And, finally, the long-promised version of Gary Beatrice's reflections on the fifty-two essential Bob Dylan songs, laid out in a very useful album by album analysis and chock full of insightful analysis. This also exists in Week 12 of the Discography discussion, but it was so good that I asked Gary if I could cull it off as a separate post and add links to all the songs, and he graciously agreed. I apologize that I have not been able to track down links to so many of the songs he mentions below.
I really appreciate Gary writing this up, and it's given me a lot to think ab out and I look back and begin to study more of Dylan's work.
Bob Dylan, Tangled Up In Blue
My favorite Bob Dylan song remains Tangled Up In Blue, and oddly enough considering his catalogue that's pretty much been the case for 35 years. I could not find the original studio version on You Tube, but you've probably all heard it. This is an excellent acoustic version with several different verses off of his highly recommended Biograph collection. My second favorite song is Visions of Johanna. After those two I have a tough time ranking his songs so I've decided to order these chronologically. In part I've organized it this way because several of you were looking for places to jump into his music, but mostly I've done it this way to make it easier on myself to identify the songs and comment on them where appropriate.
This helped me make a couple observations about Dylan's music and my tastes.
1) Although I consider Dylan the best songwriter of my lifetime, my favorites of his are based upon the sound of the songs more than the lyrics. This is most apparent by the nearly complete absence of his folk and protest music from my list. Blowing In the Wind, Times They Are Changing, A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, are all clearly among his best songs, but I just don't listen to them because I don't find them musical enough.
2) Despite the fact that he had numerous great albums, a boatload of his best songs were never on traditional albums, but were singles, b-sides or songs never released outside of compilations. I don't think this is me choosing obscurities, I think it is more the fickle nature of Bob Dylan.
3) Dylan's comeback starting with 1997's Time Out Of Mind and continuing to a lesser extent through 2016, was almost unbelievable, especially in view of the garbage he released for more than a decade before that.
So:
From Biograph (the best greatest hits collection I've heard by the way, combining three disks of must haves, alternate takes, unreleased classics all organized thematically- a great jumping in set): Percy's Song, my only folk selection,
From Bringing It All Back Home: It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) and Maggie's Farm. BABH is considered by most critics to be one of his bests but I see it more as a transition album that doesn't flow the way his next several do. Bleeding captures the anger and pointedness of his protest music without sounding dated, and Maggie is a protest song that rocks and shows a sense of humor. The best version of Maggie is from an otherwise mediocre live album, Hard Rain.
From Highway 61: Like A Rolling Stone; Desperation Row; Highway 61 Revisited; It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry, Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues. A must own album, rational minds could favor the other four songs that I didn't select. Each song finds Dylan at a creative peak lyrically (I bet there are nearly a dozen phrases from this album that are now common to people who have no clue who Dylan is) and musically, with styles that range all over the roots map. The title track features a police whistle which somehow works.
Singles (can be found on Biograph and elsewhere: Positively Fourth Street, Can You Please Crawl Out My Window. Bob decided these songs didn't fit on 61 or Blonde. Maybe they don't, but either would have served as the best song in the entire catalog of several artists I love.
Blonde On Blonde: Visions of Johnanna, Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again. Blonde is also essential rock music, every bit as creative but a bit less manic than 61, perhaps because it was recorded with some brilliant Nashville session musicians.
The Basement Tapes: Crash On The Levee, You Ain't Goin' Nowhere, Please Mrs. Henry, Clothes Line Saga. Basement was recorded in secret with The Band and not released until the mid seventies (and then released a couple years ago as a six disk set as part of the Bootleg series). Each of these songs find Dylan and The Band having the time of their life playing dozens of old time instruments and styles on songs that are mostly warm and funny but sometimes apocalyptic (Levee). Basement was the polar opposite of the Sgt. Pepper era music released at the time and miles better. You can make a compelling argument that it influenced more alternative country music than anything released since it.
John Wesley Harding: I Dreamed I Saw St. Augestine, All Along the Watchtower. His most underrated album, JWH sounds similar but a bit more polished than Blonde with a series of shorter straight forward songs, several with strong biblical themes. Again, not much like late sixties radio.
Nashville Skyline: Girl From The North Country. A lot of critics praise this straight country album but I find it somewhat slight. I love this duet with Johnny Cash, however, and their voices work great together.
Self Portrait: Minstrel Boy (The Bootleg Series re-release). Minstrel Boy is, of all things, a vocal track with the Band and their voices somehow sound great in this context.
Greatest Hits Volume 2: Quinn The Eskimo. Basement tapes classics beginning to leak out. Again great but unorthodox Dylan/Band vocals
New Morning: Went to See the Gypsy, Day of the Locusts. At the time this was considered his first comeback album, he hadn't sold much since Blonde and he hadn't had much critical praise since Harding, but I see this as a decent album that happens to feature a couple great forgotten songs about Elvis and about Dylan's refusal to accept an honorary degree.
Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid: Knocking on Heavens Door. I'm not sure if this his most covered song, and there are some good versions out there including Warren Zevon's. But nobody's surpassed the original.
Blood On The Tracks: Tangled Up In Blue; Shelter From The Storm; If You See Her, Say Hello, Idiot Wind, Buckets of Rain. Blood was the great comeback, and for my money it is his best album, too. These are some of the most heart wrenching break-up songs ever put to music, all exquisitely recorded. As with Highway 61, you can prefer the other tracks on this set and I'd have no argument.
Desire: Isis (the live track from Biograph is even better). One of Bob's long standing songwriting technique is to take a historic or biblical character or image and turn it into his own historic fiction and he returns to that with pretty good effect on Desire.
Street Legal: Changing of the Guards. I think this was an unfairly ignored album. I suspect listeners were put off by the strong gospel style background vocals which foresaw
The Christian Era Bob Dylan
Dylan had obviously read the bible but I sure didn't see a literal interpretation of it coming. Here's the weird thing. The three albums, Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love, were mostly lousy, even though they sometimes featured some crack musicians. But somehow a number of unquestionably great songs emerged from this bizarre phase. Check out Every Grain of Sand, Groom Still Waiting At The Alter (which, in classic Bob style, didn't qualify for inclusion among these wretched albums until later pressings), Heart of Mine, I Believe in You, Solid Rock.
Infidels: Jokerman, Neighborhood Bully. These are two exceptional songs from one of the very few good albums he released between 1976's Desire and 1997's Time Out Of Mind. And it isn't a great album, it's just enjoyable and features these tracks which I consider to be among his best.
Oh Mercy: Everything Is Broken. Somehow in the midst of two lost decades Dylan recorded a great rock tune.
Lost track: Series of Dreams (can be found on Bootleg 8). Somehow in the midst of two lost decades Dylan recorded an even better rock song. And he decided not to release it.
Time Out of Mind: Not Dark Yet, Trying to Get to Heaven, Standing In The Doorway, Million Miles.
Love & Theft: High Water (For Charley Patton), Summer Days, Mississippi
Modern Times: Thunder on the Mountain, Working Man's Blues #2
Tempest: Pay In Blood, Roll On John, Duquesne Whistle, Tempest
And then he found his muse. Legendary musicians tend to get undue praise even when releasing adequate material. This is decidedly not the case with Dylan's return to prominence. The best of his turn of the century original material is every bit as compelling as the music he released when he was in his twenties, and if anything it benefits from his age, wisdom, and awareness of his own mortality.
There you go. I think that's 52 songs.
 |
| Gary Beatrice, reflecting upon the Dylan discography or another fantasy baseball trade in which he ripped me off. |
 |
| Some guy, mainly made famous by Beatrice's devotion and loyalty. |
I really appreciate Gary writing this up, and it's given me a lot to think ab out and I look back and begin to study more of Dylan's work.
Bob Dylan, Tangled Up In Blue
My favorite Bob Dylan song remains Tangled Up In Blue, and oddly enough considering his catalogue that's pretty much been the case for 35 years. I could not find the original studio version on You Tube, but you've probably all heard it. This is an excellent acoustic version with several different verses off of his highly recommended Biograph collection. My second favorite song is Visions of Johanna. After those two I have a tough time ranking his songs so I've decided to order these chronologically. In part I've organized it this way because several of you were looking for places to jump into his music, but mostly I've done it this way to make it easier on myself to identify the songs and comment on them where appropriate.
This helped me make a couple observations about Dylan's music and my tastes.
1) Although I consider Dylan the best songwriter of my lifetime, my favorites of his are based upon the sound of the songs more than the lyrics. This is most apparent by the nearly complete absence of his folk and protest music from my list. Blowing In the Wind, Times They Are Changing, A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, are all clearly among his best songs, but I just don't listen to them because I don't find them musical enough.
2) Despite the fact that he had numerous great albums, a boatload of his best songs were never on traditional albums, but were singles, b-sides or songs never released outside of compilations. I don't think this is me choosing obscurities, I think it is more the fickle nature of Bob Dylan.
3) Dylan's comeback starting with 1997's Time Out Of Mind and continuing to a lesser extent through 2016, was almost unbelievable, especially in view of the garbage he released for more than a decade before that.
So:
From Biograph (the best greatest hits collection I've heard by the way, combining three disks of must haves, alternate takes, unreleased classics all organized thematically- a great jumping in set): Percy's Song, my only folk selection,
From Bringing It All Back Home: It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) and Maggie's Farm. BABH is considered by most critics to be one of his bests but I see it more as a transition album that doesn't flow the way his next several do. Bleeding captures the anger and pointedness of his protest music without sounding dated, and Maggie is a protest song that rocks and shows a sense of humor. The best version of Maggie is from an otherwise mediocre live album, Hard Rain.
From Highway 61: Like A Rolling Stone; Desperation Row; Highway 61 Revisited; It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry, Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues. A must own album, rational minds could favor the other four songs that I didn't select. Each song finds Dylan at a creative peak lyrically (I bet there are nearly a dozen phrases from this album that are now common to people who have no clue who Dylan is) and musically, with styles that range all over the roots map. The title track features a police whistle which somehow works.
Singles (can be found on Biograph and elsewhere: Positively Fourth Street, Can You Please Crawl Out My Window. Bob decided these songs didn't fit on 61 or Blonde. Maybe they don't, but either would have served as the best song in the entire catalog of several artists I love.
Blonde On Blonde: Visions of Johnanna, Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again. Blonde is also essential rock music, every bit as creative but a bit less manic than 61, perhaps because it was recorded with some brilliant Nashville session musicians.
The Basement Tapes: Crash On The Levee, You Ain't Goin' Nowhere, Please Mrs. Henry, Clothes Line Saga. Basement was recorded in secret with The Band and not released until the mid seventies (and then released a couple years ago as a six disk set as part of the Bootleg series). Each of these songs find Dylan and The Band having the time of their life playing dozens of old time instruments and styles on songs that are mostly warm and funny but sometimes apocalyptic (Levee). Basement was the polar opposite of the Sgt. Pepper era music released at the time and miles better. You can make a compelling argument that it influenced more alternative country music than anything released since it.
John Wesley Harding: I Dreamed I Saw St. Augestine, All Along the Watchtower. His most underrated album, JWH sounds similar but a bit more polished than Blonde with a series of shorter straight forward songs, several with strong biblical themes. Again, not much like late sixties radio.
Nashville Skyline: Girl From The North Country. A lot of critics praise this straight country album but I find it somewhat slight. I love this duet with Johnny Cash, however, and their voices work great together.
Self Portrait: Minstrel Boy (The Bootleg Series re-release). Minstrel Boy is, of all things, a vocal track with the Band and their voices somehow sound great in this context.
Greatest Hits Volume 2: Quinn The Eskimo. Basement tapes classics beginning to leak out. Again great but unorthodox Dylan/Band vocals
New Morning: Went to See the Gypsy, Day of the Locusts. At the time this was considered his first comeback album, he hadn't sold much since Blonde and he hadn't had much critical praise since Harding, but I see this as a decent album that happens to feature a couple great forgotten songs about Elvis and about Dylan's refusal to accept an honorary degree.
Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid: Knocking on Heavens Door. I'm not sure if this his most covered song, and there are some good versions out there including Warren Zevon's. But nobody's surpassed the original.
Blood On The Tracks: Tangled Up In Blue; Shelter From The Storm; If You See Her, Say Hello, Idiot Wind, Buckets of Rain. Blood was the great comeback, and for my money it is his best album, too. These are some of the most heart wrenching break-up songs ever put to music, all exquisitely recorded. As with Highway 61, you can prefer the other tracks on this set and I'd have no argument.
Desire: Isis (the live track from Biograph is even better). One of Bob's long standing songwriting technique is to take a historic or biblical character or image and turn it into his own historic fiction and he returns to that with pretty good effect on Desire.
Street Legal: Changing of the Guards. I think this was an unfairly ignored album. I suspect listeners were put off by the strong gospel style background vocals which foresaw
The Christian Era Bob Dylan
Dylan had obviously read the bible but I sure didn't see a literal interpretation of it coming. Here's the weird thing. The three albums, Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love, were mostly lousy, even though they sometimes featured some crack musicians. But somehow a number of unquestionably great songs emerged from this bizarre phase. Check out Every Grain of Sand, Groom Still Waiting At The Alter (which, in classic Bob style, didn't qualify for inclusion among these wretched albums until later pressings), Heart of Mine, I Believe in You, Solid Rock.
Infidels: Jokerman, Neighborhood Bully. These are two exceptional songs from one of the very few good albums he released between 1976's Desire and 1997's Time Out Of Mind. And it isn't a great album, it's just enjoyable and features these tracks which I consider to be among his best.
Oh Mercy: Everything Is Broken. Somehow in the midst of two lost decades Dylan recorded a great rock tune.
Lost track: Series of Dreams (can be found on Bootleg 8). Somehow in the midst of two lost decades Dylan recorded an even better rock song. And he decided not to release it.
Time Out of Mind: Not Dark Yet, Trying to Get to Heaven, Standing In The Doorway, Million Miles.
Love & Theft: High Water (For Charley Patton), Summer Days, Mississippi
Modern Times: Thunder on the Mountain, Working Man's Blues #2
Tempest: Pay In Blood, Roll On John, Duquesne Whistle, Tempest
And then he found his muse. Legendary musicians tend to get undue praise even when releasing adequate material. This is decidedly not the case with Dylan's return to prominence. The best of his turn of the century original material is every bit as compelling as the music he released when he was in his twenties, and if anything it benefits from his age, wisdom, and awareness of his own mortality.
There you go. I think that's 52 songs.
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