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Hey guys. I don't post here too often, but I found myself very much wanting to discuss the merits of Dylan (particularly the albums he released in the early '60s). I know people get a great deal of images and ideas of Dylan because he's been covered so much, and has had so much wide and varied output over the 50+ years that he's been writing and performing music. I certainly don't like everything he's done, and even the stuff I really like, I tend to go through phases. I won't listen to it for a few years, then for a while *all* I can listen to is Bob Dylan. I'm very much one of the people who believes that Dylan never again reached the same heights after all the drama with the half-electric tour with The Hawks (later The Band) and the release of Blonde on Blonde and the motorcycle accident. Ever since then, while I think he's had some very good records here and there (Blood on the Tracks and Time out of Mind being the most notable of his post-1966 work in my opinion), he hasn't really been able to even approach what he was doing in those 4+ years from 62-66. The records, the live work, the unreleased work, all the stuff I really like and find interesting and worthwhile all comes from that era. As a reminder, here are the six truly exceptional albums from that time period. The first three album's are all acoustic/folk but increasingly esoteric, and the last two are almost entirely electric. I'll put the exact dates because it's frankly unbelievably stunning that he did all of this starting at age 22, in such rapid succession, writing so many immortal songs. Freewheelin' alone has A-Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall, Don't Think Twice, Masters of War, Girl From the North Country, and Blowin' in the Wind. I repeat, the kid was 22 when he released that  I can never get over that. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (May 27 1963) The Times They Are a-Changin' (January 13 1964) Another Side of Bob Dylan {August 8 1964) Bringing It All Back Home (March 22 1965) Highway 61 Revisited (August 30 1965) Blonde on Blonde (May 16 1966) It's so crazy that he went from Another Side (full acoustic) to releasing Highway 61 with Like a Rolling Stone as the lead single in a single year, releasing Bringing It All Back Home (an unbelievably amazing classic album chock full of legendary songs) in the time in between. That is just insane output, and he was writing dozens of other songs on top of all of these, some of which were fantastic! Perhaps my favorite acoustic Dylan song (Tomorrow is a Long Time) doesn't appear on any of these albums. I can't stress enough that each of these albums is something of a unique masterpiece; probably Times They Are a-Changin' could be the weakest, but again it's still chock full of amazing songs. Another Side of Bob Dylan is extremely underrated in my opinion; it has some of the most complex. thoughtful, utterly captivating solo acoustic work he ever did, and it just floors me whenever I hear it. Chimes of Freedom, To Ramona, My Back Pages... It's pretty great stuff. The latter 3 albums are really the best though, just far and away, or at least that's how I feel at the moment... I admit what Dylan I like "the most" at a given time is prone to change. Still, they're the ones I listen to the most when I go through a "Dylan phase", those albums plus the Bootleg series volume 4, which has the "Royal Albert Hall" bootleg which was actually recorded in Manchester; it's the legendary show where Dylan get's called "Judas" by someone in the crowd (presumably in distaste for performing with a backing band) and gets pretty pissed off. All that said the first three albums can be tough on an aesthetic level if you're not used to the sort of voice he affects, or the stark production - just acoustic guitar and harmonica, and while I like Dylan's harmonica style I know that's not quite a universal opinion. But again, the last three albums.. They have much more of a pop sensibility, of course, and also begin to dabble heavily in some very bluesy stuff. But you can always tell which songs have that particular... unique Dylan "feel" to them. That thin, wild mercury sound. Anyway, please feel free to share thoughts/opinions whatever... I would like to try to keep the discussion focused on Bob Dylan pre-Motorcycle Accident, for now, because otherwise there's just entirely too much to talk about, and I'm honestly curious if lots of other people feel as strongly as I do about this era of Dylan being so fantastic. If I had to choose a favorite song of his I think it would be "Desolation Row", but specifically the live recording on the Bootleg Series Volume 4 - I think it kicks the absolute crap out of the album version. And I'll leave you with this legendary video from the Newport Folk Festival (1965 I think) where Dylan "went electric" and did the best version Maggie's Farm I've ever heard with Mike Bloomfield loving tearing it up on the guitar: https://vimeo.com/91430129
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Mar 6, 2015 13:47
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BigFactory posted:I mean, yeah, you're talking about some of the most highly regarded albums of the 20th century, but Times and Another Side don't really belong in the conversation. I think the first album is stronger than Times and his early 70's albums are easily better and more important than Another Side. That book definitely sounds interesting. I've heard quite a bit about the Blonde on Blonde recording sessions (and I have to say that part of me will forever be sad as hell that a finished version of "She's Your Lover Now" never made it on the album) but most of it is the typical apocryphal stories like Bob having the musicians all play the wrong instruments for Rainy Day Women, and whatnot. Which is actually the one song on Blonde on Blonde I've never liked too much. I'd agree that Times is borderline when it comes to really belonging in the conversation, but I'll stand by my opinion that Another Side is something of an underappreciated masterpiece. I think it's really, truly, a great album, and that the great songs on it can really hold their own when you get into them. Chimes of Freedom is an absolutely stunning song both structurally and lyrically "As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look//Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended//For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse//An' for every hung-up person in the whole-wide universe.." It's just an utterly stirring, amazing song. There just isn't a bad song on the album - the words are just tumbling out of him at this point, and I had always viewed the album as something of an afterthought, given the three albums that followed it were absolute monsters. But now, when I listen to Another Side, it's just a very different experience. I'd certainly put it above anything he released in the '70s or the '80s barring Blood on the Tracks; it just has so many fascinating multi-layered songs. FactsAreUseless posted:Can we talk about how Blood on the Tracks is basically a perfect album? Totally. You can even talk about how you think Infidels is a perfect album, if that's how you roll... I just wanted to give the OP a little bit of focus and talk about something at least a little specific instead of "BOB DYLAN". kaworu fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Mar 6, 2015 |
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Mar 6, 2015 19:27
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Happy Hippo posted:It looks like the whole "only early Dylan, you guys!" thing is over before page two, which is fine with me because I'm one of those assholes who thinks that "Love & Theft" is an amazing album. Love & Theft is a pretty fantastic album; I think both it and "Time Out of Mind" are pretty fantastic and probably my two favorite albums in the "late Dylan" era? But to be honest, I think two albums that are very underrated (to some degree) are "Good As I Been to You" and World Gone Wrong". Both albums are so similar (being that they're both entirely composed of traditional folk/blues songs, not orignal Dylan compositions) and they both have a similar aesthetic. I'm always amazed at how engaging and fun they are. I've always been a big fan of Good As I Been to You, because it contains to two of my favorite traditional folk songs (Frankie and Albert and Froggie Went-a-Courtin') and Dylan just does utterly delightful versions of them. It's really tough not to love these albums when you really listen to them, I think, and you can see a direct link between these albums and you can see the roots of where he eventually went with subsequent albums, too. It's like recording these traditional albums was part of a process that led to the brilliance of an album like "Love and Theft." Happy Hippo posted:It looks like the whole "only early Dylan, you guys!" thing is over before page two, which is fine with me because I'm one of those assholes who thinks that "Love & Theft" is an amazing album. I really didn't mean to be particularly restrictive at all, I just didn't want to break the rules; in the rules thread it says not to just make a general thread about a particular band/performer, so I didn't want to just be like "Bob Dylan: Talk about him." I wanted to give it a bit of focus. And despite how much I love all the different eras of his career (and I haven't even gone into how much I utterly loving love the Rolling Thunder Revue recordings from that first tour they did) I wanted to give the thread some focus. But seriously, talk about any album or era you want. Link songs from Youtube and whatnot, too; as far as I can tell Dylan uploaded practically his entire catalog to an official youtube account. I'd love to hear people posting their favorite songs from some of these more obscure Dylan albums that tend to be sometimes disregarded by snobs like me.
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Mar 7, 2015 19:00
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Fun story about "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts" that you may or may not have heard: OK, so to start out we all know that Bob Dylan and Joan Baez had... some sort of a thing, and that it ended badly, and that Joan probably loved Bob a good deal more sincerely back in the early '60s than Bob did, as she seemed really genuinely affected by what went on between them - whereas it's fairly clear that (based on what we know) Bob was clearly in much deeper relationships with Suze Rotolo and later Sara Lownds of course. Don't Look Back makes him seem like an absolute prick to Baez, as we're all aware. Anyway, Baez wrote (what I think) is a pretty fantastic song about her relationship with Dylan that's become something of a classic, actually -- "Diamonds and Rust". The first verse of Diamonds and Rust actually refers to an actual incident that happened in the mid-'70s to Baez. I'll quote the lyrics: "Well I'll be damned Here comes your ghost again But that's not unusual It's just that the moon is full And you happened to call And here I sit Hand on the telephone Hearing a voice I'd known A couple of light years ago Heading straight for a fall." So, the real-life incident this refers to (that inspired the writing of this song initially and is described in the above verse) is that Bob was writing Blood on the Tracks on the time, his marriage was hosed, and he was probably doing too much cocaine most likely. At the time he was experiencing something of a creative resurgence of course, though. In any case, what this refers to is that one night (apparently shortly after writing "Jack of Hearts") Dylan called up Joan Baez from a phone-booth (after not speaking to her for years of course, I believe) and was very excited about the song, and proceeded to read (what I think was an even longer unedited version) aloud to Baez. Don't know why but I always loved that song. There's also the anecdote of them on the Rolling Thunder Revue together, and Bob going up to Baez and saying "Hey uh... Were you going to sing that song? You know, the one you wrote about blue eyes and robin's eggs?" "Oh," Baez deadpans to him, "You mean the one I wrote about my ex-husband, David [Harris]?" *Dylan looks glum and downcast* "I'm bullshitting you, Bob." kaworu fucked around with this message at 13:06 on Mar 9, 2015 |
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Mar 9, 2015 13:03
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FactsAreUseless posted:Joan Baez also famously drilled into a bank safe. It's said she got off with quite a haul. Is this meant to be a troll of some sort? Apparently these anecdotes are better known than I thought because they're both described in better detail (and sourced) on the wikipedia page for 'Diamonds and Rust': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamonds_%26_Rust_(song) Also, BigFactory, you reminded me of the interesting cover that Judas Priest does of Diamonds and Rust. Which I always found to be a fascinating cover, since Halford is such a big Dylan fan it's interesting that he chose to rather prominently cover that song. kaworu fucked around with this message at 14:44 on Mar 9, 2015 |
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Mar 9, 2015 14:41
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