LaRM day 121 (Bob Dylan)

Next up is my favourite Dylan album. I guess the main reason that I particularly love Desire (1976) so much is that it was the Dylan album that played the most prominent part in my childhood. It's one of the albums that defines many of my oldest memories and listening to it is a personally moving experience, because I'm a cripplingly sentimental idiot. It's strange because I don't really enjoy anything very much in the moment, but memories of pretty much anything have me on the verge of tears. Anyway, enough of this nonsense, Desire is a really wonderful album, messy, unpredictable, thematically unstructured, it's an album of loose threads, all of which have their own beautiful colours, and which despite its random and ramshackle nature is the most affecting and charming record that Dylan made. You've got all sorts here, the epic, politically charged 'Hurricane', the jaunty, spirited 'Black Diamond Bay', the mournful 'One More Cup of Coffee', the lighter than air 'Mozambique', the dense, sprawling 'Joey', the wistful and personal 'Sara' and 'Oh Sister' and probably best of all the rolling, enigmatic 'Isis'. Everything on Desire is a success in one way or another, even the silly stylings of 'Mozambique', and it's an album that takes the personal songwriting and reflections of Blood on the Tracks and builds on them, moving in a variety of different directions at once.

In 1985 a mammoth career overview was released entitled Biograph. This was presumably to act as a reminder of what a series of achievements Dylan had accomplished in the past, because by 1985 he had been dedicating himself to making some truly terrible records for some time. Biograph is a three and a half hour run through many of Dylan's highlights from 1962-1981 and it's a pretty inspiring set of choices throughout, taking in the most important songs from the major albums (and some crap from Saved and Shot of Love) but also including a substantial number of outtakes, alternate and live versions of big songs and some previously unheard material as well. Highlights for the new stuff are 'Lay Down Your Weary Tune' from 1963 and the Desire out-take 'Abandoned Love', lowlights are the 1981 B-side 'Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar', and an angry rocked-up live version of 'Isis'.

So to the last Dylan studio album in the collection, 1989's critical comeback, Oh Mercy. Thanks to the gauzy, fluid production work of Daniel Lanois, who was everybody's darling in the late 80's, Oh Mercy has a less jarring sound and style than the rest of Dylan's 80's output so it's understandble that it was raised up as the return to form, but to be honest it's not exactly the greatest record there is. Neil Young and Lou Reed's great 1989 returns to form are considerably more impressive than Oh Mercy and although it's absolutely a perfectly decent record, it's not the grandstanding, blazing return of a great talent that people pretended for a short while. It's essentially a nice record, and that's about as far as it goes. It's languid, unshowy, and as usual for Lanois produced records, it's a little murky, a little spooky in its atmospherics and on the whole it's, well, it's alright. There are some decent songs on it (I have to admit I don't mind 'Ring Them Bells' and although it's Lanois through and through, I like 'What Was It You Wanted'), but the issue for me isn't so much that Dylan's songs are better than they have been for a long time, but it's that he had to give himself over to his producer pretty much entirely and that makes me uncomfortable (I've heard Lanois talk about the grinding down that he "has to do" to songwriters to make them agree to record the way he wants). It's a decent record, and it's an easy listen, and it's good to hear that it wasn't all over for Dylan's basic skills, but it's no Desire.

We go all the way back now, with the exhausting Volume 7 of the Bootleg Series, No Direction Home (2005) which covers the earliest part of Dylan's career, from home recordings in 1959 through to the release of Blonde on Blonde. Only a couple of tunes on the two and a half hours of No Direction Home have appeared anywhere before (as befits the Bootleg Series) so we have live and alternate versions of many of the serious numbers, and most impressively of all, the first six or seven songs are mostly home-recordings and very early out-takes which are very revealing. Tributes to Woody Guthrie and covers of his songs set out the political version of Dylan's stall from the off. But this stuff only lasts halfway through and, as with the studio albums, from about 1964, the lyrical preoccupations become more arcane and personal. No Direction Home does reveal just how direct Dylan was in adopting stylistic frameworks that suited his purpose or particularly interested him at any given time, and it's hard to work out whether he picked up on prevailing winds or if his restlessness set those winds blowing. The early stuff is interesting enough, but it's mostly rough approximations of the style and sound of the first few albums. More fascinating are the alternate and live versions of songs from Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde that make up the second half of No Direction Home. You can hear the working-out that went on in the writing and rehearsing of these songs and that adds an extra dimension to the finally recorded versions, and although there's nothing particularly dramatic that comes out of any of these alternate versions, they do serve to demonstrate just how great the finished records were.