Modern Times (2006)

All songs on this long, thoughtful, and satisfying Bob Dylan album are credited as written by Bob Dylan even though the titles include “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” and “The Levee’s Gonna Break,” which, you know—they’ve been done. But in some alchemical process I see starting with his early-‘90s cover albums, Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, continuing (and peaking) with “Love and Theft”, and arguably finishing up here (or maybe Together Through Life, Tempest, or Rough and Rowdy Ways, none of which I know as well because they haven’t impressed me enough to go beyond a few casual listens), it feels less like some kind of plagiarism and much more like an artist who has entirely absorbed his sources and is capable of spitting them back out in new forms—these songs feel old and new all at once. Wikipedia scholars have been hard at work identifying those sources and pulling them out of the wonderful stew of Modern Times. Muddy Waters of course for “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” Bing Crosby for “When the Deal Goes Down,” Sleepy John Estes, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Muddy Waters again for “Someday Baby” (not to mention his own “Maggie’s Farm”), and ... Ovid?! ... for specific lines of the lyrics. I wanted to say Dylan wrote his own words for the various blues / country standards, which justifies his authorship, but with Ovid now in the picture all bets are off, public domain or no. Amazingly, none of this gets in the way in terms of the pleasures of these 10 long songs. I’m not exactly sure how Dylan gets away with his thievery but he does and that’s a fact. Indeed, “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” and “The Levee’s Gonna Break” are high points of a very good set. Much is result of a band nearly as well-versed in the standards and with whom he had been playing on tour for the year previous. A lot of what’s great here is this sympathetic, well-rehearsed band that is so clearly in synch with him. But Dylan remains the sun around which these planets whirl. Rock critic dean Robert Christgau gave the album a rare A+, which he also applied to “Love and Theft”. I’m still more a partisan for that one, along with Time Out of Mind, operating in another sphere entirely. But Modern Times is like your favorite easy chair. You can sit in its lap every day, often hearing new things and, even when you don’t, it’s practically pure comfort. Put it on and pull up a seat.

Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 (1988)

I chronically associate the "supergroup" idea with albums featuring long jams by players such as Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper. But Wikipedia sez those guys are merely the source of the term when they made an album in 1968 with Stephen Stills called Super Session. The crowd-sourced encyclopedia goes on to list examples of supergroups: Cream, Led Zeppelin (!), Crosby, Stills (him again), Nash & Young, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, etc., etc., all the way unto SSAK3 last year. Fair enough, fair enough. The supergroup that the Traveling Wilburys most resembles to me is Blind Faith, with a consortium of mostly well-established if disparate players and one amazing album. I know the Wilburys have a second album, called Vol. 3 (to baffle the completists, hyuk-hyuk), but stick with me.

My instinctive resistance to supergroup projects was locked in by 1988. From the outside this looked like the usual half-baked collision of over-the-hill celebrity and tender egos and my inclination was to skip it. But at some point I saw it for cheap somewhere and thought I really oughta. The album hit me like the work of supergroups in the other sense of the term (e.g., the Beatles and the Stones) and I have been a partisan ever since. The experience was reminiscent for me, and remains so, speaking of those supergroups, of bringing Beatles albums home for the first time back in the wayback. The first sensation is pure pleasure followed by playing it a lot. In the first days and weeks with these albums you don't even particularly sort out what's good and what's better and why, you just listen to them every day, sometimes multiple times, cramming it all the way down to the brainstem until you can hear the beginnings of the next songs in the endings of the previous. As with the Beatles, you can try picking apart the constituent elements of the Traveling Wilburys but it never seems to help much.

Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited (2006)

Another way to explore the 33⅓ series, perhaps the most common: read the ones on favorite albums. Highway 61 Revisited has long been my personal favorite, and with the book's 2006 publication date this particular entry—by Mark Polizzotti, about whom I don't otherwise know much—is one of the earlier books in the series. I found things to like and not like. More than anything it underlines the difficulty of the project in conception. In many ways, all a writer can do is huff up and uncork the love, hopefully with a side of original research or at least insight ... if there is any left to be found. Polizzotti's footnotes for the book number into the triple digits, which says plenty about what has gone before as well as what is going on here. In particular, Polizzotti has issues with Greil Marcus's attempts to own the Bob Dylan critical enterprise. Polizzotti's complaints are valid, but Marcus's loopy takes are well suited to Dylan in general, even when they are obviously quite insane, so Polizzotti is more tilting at windmills in that regard. But there is good work here, and it all proceeds from the good faith of his regard for the album. Interestingly, even as much of Dylan's most compelling attraction lies in the language he uses, it also resists very much the language of the critic, making the critic look a little silly. Thus, even though Polizzotti obviously appreciates "Desolation Row" and goes on with great authority about it—indeed, much in accord with many of my own views on it. Polizzotti has my sympathies and I'm sure I have his. But he looks just a little silly going on at length about it. We all do. One of Bob Dylan's most confounding and terrific skills is the ability to tell almost anyone to shut up and make it stick. On the music, and on the sessions, this little book is much better, taking care of a lot of legwork and connecting many dots. That the picture created by the connected dots seems beside the point is hardly Polizzotti's fault. He comes from a literary background but wisely sets that aside for the most part here. It's not without insights—I had never before noticed the symmetry of the two vinyl sides, for example—but I think it's best only at small things, such as sorting out the producer's role among Tom Wilson, Bob Johnston, and of course Dylan himself and his process in the studio, still evolving in 1965 but very close to the enduring template that set in with the next album, Blonde on Blonde. No one can explain this album, Highway 61 Revisited—it's what I find so entertaining about Marcus's attempts. Polizzotti's book is definitely worth a look for the hardcore.

In case it's not at the library.

Highway 61 Revisited (1965)

(There's a short version here.)

I have to start with basically facts from my life—this album and especially the breakthrough hit that opens it, "Like a Rolling Stone," have grown so deeply ingrained into my mode of being it is as if they have been ground down to liquefaction. Now it's a matter of saturation, leached in profoundly, which I understand among other things makes me cliché on certain obvious levels, as it is also leached in profoundly to a good many, who never want to stop talking about it. Love him or hate him, as they say. So I also want to attempt to be short.

Tempest (2012)

I was talking just the other day about the tempestuous relationship so many of his fans have had with Bob Dylan. I followed a fairly familiar path, connecting with most of his best '60s albums slightly after the fact, as a teen in high school in the early '70s, then losing him across the course of the '70s until the Jesus period, when I checked out completely until Oh Mercy, coming back all the way with Time Out of Mind. He's just one of my favorites now, there I said it, it's a cliché, I accept that. He is willfully obtuse, a scoundrel and rascal, can't sing very well (and now his voice is shot), can't play guitar either, isn't a nice guy, and yeah, probably laughing at me. I don't know what the songs mean, or in this context, even exactly what the meaning of songs means. He's not exactly comfortable, I know that, and often annoying as hell. But almost always interesting, in a way that is notably difficult to describe. More on this later. In the new century, "Love and Theft" set the terms of the current state of the crisscrossing blues rock 'n' roll roots forms with rambling talk songs, well and truly introducing the expedient of absolutely first-rate bands producing unpretentiously amazing grooves. It was best on that album, from 2001, a little bit off on Modern Times, from 2006, and now a little bit further off here. He seems content to work out batches of songs like this every few years and I'm content to enjoy them for a few weeks. The song lengths here start at three and a half minutes and range on up to nearly 14 minutes for the title song, which, it must be said, doesn't deserve such breadth, but at least is unassuming about it. My favorites tend to take it up a little notch—thinking of "Narrow Way," for example (7:28), or "Early Roman Kings" (5:14), maybe the best thing here. Yes, "Roll On John" is extremely unfortunate. More broadly the tell, as always, is the humor, and the fact is that the jokes mostly aren't that funny on Tempest. But all right. Larger truth still in place. He has aged well. It is more and more looking like a life well lived, which seemed impossible at multiple points since 1962. Somehow the stakes still seem to matter, although there's a good chance that's just me.

Bob Dylan, "Clothes Line Saga" (1967)

(listen)

I think this is one of Bob Dylan's best and most funny moments and he's not even trying very hard. But that's what makes it. It seems so effortless. It's some vaguely sketched easygoing neighborhood scene with people shuffling about the place tending to laundry and bantering back and forth. "It was January the 30th / And everybody was feelin' fine"—somehow a portentous statement. The tones of Garth Hudson's organ drone on like someone nodding their head as they listen to a story. The whole band is into a poky groove. It swirls about with nothing much making sense, when all of a sudden striking events are reported, and the song snaps into sharp focus: "'Have you heard the news?' he said, with a grin / 'The vice-president’s gone mad!' / 'Where?' 'Downtown.' 'When?' 'Last night' / Hmm, say, that’s too bad!' / 'Well, there’s nothin’ we can do about it'..." And then the song goes shuffling off to other precincts, even attempting less successfully to replicate the rhythms of that "where? downtown, when? last night" little trick, which is so much fun to sing with too. In general I prefer these throwaways that so generously pepper The Basement Tapes ("Lo and Behold," "Don't Ya Tell Henry," "Please, Mrs. Henry") because it feels more like people enjoying themselves and I think that's the best point of this and the best of his stuff from the time, immediately post-famous motorcycle accident. But I'm equally intrigued by a song traveling under very nearly the same name ("Clothesline Saga") on the big "Genuine" Basement Tapes, in which he seems to be singing "Get your rocks off" as much as anything. Maybe a mislabel.

19. Bob Dylan, "Ballad of a Thin Man" (1965)

(listen)

The fact is I could have taken any song from Highway 61 Revisited and put it approximately here, or spread them all up and down this list—it's my favorite album and has been for as long as I can remember and somehow it stays fresh and bracing every time I come back to it, even broken down to constituent parts. But this is the song that I recall amazing me first and most, doing things I didn't know could be done in a song or anything like it. It proceeds like a dream, a nightmare of powerlessness from the point of view of the tormentor, existing languidly within the smoky music of that remarkable session. It's at once funny and caustic. I laughed at parts of it like it was a stand-up routine: "And you say 'What does this mean?' and he screams back 'You're a cow / 'Give me some milk or else go home.'" And I gulped at others, recognizing myself in Mr. Jones nearly as much as I recognized myself (or the desire for it to be myself) in the ultra-cool uber-hip insider singing the song. One has only to see Dylan's treatment of Donovan in the D.A. Pennebaker documentary Don't Look Back to realize that a good deal of the time, at this point in his career, he was trading in the kind of alienating clique-mongering that's more appropriate to junior-high kids (and there are any number of reasonable explanations for that, given the totality of his experience at the time). Yet "Ballad of a Thin Man" is as seductive a portrait of the impulse as can be found anywhere, and a fine example of the pure blasts of dazzling language that populate that album too. It still amazes me—even knowing that I have become someone, like Mr. Jones, who has been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books.

35. Bob Dylan, "Mr. Tambourine Man" (1965)

(listen)

I've always considered Highway 61 Revisited the best Bob Dylan by a fair sight, but Bringing it All Back Home, home of the original (and best) version of "Mr. Tambourine Man," is worthy in its own right. Worthy, did I say? Downright essential. "Mr. Tambourine Man" kicks off the second side and has often seemed to me a far-reaching look to what was to come, even though it's plainly as acoustic as can be, with Dylan strumming away and blowing his mouth harp, accompanied only by a subtle electric guitar figure from Bruce Langhorne. I was not much a fan of the Byrds cover, so for a long time I was reluctant to play that second side, drawn to it more by the dark, penetrating, and often very funny long song, "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," which of itself practically made it the better side (with "Gates of Eden" and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"). I don't recall the circumstances, but I put it on once for another chance at that long one and finally this leapt out at me. It's so many things all at once: Controlled, caustic, soothing, mournful, plain as can be, as light and nimble on its feet as a cat, and ultimately quite beautiful, but in a way that leaves one stammering around outside the edges of it. The best way in is ultimately just listening, letting the levels peel back and back and back. The language spills like rushing water as it does on so much of Dylan's best material, the rhythms of it and its meanings vying at once for attention, tumbling together stream of conscious style, enveloping one all at once in an indelible moment and feeling. It's not my favorite song by him—there's still one more ahead, and a good many candidates always ready to surge (including the aforementioned "It's Alright, Ma")—but it may be the single warmest thing he ever did.

Chronicles, Volume One (2004)

I understand the idea here is there's going to be three volumes altogether, and even that he is already busy working on the second. But we all know how Mr. Robert Zimmerman is occasionally prone to some stretchers. I'm just happy for what we got here, which is typical enough for Bob Dylan in terms of its capricious approach to the task of memoiring—skipping about from the period of his odyssey in which many of us are inordinately interested, the landing and early days in New York City in the early '60s, to a couple of others with marginally less draw: when he was recording the albums New Morning (1970) and Oh Mercy (1989). Over and out, done, more or less: 293 pages. What's much less typical from Dylan, and should probably be considered as surprising as it is appreciated, is the straightforward fashion in which he recounts the events. Where previously much of his life and background was murky and general, cloaked in deliberate if playful misinformation and almost sarcastic mythologizing—orphaned in the Dakota flatlands, taught to play guitar by Hopi Indians, a busker on the streets of southside Chicago (I actually made all those up, but they're not that far from the stories he used to spread about himself)—here he lays it all out flat, clean, and unadorned. There's more where that came from in the Scorsese documentary that followed in the year after publication of this book, but in many ways this is where the clean breast started. The change of heart it betokens had likely been in process for many years before that, going back (my guess) to his serious health scare of circa 1997. In many ways, however, and as happy as I am to have it and read it and get a clearer sense of the trajectory of his life and career, and I wouldn't have it any other way either, the end result is also a bit like the experience when one finally manages to cajole a magician who has just performed some astonishing trick into giving up its secret. It's good to know, on one level, but some of the wonder of it is inevitably rubbed away for good. Is this something Bob Dylan himself understands? Well, it did take him a long time to cough up even this one. And when did they say that next one (of three?) (and he's just about 70 now?) was supposed to come out?

In case it's not at the library.

"All Along the Watchtower" (1968)

8. Jimi Hendrix Experience, "All Along the Watchtower" (Sept. 28, 1968, #20)

One of the most audacious covers ever and a surprise hit that I think everyone can probably get behind in one way or another. (The only comparable moments might be the Pet Shop Boys covering U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name," but in that case it was the original that scored the hit, or maybe Matt "Cloverfield" Reeves covering Let the Right One In, but that's the movies, so no, neither one is even close.) Bob Dylan, still retrenching from his mid-'60s years on the road buffeted between the forces of loud electric rock and those of his would-be acoustic masters, released one of his quietest albums in years early in 1968, John Wesley Harding. It was uneven, though it carried some of his best material, and it featured a subdued little song with some inspired strumming called "All Along the Watchtower," which barely clocks in at two and a half minutes. Along came Jimi Hendrix, who plucked it as the standard-bearer (in terms of chart action anyway) for his magnum opus, Electric Ladyland. As a young 'un at the time I didn't even know Bob Dylan had anything to do with it. All I knew was the knack Hendrix immediately evinced for making a song soar, with his guitar playing, his singing, and his uncanny sense for dynamics and the textures of sound—most of which he figured out how to produce on an electric guitar. This drops into place with a mighty kick and walloping chords, reaching altitude fast and floating there, Dylan's melody alternating with spooky, thrilling noises and lyrical, thrilling guitar play. That I came to know it on an AM radio still seems beyond comprehension to me. Anyone who dared to wonder what's with that Hendrix guy, I could always point to this.

"Tangled Up in Blue" (1975)

25. Bob Dylan, "Tangled Up in Blue" (March 29, 1975, #31)

OK, I acknowledge that the consistency I'm liable to evince when it comes to Bob Dylan and his singles and albums probably amounts to very little or none at all. By all rights, "Like a Rolling Stone" should rank way higher than the #154 position it finally occupied when I finished fiddling with this list. Every time I hear it on Highway 61 Revisited, my favorite album all my life ever since I first heard it, I am thrilled still. On the radio, however, not so much—maybe it needs that sound of a needle locking into a groove? And so contrariwise with "Tangled Up in Blue," which comes from an album I don't actually much care for, but I love the song deeply and immediately whenever I hear it blowing casually out of a radio. It's all personal, "tangled up" in memory and sentiment. I was living at the time with five or six others in a rental house in Minneapolis, on the river just across from the West Bank and close to the hippie district, where it seemed every shop one entered at the time was blasting this song. This was the beatnik portion of my life, 20 years old and reading "Howl" and The Subterraneans and enthusiastically attending French New Wave cinema in venues with folding chairs. With a gray female cat named Benson who got pregnant and had the litter in an old medical case that sat in my closet. Smoking Gitanes because that's the brand we all thought Jean-Pierre Leaud was smoking in La maman et la putain (in fact it was Galouises). In May, I traveled by Greyhound bus to San Francisco, where I stayed at the YMCA and slipped into a Pharoah Sanders show, perhaps the last time I was underage for anything, and thrilled until the wee hours to the African rhythms and the shredding tenor. Et cetera. I guess this song was about gone from the radio by the time I got back.

Dylanesque (2007)

A welcome surprise—for me, emphatically, both a surprise and welcome. It was Bryan Ferry's first album in five years, and I had sort of lost track of him, can't even remember the last time he released a full-on covers project—the '70s? Oh, OK, I see he took a Linda Ronstadt/Rod Stewart-like flier at pop standards in '99, which obviously didn't make much impression on me. But putting the focus so squarely on Bob Dylan is the real surprise here. Arguably chutzpah, but what a choice selection it is, from all phases of the storied songwriter's fabled career, including one ("Make You Feel My Love") from 1997's Time Out of Mind, all of which works I think to justify my decades-long sense that Ferry "really meant it" when he covered "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." A lot of pre-punk glammers were Dylan fans, secretly and otherwise (David Bowie, for example, pays his backhanded tribute on Hunky Dory), and a good number of usual suspects show up here such as Brian Eno, Chris Spedding, Paul Carrack, and Robin Trower, to name four (keeping in mind that "one of these things is not like the others"). Reviews of this that I've seen are largely lukewarm, and it's true that the sound here hews closely to the Avalon style that Ferry has rarely abandoned since the early '80s. Nevertheless, it reminds me all over again what a gifted and coverable songwriter Dylan is, a fact established on the top 40 charts in the mid-'60s, with the Byrds, Turtles, Cher, and others stampeding in to get in on this action. For that alone it's worth the price of admission. But, still, it's hard to find a whole lot of clear lines and definition in this sticky bun of an album, whose songs tend to shuffle along and blur into one another—not one particularly steps forth to distinguish itself, though if I had to choose I guess I would point to the more obscure Dylan songs here such as "Baby Let Me Follow You Down" or "If Not for You." But if nothing is an outright hit, neither is anything an outright miss, and in many ways it's a pleasure simply to hear this quasi-collaboration cum tribute go down, and appreciate the fact that it exists at all.

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005)

UK/USA/Japan, 208 minutes, documentary
Director: Martin Scorsese
Photography: Mustapha Barat, Maryse Alberti, Oliver Bokelberg, Anghel Decca, Ken Druckerman, Ellen Kuras, James J. Miller, James Reed, Lisa Rinzler, Michael Spiller

There is practically no end of mysteries when it comes to Bob Dylan, not least the matter of his appeal. Personally, I don't think any other figure, after James Brown, looms so imposingly significant in 20th century popular music, and yet I remain hard-put to articulate the reasons. But after 1997's Time Out of Mind, it simply became an article of faith, one easily renewed by constant and regular visits to the catalog, from the earliest classics of the '60s to his recent radio show on XM. Martin Scorsese's leisurely and wide-ranging documentary, a kind of generous prodigy even just for its ability to probe and get its hands on so much of Dylan's confusing early career, particularly the breakout, finds the way to raise the curtain on many of the mysteries, in the process making some of them more mysterious than ever. Focused on Dylan's origins in Hibbing, Minnesota, as Robert Zimmerman, and tracing the vicissitudes of his catapult to fame and unparalleled reign until a motorcycle accident put him out of commission in mid-1966, the documentary incorporates extensive interviews with many of the principles, most notably the man himself, who clearly retains much of his hostility to being interviewed, but here sucks it up and does his best. One result is that that element of Dylan's personality and life anyway is revealed once and for all as genuinely sincere. It's arguable that much of Dylan's early success stemmed from little more than the vivid imagination of someone trying to escape a dead-end small town life, manifested as often as not in a tendency to tell a lot of stretchers, in combination with something psychologists might label "poorly developed individuation"—he didn't, arguably perhaps even doesn't still, know who he is himself, at least not in relation to the rest of us. He is a man of action, albeit a peculiar kind of action. Once he managed to land a record contract with Columbia shortly after hitchhiking into New York City at the age of 19, that's when the miracles really started to occur. The first album was a dud, so he decided instead to write his own stuff rather than stick with the working plan to that point of unearthing and absorbing every last oddity of American folk music. Result: The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, one of the great albums of the era, which has lost little of its charm or power in the 50 years or so intervening. And make no mistake, the material sounds better than ever playing in and around the interviews here, and captured in live performances of the time. That's pretty much the way it goes. The rise to fame and adulation is vindicated right down the line, certainly for many fans, as each impossible peak is followed by another. By the time Al Kooper is relating the story of how he came to play organ on "Like a Rolling Stone," followed immediately by the snare hit that kicks the song off and then a good two-minute blast of it, just the way it sounded on the radio back in 1965, or better, it's goose bumps time right down the line. Meanwhile, the whole drama is fascinating to follow, the absurdly spiteful vilification he endured from his folk/protest fans when he started playing with a band, the endless harassment he attempted to cope with from the press, the famous with whom he consorted—Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Joan Baez—and always, always writing songs and songs and songs. One of the most telling things about Dylan that occurs to me every time I look at this is that he has written so many of his songs, and so many of his best songs, on a typewriter. It was just pouring out of him. Joan Baez tells a great story here about stealing a song from him after she sat in a room with him while he worked it out, "Love Is a Four-Letter Word." Later, when Dylan hears her version of it on the radio in her company, he says (and here Baez goes into her terrific Dylan impression), "That's a really great song." She's gob-smacked. He's forgotten that he wrote it. "You wrote it, you dope," she says that she told him. Will this movie convert anyone who doesn't already appreciate Dylan for what he is? Maybe—just maybe. For fans, however, there's no question. It's absolutely essential.

"Love and Theft" (2001)

"Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum" Just to make sure there weren't any questions about the last one, there's this one (and then the one after that). Bob Dylan may be 60+ (and currently looking down the barrel of 70) but he's enjoying arguably the peak of an illustrious and storied career. How is he doing this? The brilliant assembly of side players doesn't hurt. Ditto the immaculate production. But, fact is, the loopy, loony sensibility that's always been at the heart of the best Dylan is simply at the heart of this too. It's often funny. It's always deeply rooted in American experience, down deep in the subconscious where you can only feel it, and feel how giant and imposing it is indeed. Sometimes it's so beautiful it makes you want to cry – not for the sentiments, which again like the best of his stuff were mostly cauterized away before anything was ever recorded, but just for being so damn well done. P.S. Don't make too much of the release date, September 11, 2001. Tuesdays and Septembers are known quantities in the industry in the first place. And then the signifying album in that category anyway is more likely Slayer's God Hates Us All. Don't you think? I mean, what's love got to do with it, right? Nothing and we all know that. In this album, by contrast, it's at least half of everything, hence the title.

Time Out of Mind (1997)

"Highlands" For those following along (many of us not exactly, admittedly), this one didn't entirely come out of nowhere. There is the '60s catalog, obviously enough. Bits and pieces of the meditative squawk here can be heard as early as Infidels. On Oh Mercy Bob Dylan and Daniel Lanois first collaborated and began to experiment with the soundscapes that here open into majestic vistas of rugged planets. And on the two albums immediately before this – World Gone Wrong and Good As I Been to You – Dylan reaffirmed his most profound connections, with the folk music of Harry Smith's "old, weird America." A brush with death no doubt contributes to the overarching sound of eternity put on display in every song here – the crucible, like. Whatever it was, Bob Dylan came roaring back to form at every level: musical, visionary, unblinking, and overflowing with love. The above-mentioned "Highlands" plods along for 16:31 with perfect doomy aplomb. At some point, it never misses a beat and becomes an hysterical comedy scene. That's the level he's operating on here. "Desolation Row" levels, we're talking. And beyond.

Infidels (1983)

Aiyiyi. What to make of this. The Jewish Minnesotan Bob Dylan, in his early 40s, embraces Christianity, along with a penchant for fundamentalist religious language: Satan, martyrs, shame, doom, the names of the books of the Old Testament Bible, and such-like frequent his lyrical drone all too depressingly often. With this album the story at the time was that he was stepping away from that, and there's proof enough in the grooves – "Sweetheart Like You" is practically bawdy, "Don't Fall Apart on Me Tonight" could not possibly be addressed to the Messiah, and "Union Sundown" is a lament for the labor movement that is remarkably, affectingly bitter. But it's clumy and self-righteous too. Painful political allegories populate this landscape like cactus in the desert and the cant of a religious zealot remains unmistakable. In spite of a good band – a great band, in fact: Sly Dunbar, Robbie Shakespeare, Mick Taylor, Mark Knopfler, and Alan Clark, with production by Knopfler – the fundamentalist impulse often goes front and center. Or maybe that's just the sound of an insecure man having a mid-life crisis? Happens even to the best of us. Case in point. So sure, of course, you have to forgive the guy such lapses. How could you not? It's just, that language and its many vile biases are still hard to hear, now that we know his one-time pals have not been joking about their apocalypse and whatnot. "Oh, man has invented his doom First step was touching the moon." Again, good grief.

Slow Train Coming (1979)

As a secular humanist witnessing the coming to power of Republicans in the U.S., having made their deal with fundamentalist religious forces, and with arguably the first shot across the bow of a modern religious war when fundamentalist Shias in Iran took American diplomats hostage, I found this album almost unbearably discouraging at the time of its release. Not to mention dumb as hell. Bob Dylan's greatest expressions of faith, hope, and courage lay behind and, even more so, ahead of him. This was a time of weakness; he lost his way for a period that lasted nearly a decade or more. Defenders of this album point to the clean production work and Mark Knopfler's fine contributions. Or, of course, they talk about Dylan's newfound "faith" approvingly (not so many of them left, really). This is certainly listenable enough, but the best I think can be said for it is that it's better than the two that followed: Saved and Shot of Love, respectively. Good grief.

Before the Flood (1974)

I think of this as coming after the flood and so remembering its title often induces cognitive dissonance. More pity me. OK, it's basically a decent collection of Dylan songs, performed live by the man with The Band, but it doesn't seem to me to live up to much of its advance billing. As example, see what Robert Christgau wrote about it at the time. Needless to say, perhaps, YMMV.

John Wesley Harding (1968)

"Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" To most of those in the '60s "on the ground" (how we love to use that phrase now), this is the first that was heard from Bob Dylan after Blonde on Blonde and the LMA (legendary motorcycle accident). In fairness, it's not easy to hear The Basement Tapes as any kind of clarifying transition between the two. Something clearly broke in between – or maybe I should be more delicate and say something zigged when we all thought it would zag. And I'm not talking about the LMA, or maybe I am. This is practically funereal by comparison to either Blonde or Basement, focused but so hushed you almost feel like you can't turn it up without defeating the purpose. (Compare Nebraska.) It took Jimi Hendrix to really tease out the power Dylan is playing with here with his cover of "All Along the Watchtower" (one of the very few Dylan covers that is actually a match for the Bob Dylan version). This one's full of weak points, absurd turns of phrase, meandering tuneless exercises, and all too easy targets, viz., "Dear Landlord." But in its best moments – aforementioned "Watchtower," above-mentioned "Frankie Lee and Judas Priest," and "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" – it ranks with his best.

The Basement Tapes (1967)

In which we plunge into the deepest swamps of rock mythology, with Minnesotan shot out of a cannon Bob Dylan holing up post-legendary motorcycle accident with his Canadian buddies, affectedly calling themselves The Band (which I wish so much was "the Bob Dylan Band," but I can't explain why), in a pink upstate New York house, Woodstock County (figuratively if not literally, I'm too lazy at the moment to look it up), its basement – natch – set up as recording studio/performance space. Went to work. Produced all this and more. Tracks from which were subsequently covered and bootlegged and covered again and bootlegged again, until finally it occurred to someone at record company Columbia to, um, like, release it. Chief mythologist Greil Marcus provided liner notes for the inside gate sleeve. We were all suitably stunned, those of us without benefit of intimacy with the bootlegs, not least because Blood on the Tracks was also released in approximately the same timeframe. Things like that seem to happen frequently in the career of Bob Dylan. This double set is raw, woodsheddy, hammered together and sturdy, rollicking in a strangely mellow way, and often very funny. The whole thing is basically good. Not kidding. Every song.