated pop and jazz that dominated commercial music of the 1950s. It had a do-it-yourself quality. These were much the same impulses that spawned punk rock in the following decade. Though, in hindsight, many of the white musicians in the movement were, quite frankly, too uptight and inhibited to make really great lasting recordings–punk proved more lasting more often. Compare some of the afro-american blues represented here, like that from Lonnie Johnson, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, there is a stark contrast in authenticity. So the “new” folkies often failed, but in their failure they took a step in the right direction. Dylan landed in the middle of all this, and there’s no doubt the ways he took influence. Indeed, this collection makes a few choice selections of songs that Dylan liberally borrowed from to make his own songs like “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” (“Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I’m Gone)”), “Ballad of Hollis Brown” (“Pretty Polly”), and “Restless Farewell” (“The Parting Glass”). Dylan soared above his influences, at least most of them. Greenwich Village in the early ’60s was an incubator, but it also had a local, provincial and slightly closeted nature that was as much a limitation as the key to new breakthroughs. Anyone wanting to understand the roots of Bob Dylan and, maybe more importantly, to understand the cultural catapult that sent him onward an upward to write things like “The Times They are A-Changin’, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Tombstone Blues,” “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and all the others will find a treasure trove here.

Bob Dylan – Hard Rain

Bob Dylan – Hard Rain Columbia PC 34349 (1976)

So, why is he shouting? Some good songs, of course, but still pointless. If you want to hear Dylan being crushed by the forces of evil, well, maybe then this is the album for you. I can accept Self Portrait as some kind of prank on his fans, Planet Waves as something simply lazy, but this? This is Bob Dylan’s defeat. I know some people look to Dylan as a counter-cultural icon, but I prefer to think of him in as someone carried along by the same wave as the rest of the movement in the 60s. Hunter S. Thompson wrote how with the right set of eyes you could look West and see the high water mark, where that wave crested and rolled back. Hard Rain is that near-tsunami rolling back and crashing somewhere East against the opposite shore. Dylan seems exasperated, at a loss with what to do to juggle artistic and commercial concerns, and plain worn out by that process. He sure has worse albums out there. Yet this suggested that Dylan was probably going to focus on bland, clichéd approaches to music during the rest of his career, which often proved to be the case.

Bob Dylan – Planet Waves

Bob Dylan – Planet Waves Asylum 7E-1003 (1974)

Planet Waves was a return to more stripped-down folk music, like John Wesley Harding. Dylan is backed by The Band. While this was his most commercially successful album to date, it has not aged particularly well. Harbingers of things to come were the rather shoddy under-production and unenthusiastic performances. A kind of laziness in the recording process made its first appearance here (setting aside Self Portrait). This album did mark a thematic shift, with a mixture of nostalgic yearning (“Forever Young,” “On a Night Like This,” “You Angel You”) on the one hand, and rolling anger and melancholy (“Going, Going, Gone,” “Dirge”) on the other. There are definitely a lot of songs that seem to reference Dylan’s marriage, which was headed for divorce in a few years.

Like a lot of other 1970s Dylan albums, Planet Waves has some fairly good songwriting, even if the songwriting falls short of the best Dylan was capable of. But he just doesn’t find the right “sound” most of the time. Some describe the problem as the songs being half-formed. It’s also a matter of over-producing the record to compensate for a lack of engagement with the material up front. Anyway, this one feels disappointing because it is so immediately apparent that this could have been a really good record. Sadly it ends up being a somewhat mediocre one. At its best, this comes across as a warm-up for the following year’s bitter and angry classic Blood on the Tracks.

Bob Dylan – Self Portrait

Bob Dylan – Self Portrait Columbia C2X 30050 (1970)

Now’s here’s a Bob Dylan album that is decidedly half-baked. Dylan himself has shrugged it off as a joke on his over-eager fans, meant to deflate their expectations of him. But it’s hard to believe much of what Dylan says about himself and his work. Looking at this sprawling double-LP, it distinctly looks like about four different projects crammed together. Some of the songs seem to carry forward the country sounds of Nashville Skyline, with an old-timey focus that also echoes John Wesley Harding. Other songs seem almost like demos for his upcoming New Morning album, with smooth yet elaborate sounds that fit into the ongoing California singer-songwriter movement. There also are some poorly recorded live tracks from Dylan’s appearance headlining the 1969 Isle of Wight festival. Lastly, some of the songs seem to chart an alternate path from New Morning by presenting an orchestrated version of more traditional folk music (kind of like Pete Seeger with strings, horns and backing singers). Through it all, there are many cover songs, and the relatively few new compositions feature almost no lyrics–typically just repeating a few short verses or even lacking any words at all.

This album was poorly received. One possible explanation is that this was really something of a vault-clearing, odds-and-ends collection of demos, outtakes and leftover live recordings, but was marketed as just another new Dylan album. The result was a mismatch of expectations–intended or not. Maybe no one could have expected the reaction, because those kinds of vault-clearing albums weren’t exactly commonplace in rock and pop music yet, though there certainly were precedents in jazz, for instance.

The best material here is scattered and all over the place. To find the modicum of decent material you have to slog through a lot of what seem like half-finished songs, boring and uninspired–like “Days of 49,” which could almost have been a John Wesley Harding reject. “All the Tired Horses” is nice because its one of the more successful songs here that breaks from what Dylan has done elsewhere. A few other songs like “Alberta #1” and “Wigwam” are decent too. Listening to this end-to-end is something much more like work than pleasure. Most listeners will want to ignore this one entirely.

Bob Dylan – Down in the Groove

Bob Dylan – Down in the Groove Columbia CK 40957 (1988)

A tedious and painful listening experience. When Bob Dylan is lazy or just uninspired he always leans on the blues. He does so a fair amount here. While he worked it out better with the simpler World Gone Wrong a few years later, here the glitzy and grandiose 1980s production suffocates any possibilities. Not that there really are many possibilities. “Ninety Miles an Hour (Down a Dead End Street)” might be the best offering, which is not saying much. This is a leading contender for the ignoble title of “worst Bob Dylan album.” Really, it’s embarrassing.

Bob Dylan – New Morning

Bob Dylan – New Morning Columbia KC 30290 (1970)

“If a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing, even badly . . . .” William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads (1983).

Some claim New Morning was relevant at the time. And I suppose it does show an interest in the West-Coast singer-songwriter movement. “Day of the Locusts,” with its grand, booming piano parts, is probably the best example of how this album sets aim for a more lush, orchestrated and dramatic sound than almost anything else Dylan had done before. But what I hear as well are too many songs comparable to second-rate Grateful Dead material from that band’s country-rock phase (“Went to See the Gypsy,” “New Morning”), half-baked novelty concepts (“Winterlude,” “If Dogs Run Free” [the birth of Tom Waits‘ career?]) and lots of songs with very poor vocals — even by Dylan’s typically low standards in that department. This does, however, mark a turning point where Dylan’s lyrics became more personal, and for a change he is more focused on his own life in what seems like a fairly direct manner — he’s not just singing impersonal or abstract material in the first person. He’s also willing to show more vulnerability here than he would for decades, if ever. Purely in hindsight, though, this album is just too inconsistent to impress, even if there are a few good tunes here and there (“If Not for You,” “The Man in Me”). But, I still feel like rooting for Bob on this one, even when things go wrong, which they do more often than not, because he’s stepping out of his comfort zone and trying something different.