Worst Dylan Songs -- sez TIME Magazine

evidently not? i've never understood that quote. unless he meant that he felt dylan came too late in the game and really shoulda been making bleep-bloop-bloop records when he was immersed in his born-again period

Mozambique from Desire is pretty terrible. Patronising colonialist drivel. Lester Bangs' demolition of that album is a great read.

did dylan ever acknowledge disco in any sense btw?

some of the 78 live stuff is pretty disco-ed out. "shelter from the storm" gets a funky re-working.

did dylan ever acknowledge disco in any sense btw?

the Street-Legal tour employed a bongo player. There may have been a disco ball.

Mozambique from Desire is pretty terrible. Patronising colonialist drivel. Lester Bangs' demolition of that album is a great read.

yeah srsly. Even if you put Bangs' reading aside, you have to deal with how execrably Dylan sings.

i like bangs and all but his focus on how 'joey' was undermined by its subject being an asshole seemed sort of blinkered to me -- i mean, jesse james was a bad guy too!

had just about enough of this desire bashing
live version of mozambique from 76. http://www.bigozine1a.com/MPX3/BDsanant/BDsanant03.mp3
sure the lyrics are dumb! i don't think that's entirely unintentional.

i used to own a copy of street legal and once borrowed a copy of desire from a friend, but never managed to get into anything on them, except maybe for changing of the guards and one other song which escapes me. but now i'm thinking maybe i should revisit them, even if only out of perverse curiosity, b/c this was like 15 years ago or more when i first tried listening to them. but i imagine they would still fall flat on my ears. i'm someone who never appreciated blood on the tracks, other than you're a big girl now. i like his loud albert hall-ish rock stuff and nashville skyline and self-portrait, but much of the other time in listening to him i kinda just want him to shut up. oh, and oh mercy. i feel like i should check out that one properly

street legal is pretty flawed, but i like most of it. actually "no time to think" might be one of my candidates for worst ever Dylan song, now that I think of it. but i only came around to street legal when it was remixed in the late 90s -- it sounded so much better then!

"Senor" is the best thing on the album by some distance, and it really took off when I saw him perform it in '05.

yeah there's something kind of silly about senor as a whole, but dylan really sells it -- all the versions I've heard, you can tell he really enjoys singing it.

well, it's a set of Dylan-parody lines looking for a home, right? The world's best Dylan imitator writing his own Dylan song.

lincoln county rooooad ... or armageddon?! haha

did dylan ever acknowledge disco in any sense btw?

I've just spent 15 minutes looking for something I can't find: a late-'70s interview where someone asks him if his new music's disco, and he says something like, "No, the Village People are disco, I'm not disco." He says it in a way that's funny and playful, not resentful, and in a way that made it seem like he was very aware of what was happening elsewhere musically. (I thought it would have been the '78 Rolling Stone interview, but it's not there.)

There's this, though, from his '84 Rolling Stone interview: "I've seen a lot of stuff written about me. People must be crazy. I mean responsible people. Especially on that Street Legal tour. That band we assembled then, I don't think that will ever be duplicated. It was a big ensemble. And what did people say? I mean, responsible people who know better. All I saw was "Bruce Springsteen" because there was a saxophone player. And it was "disco" — well, there wasn't any disco in it."

He seemed a little less playful at that point. Earlier in the same interview he mentioned Cisco Houston.

i like bangs and all but his focus on how 'joey' was undermined by its subject being an asshole seemed sort of blinkered to me -- i mean, jesse james was a bad guy too!

yeah but if you write a song "About" jesse james that's just a bunch of self-pitying cliches, contrasting them with the actual facts of james is a good way to point out what crap it is

I love all those Emmylou Harris harmonies on Desire.

Not Heard "Wiggle Wiggle" so in my imagination it sounds a lot like Roy Orbison's "Ooby Dooby".

Does it?

I love Mozambique - it's funny.

Classic - Sara, Isis
V good - Hurricane, Mozambique, One More Cup of Coffee
OK - Oh Sister, Romance in Durango, Black Diamond Bay
Dud - Joey

I like Desire, but the tracklisting is always Hurricane, Isis, Mozambique, Coffee, skiiiip, Sara

Hurricane probs my favourite Dylan song.

Is this Lester Bangs takedown of Desire available online anywhere? Sounds fascinating.

here you go... http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/smalltalkatthewall/message/42037

Lawrence from Felt on some of those later Dylan records:

"What I liked about…Bob Dylan were the brilliant lyrics, but after ‘Desire’ why didn’t Dylan use synths instead of saxes and soul backing singers? He wore flares, didn’t acknowledge the new wave, and that dated him"

anyway...

― dell (del), Wednesday, May 25, 2011 8:08 AM (13 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I love Lawrence so so so much

Ballad In Plain D is clearly the worse. No-one has ever listened to it more than once. NO-ONE.

Any lover knows you skip the first songs on each side of Desire. Then you only get the Jung psych cross the border tales.

whoa, really? you skip Hurricane? why?

cuz I married ISIS on the fifth day of May!

oh, you're one of those CRAZY PEOPLE who LISTEN TO LYRICS, that would explain it ;-)

hey. I listen to music, too.

Look at it this way: every four years Dylan writes a `new' protest song and it's always about a martyred nigger and he always throws in a dirty word to make it more street-authentic. I don't use the word `nigger' for effect or to make myself look hip, but rather because just like our fathers before us that is all Jackson and Carter have been to him: another human life to exploit for his own purposes.

uh...

fuckin Lester

rmde

yeah i like lester bangs, but he was wrong a lot of the time.

My favorite of these is "Rainy Day Women". I like the drunken marching band sound and it's funny.

The worst song: "Rainy Day Women."

― The Edge of Gloryhole (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, May 24, 2011 12:36 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

http://i1128.photobucket.com/albums/m485/poophead2/laughing_o_GIFSoupcom.gif

that Lester piece is pretty epic... don't really agree with him that the biggest problem with Joey is that it takes liberties with the facts, seems like he got rather hung up on that

Hm. Although I haven't read it in years, I thought he was more disgusted with Dylan's stupid romanticizing of this thug.

well yeah, same difference.

also do vinyl pressings of Desire totally suck or what? can't believe they could actually fit 30 minutes on side 2

but there IS a difference.

even if he'd read a NYT article verbatim it's a halfwitted song.

I dunno, I take it as a given that pop music is going to involve the stupid romanticization of thugs, it's a pretty ancient lyrical conceit.

the song (which I am listening to RIGHT NOW) is interminable and pretty boring tho

there are two versions of "Forever Young" on Planet Waves, right? i like the fast one.

xp yeah, i mean, as far as stupid romanticization of thugs, dylan wrote a whole album about billy the kid. (and i love that album)

On the other Dylan thread, i suggested that "Dark Eyes" make this list.

^PG & BTK is one of my faves of his from the 70s. I know it's 60% filler. But it's damn good filler.

Well, the difference is that the cowboy era is already suffused with enough mythos to allow him some wiggle room. Gallo is one of those guys at the bar in Goodfellas.

so comedy acceptable romanticization = tragedy + time

I could write extended remarks on aging hippies, in an attempt to stay relevant and hold fast to their weird obsession with heroes and martyrs, picking dumb subjects for songs in the seventies and eighties.

so comedy acceptable romanticization = tragedy + time

would so pay to watch Alan Alda play Gallo.

picking dumb subjects for songs in the seventies and eighties.

oh man can we make a poll out of this

Patti Smith and Dylan would crowd the competition.

i dunno, i guess i think of "joey" as an exercise in mythmaking -- like dylan *knows* it's bullshit in the same way he knows that billy the kid is kinda bullshit. but the larger than life idea of these guys in the imagination and in song, that's what he's interested in. has dylan ever been interested in "facts"? maybe i'm giving him too much credit. it's not like my fave song or anything, but i think just taking it at face value, saying dylan thinks joey gallo was a rad, admirable dude, might be a mistake. also, i like the opening lines:
Born in Red Hook Brooklyn in the year of who knows when
Opened up his eyes to the tune of an accordion
Always on the outside whatever side there was
When they asked him why it had to be that way "Well" he answered "just because".