Favourite Dylan Album

[Kieran]

Following tented's excellent thread about the Beatles, let's see what you like in Bob. More difficult maybe, because his career is so long, and vast. So maybe give an all-time disc, then favourites through the decades.

Me? Okay, I'll go first!

All-time: Highway 61 Revisited

For me, this is the greatest of all rock albums. It's inch perfect, bar a single line in Ballad of a Thin Man, relating to milk from a cow. But it's Dylan at his essence: tough, raw, spontaneous, singing rock music with what the poet Philip Larkin described as his "cawing, derisive voice." It contains songs like the title track, Like a Rolling Stone, Desolation Row, From a Buick Six. It's punkish, punchy and absolutely beautiful.

1960's: Bringing It All Back Home

1970's: Desire

1980's: Infidels

1990's: Time Out Of Mind

2000's: Love & Theft

2010's: Tempest

 

[Vince Evert]

Infidels and Blood on the Tracks

 

[shawnbm]

Nashville Skyline, Blood on the Tracks and Love and Theft, but I'd put his songs with The Band diwn in the basement of Big Pink (the Basement Tapes) as tied for first with any Dylan record.

 

[TsarMatt]

It has to be Highway 61 Revisited. One of the most complete and beautiful albums of all time.

 

[Kieran]

For me, the difference between H61 and Blonde on Blonde is in the performance. BOB is more polished, better produced and arranged, but less wild. There's no Tombstone Blues there, which seems the default setting looseness for H61. Okay, BOB has Rainy Day Women, but otherwise it's tighter and more crafted, but the spontaneity of H61 is what captures the essence of Dylan for me. Plus, I never liked Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. It sounds fake to me, like a rubber duck on the pond. It sounds like Dylan trying to write epic for the sake of matching Desolation Row, but without the great, imperishable force of inspiration behind it.

I think by the time of BOB he was feeling jaded and wanted out - he stopped soon after, with the bike crash. Bringing it all back Home is the logical step just before H61, another crazy loose riffing blast. Love & Theft has been described as H61 for elder gents, and I agree. It's fairly much a brilliant album from the opening fade-in riff.

For the 80's, the much maligned 80's, I picked Infidels, because it has great songs, and he left off great songs, so it was fertile patch for him. But I could easily have picked Saved, Shot of Love, Empire Burlesque, or Oh Mercy. Such a range of different albums he released in that decade, and people still think the mojo went AWOL...

 

[tented]

I know it's not his greatest album, but my personal favorite is Blood on the Tracks. No other album I've ever heard deals with heartbreak like that one. It's almost painful, bordering on embarrassing. Like eavesdropping on psychoanalysis, set to music.

Oddly enough, the song I come back to the most is the final track, "Buckets of Rain" which is a perfect miniature of the whole album: quiet, confessional, tired, mad, and bursting with anger.

Other favorites: Infidels, John Wesley Harding, Pat Garrett (the instrumental tracks are great, especially the first one, Billy), Desire, and Time out of Mind.

 

[tented]

For me, the difference between H61 and Blonde on Blonde is in the performance. BOB is more polished, better produced and arranged, but less wild. There's no Tombstone Blues there, which seems the default setting looseness for H61. Okay, BOB has Rainy Day Women, but otherwise it's tighter and more crafted, but the spontaneity of H61 is what captures the essence of Dylan for me. Plus, I never liked Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. It sounds fake to me, like a rubber duck on the pond. It sounds like Dylan trying to write epic for the sake of matching Desolation Row, but without the great, imperishable force of inspiration behind it.

That's an informed, thoughtful take on the difference between the two -- which means I agree. :snigger

 

[Kieran]

For me, the difference between H61 and Blonde on Blonde is in the performance. BOB is more polished, better produced and arranged, but less wild. There's no Tombstone Blues there, which seems the default setting looseness for H61. Okay, BOB has Rainy Day Women, but otherwise it's tighter and more crafted, but the spontaneity of H61 is what captures the essence of Dylan for me. Plus, I never liked Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. It sounds fake to me, like a rubber duck on the pond. It sounds like Dylan trying to write epic for the sake of matching Desolation Row, but without the great, imperishable force of inspiration behind it.

That's an informed, thoughtful take on the difference between the two -- which means I agree. :snigger

Glad you agree, brother, you know Dylan's music as well as anyone. And I wasn't criticising BOB, which is one of the towering achievements in rock & roll, the first double album, and contains classic songs like I Want You, Visions of Johanna and Just Like a Woman - as well as maybe Bob's greatest, most coruscating harp solo, on Absolutely Sweet Marie, and one of his most drawling acid blues, Temporary Like Achilles. I just think it's a bit below H61, which not only has rowdier, edgier music, but lyrics which are the highest Dylan could manage, which is saying something.

Interestingly, on the Scorsese Bootleg Series album which contains BOB outtakes, I prefer the rough early version of Stuck Inside of Memphis... because although he fluffs the lines and goes blank in rehearsal, it sounds more in the wild spirit to me, and I would have loved if he'd released that on the album instead, unfinished though it sounded. There's probably a modern medical term for that, Deconstructivism , or something, but it sounds better to me before they jury-rigged it into submission...

 

[Horsa]

The times they are a-changin'