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| 1978 Tour Programme |
Next year, in 2012, Bob Dylan will have been making records
for half a century – remarkable longevity for an artist whose career might have
ended as far back as 1966. When we also take into account that many of his
songs from the last twenty-odd years suggest an almost overwhelming
world-weariness which, combined with his frequent failures to ‘get his act
together’ whilst circling the globe on his so-called Never-Ending Tour, it may
make us further marvel at how he’s managed to keep on keeping on for so long.
Given that Dylan must be considered the most important,
interesting and original single artist of his time working in the realm of
popular music, it is perhaps surprising that, when his albums are examined in
terms of their quality, a quite conventional curve of distribution becomes
apparent. At the optimum end of the curve, we will find the tremendous sequence
of records he made in the 1960s (during which, like the titular anti-hero of John Wesley
Harding, Dylan appears to never have
made ‘a foolish move’ *1 – at least, not creatively) and also the best of those
from his resurgent 1970s. Thereafter, most of his releases will lodge in the
medium-quality rump of the curve or at the negative end along with a couple of
missteps from the glory days.
The same arc of achievement is likely to be observed in most
artists: their best work behind them by their forties, if not before, followed
by a dimming of the light and a slackening of the creative impulse. Dylan’s
career though, has featured several ‘come-backs’ (in 1968, 1974, 1989 and 1997)
and because he has been such an extraordinary figure on the cultural landscape,
his work seems to demand to be judged by different standards and according to
his own lights. Thus it is that Dylan’s fans sometimes struggle to accept the
notion that he is capable of producing substandard art. Critics too, often
overrate the great man’s efforts because – well, because he’s such a great man.
Despite these tendencies, there is however, a reasonable
consensus about Dylan’s very best and worst albums: chronologically, Highway 61Revisited (1965), Blonde On Blonde
(1966) and Blood On The
Tracks (1975) at the top - and Self Portrait
(1970), Knocked Out Loaded (1986) and Down In The
Groove (1988) at the bottom.
It’s possible to add, with some justification, several other
1960s titles to the Best list along with perhaps Desire (1976), Oh Mercy
(1989) and Time Out Of Mind
(1997). On the other hand, some see
little merit in the likes of Nashville
Skyline(1969), Saved(1980) and Under
The Red Sky (1990) – I would argue that the dull pair of contract-filling
sets of solo acoustic blues and folk standards, Good As I Been To You (1992) and
World Gone Wrong (1993) belong in
this rock-bottom batch too (readers may notice by now that this article is
dealing only with those albums classed as original studio releases – so live
albums, compilations and The Bootleg Series are beyond my remit here).
I intend however, to focus – in chronological order - on
three other commonly overlooked titles (purposely not mentioned above). The
first of these is one of Dylan’s most execrated releases; let’s hear it for:-
DYLAN (1973)
Whaaaat! I hear you exclaim. Well, yes – let me explain.
Dylan is derided
as a ragbag of odds and sods left over from the Self Portrait and New Morning
sessions. As such, it is rightly regarded as an aberration in the back
catalogue and these days, is only available in download form.
The cover didn’t help. Lazily titled and shoddily packaged
with the same badly cut-out image of Dylan appearing front and back, it looked
- in that heyday of great album cover art - merely cheap and nasty. The record
barely comes up on the radar of most critics, and if it does, is usually
dismissed as a matter of routine. Tim Riley casually passes over it, sniffing
that it is ‘limp’. This though, amounts to high praise compared to Michael
Gross who, living up to his name, wipes his hands after calling it
‘disgusting’. Clinton Heylin also works himself up into a righteous lather,
spluttering that it is ‘unregenerate in its abjectness’.
Considering that Dylan
is basically just an album of cover versions, some of them of traditional
material, one wonders what caused such horror amongst the scribes. I bought the
album shortly after its release and thought that it was, well, actually quite
good. And far from it being ‘unregenerate’, I’ve come to enjoy it more over the
years. Perhaps it took critics back to that bad taste in the mouth created by
the myth-busting Self Portrait. ‘What is this shit?!’ Greil
Marcus had screeched at the time in the headline from ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine.
Ah, but they were different days and that kind of hysteria
was perhaps understandable - such was the weight of expectation accompanying
any new release by His Bobness, then not only The Voice Of His Generation but
also The King of The Counter-Culture. Ironically, ‘Rolling Stone’ has gradually
drifted away from the cutting edge into the middle of the road, whilst Marcus
has devoted much of his subsequent musings to the sort of roots music that can
be found on Self Portrait and which is now a loose genre, respectably known as
‘Americana’…
There are one or two yea-sayers, however: Michael Gray feels
that Dylan ‘isn’t as bad as [Columbia
But let us now imagine for a moment that the songs on Dylan had only ever become available,
not in 1973, but as part of a recent edition of The Bootleg Series**. Would they have suffered such opprobrium as on
their actual release? Of course not. I fancy that reviewers would find them
interesting, tuneful and well worthy of publication. The musicians are no
slouches either: led by multi-instrumentalist Al Kooper, it’s the New Morning
band on most tracks and includes David Bromberg on guitar, Harvey Brooks and
Charlie Daniels sharing bass duties and Russ Kunkel on drums.
The songs, then. It opens with ‘Lily Of The West’, a murder ballad,
powered along by folk guitars, the sort of song that Johnny Cash might have
included on one of his late-flowering collaborations with producer Rick Rubin.
Dylan struggles slightly with the low vocal register but, at the same time,
obviously relishes the archaic idiom of the lyric.
It’s a bracing opener which leads to a change of tempo in a
slowed-down version of ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’. Dylan conjures a very
different atmosphere here to that on the more well known versions by Elvis
Presley and Andy Williams. He lingers lovingly over the words whilst a
whispering organ and wordless backing vocals help to create a warm, intimate
mood. His harmonica coda is beautifully played too.
‘Sarah Jane’ is a train-song and, as we know, Dylan likes
train-songs. It is a jolly little love ditty, no more and no less, probably
recorded by Dylan at the time in honour of his wife and the line, ‘I’ve got a
wife and five little children’. The lyric is supported by a fair dollop of
la-la-la-ing by the backing singers which he joins in on now and again. Dylan’s
use of girl groups on Self Portrait and New Morning had surprised some - and
was scorned by others. By the 1980s, most people were heartily sick of them and
Dylan eventually dropped them but, in 1973, they still sounded quite fresh (too
fresh for Michael Gray who rightly feels they are too high in the mix).
Side One ends with Peter Lafarge’s ‘The Ballad Of Ira
Hayes’, a tragic and true story of the rise and fall of the native American who
became famous for his part in raising the Stars and Stripes on the hard won
hilltop of Iwo Jima in the Philippines during the second World War. Hayes, who
was one of the marines caught in the iconic photograph of the event, found it
difficult to cope with the effects and eventual loss of the fame that came with
the post-war showbiz re-enactments of the flag-waving, and died an impoverished
alcoholic whilst still young. Judging by the sincerity of Dylan’s rendition, it
is a song he may well have wished he’d written himself. A 1964 version by Johnny Cash is undone by an absurdly
jaunty arrangement which fatally undermines the song’s sentiment – no doubt
genuinely felt by Cash, but frankly, Dylan’s slow, soulful take wipes the floor
with it.
Side Two begins with another story-song, J. J. Walker’s ‘Mr.
Bojangles’. In the hands of cabaret performers like Sammy Davis Jnr., the song
had acquired a rather sickly tone which dulled the quality of its lyric. Dylan
– who, of course, once described himself as ‘just a song and dance man’ – sets
about restoring the song’s nobility and brings the words back into focus. The
tale of the itinerant song and dance man forever in and out of jail because he
‘drinks a bit’ is a picaresque and Dylan rescues from bathos lines such as that
dealing with Bojangles still grieving after twenty years for the dog which ‘up
and died’, with the eloquence of his singing. Speaking of which, the way he
holds the final note in the phrase, ‘Mr. Bojangles, dance’, produces a rousing
climax to what is surely the best ever version of this tune.
‘Mary Ann’ opens with ‘Oh, fare thee well my own true love’,
a phrase the like of which figures in some of Dylan’s own compositions. A
sailor pledges undying love to Mary Ann from the other side of the world in a
short, simple song notable for the sweetness of its melody and the warmth of
Dylan’s vocal.
Joni Mitchell’s early eco-hit, ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ may seem a
curious choice and Dylan’s singing on this is perhaps his least committed on
the album. The girls go ‘ooh pop pop pop pop’ happily enough but the man
himself sounds in a something of a hurry to reach the end of the song. It’s one
of the album’s less effective tracks.
‘A Fool Such I’ is another. The album’s last two songs are
the ones from the Self Portrait sessions
and Dylan uses the voice that was first heard on Nashville Skyline and which
disappears from 1970 onwards. Pretty much following the arrangement on Elvis
Presley’s 1959 hit without adding anything of interest to it, it was obviously
thought to have commercial potential because Columbia released it as a single.
It met with little success and may have done better if its flip side, ‘Lily Of The
West’ had attracted some airplay instead.
The last track might be, as a matter of opinion, either the
best or worst one on the album. A solo acoustic version of ‘Spanish Is The
Loving Tongue’ had already been out as the b-side on Dylan’s 1971 single,
‘Watching The River Flow’. Its curtain-closing position on the Dylan album suggests that whoever
sequenced the songs figured it could provide a big finish. A love-lorn scenario
of a man wanted by the law for ‘a gambling fight’, dares not cross the border
to return to the senorita who taught him Spanish. He reflects that as he ‘broke
her heart, lost my own’, the situation may well be for the best. Half-way into
this hushed ballad, the pining Tex-Mex guitars give way to a huge roll on the
piano which heralds a change of tempo and the song proceeds as a gentle tango,
complete with one last bout of la-lal-las from the girls. It’s a truly cornball
moment and yet it somehow works. Technically, this recording may rate as one of
Dylan’s best ever vocals (although some diehards simply can’t stand that treacly
1969 / 70 voice).
So, I would contend that there is much to enjoy for the
open-minded listener in this interesting but much reviled footnote of a record.
It is not, however, remotely in the same league as my next
choice of album which was - it is frequently forgotten - absolutely crucial in
Dylan’s development as a performer and recording artist.
PLANET WAVES (1974)
‘We have much to talk about
‘We have much to talk about
And much to reminisce,
It sure is right
On a night like this.’
(On A Night Like This)
The original title for this album was to be ‘Ceremonies Of The Horsemen’, a vague but evocative phrase
drawn from the 1965 love song for Dylan’s first wife, Sarah (‘Love Minus Zero /
No Limit’). Then again, his monochromatic painting on the front cover bears two
other legends: ‘Moonglow’ and ‘Cast-Iron Songs & Torch Ballads’. I believe
either of these would have been an improvement on the abandoned title or its
equally vague replacement.
Nothing much is revealed from gazing at the three heavily
daubed figures huddled in the picture – one, or all of them may resemble Dylan
and might represent a gathering of selves ready for the journey ahead, back out
into the hurly-burly of the world of
performing and touring after more than three years of relative inactivity. The
four motifs in the picture: an anchor, a heart on a sleeve, a CND symbol and
what looks like a lantern, resonate with themes arising from the songs, the
painting itself and the artist’s somewhat breathlessly scribbled liner note on
the back cover.
I won’t attempt a literary analysis of this other than to
mention that it is pretty much of a piece with Dylan’s other sleeve-notes
(apart from the unexpectedly crude references to ‘bar stools that stank from
sweating pussy’ and ‘space guys off-duty with big dicks’). A nostalgia for what
he calls ‘the gone world’ chimes with some of the songs and the opening
proclamation, ‘Back to the Starting Point!’ cuts two ways: the walk down Memory Lane
For Planet Waves marked
not only Dylan’s first proper album since 1970 – and the first of his brief
sojourn on the Asylum label before returning to Columbia for good a year later
– but also his commitment to play live again, which , apart from the odd
guest-spot, he hadn’t done since 1966.
So this record was a catalytic release. It provided the impetus for Dylan’s second
most prolific period, starting a run of seven studio albums in less than eight
years and doing well on the charts, reaching #1 in the US and #7 in the UK
Well, to begin with, it stands in the immediate and very
long shadow cast by the album which followed it just a year later, the rightly
celebrated Blood On The Tracks.
Then, critics nitpicked about the
production sound and have tended to skim over it on their way to discussing the
massively successful comeback tour with The Band - as encapsulated in the live
album, Before The Flood - all of
which took place in 1974, with Blood
On The Tracks straining at the leash for release the following January.
Dylan was again ‘busy being born’*2,
shaking the dust off his feet. Apart from ‘Forever Young’, which was the only
song from the album he was still playing as the tour reached its end, he has
only very rarely included selections from Planet
Waves in his numerous concerts down the years. With the exception of
‘Going, Going, Gone’, no other song from it has appeared on his live albums.
Neither has he remarked upon the record much in interviews beyond a few
throw-away comments in the booklet which accompanied the Biograph (1985) compilation (i.e. ‘On A Night Like This’ – ‘not my
type of song, I think I just did it to do it’; ‘You Angel You’ - ‘sounds to me
like dummy lyrics’; ‘Forever Young’ – ‘I wrote it thinking about one of my
boys…not wanting it to be too sentimental…the lines…were done in a minute…the
song wrote itself.’).
Personally, I’ve always loved Planet Waves whilst recognising that it
stops short of the pantheon of his very best work. Some critics are fans too:
Michael Gray deems it ‘potent, compelling’, and Michael Gross commends its
‘sexy, rocking’ feel. Both of these writers are interested in the album’s
preoccupation with the past as seen from the standpoint of a mature married man
and father in his early thirties whilst Paul Williams describes it as ‘a very
giving album’ and puts his finger on the ‘sense of rediscovery of self combined
with fear of loss.’
Though generally in favour, Tim
Riley bemoans the ‘slipshod’ production and what he repeatedly calls its
‘frumpy’ sound. I’m at a loss as to quite what he means by this – drab, perhaps? Well, compared to the
glitzy bounce of those contemporaneous trends of Glam Rock and Disco, Planet Waves probably does seem
a rather low-key affair, but that never affected my appreciation of it. I will,
by the way, discuss in more detail, the vexed question of production on Dylan
records further on.
When we consider the eleven songs
on the album, we find them all to be love songs, more or less: romantic,
sexual, marital and paternal love. The song that failed to make the cut,
‘Nobody ‘Cept You’, which later appeared on The
Bootleg Series 1-3 (1991) is another one. It apparently worked well live
but was never nailed in the studio. The out-take features Robbie Robertson
pottering around on the wah-wah pedal to no great effect. Robertson’s playing
on the official tracks however, is beyond reproach.
This, incidentally, is the only
Dylan album that The Band play on as a unit apart from the live album that
followed and The Basement Tapes
(1975) which came out
the next year but were,
of course, recorded much earlier. The musicians knit together the fabric of
the songs in a way that is both tight and subtle. ‘On A Night Like This’,
though, is mainly about Dylan’s harmonica playing which, unusually, operates
not merely as the lead instrument but as a constant thread dubbed behind the
vocals. Zipping smartly in to get the record underway, the song is a simple,
but highly effective starter which rides the lyrical conceit of lovers making
hot whoopee beside a log fire, whilst outside in the snow, ‘the four winds blow
/ Around this old cabin door’.
This upbeat mood is promptly
arrested by the cautionary ‘Going, Going, Gone’. Here we find the narrator ‘at
the top of the end…closin’ the book’ and determined to ‘cut loose / Before it
gets too late’. This can be tellingly interpreted as Dylan resolving to come
out of semi-retirement, make music and hit the road again. And what music!
Richard Manuel’s piano carries the rhythm with Garth Hudson’s organ wheezing
eerily in the background, but it is Robertson’s climbing, spindly notes and
plunging accent chords that truly compliment Dylan’s terrific vocal. He is
grimly set on a course and ‘don’t really care / What happens next’. The rising
bridge urges him to ‘follow your heart’ but also warns ‘Don’t you and your one
true love ever part’.
It’s a great song and one of
Dylan’s best of the period (the inferior live version on the Dylan At Budokan (1979) is heavily rewritten) Naturally,
it has been seen to implicitly reference his then wife, Sarah, and her fairly
well known doubts and fears about his re-entering the rock and roll fray.
However much those of us who write about Dylan should heed his oft-repeated
scorn at the idea of hanging his songs from the branches of what is known or surmised
about his life, there are certain songs which are reasonably unambiguous. I
think this is one of those songs (and, of course, ‘Sarah’, from Desire (1976), less contentiously, would
be another).
Is the next song, ‘Tough Mama’,
also ‘about’ Sarah? Well, epithets like ‘Sweet Goddess’ and ‘Silver Angel’
match the rather cloying terms like ‘Radiant Jewel’ and ‘Scorpio Sphinx’ which
I feel slightly undermine the otherwise eloquent Desire song.
Anyway, whoever ‘Tough Mama’ is,
Dylan tells her in the third verse that ‘you know who you are and where you’ve
been’. The hyperbole above is also offset by a lyrical flash which brings the
sleeve-note back to mind when the weather is described as ‘a-hotter than a
crotch’…The lyric, which, but for those epithets, might almost come from Highway 61 Revisited, seeks to persuade
the woman to stick by him and, in the song’s last line, meet him ‘at the border
late tonight’ (where, presumably, the tour-bus awaits). Musically it’s a rollicking track with The Band’s fine ensemble
backing Dylan’s raucous harmonica. Robert Christgau probably had this track in
mind when he grinningly refers to the ‘scrawny, cocky…stray cat music’ to be
found in parts of the album.
So who might ‘Hazel’ be then,
with her memorably ‘dirty blonde hair’ and ‘stardust in her eye’? An old flame
from way back when, perhaps? Who cares? It’s a wonderful little love song,
elevated by the warm, wistful vocal and another soaring bridge (listen to the
way Dylan sings ‘up on a hill’). The key point here may be that Hazel is ‘goin’
somewhere and so am I’.
Whoever the woman is in
‘Something There Is About You’, she makes Dylan nostalgic for his pre-fame past
and ‘brings back a long-forgotten truth’:
‘Thought
I’d shaken the wonder and the phantoms of my youth
Rainy days on the Great Lakes,
walkin’ the hills of old Duluth
Naturally, critics have seized
upon this almost Wordsworthian couplet because of its frank mention of Dylan’s
home town - he ‘who’s so good with words and at keeping things vague’ as Joan
Baez put it in her great 1975 song about their relationship, ‘Diamonds &
Rust’. Interestingly, when singing ‘Going, Going Gone’ live in 1976, by which
time Baez was temporarily back in the picture romantically, Dylan had added the
lyric, ‘Now I’ve just got to go / Before it’s all diamonds and rust’…). The
woman in ‘Something There Is About You’ seems to have saved him from the
vertiginous and excessive stardom of his past:
‘I
was in a whirlwind, now I’m in some better place’
He’s grateful but not grateful
enough to ‘promise to be faithful’. It’s a hard, honest admission and anchors
this torch-song with chilling cast-iron. Musically, Dylan again leads The Band with
strong vocal and harmonica performances, although the pretty melody doesn’t go
anywhere much.
And so to ‘Forever Young’ - so
good they included it twice. Then there are three other official versions: a
solo acoustic rendition from Biograph; a version with The Band on their
valedictory live album, The Last Waltz
(1978); and another live cut from the Budokan
set. All of these have much to recommend them but, of the five, my
favourite is probably the Last Waltz one with Robertson’s
stratospherically epic Stratocaster.
It is the big song on Planet Waves and one which his audiences will
always crave to hear - along with ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ and ‘Like A Rolling
Stone’ et al. In a 2005 poll of musicians and house writers on ‘Mojo’ magazine,
‘Forever Young’ is the only track
from Planet Waves to figure in their Top 100 Dylan songs (albeit only at #44).
Dylan’s poet pal, Allen Ginsberg
loved it, recommending it as a latter-day national anthem for America
‘God’ is only mentioned once, at
the outset, and the song has none of the rather tedious, unpleasant religiosity
that blighted parts of the so called ‘born again trilogy’ of albums a few years
down the line. In fact, ‘Forever Young’, a hymn of hope, has more in common
with the lovely little chant, ‘Father Of Night’, the hymn of praise which ended
his previous studio album, New Morning
(1970).
When you turned the original
record over you found a reprise of ‘Forever Young’, this time in a jaunty,
hoedown tempo. I liked it well enough although thought it something of a makeweight.
Ideally, a more simpatico take of ‘Nobody ‘Cept You’ might have made for a
stronger programme, but one has to say that the sequencing on Planet Waves is nicely symmetrical. As
on the first side, a cheerful, lively opener is followed by a much slower,
darker proposition.
‘Dirge’ was, confusingly, titled
‘Dirge For Martha’ to begin with – quite who she might have been, no-one seems to know. It features just Dylan
on piano and Robertson splintering out notes on an acoustic guitar. Dylan’s
mastery of the piano may be only rudimentary, but he can be a highly effective
player - as here, and Robertson’s playing is yet again exactly right, echoing
the frustration and spite of the words (Tim Riley remarks on the ‘brittle,
spooked’ atmosphere of the performance). The song makes most sense to me when I
hear Dylan’s powerful vocal addressing not a woman, not Sarah (let alone the
mysterious Martha), but some personification of the gaping maw of stardom
opening up before him once more as he prepares to put himself back in the
marketplace. It might – more shakily – be compared to ‘Dear Landlord’ from John Wesley Harding (1967), a song
probably addressed to his manager, Albert Grossman. Whoever or whatever the
song is aimed at, its final ironic couplet is a telling admission of how
bitterly conflicted Dylan must have been feeling when he wrote ‘Dirge’:-
‘Lady
Luck, who shines on me, will tell you where I ’m at -
I hate myself
for loving you, but I should get over that.’
‘You Angel You’ is another fine
ensemble performance and one of the catchiest tracks. It may have been written
with an eye on the chart and was released as the flip side of ‘On A Night Like
This’, the lead single from the album which disappeared without trace, despite
the perceived commercial appeal of both songs. ‘Dummy lyric’, or not, it might,
with a country arrangement, have fitted snugly on Nashville
‘Never Say Goodbye’, like most of
the material here, gets by without recourse to a conventional verse-chorus
structure. A short song – there are no sprawling epics on this album – it is
propelled by the rhythm section of Rick Danko on bass and Levon Helm on drums,
and is over almost before you know it. It begins with this haunting verse:-
‘Twilight on
the frozen lake
A north wind
about to break
On footprints
in the snow
And silence
down below’
The elemental geography of his
Minnesota past is evoked again (that ‘twilight’ and ‘silence’ has stayed with
me ever since I first heard it all those years ago) but, to be honest, the rest
of the song, lovely listening experience that it is, fails to really live up to
its opening. By Dylan’s standards, it proceeds as a fairly conventional love
song, although the final verse fleetingly raises the ghosts of a couple of his
earlier classics (‘Girl Of The North Country’ and ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby
Blue’) before fading away.
As the first half of the record
ended with a love song for his children, so the second leaves us with a love
song for his wife (call me sentimental, but it is called ‘Wedding Song’…).
It’s Dylan down to the bone, just him on acoustic guitar and harmonica, playing
and singing in that uniquely authoritative way of his.
It’s both a declaration of the depth
of his continuing love for and abiding gratitude to Sarah as well as a pledge
of reassurance to her that his return to recording and touring won’t lead him
back to the abyss. They can get through this, he sings, because ‘the past is
gone’. In what is perhaps the album’s most quoted lyric, he restates his
renouncement of that ‘Spokesman of a Generation’ soubriquet, telling Sarah and
anyone else who cares to listen, that:_
‘It’s never
been my duty to remake the world at large,
Nor is it my
intention to sound the battle charge’
Back on Side One however, he has
also told her that his ‘hand’s on the sabre’ although he may be willing to let
her call the tune because she has ‘picked up the baton’ (‘Something There Is
About You’). There seems to be a kind of desperation abroad here, amidst all
the affirmation, and he fears that her love ‘burns him to the soul’ and cuts
him ‘like a knife’. And yes, he loves her ‘more than blood’, but listen to the
way he sings that phrase and you
realise just how close we are to the most famous break-up record in the history
of popular music. Blood On The
Tracks waits in the wings, its wounds
perhaps already opening up by the end of its predecessor.
* * * *
Here’s how underrated Planet Waves is - Robbie Robertson, who
as this article makes clear, is, after Dylan himself, the key musician on that
record (and although no producer is named on the album, Robertson is credited
with ‘Special Assistance’) - was featured in the music press promoting a new
album and looking back over his career. As I was, at the time, in the middle of
writing this piece during the Spring of 2011, I checked out three of the
quality magazines, ‘Mojo’, ‘Uncut’ and ‘The Word’. What I found was that
Robertson’s stroll down
Perhaps Robertson didn’t want to
remind readers of an album that he pretty much produced but which has been
criticised for its sound. After all, the critics have told us that you can
actually hear Dylan’s jacket button scratching against his guitar on the first
and only take of ‘Wedding Song’ (at least, you might be able to if you’re zeroing
in through top of the range Bang & Olufsen speakers and headphones).
Well, if you’re that kind of high
fidelity buff, you’ll probably find my final choice of underrated album all but
unlistenable…
STREET LEGAL (1978)
‘Oh, babe, time for a new transition.’
‘Oh, babe, time for a new transition.’
(‘We Better Talk this Over’)
I have admired this album from
the start and still rate it as one of the very best pieces of Dylan’s
post-1960s work. Quite apart from the words and music, I liked the sound of the thing. It seemed to me to
me to come closest to what Dylan had struggled to articulate as ‘that…wild
mercury sound’ when describing the music in his head as captured on his Blonde On Blonde album.
Imagine then, my puzzlement and
dismay as, over the years, one critic after another lined up to pour scorn on
this recording (in the Biograph interview,
Dylan himself complains that ’The critics treated this album spitefully’). Tim
Riley, for instance, didn’t even deem it worthy of extended discussion in his
‘Dylan Commentary’, attacking what he hears as its ‘blurry sound, half-hearted
arrangements and misplaced passion’. Robert Christgau recoiled at such
‘horrendous product’, whilst Greil Marcus, presumably suffering from ADS,
complained that it was ‘simply impossible to pay attention to for more than a
couple of minutes at a time’.
There was some more measured appraisal.
Clinton Heylin described it as ‘an album only marginally flawed in conception
[but] dramatically impaired in its execution.’ David Mansfield, who played mandolin
and violin on the actual record, insisted that it ‘sounded marvellous in the
room…like Dylan meets Phil Spector’, but nevertheless feared it was ‘poorly
recorded.’ Meanwhile, Paul Williams felt it was ‘weird…fascinating…tantalising…a
tease’, liking the whole sound of it, but having serious reservations about the
lyrics. ‘Mojo’ magazine’s fabulous retrospective tome on Dylan, damned it with
faint praise, allowing it to be ‘not exactly a howler.’
At the time of its release,
however, Street Legal was treated
more generously by the British music press. In the now defunct ‘Melody Maker’,
Michael Watts called it Dylan’s ‘best since John
Wesley Harding,’ whilst over at ‘New Musical Express, Angus MacKinnon
claimed it was his second major album of the 1970s. Michael Gray has continued to agree with this view in his ongoing
appreciation of the back catalogue, extolling the record’s ‘astonishing
complexity and confidence, delivered in Dylan’s most authoritative voice.’
It might be as well at this point
to once and for all deal with the question of production. Don De Vito had
produced the previous album, the extremely well received Desire - at least, the liner-note says that he ‘could have produced
this album’, whilst on Street Legal, he
is described on the sleeve as ‘Captain In Charge’. De Vito has therefore
presided over the two (consecutive) records which feature the biggest studio
bands with which Dylan has ever worked.
Now Dylan is famous – and, in the
main, highly regarded – for his no-nonsense approach in the studio. It is not
his natural habitat and he likes to be in and out a.s.a.p. and, if he has
anything amounting to a studio aesthetic, then that seems to be about it. There
cannot be many artists who have not only recorded but released as many first, second and third takes as Dylan. It is –
and Paul Williams has devoted three volumes of analysis to saying just this –
the performance that counts. Dylan is
simply not interested in the technical gloss that modern recording techniques
can confer (as a cursory listen to his ‘Theme Time Radio Hour’ will confirm).
On those odd occasions when he has allowed himself to be
seduced by the dictates of what is fashionable, his records have ended up
sounding badly of their time (like George Baker’s mix of Empire Burlesque) or just too damn shiny (like the Was brothers’
job on Under A Red Sky (1990).
It is fair to surmise that De
Vito may have struggled to achieve a compromise with Dylan’s artistic vision
whilst miking up the biggest bands the singer had ever recorded with. The
producer’s remixed version came out in 1999 to muted approval. It doesn’t sound
that different to me – yes, in the
manner of remasters, it’s brighter and the voice, drums and organ are clearer,
but it hardly revolutionizes the way I hear the record.
But let us move on to the album
cover before reminding ourselves of those terrific songs. On the front, looking
like he may have just knocked off after a shift in a factory, Dylan stands on a
shabby downtown street in a doorway by some grimy stairs. He has a jacket under
his arm and he’s looking expectantly to the left, as if waiting for a lift or
maybe a bus or taxi - or maybe it’s a station and there’s a Slow Train Coming (1979)…Whatever, as
the title of the album suggests, he’s ready to move on.
There are a couple of black and
white shots on the inner sleeve of him with cool looking black dudes. In one of
these, his face is brilliantly lit by the match he’s applying to a cigarette
(is he ‘seeing the light’ perhaps?). In the original vinyl release, there was
also a colour poster enclosed of him wearing the same glitzy stage outfit that
graces the back cover (and which will reappear on the tour album, Budokan), where he stands sans guitar or
harmonica, with a hand-held mike. Dylan, more interested in the presentation of
his shows in those days than since, is wearing the whiteface make-up that had
masked his performances for the last few years. The godawful costume he wore at
the time appears to have been influenced by those worn by the likes of Neil
Diamond and Elvis Presley, whose recent death had rocked Dylan. The schmutter
was thought by some to be a kind of homage to Presley. It didn’t really matter
live – I was at Earl’s Court in ’78 and saw a tremendous show, but I still find
those stills something of an embarrassment.
So, yes Dylan was well and truly
‘still on the road / lookin’ for another joint’*3. The Before The Flood tour had led to the ‘Rolling Thunder’ tour(s) and
then the world tour that followed Street
Legal.
The album announces itself with
‘Changing Of The Guards’ (at #80, it’s one of two Street Legal tracks to make that ‘Mojo’ Top 100 I mentioned
earlier; ‘Senor’ at #90 is the other).The opening words refer to Dylan’s
recording career (‘Sixteen years’) and the number of albums up to and including
Street Legal itself (‘Sixteen
banners’ – if, that is, we count the soundtrack, Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid (1973) and discount the aberrant Dylan discussed above). Powered by the
drumming of Ian Wallace with only a Steve Douglas saxophone riff every two
verses approximating to a chorus, the song drives through seven minutes,
punctuated by the girls’ strictly patterned backing vocals, without once
flagging. This is due to Dylan’s commanding vocal and the sense of apocalypse
evoked in the intense lyric which holds the listener’s interest tightly.
(There is no space here to
attempt an extended analysis of the lyrics on Street Legal. Suffice to say, it is perhaps Dylan’s most complex
album lyrically. Never again, would he seem to devote so much thought and
effort, over the course of an entire album, to the poetics of his writing).
Having ‘stepped forth from the
shadows, to the marketplace’ (that ‘Dark Beauty’ of fame and fortune perhaps, that he agreed to
return to one night on the border, back on Planet
Waves), the narrator of this first
song tells us that his ‘last deal gone down’ and that he is turning his back on
the ‘merchants and thieves’ and the ‘organization’. False idols are about to
fall, ‘Eden
Such rich wordplay is put to one
side during the next cut as ‘New Pony’ brings us back down to earth with a
grinding carnal bump. The lolloping guitar of Billy Cross carries the simple
blues groove but, really it is Dylan’s almost demonically lip-smacking vocal
which make it such an arresting track. Cross also plays a fine solo and Douglas comes in with a great sax coda, whilst all the
way through, the girls are urgently chanting ‘How much, how much longer?’
What are they waiting for, we might
ask. Well, there are two ponies involved here: ‘Lucifer’ who is shot by the
narrator in the first verse; and her replacement, ‘Miss X’ with her dancing
skills, her ‘sweet disposition’ and her ‘voodoo’. Are either of these ‘ponies’
the same as the ‘beloved maid / Whose ebony face is beyond communication’ mentioned
in the previous song? Like Michael
Gray, I’ve always felt that some of Street
Legal ‘charts Dylan’s voyage from
Sara to Jesus’, and history tells us that one of the black women singing on the
album is Carolyn Dennis, who Dylan would marry in 1986 – so maybe that was ‘how
much longer’, then…
At over eight minutes and no less
than eighteen verses long, ‘No Time To Think’ is obviously designed with epic
qualities in mind. It is however, a non-narrative tour-de-force and may,
superficially, be less interesting to listen to than other long tracks such as say, the quasi-story of
‘Desolation Row’ or the surreal tale of ‘Lily, Rosemary & The Jack Of
Hearts’. It has more in common with the tirade of ‘Idiot Wind’, only here, the
desperation is philosophical rather than marital. It also reminds me of the Shot Of Love (1981) out-take,
‘Angelina’, in its obsessive rhyming.
Taking its lead from the
interlaced saxophone and violin melody played by Steve Douglas and David
Mansfield, the even-numbered verses musically descend whilst the odd-numbered
ones climb until the title-phrase is hammered home every eighth line. The rigid
a-b-a-b, c-d-e-e rhyme scheme is underpinned by a looser system of internal
rhymes and more tightly patterned backing vocals. All of this makes for a
sophisticated and highly structured musical foundation over which Dylan sings
out his heart. It can be both breathtaking and tiring.
‘Baby, Stop Crying’ was Dylan’s
last significant hit single in the UK
We now arrive at the album’s most
controversial point: ‘Is Your Love In Vain?’ Although Dylan has many women
fans, he must, over the years, have proved hard work for the stricter feminists
among them. Standing shoulder to shoulder with them, Robert Christgau,
castigates the singer of this song as a ‘boozy-voiced misogynist’. Over the top
perhaps, but it is difficult to defend that notorious line, ‘Can you cook and
sew, make flowers grow?’ especially when set beside the singer’s moaning that he
can’t be doing with the woman intruding on his ‘solitude’ and insisting that
she understand his ‘pain’. One feels like telling him to get a grip! Consider
this song next to ‘New Pony’ and it does rather look like Dylan wants his women
to be angels in the kitchen and whores in the bedroom: not a job spec. likely
to impress his left-leaning audience back when women’s rights was a key issue.
He sounds a sadder and wiser man on the less strident live version on the Budokan album, but the offending lyric
is unrepentantly intact.
It’s a pity because ‘Is Your Love
In Vain’ is a great track to hear if
you manage not to listen to the words
(the bridge in the third verse is the only one worthy of the tune, with its
neatly expressed ‘I’ve been in and out of happiness’). With the sax augmented
by Steve Madaio’s trumpet, the sound is full and rich and reminds me vaguely of
the effect achieved by one of the standout tracks on Self Portrait, ‘Wigwam’.
One of Dylan’s
not-quite-masterpieces opens the second half of Street Legal. ‘Senor (Tales Of Yankee Power)’ - that parenthetical subtitle has always somewhat thrown me because
I tend to read the song as one of its author’s periodic dialogues with his God
and, as such, I find it intensely powerful. The subtitle, however, implies an anomalous
political subtext - especially in the light of the recently concluded Vietnam
war - which, along with the two rather confusing bridge verses (3 & 5), can
act to cloud the issue of the spiritual quest clearly underway in the rest of
the lyric. (Dylan’s own comment, in the Biograph
overview, reduces ‘Senor’ to the mere level of a break-up song!).
Overall, though, the ominous
heat-haze which blurs the words and music here does not ultimately distract us
from the conviction that the narrator is moving ever closer to some point of no
return. Without approaching the frequently postulated critical theory of
Dylan’s identification with Christ, it is worth, I think, looking again at the
song’s stirring – and much quoted – last
verse:-
‘Senor,
senor, let’s overturn these tables,
Disconnect
these cables:
This
place don’t make sense to me no more.
Can
you tell me what we’re waiting for, senor?’
This is heady stuff indeed and
the way that Dylan cries out that penultimate line should leave us in little
doubt that some ‘finishing end is at hand’*4.
Greil Marcus, trying desperately
to keep his eye on the ball, dismisses ‘Senor’ as ‘a pastiche of the best moments from The Eagles’
‘Hotel California’’, one of their best and certainly most Dylanesque pieces,
which came out the year before. True,
there’s an echo in the guitars, but that’s pretty much where the similarity
ends (and don’t you wish you’d heard ‘Senor’ even half as many times on the
radio as that overplayed Eagles hit?).
‘True Love Tends To Forget’,
although it features a much neater, stronger lyric, is, after ‘Baby, Please
Stop Crying’, the slightest track on Street
Legal. A drop in pressure was needed after ‘Senor’ and the two
Country-flavoured pop songs which follow it, do the job effectively before we
roll into the rain-soaked railway station waiting at the end of the album. The
first of these seems likely to be related to ‘New Pony’, as the narrator is
reassuring a woman waiting for him that he’ll soon tell her when. By the same token, there may also be
another woman here - you know how Dylan likes to fool around with pronouns -
messing with his mind and means and keeping him ‘knockin’ about from Mexico to Tibet
The song follows on logically from
the previous one and both have titles that encapsulate their lyrics. The final
verse of ‘We Better Talk This Over’ manages to be both resolute and regretful:-
‘Oh,
babe, time for a new transition.
I
wish I was a magician;
I
would wave a wand and tie back the bond
That we’ve
both gone beyond.’
It is however, the wistful sense
of loss that dominates the tone of the last song on Street Legal (and of this
phase of his career). If this album is one of Dylan’s most underrated, then I
feel that ‘Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)’ is one of his
most underrated songs.
Dylan may well despise critics as
misguided ‘jerks’ preying on his songs and scorn their ‘attempts to shovel the
glimpse / Into the ditch of what each one means’*5, but that, I’m afraid, is
his tough luck. It is his decision to
put his work in ‘the marketplace’ - to use his
term from both ‘Tough Mama’ (PW) and
‘Changing Of The Guard’ (SL) – where
it will be heard, enjoyed (or not, as the case may be), bought and analysed
just like any other work of art. Let us not forget that he has elsewhere told
Edna Gundersen that ‘People can learn everything about me through my songs, if
they know where to look’.
It is, however, often the case
with Dylan, that his albums and songs simply do not yield themselves up to a
full explanation. This is certainly so with the major songs on Street Legal and ‘Where Are You
Tonight?’ contains its share of inscrutable, albeit highly evocative detail.
What we can say with a fair amount of confidence though, is that its narrator
is forging ahead through the ‘dark heat’ with a heavy heart, even if his spirit
is starting to soar.
The song opens to the sound of
bongos, with a fine piece of scene-setting:-
‘There’s a
long-distance train rolling through the rain,
Tears on the
letter I write.
There’s a
woman I long to touch and I’m missing her so much
But she’s
drifting like a satellite.’
So far, so clear. Then it starts
to slip into the past tense, becoming ‘a book that nobody can write’ in which
‘The truth was too obscure, too profound and too pure’ - and, perhaps, too personal - to be conveyed unambiguously.
There’s some fascinating stuff about ‘forbidden fruit’ with the Gemini narrator
fighting against sexual temptation, ‘I won’t but, then again, I just might’,
and against his twin self, ‘that enemy within’.
By the time the last verse and
chorus arrives, the smoke and mirrors begin to fade away and the light in the
carriage window clarifies:-
‘There’s a
white diamond moon on the dark side of the room
And a pathway
that leads up to the stars.
If you don’t
believe there’s a price for this sweet paradise
Just remind me
to show you the scars.’
The music swells towards the
climax. The organ, played by Alan Pasqua, which has been all over this album,
submerged in the rhythm section, has been leading this arrangement, but now it
is the sax which reclaims the spotlight. Dylan’s voice, tremendously soulful
throughout, rises into the chorus, unhinged but still in tune:-
‘There’s a new
day at dawn and I’ve finally arrived.
If I’m there
in the morning, baby, you’ll know I’ve survived.
I can’t
believe it, I can’t believe I’m alive,
But, without
you, it doesn’t seem right –
Oh, where are
you tonight?’
The lead guitar solos the song
out with Dylan and the backing singers confirming and affirming the journey’s
momentous destination; ‘Hey, hey’, indeed. It’s as good a few minutes of words
and music as you will find on any Dylan record.
* * * * *
As we know, Dylan then proceeded
to change trains and, after stopping at the stations Denunciation, Damnation,
Proclamation and Salvation, eventually wound up back on the main line.
The passing of the new century’s
first decade saw his career at another unexpected critical and commercial high
with transatlantic #1 albums. Now this essay has been concerned about the
albums I consider to be his most underrated, but I’d like to conclude with a
few more words about what I feel to be his most overrated work. And these are the last four records he has issued
to date.
Firstly, the one which started
this latest comeback: Time Out Of
Mind, with its ominous lyrics and
penumbral Daniel Lanois production. It’s a wonderful album, to be sure, but
aren’t most of its songs overlong?
Its closer, ‘Highlands ’ is, at sixteen minutes, easily the longest track Dylan has ever released – and for
what? Little more than a mildly amusing shaggy dog story!
Love And Theft (2001) is an interesting melange
of pre-Rock & Roll styles and has some nice jokes but most of its songs are
fundamentally slight. Modern Times (2006) is, with its comic moments,
something of a sequel to Love And Theft, but
isn’t a patch on Time Out Of
Mind, about which Dylan has proudly
said, ‘There isn’t any waste. There’s no line that has to be there to get to
another line.’ This does not seem to be the case with subsequent albums where
Dylan often idly rhymes his way through sometimes quite disjointed images to
very little effect. The accordion-drenched Together
Through Life (2009) is the weakest of these four records. Its
strung-together Dylanisms sound tired and I doubt that it will prove the sort
of album that is likely to repay repeated listening.
All of these releases have met
with a warm critical reception and yes, there are some great new songs to add
to the canon – ‘Not Dark Yet’; ‘Mississippi’ - especially the two alternate
takes on Tell-Tale Signs: The Bootleg
Series Vol. 8 (2008); and ‘Sugar Baby’; and yet I don’t honestly think
any of the albums are as good as Planet
Waves - and they’re definitely not in
the same league as Street Legal.
To these ears, the best release
with Dylan’s name on it since Oh Mercy (1989) is that latest instalment
of The Bootleg Series which
emphasises yet again just how much of his best material Dylan leaves behind him
on the studio floor.
Anyway, if you’ve read this and
disagreed with my choices, then so be it. Maybe ‘You’re right from your side /
And I’m right from mine’*6. Maybe ‘We just saw it from another point of view’*7
BIBIOGRAPHY
Barker, Derek (ed.) – Isis : A Bob Dylan Anthology. Helter Skelter
(2001)
Blake, Mark (ed.) – Dylan: Visions, Portraits And Back Pages. DK
(2005)
Crowe, Cameron - Biograph booklet. Columbia
Dylan, Bob – Lyrics: 1962-2001. Simon & Schuster (2004)
Gray, Michael – Song & Dance Man: The Art Of Bob Dylan. Hamlyn
(1981)
Gross, Michael – Bob Dylan: An Illustrated History. Elm
Tree Books (1978)
Heylin, Clinton – Behind
The Shades: Take Two
Heylin, Clinton - Revolution In The Air: The Songs Of Bob
Dylan Vol. 1: 1957-73.
Constable
& Robinson (2009)
Riley, Tim – Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary. Plexus (1992)
Williams, Paul – Bob Dylan: Performing Artist 1974-86: The
Middle Years.
Omnibus
(1992)
UNSPECIFIED QUOTATIONS FROM SONGS
*1 – ‘John Wesley Harding’ (1968)
*2 – ‘It’s Alright, Ma, I’m Only
Bleeding’ (1965)
*3 & *7 - ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ (1975)
*4 - ‘To Ramona’ (1964)
*5 – ‘Gates Of Eden
*6 - ‘One Too Many Mornings’
(1964)
*8 - 'Motorpsycho Nitemare' (1964)
*8 - 'Motorpsycho Nitemare' (1964)
1.
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