Bob Dylan: Desire (1976)
We're coming up on the 50th anniversary of Bob Dylan's Desire, which added to his mid '70s renaissance initiated by the previous year's triumphant Blood On the Tracks and Bob's mythical late '60s recordings with The Band, released as The Basement Tapes.
But Blood ... and Desire couldn't be more different, as the former was an intimate, confessional song cycle focused (despite his endless denials) on Dylan's divorce, while the latter looked outward with a collection of musical biopics about both real-life and imaginary characters.
For this reason, Desire has often been called one of Dylan's most "cinematic" efforts and it also marked one of those rare occasions in which Bob collaborated with a co-writer -- this being theater director and lyricist Jacques Levy.
Perhaps the most famous fruit of their partnership was the album's first cut, "Hurricane," which told the tale of wrongfully incarcerated boxer Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter and of course later inspired a 1999 movie starring Denzel Washington.
A true epic, at over eight-and-a-half minutes in length, "Hurricane" was actually re-recorded at the insistence of Columbia's lawyers, who saw potentially libelous claims about witnesses in Rubin's case in the first version cut by Dylan and his band.
And even though the song's production and performance were a far cry from Bob's folk songs of the 1960s, "Hurricane" was still a protest song that reminded fans of Dylan's roots in other third-person narratives, before he'd turned inwards in recent years.
Another, even more controversial number called "Joey" was criticized for romanticizing the life of mobster 'Crazy' Joey Gallo, but this sin was nothing compared to the song's meandering, eternally and insufferably, for eleven minutes behind Dylan's oft-out-of-tune wailing backed by a frustrated Emmylou Harris.
According to Harris, who also performed on the gypsy travelogue "One More Cup of Coffee," Dylan refused to share any lyrics or melodic cues ahead of recording, forcing her to watch his mouth and guess when and what she should be singing!
No wonder Bob was such an infrequent collaborator ...
But, while we're on that subject, one of Desire's defining contributors was violinist Scarlet Rivera, whom Dylan had literally plucked off the streets of Greenwich Village, and put to work essentially replacing the role typically played by his harmonica.
It's impossible to imagine "Hurricane" without her sinuous parts, but Rivera also shines on the mariachi string section on "Romance In Durango," and the tasteful call-and-response throughout "Isis," which became her showcase during the ensuing Rolling Thunder Revue tour.
Rounding things out, "Mozambique" is a brief, superficial comment on that country's recent independence from Portugal, "Oh, Sister" takes a vague turn towards the spiritual, and "Black Diamond Bay" describes a deadly volcanic island eruption through the lens of several eventual victims.
Finally, the closing "Sara" contradicts all that came before by pivoting back to the first-person narratives of Blood On the Tracks with a revealing one-way conversation between Dylan and his ex-wife, full of clear and specific memories about their relationship and children.
Clearly, there was more than enough evidence on hand to reaffirm Dylan's renewed status among America's greatest living songwriters, since Desire went on to spend five weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and shifted over two million copies in the U.S. alone.
Unfortunately, our erratic, recalcitrant genius wasn't able to sustain this momentum and instead sprinkled an uneven assortment of live and studio albums through the rest of the decade, before largely losing his way in the '80s.
More Bob Dylan: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin’, Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, Blood on the Tracks, Infidels, The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991.
