Could you give me like a guide to Bob Dylan? I've heard Highway 61 Revisited and loved it but I dunno where to start from there, his discography is massive.
yes, yes I can. and this is a wonderful day for you to start, seeing as how Dylan has just won the Nobel Prize in literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great american song tradition.” the committee who awarded it to him placed him explicitly in step with the greatest poets of the english language, from milton and blake, to eliot and auden, to whitman and yes, shakespeare. I agree with them. I have always agreed with them.
so let me give you the walk through; I’ve covered 14 of his 36 albums here. I call them
the freewheeling bob dylan (1963) - technically this is his second album, but it’s where Dylan as we conceive of him in this particular era was born: the social conscience, the voice of a generation, the passionate and strangely poetic young lover. he’s righteous, full of youth and conviction, and already carving an indelible place for himself within the folk scene. you could consider this a companion to 1964′s the times they are a’changin’; both are acoustic, both challenge the status quo and the political complacency of the Greatest Generation. when you pull this up in spotify, just take a moment to look at the tracks; at least five would become immediately synonymous with that period in history, the lyrics as iconic as the black and white newsreels you watch in your first semester of high school social studies. he was twenty-two years old.
key tracks: “blowin’ in the wind”, “a hard rain’s a-gonna fall”, “masters of war”, “don’t think twice, it’s all right”, “girl from the north country”
bringing it all back home (1965) - the longer you listen to Dylan, the more you will realize one thing: he hates to be told what he is. he hates even more to be told what you think he is. the early sixties saw him placed at the forefront of the anti-war movement, and he bridled at it. from the first ragged chords, bringing it all back home is a snarl of an album, a defiant fuck you of “going electric”, as his angry folk detractors called it, with the lyrics swerving personal in places, surreal in others. “subterranean homesick blues” was an early forerunner to both the music video and spoken-word music (whether it’s a true precursor to rap, as it’s sometimes said to be, is debatable), and “mr. tambourine man” displays the free-association imagery that would have people drawing comparisons to the french poet Rimbaud.
key tracks: “mr. tambourine man”, “subterranean homesick blues”, “maggie’s farm”, “it’s all right ma, I’m only bleeding”, “bob dylan’s 115th dream”
highway 61 revisted (1965) - an album that’s often argued to have ushered in the american cultural conception of “the sixties”. purely electric, with rock musicians on every track, Dylan dives into his blues background and knots the deep, warbling chords to a constantly-deepening sense of his own strange poetry. the country was transforming, tearing at itself to grow, and Dylan’s lyrics reflect the chaos, eschatological strangeness, and wry, black humor of the world he saw around him. “desolation row” is a little like Ginsburg’s “howl”, just–smirking, with its feet up. journalists really wanted to know the man behind the music at this stage in his career, and Dylan was just dreadful about it. he sat for press conferences and gave cryptic answers, got into shit with reporters, wrote diss tracks (”ballad of a thin man”), and talked about his future career in women’s underwear. when prompted, he describes his work as “vision music”. the Dylan you know, the Dylan with the wild mop of hair, and the coathanger shoulders, wearing sunglasses so you can’t see how fucking high he is? this is that Dylan.
key tracks: “like a rolling stone”, “desolation row”, “ballad of a thin man”, “highway 61 revisited”, “tombstone blues”
blonde on blonde (1966) - yeah, take a look at the time stamps of the last three albums. just think about that for a second. blonde on blonde has repeatedly been described as one of the greatest albums of all time, and for Dylan it was one of three, an absolute string of homers in which he defined himself as a poet, a musician, and a quintessentially american figure in what was then an unknowable future. the songs here are truly, achingly romantic, tempered with glittering, sometimes bizarre detail and turns of phrase. there are songs in here that I listened to for years, trying to imagine what it would be like to feel about someone, anyone, the way Dylan feels for the girl in “I want you”. his poetry lands with striking beauty on this album, and tastes as good on your lips as it sounds in your ears and in your chest: “the ghost of electricity / howls in the bones of her face”.
key tracks: “I Want You”, “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”, “Visions of Johanna”, “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again”, “Just Like a Woman”
john wesley harding (1967) - the Bible begins seeping unmistakably into his work here, not in a spiritual sense, but as a language, an ancient morality. he would refer to a King James edition often while writing, and the album contains over sixty biblical allusions in total, often hidden or twisted in on themselves. the worlds he painted in his lyrics became more self-contained, and could sustain odd, archetypal characters: the thief, the outlaw, the joker, the dangerous, unearthly damsel. a few songs could even be described as parables, but with dark, shrugging morals. in “I dreamed I saw st. augustine” a vision becomes a fable about mob mentality, and the smothering of what a crowd adores or can’t approach on their own terms.
key tracks: “john wesley harding”, “all along the watchtower”, “as I went out one morning”, “the ballad of frankie lee and judas priest”, “the wicked messenger”
self portrait (1970) - so you know how I said Dylan didn’t like to be pigeonholed? he also didn’t like having a lot of people looking up to him, hanging on his every word. he didn’t like walking out of his house to fans, or acolytes. he wanted them to forget about him and let him work. so he recorded self portrait. it’s not particularly good. in places it’s actually directly, intentionally dull and vapid, with the sound of a shitty bootleg. he painted the cover himself, in five minutes. later in life he recalled: “I wasn’t going to be anyone’s puppet and I thought this album would put an end to that.” it’s—not a great listen, particularly, but it really grants perspective. sometimes the best way to see the lightning in a bottle is to see its absence.
key tracks: the recovered version of “like a rolling stone”, “living the blues”
blood on the tracks (1975) - I…have a difficult time being objective about blood on the tracks. I have sort of a difficult time even talking about blood on the tracks. this is–my album, every single song tears at my heart, it feels like a well-worn paperback of poetry, with faded, dog-eared covers, black in the margins with my notes over the years. I adore it. it’s widely seen as Dylan’s return to form after a stubborn few years, and may track his separation from his first wife, but god, who cares. it’s a bruising, clear-eyed, angry, lonesome series of songs, all turning on matters of the heart. women destined in our narrator’s life, women disappearing and returning, bank robberies and hangings as a metaphor for vanishing last chances, sneering refutations of every argument, and finally, a tender, melancholy ode to what it feels like to be safe in someone’s arms.
key tracks: all of them. I’m not joking. please listen to this album from start to finish. it’s a gift.
desire (1976) - with blood on the tracks and desire, it became very clear that Dylan was not an artist tethered to the 60s. he shaped that decade and then left it; he didn’t need that cultural atmosphere to create, instead continued to walk lightly along whatever streets wound through his mind. that being said, Dylan’s keen eye for injustice never left him, particularly racial injustice; on desire he digs sharply into the story of middleweight boxer Rubin Carter, a black man falsely accused of murder and jailed for the same. Carter sent Dylan his biography, and the song “hurricane” was born. it remains depressingly relevant.
key tracks: “hurricane”, “joey”, “romance in durango”, “isis”
slow train coming (1979) // saved (1980) // shot of love (1981) - in 1978, Dylan had a vision of Jesus Christ in a hotel room in Tuscon. he was coming off some brutal reviews of his last album/documentary hybrid, and was unsteady on his feet at a San Diego concert. someone in the crowd threw a silver cross onto the stage. Dylan pocketed it, and then, late at night in the next town, “the glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up.” his next three albums were meditations, psalms and anthems to his Christian rebirth, and together constitute some truly beautiful, vibrant, american religious songwriting. I have the album art from slow train coming on the wall in my bedroom.
key tracks: “every grain of sand”, “property of jesus”, “gotta serve somebody”, “slow train”, “shot of love”
infidels (1983) - Dylan’s best poetry uses allusion and wordplay to wreathe the listener in ambiguity. not always emotional ambiguity, but true spiritual suggestion; words that you should know, concepts you half remember, images that tease at old and hidden strings in your cultural/human memory. who are these characters, why are they familiar, why does this turn of phrase reverberate? what does it mean to say these words to a woman, to feel so clearly what’s being felt in Dylan’s voice? infidels (and particularly the track “jokerman”, a masterpiece) is an album for those sorts of questions. considered a return to form after his religious releases, a twisty, multi-layered, sometimes sad, sometimes witheringly sarcastic piece that follows everything from a political antichrist to a tender reunion of two lovers. Dylan wouldn’t speak much on religion from this album forward, saying that he found his peace and spirituality in his music and writing, no more, no less. however, that didn’t stop him from sharpening his writing to a point on “neighborhood bully”, a spirited defense of the nation of Israel.
key tracks: “jokerman”, “don’t fall apart on me tonight”, “man of peace”, “I and I”, “neighborhood bully”
oh mercy (1989) - a small, aging, apocalyptic album, particularly in the latter half. there’s something elegiac here, songs about lost people the narrator used to be, or worlds crumbling away into flood. oh mercy isn’t one of Dylan’s most vaunted works, but contains lovely poetry and sweet, rich production, strung through with foreboding and a slow, inevitable crash.
key tracks: “man in the long black coat”, “most of the time”, “what good am I” “disease of conceit” “shooting star”
time out of mind (1997) - the 90s were a struggle for Dylan; he wasn’t producing much original work, and often wondered if there was a point when “a person has written enough songs. let someone else write them.” luckily, he never reached that point. time out of mind was released in september of 1997, and may be his strongest showing since infidels. it’s moody, reflective; Dylan lets his poetry slow and turn in the mind of the listener like a true romantic. in fact, his “not dark yet” has been cited as a modern reflection of Keats’s ode to a nightingale: a writer beautifully bearing the burden of mortality and making his way towards what’s waiting.
key tracks: “not dark yet”, “love sick”, “trying to get to heaven”, “cold irons bound”
love and theft (2001) - runaways, con men, preachers, blues singers, gamblers, devils and outlaws have always occupied American folksongs, and Dylan has always been a folk writer, if not a singer. he makes the most of these characters here, against the backdrop of a declining south, draped with shadow and laughing madness. it’s one of the most indelibly American albums ever recorded, and was hailed as a work of genius, Dylan’s “immortality album.”
key tracks: “tweedle dee & tweedle dum”, “floater”, “high water (for charlie patton)”, “honest with me”, “sugar baby”
tempest (2012) - a deliberate, sharp-toothed, unearthly outing, tempest is weird, and wants to be. in his old age Dylan has exhaled into the inherent strangeness of Americana, and put his own stamp on old old traditions. he’s become the archetype that other people invoke. this album was widely praised, particularly for its mysterious nature, and Dylan’s continuing delight in allusion. it’s continuing evidence that age doesn’t diminish a poet, just gives him deeper, darker wells to peer down.
key tracks: “narrow way”, “scarlet town”, “early roman kings”, “pay in blood”, “tempest”
I would say I envy your first listen to these albums, but…I’m not sure I do. I mean, they’re stunning, but one of the great beauties of Dylan’s work is its depth and richness: it never stops unfurling. so–welcome, I guess. love it or hate it, it’s unlikely you’ll ever shake his work completely.
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