Bob Dylan’s friend, early champion and biographer Robert Shelton once said that by starting with “Rainy Day Women #12 &35” and ending with “Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands”, Blonde On Blonde had opened with a joke and closed with a prayer.
For a lot of people, the same could eventually be said about Dylan’s ’70s, a decade that began for Dylan with the release of Self Portrait, a double album of largely country and western covers – widely regarded as a joke that no one found funny – and the curtain coming down on it with his conversion to millennial Christianity and the end days sermons of Slow Train Coming.
In between, there was New Morning, seemingly rushed out after the critical drubbing of Self Portrait in an attempt to reassure fans that Dylan’s creative spark had not been entirely extinguished; a glorious soundtrack album; a reunion with The Band for Planet Waves and Tour 74, masterminded by music mogul David Geffen, who seemed less interested in a new album from Dylan as putting him on tour as soon as possible with The Band, ideally playing all their big hits in the biggest arenas they could book and getting a live album out as soon as the tapes could be mixed and the records pressed. Before The Flood was released four months after the tour’s final shows in Los Angeles.
New Morning and Planet Waves were both partly attempts to celebrate Dylan’s the domestic bliss of Dylan’s happy new life in Woodstock, with his wife and children and cows no doubt in a barn somewhere. By 1975, the pain of his unwinding marriage inspired one of his greatest recordings, Blood On The Tracks, a creative rebirth that took him back to his old Greenwich Village haunts, where he assembled the cast of the fabulous, carnivalesque Rolling Thunder Revue tour, shooting a road movie he called Renaldo & Clara along the way.
He had spent a lot of money on the film. His divorce cost him even more. To pay off the accumulating bills, he recorded Street-Legal with a big, ungainly band he then took on a year long world tour – the “Alimony Tour”, as it was quickly dubbed, 114 dates that left him in all ways exhausted, vulnerable to despairing moods. At which point, Christ entered his life, with the promise of salvation. He recorded Slow Train Coming, renounced all his own songs to the dismay of fans. At the opening night of his first Born Again tour, at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco, one of them held up a sign that said, “God likes your old songs, too, Bob.”
By now, however, he could only hear the Lord’s words and continued his personal crusade, despite the unrest of fans with his apocalyptic ranting, the dire sermons, doom-laden announcements. The two albums he made next – Shot Of Love and Saved – would further test their faith in him, who he had become, who he might be next. Fans deserted him like they were fleeing a burning building, more than a threat to his career than any number of soppy C&W covers. The coming ’80s would be a hard decade for him, hallelujahs turning to boos, praise to derision, his legend on the line.
13
Dylan
1973
When Dylan was lured by David Geffen to Asylum Records and a big bucks reunion with The Band, Columbia retaliated with this spiteful compilation of outtakes from Self Portrait and New Morning, all covers, including knockabout versions of “Mr Bojangles” and Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”, never intended for official release. It was pretty abysmal stuff and surely only released to embarrass Dylan. Ironically, it benefited from all the hoo-hah surrounding Planet Waves and Tour 74 and to date has sold more copies than Oh Mercy.
12
Bob Dylan At Budokan
1979
Dylan’s third live album in five years, recorded on some of the earliest shows of what became known as Dylan’s 1978 ‘Alimony Tour’ – the 114-date world tour Dylan played mainly to pay for an expensive divorce and the legal fees that came with it. The ungainly band that played on Street-Legal, augmented by horns and backing singers, blundered through overblown arrangements of classic songs, reducing everything in sight to lumpy rubble. The best that can be said is that it had its moments and there were even more of them on 2023’s The Complete Budokan, a 4CD set with 36 extra tracks.
11
Before The Flood
1974
Dylan and The Band bulldozed their way through 21 of their biggest hitters on this double live album from their 1974 reunion tour. The arrangements were blustery, the playing heavy-handed, overwrought. Dylan, mistaking shouting for singing, sounded mostly like a man trying to make himself heard during an air raid. “I was just playing a role on that tour,” he said later. “I was playing Bob Dylan and The Band were playing The Band. It was all sort of mindless.”
10
Self Portrait
1970
Hostile derision was the typical response to Dylan’s 1970 double album whose deliberate sprawl contained Basement Tapes leftovers, live cuts, versions of Paul Simon’s “The Boxer” and Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain”, covers of pop and country and western songs sometimes soaked in mawkish orchestral arrangements. What was going on? Had Dylan lost his mind? Was it an attempt to sink his career, Metal Machine Music with Mantovani strings? He had seen the album at some point as a celebration of American music, American song, perhaps America itself, a bold idea betrayed by a loss of confidence or interest on Dylan’s part. Maybe it was just poor or misguided track selection that favoured saccharine covers to the grittier recordings of old folk and country songs that appeared on 2013’s The Bootleg Series Vol 10: Another Self Portrait, a brilliant 2CD set that also included alternative takes of songs from New Morning, that achieved what many might have thought impossible by reclaiming Self Portrait from its dingy reputation as Dylan’s most mocked, belittled and perhaps misunderstood album.
9
Slow Train Coming
1979
Slow Train Coming put Dylan in a pulpit, scolding sermons and dire doomsday prophesies replacing the apocalyptic poetry of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and its broad compassions. It was his first album of evangelical songs since his conversion to millennial Christianity, full of what Nick Cave described as “mean spirited spirituality”. In Cave’s opinion it was a “genuinely nasty record”. Dylan wasn’t yet seen as a demented Bible-basher – that reputation would come with Shot Of Love and Saved – and a slick band and Jerry Wexler’s seamless production made it all sound extremely palatable. It won Dylan a Granmmy and sold more in nine months than Blood On The Tracks sold in a decade.
8
The Basement Tapes
1975
Fans had to wait until 2014’s The Bootleg Series Vol 11: The Basement Tapes Complete for the first official release of Dylan’s fabled 1967 Woodstock recordings with the nascent Band, an often-phantasmagorical trip through what was famously described as “the old, weird America”, lots of covers and as many new Dylan songs, many of them soon as acknowledged as classics. It was a 6CD set with 138 tracks and utterly phenomenal. Until then, there was this compromised 1975 double album compiled by Robbie Robertson that featured a mere 13 tracks from the basement sessions and controversially included eight tracks recorded by The Band without Dylan with no real connection to the sessions that gave the set its name. It did introduce “Tiny Montgomery” to the world, though, one of the most delightfully out-there tracks captured on Garth Hudson’s trusty old reel-to-reel.
7
Planet Waves
1973
Dylan and The Band back together was something that should have set at least a couple of barns on fire. Planet Waves, however, was a sadly spluttering affair that never really lit up, the playing mostly as half-baked as the songwriting. It’s a longstanding irony that on an album meant to celebrate domestic bliss Dylan seemed positively desperate on two of its better songs. “Going Going Gone”, was a brute and regal highlight, Dylan sounding like a man looking for a train to throw himself under; “Dirge” almost disappeared into a harrowing darkness. Mostly, though, it seemed like a belaboured afterthought to the looming Tour 74 and all those sold-out sports arenas.
6
Street-Legal
1978
On Street-Legal the big, blustering band Dylan had assembled for his 1978 world tour churned through some great songs – “Changing Of The Guard”, “Senor (Tales Of Yankee Power)” – like a backfiring threshing machine. What production values there were went missing in a muddy final mix. One song was too powerful to be diminished. “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Thru Dark Heat)” was raging, tortured, unforgettable.
5
New Morning
1970
First reactions to New Morning when it came out four months after the humiliations heaped on Self Portrait verged on the hysterical. “WE’VE GOT DYLAN BACK!” shrieked a particularly hilarious Rolling Stone headline. Some reviewers bafflingly claimed it was Dylan’s best album to date, which it clearly wasn’t. There were good songs on the album, even some great ones – “If Not For You”, “Sign On The Window”, “The Man In Me”. But the album sounded somehow timid in the end and uncertain, Dylan not at all sure what he should sound like as the 70s opened up in front of him.
4
Desire
1976
The cloistered intimacy of Blood On The Tracks gave way on Desire to a more sprawling, flamboyant sound, often dominated by Scarlet Rivera’s scything violin. Broadway director and lyricist Jacques Levy brought a theatrical flair to key songs. The thrilling “Hurricane” was a masterful narrative, Dylan’s first protest song since 1970’s “George Jackson”. “Sara” was piercingly emotional. Elsewhere, there was high drama on “Isis”. “Oh Sister” and “One More Cup Of Coffee”. The inclusion of “Joey”, a song that crassly romanticised New York gangster Joey Gallo, at the expense of the wonderful “Abandoned Love”, was a terrible mistake.
3
Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid
1973
Dylan displayed admirable knife-throwing skills in Sam Peckinpah’s magisterial final Western, turning in a wry performance as a character named Alias. But his biggest contribution to a great movie was a gorgeous soundtrack. The mood was largely reflective, full of melancholy, a perfect fit for Peckinpah’s dreamlike elegy. “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” was a big hit, a staple for years of Dylan’s live set, a highlight of The Rolling Thunder Revue tour. But the whole thing had an elegant twilit loveliness – the cantina drift of “Bunkhouse Theme” especially – and was beautifully played by an instrumental cast that included Roger McGuinn, Jim Keltner, Booker T, Russ Kunkel and Bruce Langhorn, who played guitar on Bringing It All Back Home. Los Lobos contributed a noble version of “Billy 1” to the soundtrack of Todd Hayne’s 2007 kaleidoscopic Dylan biopic, I’m Not There.
2
Hard Rain
1976
Hard Rain was recorded on the second leg of The Rolling Thunder Revue tour, dates Dylan played to pay off the production costs of Renaldo & Clara. The hats and scarves were gone. The guest stars, too. So, no more Baez, Joni, McGuinn, Ramblin’ Jack, Allen Ginsberg. The mood was sour. Dylan’s marriage was falling apart and so was he. Songs from Blood On The Tracks replaced songs from Desire in the tour’s set lists. The music was nightly brawling, ferocious. Here, the band tore through “Maggie’s Farm” and “Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again” like a getaway car crashing through roadblocks. “I Threw It All Away” was a desperate howl, “You’re A Big Girl Now” full of anguish and crescendo, Dylan sounding broken. A raging “Shelter From The Storm” was more threat than welcome. “Idiot Wind” was 10 minutes of apocalyptic venom. As far as spectacularly confrontational contemporary live albums go, its only rivals were Neil Young’s 1973 Time Fades Away and Lou Reed’s 1978 Take No Prisoners.
1
Blood On The Tracks
1975
If it’s true that every ending has a story, then Blood On The Tracks was the bitter and heartbreaking story about the end of a marriage, plausibly Dylan’s own. The painful heat of unwanted separation was an inspiration. These were the best songs Dylan had written in nearly a decade, each one a chapter in the novel the album became. They were full of meticulous detail, interlaced timelines, the past and present one voice. You imagined him recording them, alone in a room full of tears. At the same time, it was as easy to think of Blood On The Tracks as something you might see on a screen as take down from a bookshelf to read. “Tangled Up In Blue” alone had enough plotlines for at least a couple of films by Bob Rafelson or Hal Ashby, key roles for Karen Black and Ellen Burstyn, a telling came from Bruce Bern. No mention should be made of Blood On The Tracks without reference to “Up To Me”, one of Dylan’s greatest songs, the equal and more of anything on the album, but left off it in favour of “Buckets Of Rain”, that didn’t surface until 1985’s Biograph.