Bob Dylan – Page 4 – Rock Salted

Bob Dylan – Nashville Skyline

Bob Dylan – Nashville Skyline Columbia KCS 9825 (1969)

It is almost a cliché for pop musicians of a certain vintage not normally associated with country music to release a “country” album. The timing is always when their sales are declining and they are on the long downward slope that almost inevitably afflicts their careers as they leave behind their best years as artists. One sobering truth about the pop music business is that the vast majority of acts have only about five to ten years or so of genuine relevance — if they are lucky to have any relevance at all. Sure, there are exceptions, but taking a large enough step backwards the trend is unmistakable. Yet the allure of doing a “country” album is great enough that it is one of those thing that seems inevitable for long-running acts. The first major artist to really do it was Ray Charles with Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. The Byrds did it with Sweetheart of the Rodeo too. Even decades later, Elvis Costello did it with Almost Blue, Frank Black did it with Honeycomb, etc. Nashville Skyline was Dylan’s foray into full-fledged country music — he had recorded in Nashville before, but he wasn’t pursuing country music then. The reasons Dylan or anyone else would make a record like this are many-fold. There is usually some crass motive to find cross-over success (reach new demographics and potential new sales!). Sometimes it’s just a self-indulgence that past success has enabled (always loved country music but didn’t have the credentials or label support to make it happen before, here is a chance for a vanity project!). Or it could even be slumming (oooh, making a country album would be something different and exotic!). Other times, it’s just desperation (writer’s block and creative dead-ends…hmm, well, why not a country album?). It’s become something a little more shocking for a non-country artist to make country music in the Unites States, given the social context of modern times. Popular country music, from the countrypolitan era onward, has really severed many ties from its origins in folk music. It’s often a campy self-parody that talks down to its listeners. Add to that the fact that urban middle-class liberals tend to harbor great hostility toward “rednecks” (the rural poor) and even blue-collar types (the urban working class) and it is the “rednecks” and some of the urban working class that are the core audience of modern country music.

So where do Bob Dylan and his Nashville Skyline fit into all this? For many, this was the album that marked the beginning of the end for Dylan. His early years showed him to be a talented but not iconoclastic folk singer. He stayed within the bounds of that tradition. But then he went electric, shocking and appalling many narrow-minded folkies, and in doing so his songwriting adopted the currency of the beat generation. It was this mid-Sixties period that made Bob Dylan into a cultural icon. But by the end of the decade, and after his motorcycle crash, he was largely done with his beat-poet songwriting. John Wesley Harding presented a slightly different type of songwriting, built more around mythology and simpler, less literary forms. But traces of his earlier styles remained. This, his next album, would be a kind of break, looking into completely new areas for a new style of songwriting.* Dylan looked to country music.

This is an effective album, even if it’s not littered with classic songs. The re-make of “Girl From the North Country” sung with Johnny Cash and “Lay Lady Lay” are the standouts (in spite of Dylan and Cash singing different lyrics at one point in their duet). But the rest is still quite good. This is no Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde, but what is? Dylan certainly had no hostility to the working class, and even proved to have a very conservative affinity to it that confused many who labelled him a countercultural revolutionary. The key to this album is that Dylan wasn’t just slumming. He had a genuine appreciation for country music. It may not be his forte exactly, but he manages to demonstrate some versatility. The bad news in all this is that this was just the first instance of Dylan flapping in the wind for the next many years trying out new things — without really sticking with any — and generally just losing touch with his strengths as a songwriter. But what happened later should not tarnish this album, which is quite good despite falling short of being a major classic. And while this feels a tad escapist, like Dylan trying to cheer himself up with a dose of music he had long appreciated from a distance, well, he makes a convincing go of it.

*My hypothesis is that celebrity-status Dylan didn’t read as much poetry anymore and lost touch with that element.

Bob Dylan – Good As I Been to You

Bob Dylan – Good As I Been to You Columbia CK 53200 (1992)

This one edged out Empire Burlesque and Knocked Out Loaded as having the most horrible album cover to grace a Bob Dylan album — was the cover photo taken right after Dylan woke up in a homeless shelter? Nonetheless, this collection of solo renditions of traditional folk songs works quite well. Dylan is surprisingly invested in the material. The selection of songs is good, like a page out of the Carter Family songbook or Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (and “Frankie & Albert” the opener is best known for appearing on the Anthology as “Frankie,” performed by Mississippi John Hurt, though Lead Belly recorded it as “Frankie and Albert” too). This was the right time in his career to make this album too. He had a lifetime of listening to folk music to pick just the right ones to record, and with the benefit of advancing years he can perform them simply and faithfully and still sound convincing. It might not be a major achievement, but Dylan would not ever make another album better than this for the rest of his career.

Bob Dylan – World Gone Wrong

Bob Dylan – World Gone Wrong Columbia CK 57590 (1993)

Although no one could have guessed it at the time, World Gone Wrong in a large part set the tone for much of the rest of Dylan’s career. His albums from Time Out of Mind until his late-career switch of a standards crooner — especially Together Through Life — rely heavily on an electrified version of the simple blues forms that coalesced here. This just doesn’t work as well as the folk styled Good as I Been to You though, even if this one is engineered much better. These are grim tunes, stripped of the deeply weird and unpredictable elements of that prior collection of folk. Playing the blues Dylan tends to sound lazy. “Delia” is still nice.

I may be in the minority, but I think this is no better (or worse) than what you could hear from a street musician busking with old blues and folk tunes. It’s one of those albums that kind of drifts by without taking any big chances, without opening up and risking exposing vulnerabilities. Instead it pares down the thematic range to almost a monotone. But it plays into expectations. So in perfunctory fashion it delivers what it advertises. That seems to be why “Dylan bores” like this album. And it fulfilled Dylan’s existing contract to Columbia with minimal effort on his part. Moving on then…

Bob Dylan – Empire Burlesque

Bob Dylan – Empire Burlesque Columbia FC 40110 (1985)

Empire Burlesque first came to my attention when Richard Hell wrote something on his web site about liking it. While the focus isn’t always on the lyrics — something almost guaranteed to turn off most Dylan fans — the musical backdrop is far richer than on most of his albums. It does sound a little dated. But the use of (synth) horns and backing singers works better here than on Street-Legal. There is a ragged decadence to the music that fits. It captures well the superficiality and banality of the Thatcher/Reagan era. The songs evidence contentment, but with questioning, lingering doubt just below the surface. Something about it all sounds mature. Plus, for the skeptics, try going straight to the solo acoustic closer “Dark Eyes.” Can you maybe admit that the young Dylan of the 1960s was still alive and well? If you can answer “yes” in the context of an overtly “folk” song, then go back to the opener “Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love?)” and “Emotionally Yours” and ask if there isn’t some of the same spark there in a whole different setting. This album may be reviled by many fans, but it is probably my favorite of the post-Desire albums, edging out Shot of Love and Good As I Been to You. This might be his best of the 80s — yes even better than Oh Mercy.

Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited

Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited Columbia CL 2389 (1965)

Highway 61 Revisited was Dylan’s entry into the realm of superstardom. He had popularity that was entering the same leagues as that of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Bringing It All Back Home was massively popular, but Highway 61 confirmed that Dylan was no flash-in-the-pan success.

This is quite simply the single most essential Dylan album, and one of the most essential rock and roll albums by anyone from any era. The enduring importance of this album might be how it managed to be a rock album of substance, something with real weight and depth, not just tawdry entertainment. Unlike Bringing It All Back Home with an entire side geared toward folk rather than rock, Highway 61 Revisited focused entirely on rock. So much early rock and roll was easily dismissed as just dance music or hillbilly stuff without cachet in urban centers. This album was something else. It raised the bar for what rock music was (or could be) about. In a way, it helped give unprecedented legitimacy to rock and roll, without ever diminishing the intensity and energy and exuberance of the music. By this point, Dylan’s songwriting talent was unassailable. He had successfully fused blues rock with poetic lyrics that encompassed symbolism, American and biblical mythology, surrealism, literary references, and vivid imagery. The songs rarely “meant” anything in a literal sense. They were oblique invocations of certain feelings and images without a fixed and definite meaning. You can listen to these songs again and again and come away with a slightly interpretation each time. Roland Barthes wrote the following year in Criticism and Truth that “a work is ‘eternal’ not because it imposes a single meaning on different men, but because it suggests different meanings to one man…” So it was with these songs. Dylan’s approach was drawing huge influence from the writings of the Beats, incorporating that writing style into a rock and roll setting. The music still had a huge, driving syncopated beat, complete with just enough of the twang and grit to draw a clear line of influence from early rock and roll. He was supported by a studio band that included members of The Paul Butterfield Blues Band plus Al Kooper on keyboards. Kooper was not a keyboardist, but the recording sessions for this album made him one. Electric guitarist Mike Bloomfield has a strong presence that separates the sound of this album from others Dylan had recorded to this point (or what he did later, for that matter).

On “Tombstone Blues,” Dylan sings “the sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken,” invoking American slang in which both “yellow” and “chicken” refer to cowardice. Applying the terms to the sun, Dylan–in a way that epitomizes his songwriting at the time–says something that is perfectly plain but that doesn’t mean anything in particular. He turns the word “yellow” from a description of color into a slang reference to something that doesn’t really have a literal meaning when applied to the sun. But to follow this, you almost have to work backwards through the lyrics. In a nutshell, that’s Dylan’s mid-1960s songwriting.

Bob Dylan – John Wesley Harding

Bob Dylan – John Wesley Harding Columbia CS 9604 (1967)

After the enormous success of Blonde on Blonde, Bob Dylan had his motorcycle accident and he retreated from the public eye. He wouldn’t put on a public concert for a few more years, and it would be about eight years before he toured again. After exploring rootsier music in private with The Band in recording The Basement Tapes demos, he made something of a break with the studio recordings of John Wesley Harding. In what would come to characterize a lot of Dylan’s later recordings, there is something of a search for peace and solitude in this music, as opposed to the brash and bold approaches of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. He turned away from what listeners might have expected. Now Dylan was exploring myth and historical curiosities of the American Old West — just after the Summer of Love found the counterculture exploring entirely new social relations. The album title is about Texas gunfighter John Wesley Hardin (Dylan changed the spelling here). The entire album is something of a return to more traditional folk music, but with a significant change from Dylan’s earliest albums. This album was recorded with a backing band, and the drums of Kenny Buttrey and bass of Charlie McCoy propel the music forward. If any of Dylan’s albums deserve the description “folk-rock” he so disliked, it’s probably this one. Recorded entirely in Nashville, Dylan’s vocals are noticeably stronger than on so many of his recordings. His nasal whine and mumbled grunts are held in check.

The songs tend to be good, even if some are content to merely lock into a simple groove. “All Along the Watchtower” is a song usurped by Jimi Hendrix for an incendiary cover version on next year’s Electric Ladyland. Although the version by Hendrix is iconic, Dylan’s original version is still vital. Dylan’s version has a pressing weariness that is completely different from the ominous desperation of the electrified Hendrix version (which tends to be used in almost every Hollywood Vietnam War movie).

While perhaps not as immediately ear-catching to the newcomer as the last few albums, John Wesley Harding remains among Dylan’s best albums. I’ve played this album numerous times around others and they ask what it is, because few seem to immediately recognize this as Dylan (or at least seem unsure about it) but generally are drawn to like it.