Nashville Skyline, recorded February, 1969, released April 9, 1969

Background: By 1969, Bob and Sara Dylan were the parents of 4 young children and in December of that year Jakob, the fifth and last child would be born. Little had been heard from Dylan since John Wesley Harding. In the meantime, it seemed, the world had moved on. Viet Nam. Haight-Ashbury. The Summer-of-Love-Flower-Power-psychedelia-Timothy Leary. Watergate, for heaven’s sake! Where was ‘The Voice of the Generation’ when you needed him? “For the public eye, I went to the bucolic and the mundane as far as possible. In my real life I got to do the things that I loved best and that was all that mattered…” (Chronicles, Vol. 1, p 123.)

The Recording: A new voice. (Rumor has it that he stopped smoking to achieve this smoother tenor sound.) Twanging guitars. Charlie Daniels. JOHNNY CASH! And, among the tunes, the song that, for me, emerges as Dylan’s sexiest: Lay Lady Lay. Bob’s been hitting the sourmash, for sure, but what surfaces here is not to be scoffed at. Nashville Skyline Rag, his first full-length instrumental, is a foot-tapper, Peggy Day, To Be Alone With You, One More Night and Country Pie are also upbeat and harken back to an earlier decade. There’s a similar, slightly melancholy flavor present in I Threw it All Away, Tell Me it Isn’t True, and Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You all of which reflect a more serious side of the sing/songwriter. If a Conway Twitty had come out with this album no one would have thought twice about it, but once again Dylan is playing musical chameleon and people take notice. Even if, as one looks back, there’s a more than a hint that this is the direction he’s taking in John Wesley Harding the fence that that album straddled stood much closer to old mountain ballads than it did to fifties or sixties C&W.

Conclusion: Another surprise, but just the fact that it is is in its own way predictable, as far as Dylan’s music goes. Taken at face value, it’s a pleasant listening experience; taken as a Dylan album, one gets the feeling that there’s something more up his sleeve. That grin he’s wearing on the album cover as he tips his hat says, “Wait ‘til you hear what’s inside—I’ve been having fun!

John Wesley Harding recorded Oct./Nov. 1967, released December 27, 1967.

Background: The booing. The hoopla. Europe. Life threats. Amphetamines. Press conferences. Woodstock. THE accident (June 29, 1967).The Recording: The trees are bare. Dry leaves rustle under your feet. November air touches your face with chilled fingers. A plaintive voice (can it be Dylan?) tells you stories as you make your way, unsure of your destination, but feeling that your journey’s origins were in a solid place. Settings for many of the tales you hear—John Wesley Harding, As I Went Out One Morning, All Along the Watchtower, I Am a Lonesome Hobo, Drifter’s Escape, Dear Landlord, I Pity the Poor Immigrant— are as stark as your own surroundings and the spare accompaniment of acoustic guitar, harmonica and unobtrusive drum. I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine and The Wicked Messenger confront Biblical allusion with an even greater directness than Highway 61 Revisited. The album ends with the upbeat Down Along the Cove and I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight, a surprisingly mellow love song that might be considered the foreplay preceding Lay, Lady, Lay. Dylan’s listener/fan base had already been splintered by his electric evolution. Now, it would seem, both factions would be left dazed by this album. Yet another Dylan has emerged. Unvarnished, unpretentious—unplugged. Where did this come from? (The basement at “Big Pink”, but that’s not an official answer until 1975.) Where is this going? (That question will be answered many months later in one word: Nashville.)

Conclusion: Dylan’s muse has lured him to yet another seemingly unknown region. If listeners didn’t understand that the tenacious pull of transformation is Dylan’s driving force when he ‘went electric’, this album should have brought the fact into clearer focus for them.

The Basement Tapes, Recorded June-Nov 1967, Released 1975

Okay, I've debated about this. First it came here, but then I thought I should be recreating the public experience at the time and not include access to these songs until they were released in 1975 (even tho' bootlegs abounded for all of the intervening years). But the more I try to eliminate my knowledge of them from my reactions to the subsequent recordings, the more it becomes a futile exercise and the more I realize that if someone were to read this, as I intend, as an introduction to Dylan, there's no real reason to keep this information from them and many reasons to include it.

Background: At this point, The Basement Tapes have taken on a mythical quality. Basically, Dylan was recuperating from his motorcycle accident, his backing group, formerly The Hawks, had taken up residence near his Catskill—yes, Woodstock—home. They began working together regularly, at first just jamming, playing songs they all knew and teaching each other ones they didn’t. Much else is conjecture, rumor and myth-building. For whatever reason, they eventually decided to tape at least some of their sessions, whether it was supposed to be as demos for themselves or other artists, or if they just wanted to know how the whole thing was sounding, we really don’t know.

The Recording: Not always the best quality, not even, necessarily complete songs, these are the re-mastered 1975 releases of a portion of the songs that were taped. People who gather the bootlegs have a much larger playlist from these sets. (See Sid Griffin’s Million Dollar Bash for an exhaustive—if somewhat speculative—investigative report of the sessions and the re-masterings as well as a song-by-song description of the complete set of tapes as they are known to exist.) 24 songs. The first to emerge from the basaement were used by Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, as demos and soon became hits for other groups. Others became standards in The Band’s repertoire a few years down the line. A select set has made it’s way to Dylan’s live concerts. And a few, except for the fact that they are among this touted group, have faded quietly away.

Conclusion: Eric Clapton has confessed that hearing these tapes was the impetus for his disbanding Cream to seek another musical direction for himself. These are an important milestone in popular music, at the very least. They are the explanation, if you will, for the change in direction Dylan takes in the recordings that follow. But what was behind that, we may never really know. Did the emotional burden of the events in the years leading up to this period thrust him in a new direction in hopes of escaping the expectations he felt had been placed upon him or did a young loner from the mid-west who’d never been able keep a band around him in high school and who had taken it upon his narrow nineteen year old shoulders to venture to New York City and solitarily follow his muse despite what might come finally find solace in a group of talented musicians who were open to new ideas? Whatever the motivation, much was accomplished that eventually spilled into mainstream music in the decades that followed.

Musings II: In Concert

So I saw him ‘in person’. Was it a religious experience? No. Was I prepared? Not the first time. Yeah, stupid me. The first time I expected that ‘The Man’, ‘His Bobness’ would be belting ‘em out just as I’ve always heard them in the soundtrack of my life, that the hits would just ‘keep on coming’. Right. That was when I was a true novice, when I still had expectations of predictability. But in the little more than a year since that first time I’ve learned a lot. A lot. First, I’ve come to realize that, despite what people say about his mumbling, it’s the lyrics that you really have to know backwards and forwards to have any hope of recognizing the songs because it’s the melody and the rhythm that he truly enjoys messing with. The lyrics hold up pretty well in comparison and if you can just pin down a phrase here or there among the mumbled words and distorted delivery thanks to the amped up sound system, you’re golden. I’ve found that binoculars are a great aid here if you can get a seat where you’ve got a shot at watching his mouth.

Okay, let’s skip all the usual arguments: “Why bother going to see him if he can’t sing/if he doesn’t care/if he’s just an old geezer” vs. “Would you go see Shakespeare or Picasso if you had the chance?/He can too sing, it’s just a new style”, etc. Taking the experience at face value rather than expecting to see only a slightly older version of the 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert or talking yourself into the transcendental nature of being in the same arena with his greatness, what do you have? These days you have a rockin’ band that, over time, is getting better and better at knowing what Dylan’s doing out there and enhancing it with their own talents. You’ve got a repertoire of classics and new tunes woven into such an unpredictable string of setlists that there are at least 2 websites dedicated to forecasting what he’s gonna play. You’ve got an old-fashioned, down-to-earth, no fancy-laser-light-super-screen-projected extravaganza techonographed to co-ordinate with a lip-synched production of previously recorded muzak, concert. There’s a man and his band. Period. (Okay, a coupla lighting effects here and there, but if you’re the lighting guy at a Dylan concert, you can pretty much phone in your efforts—and Dylan certainly won’t care/notice if you screw up ‘cause that’s not what he’s paying attention to. He’s there to have a good time for himself. Period.

How do I answer the complaints about the fact that he barely acknowledges the audience, that he sings ‘too many” new songs leaving out some of the old standards, that he’s just plain old? I say that this guy has followed his muse, his bliss, his instincts for a very long time now. Despite (or because of) his success, he’s paid some pretty high personal prices along the way. On top of that, he’s a very sen-sa-tee-uhv (oops, we haven’t gotten to Blood on the Tracks yet, have we?) person, who has built up an arsenal of defenses against the real and perceived lack of appreciation of his art by fans and non-fans. The fact that he still puts himself out there and is still creating, night after night, is a testament to his genius/artistry and I, for one, consider it a privilege to witness it. Period.