Deep Album Cuts Vol. 188: Bob Dylan
Next week Bob Dylan is releasing Rough And Rowdy Ways, his first album of original songs in nearly 8 years. I'd wanted to include him in this series for a long time, and was thinking of saving it for the big 200th installment. But with the album on the way, I've spent a lot of my quarantine time familiarizing myself with some of Dylan's albums that I hadn't heard in full before.
Bob Dylan deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):
1. Song To Woody
2. A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall
3. Masters Of War
4. The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll
5. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Have Never Met)
6. Love Minus Zero/No Limit
7. Ballad Of A Thin Man
8. Visions Of Johanna
9. Most Likely You'll Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)
10. Dear Landlord
11. Girl From The North Country with Johnny Cash
12. In Search Of Little Sadie
13. The Man In Me
14. River Theme
15. Mary Ann
16. Going, Going, Gone
17. Simple Twist Of Fate
18. Shelter From The Storm
19. Million Dollar Bash
20. One More Cup Of Coffee
Track 1 from Bob Dylan (1962)
Tracks 2 and 3 from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963)
Track 4 from The Times They Are a-Changin' (1964)
Track 5 from Another Side Of Bob Dylan (1964)
Track 6 from Bringing It All Back Home (1965)
Track 7 from Highway 61 Revisited (1965)
Tracks 8 and 9 from Blonde On Blonde (1966)
Track 10 from John Wesley Harding (1967)
Track 11 from Nashville Skyline (1969)
Track 12 from Self Portrait (1970)
Track 13 from New Morning (1970)
Track 14 from Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid (1973)
Track 15 from Dylan (1973)
Track 16 from Planet Waves (1974)
Tracks 17 and 18 from Blood On The Tracks (1975)
Track 19 from The Basement Tapes (1975)
Track 20 from Desire (1976)
Obviously, Dylan has been making albums for almost 60 years, and I decided to just focus on the really rich first 14 years or so when most of his unimpeachable classics were made. But as usual my self-imposed 80-minute cap makes for tough choices, especially when I was picking one or two songs apiece from iconic albums that contained several songs that are pretty famous even without being released as a charting single by Dylan or anyone else. But hey, we're talking about arguably the most celebrated songbook in popular music, I'm not covering it comprehensively. So I didn't make room for 11-minute epics like "Desolation Row" and "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," but I got in some 6 and 7-minute tracks. And by the way, I'm amused that he seemed to stop at 11 minutes a few times, and finally blew past it in recent years with the 13-minute "Tempest" and then the 16-minute "Murder Most Foul."
Track 1 from Bob Dylan (1962)
Tracks 2 and 3 from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963)
Track 4 from The Times They Are a-Changin' (1964)
Track 5 from Another Side Of Bob Dylan (1964)
Track 6 from Bringing It All Back Home (1965)
Track 7 from Highway 61 Revisited (1965)
Tracks 8 and 9 from Blonde On Blonde (1966)
Track 10 from John Wesley Harding (1967)
Track 11 from Nashville Skyline (1969)
Track 12 from Self Portrait (1970)
Track 13 from New Morning (1970)
Track 14 from Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid (1973)
Track 15 from Dylan (1973)
Track 16 from Planet Waves (1974)
Tracks 17 and 18 from Blood On The Tracks (1975)
Track 19 from The Basement Tapes (1975)
Track 20 from Desire (1976)
Obviously, Dylan has been making albums for almost 60 years, and I decided to just focus on the really rich first 14 years or so when most of his unimpeachable classics were made. But as usual my self-imposed 80-minute cap makes for tough choices, especially when I was picking one or two songs apiece from iconic albums that contained several songs that are pretty famous even without being released as a charting single by Dylan or anyone else. But hey, we're talking about arguably the most celebrated songbook in popular music, I'm not covering it comprehensively. So I didn't make room for 11-minute epics like "Desolation Row" and "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," but I got in some 6 and 7-minute tracks. And by the way, I'm amused that he seemed to stop at 11 minutes a few times, and finally blew past it in recent years with the 13-minute "Tempest" and then the 16-minute "Murder Most Foul."
Even though I grew up steeped in a lot of '60s and '70s music via my parents, Bob Dylan was one of those artists I didn't hear a whole lot beyond the obvious stuff -- the only memory of any Dylan CD we had around the house was that first Greatest Hits comp from 1967. I was 21 when I fell in love with "Simple Twist Of Fate," and checked out Blood On The Tracks within a year or two of that and over the years it's really become a major favorite.
"Shelter On The Storm" has always been a particular favorite, I kind of rolled my eyes when it recently gained notice as sort of a COVID-19 anthem (featured in a quarantine-themed Zillow ad and performed by Chris Martin of Coldplay on one of SNL's "Saturday Night Live at Home" specials). I think one of my favorite bass performances of all time is Tony Brown on the half of Blood On The Tracks drawn from Dylan's first New York sessions for the album, just gorgeous stuff -- I was surprised and disappointed to see that Tony Brown appeared on no other Dylan and albums and only a handful of other artists' albums, and retired from the music industry less then a decade later.
But I found it daunting to get into an artist's 15th album and know that there were so many other essential albums before that, and that Blood On The Tracks was kind of a different, more personal album than his earlier protest songs, so I'd been kind of slow to check out the '60s stuff. But I've really enjoyed diving deep into it this year. Dylan's early career is often split into before and after one event: his 1966 motorcycle crash. Up to that point, he'd recorded 7 albums in 5 years that displayed an incredible growth and development, from the self-titled debut of traditional folk songs and 2 originals to the sprawling full band double album Blonde On Blonde. So the first 9 tracks on this mix chart that astonishing early period, including some songs like "Visions Of Johanna" and "Ballad Of A Thin Man" that were never chart hits for anybody but still pretty damn famous as album cuts.
The 2005 Scorsese doc No Direction Home gets over 1/4 into its 3 hour runtime detailing Bob Dylan's early performing career before any mention of him writing a song, and that song is "Song To Woody," one of those 2 originals on his debut, written after he'd already met his idol Woody Guthrie. "I felt like I had to write that song. I did not consider myself a songwriter at all, but I needed to write that and sing it," Dylan says in the film. It's amazing to me that he'd say that about a period of time maybe a year before incredible songs like "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" and "Masters of War" started pouring out of him and wouldn't stop for years. It's also kind of remarkable and surprising that a beloved writer whose singing voice has its share of detractors was signed pretty much purely as a performer at first.
One early Dylan song I was not previously familiar with was "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," a song about a black woman who was murdered by a white man in Baltimore in February 1963. Her killer was convicted and given a light sentence in August, Dylan read about it and recorded his song in October, and released the song the following January. That's nothing compared to how quickly artists react to injustice in the news, when George Floyd was getting mentioned in songs within a week or two of his death, but it's still interesting to think about how relatively quickly Dylan was incorporating current events into his records.
The decade after the motorycle crash is disjointed and confusing, peppered with classics but also a lot of confusing decisions. Bob Dylan spent most of 1967 holed up in Woodstock with members of The Band, making home recordings that were primarily shopped to other artists by Dylan's songwriting publisher, then heavily bootlegged, and eventually released 8 years later as The Basement Tapes. At the end of '67, Dylan went to Nashville and made John Wesley Harding with a completely different set of musicians, stripping his sound back to an acoustic guitar, bass and drums -- Nashville session vet Kenneth A. Buttrey's drumming on that album is another performance I adore, such a tight and propulsive sound he has on there. Great as that album is, though, it's slightly baffling that Dylan had this amazing chemistry with The Band and went on huge, historic tours with them as his backing band, but then shelved all the work he'd done with them and went in a different direction.
Dylan sang in a markedly different style on the warmly received Nashville Skyline and the disastrously received double album Self Portrait. I don't particularly like either -- I think Nashville Skyline is the worst album that's regularly voted to be a top 10 Dylan album, I have little use for it aside from the famous Johnny Cash duet of "Girl From The North Country," a song he'd first recorded on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. But I was kind of amused at how innocuous Self Portrait seems now for an album that regularly appears on lists of the worst albums by great artists, and struck some as such an act of betrayal or self-sabotage that it signified the end of the '60s as much as the breakup of The Beatles.
Out of that weird period, you get one truly great album, New Morning (featuring "The Man In Me," which I first heard in a whimsical scene The Big Lebowski, but listening to it now it strikes me as a really profound and touching song). Outside that, the early '70s is rife with frustrating minor works like label-assembled outtakes collection Dylan and the Peckinpah soundtrack Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, which featured Dylan's biggest hit of the decade, "Knockin' On Heaven's Door," and little else of note.
In '74, Dylan finally made his only proper studio album backed by The Band, Planet Waves, and embarked on a tour with them that produced the live album Before The Flood. Planet Waves is pretty damn good but I still feel like it's a great lost opportunity of rock history that we don't have as many Dylan/Band albums as there are Neil Young/Crazy Horse albums. In '75, a few months after Blood On The Tracks, their 1967 collaborations were finally released as The Basement Tapes, and has become itself one of Dylan's most revered records. It's obviously got great songs and a unique, engrossing sound and atmosphere, but I have to admit I don't rate it as highly as a lot of people do. Levon Helm wasn't in Woodstock with them until the end of the sessions and only appears on some of the album, and a lot of what I love about The Band is Helm's drumming and singing.
I wasn't sure whether to stop the playlist at Blood or Basement or somewhere later, and then "One More Cup Of Coffee" from Desire jumped out at me as a nice place to end. I like Scarlet Rivera's violin on Desire -- the story goes that Dylan saw a woman with a violin case crossing the street in NYC and asked her to come to the studio and play on a few songs, and she wound up being a major part of the sound of one of Bob Dylan's highest selling albums. But of course, stopping there leaves about 4 decades of further ups and downs in his catalog, a lot of which I still have ahead of me to explore.
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