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DISCOGRAPHY
Bob Dylan (1962) 4/10
Freewheelin' (1963) 5/10 +
Times They Are A-Changin' (1964) 5/10
Another Side (1964) 5/10
Bringing It All Back Home (1965) 7/10
Highway 61 Revisited (1965) 8/10
Royal Albert Hall Concert (live, 1966) 7.5/10
Blonde On Blonde (1966) 8/10
John Wesley Harding (1967) 7/10
w/ the Band: Basement Tapes (1967) 7/10
Nashville Skyline (1969) 5/10
Self Portrait (1970) 4/10
New Morning (1970) 4/10
Dylan (1973) 4/10
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (soundtrack, 1973) 5/10
Planet Waves (1974) 5/10
Blood On the Tracks (1975) 7/10
Desire (1976) 7/10
Street Legal (1978) 6.5/10
Slow Train Coming (1979) 5/10
Saved (1980) 3/10
Shot of Love (1980) 3.5/10
Infidels (1983) 5.5/10
Empire Burlesque (1985) 6.5/10
Knocked Out Loaded (1986) 5/10
Down In the Groove (1987) 3.5/10
Traveling Wilburys: Volume 1 (1988) 5/10
Oh Mercy (1989) 6.5/10
Under the Red Sky (1990) 3/10
Traveling Wilburys: Volume 3 (1990)
Good As I Been To You (covers, 1992) 4/10
World Gone Wrong (covers, 1993) 4/10
Time Out of Mind (1999) 6.5/10
Love and Theft (2001) 5.5/10
Modern Times (2006) 6/10
Together Through Life (2009) 4/10
Tempest (2012) 5/10
Shadows in the Night (covers, 2014) 3/10
Fallen Angels (covers, 2016) 3/10
Triplicate (covers, 2017) 3/10
Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020) 5/10
His first album, simply titled Bob Dylan, contained mostly covers except for the notable Song for Woody, but that song alone was not enough to garner much attention.
Before Dylan had dropped his second album, Freewheelin, he was close to being dropped from the label entirely. But this time his music raised eyebrows and turned heads. Songs such as Blowin in the Wind, Don't Think Twice, and Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall were considered instant classics of contemporary folk.
Dylan's lyrics, sung with a voice of colloquial maturity and whoopin'-hollerin' youth, were profound and simple to the point of poetry. But more importantly, he demonstrated to musicians just how much attention one gets if they write their own material, just as Chuck Berry had with his singles in the 1950s. Dylan's popularity moved his rock peers to be more ambitious, to write their own songs and dare to be unconventional with their sound when necessary.
As Dylan embraced the exciting trends of Rock music, Bringing It All Back Home features one half of folk-rock (electric) songs and one half of acoustic folk songs.
Months after, Dylan performed at the Newport Folk Festival, whereupon he played some of his electric music to outraged acoustic purists. The show became a scandal overnight, but Dylan's persistence would earn him an artistic integrity that prioritized his art over the convenience of his consumers.
His concerts thereafter were polluted with more outraged and derisive audiences; including a show at the Royal Albert Hall in 1966, in which he was called Judas. The Royal Albert Hall Concert (Bootleg Series Vol. 4) captures the entirety of the show. The concert was structured similarly to Bringing It All Back Home, with one half being acoustic performances and the second being electric.
The Greatest Hits Vol. II compilation would include four songs Dylan had written for the Band, newly recorded by Dylan himself in 1971. Not one, but three of them would be Dylan classics: When I Paint My Masterpiece, You Ain't Goin' Nowhere, and I Shall Be Released.
Under the Red Sky is easily Dylan's worst album despite its impressive line-up of backing musicians: Slash, George Harrison, Elton John, Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughn, David and Don Was, David Crosby, David Lindley, and the return of Al Kooper on keys to boot.
The title song, Under the Red Sky, does entertain with its wispy accordion and Kooper's gospel organ accompaniment, but the lyrics are as stupid as the rest of the songs — and when an acclaimed songwriter starts an album with words like "Wiggle Wiggle Wiggle Wiggle," you better believe the lyrics get stupid.
Clearly Dylan's intention was to recapture the pop-rock energy of his albums from '85-'88, but the result sounds more like a batch of demos, tracks that would have been scrapped to maintain any other album's creative integrity. The only explanation for the lack of quality would be a split of attention between recording this (Jan–May) and recording the Traveling Wilburys album released in the same year (April–May). But even then, I don't know what the hell Dylan was doing in those first three months; perhaps that was the time dedicated to one song's accordion and gospel organ and the rest of the album was recorded after.
Together Through Life dabbles in lame styles of blues and Americana, but there are some hints of ambition. Beyond Here Lies Nothing invigorates with its accordion riff, and accordions return for the persistent chords of If You Ever Go to Houston.
Perhaps the most inconsistent album of his career, Tempest exhibits some of Bob's very best lyrics (Tin Angel, Tempest) coupled with his very worst (Long and Wasted Years, in which he pointedly writes: "I wear sunglasses to cover my eyes").
His skills as a songwriter have also reached a critical nadir of Americana and blues imitation: Early Roman Kings pretty much moves like George Thorogood's Bad to the Bone draped with an accordion; meanwhile the western swing of Duquesne Whistle fails to sound as graceful — and the romantic Soon After Midnight fails to sound as tender — as anything off Modern Times.
Bob's old habit of redundancy also shows its head in the seven minutes of Narrow Way, the dull rhythm of Long and Wasted Years, and the aforementioned "Bad to the Bo-man Kings". Yet the repetition works if Dylan doesn't indulge too much: Tin Angel barely has a melody at all, but its great lyrics and unpretentious delivery prove a tense and captivating murder ballad; Tempest is a fifteen-minute refrain of the same melody, the words being a tribute to the Titanic on the disaster's hundredth anniversary.
Shadows in the Night (2015), Fallen Angels (2016), and Triplicate (2017) make up an obscenely boring trilogy of traditional pop/standards covers, marking what is perhaps the lowest point in Dylan's career.
I am certain that Dylan simply wanted to cover songs he liked rather than stress himself to write new material, but sometimes I wonder if he released these albums to prove a point of some kind — like a rebuttal to those who still criticize his voice for being too unpolished, so he sings songs known through America's "coolest" singer Frank Sinatra just to spite them.
The very idea of Dylan doing music standards isn't bad by itself, but what the albums fail to do is invigorate the concept in practice. The sound of light jazz-rhythms and steel guitars behind Bob's vocals is stale right from the start, so elongating that into an hour — or Triplicate's THREE HOURS — does not do the music any favors.
Martin Scorsese's documentary on the Rolling Thunder Revue concert tour provides archive footage of Dylan and his peers along with fictional additions to make it some sort of mockumentary at the same time: the filmmaker Stefan Van Dorp never existed, Sharon Stone fictionalizes her experiences with Bob, and the US representative Jack Tanner is a character from Robert Altman's film Tanner '88. Why Scorsese decided to confuse the documentary's focus and elongate the runtime is a mystery, since these mock-features are not funny nor are they interesting in the film's context.
As sequences pass, the documentary becomes more of a concert film with lots of filler in-between each performance. But some of the filler is cool: seeing Dylan and Allen Ginsberg read poetry by the grave of Jack Kerouac, or seeing Joni Mitchell and Patti Smith perform in their own segments, or one particularly intimate scene where Dylan and Joan Baez solemnly discuss their separate marriages. But as with the unnecessary mockumentary aspects, much of the filler doesn't work. For instance, the very start of the film shows an unrelated magician act bit that resurfaces at the end for whatever reason.
The vital difference between this movie and No Direction Home is that Rolling Thunder openly has no point. There's a fantastic supply of interviews, rehearsal footage, concert footage, backstage footage, and miscellaneous footage on top of that. It's just that none of it goes anywhere, as Dylan literally states at the beginning: "[The Rolling Thunder Revue] is about nothing. It was just something that happened forty years ago."
His first original work in eight years, Dylan released Rough and Rowdy Ways in mid-2020. The music's
Murder Most Foul is a fluid and abstract rendition of the chamber-folk from Tempest, but unlike those songs, Dylan's vocals are as close to spoken-word as they've ever been, and thus the near-aimless improvisation of the instruments behind him make it more of an accompanied poetry-reading than a completed musical piece. If the lyrics were bad, this would have been more of a problem, but thankfully, Dylan's writing is just as witty and refined as his work from 2012.
ROCKUMENTARIES
D.A. Pennebaker: Don't Look Back (1967) 5.5/10
Martin Scorsese: No Direction Home (2005) 7.5/10
Todd Haynes: I'm Not There (2007) 6.5/10
Martin Scorsese: Rolling Thunder Revue (2019) 5/10
EXTERNAL LINKS
Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour -- official archive of the entire series
Subterranean Homesick Blues video -- iconic opening for Don't Look Back
Dylan's acting in Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid -- Dylan is actually the worst actor I've ever seen
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