Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks poll

is Dylan one of the few canonical rock dudes folks still moralize over a bit? it's interesting, you see it here with people talking about "Idiot Wind" being less good bc he comes off abusive, the ongoing hand-wringing over "Joey" of course, etc. I'm not sure what it is, but you don't really see people apply that to old canonized rock types (exception: "Run for Your Life" with the Beatles, I guess). there's a greater point here about people maybe identifying with Dylan's narrators or something but I'm tired and don't know where to make it

I've never thought of Dylan as a person so

hm, i am almost inclined to say the opposite is true. dylan's persona has always been acerbic -- not the type to suffer fools gladly -- and part of the thrill of songs like "like a rolling stone" is the gratuitousness of its cruelty, the way he just eviscerates the addressee past the point of reasonableness... i mean, he is kicking this girl when she is down. the redemptive factor, i think, is that dylan's anger is often self-directed, or like, there are times when it is obvious his narrator is projecting. only naive bob-o-philes would believe that his anger is always righteous though.

on a related note, i never understood wtf is going on with "run for your life" that song always freaked me the fuck out and i'm a fan of "under my thumb", which i think is as much a song about the narrator's insecurity as it is a "sexist" work.

folx around here know I dismiss biography so when "Joan Baez" or "black eyeliner" come up I just listen to "Joey" or "Black Diamond Bay" and think "Christ on a crutch these things are long and stupid."

Love this whole abum but "Simple Twist of Fate" is the winner.

because you love the Steve Martin movie.

xp yeah I agree with that, just think "Joey" is a long-winded and sorta crappy song (and I love Desire otherwise), but you know the dominant narrative is "how dare Dylan romanticize a gangster"

lester bangs devoted most of his review to complaining about that, which i always thought was a little funny since there must be a thousand songs that sing the praises of jesse james or bonnie and clyde or whoever. the real problem with the song is that it goes on forever.

his criticism of "Mozambique" (a single!) is on the nose though

because you love the Steve Martin movie.

― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 22 April 2013 2:08 AM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Have no idea what this is so not sure whether to answer yes or no.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/413j0ZoImoL._SX500_.jpg

lol Mozambique was a single?! god, zimmy stayed trolling even back then.

looks like I'm gonna have to find Blood on the Tapes, though, getting back to the actual album. I kept holding out that they were gonna release a bootleg series disc of it and it never happened.

"If You See Her, Say Hello"

This song just wounds me.

"Mozambique" started as a game, to see how many rhymes for "-ique" Dylan and Levy could find.

I really like the Rolling Thunder Revue version of Shelter From The Storm with the yelling and slide guitar etc., and the full-band, more country arrangement from the 90s that I think was posted here. I didn't like the album much, but that has to do with what a contrarian Dylan fan I am.

The version on Hard Rain is like Dylan backed by Carlos Alomar. I absolutely love it.

we always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point of view

tangled up in blue was of enormous importance to me in high school. i almost feel like i betrayed my 15 y/o self by voting for if u see her... which was of enormous importance to me this year after i broke up with my gf

Pete Hamill's original liner notes, removed at some point:

http://www.bobsboots.com/CDs/cd-b28_Hamilltext.html

Haven't read them--supposedly wildly pretentious.

In the end, the plague touched us all. It was not confined to the Oran of Camus.

<stops reading>

but really, this is one of those albums that is "lived with" more than "listened to"... that has continual relevance throughout one's life. it is like the Ulysses of albums; you can never be finished with it.

i love bob dylan.

they gave Pete Hamill a Grammy for those liner notes, in case anybody wants to make the case that the Grammys were ever not ridiculous

they give Grammys for liner notes? does that still happen?

it does.....though lately all that seems to win is big reissue boxes.

Wanted to do a poll but can't find enough good linkable ones......

Did the notes for that one Van Morrison album written by Janet Planet win anything?

ok, worst Literary Liner Notes of the Rock Album Era might work

Nominees:

Blood on the Tracks
Aja
Velvet Underground 1969 Live

anybody got any faves?

xp--I believe that a woman has NEVER WON the Grammy for "Notes!"

i guess at this point in my life' i'll never get to love Dylan, no matter how many chances i'll give his music.

he'll survive

if anyone wants those NY sessions http://hungryears.tumblr.com/post/31923051004/bob-dylan-the-new-york-sessions-blood-on-the-tracks

Early on, he warned us, he gave many of us voice, he told us about the hard rain that was going to fall, and how it would carry plague. In the teargas in 1968 Chicago, they hurled Dylan at the walls of the great hotels, where the infected drew the blinds, and their butlers ordered up the bayonets. Most of them are gone now. Dylan remains.

" Most of them are gone now. Dylan remains abides "

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

surprised lily, rosemary, and the jack of hearts got votes because it is terrible and does not fit in with the other songs on this album at all

surprised there wasn't more love for "if you seer her"

me too, that's the one i voted for. one of the best songs of the 70s imo.

surprised lily, rosemary, and the jack of hearts got votes because it is terrible and does not fit in with the other songs on this album at all

This is true except that it's awesome and totally fits into the album wtf

otm color me perplexed

i don't like it. maybe it would be a good track on some other dylan album, but it's too much of a non-sequitur for this album, and among dylan's freewheeling, long narrative songs with kooky characters i don't think this is one of the strongest. all those poker metaphors.

i should add that i am mostly talking about the lyrics. it sounds pretty good, especially the organ and the bass.

i think of it as sort of a fun intermission. the album would be just a little too heavy-spirited without it.

It's about people dealing with/not dealing with/escaping/not escaping their complicated pasts and promises and betrayals, just like everything else on the album. (And being too preoccupied with their own dramas to notice the drilling in the wall.)

xpost JD hm, i can see that. i am listening to it now -- and am really easily swayed in my opinions -- and i am thinking that this song reminds you that you're listening to a dylan album. this song is really the only one that celebrates verbal inventinveness and imaginative digressions for their own sake, which are both important hallmarks of dylan's style

Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts is quite fun to listen to, but every time it's on I try to follow the words to understand what it's actually about and it's just impossible - my mind wanders after a couple of verses. I couldn't tell you anything that happens in the song.

He'd have been fine if we just held the poll results until he'd had a chance to compose an essay about them.

Whoops wrong poll

Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts - seems like the kind of song that thinks its gonna thrill you through wit and cleverness but ends up just being pretty boring. Even when I was pathologically obsessed with that album, I would nearly always skip it.

"Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts" is not out of place out all, it is like the story within the story, a little cornell box of the rest of the album. The play's the thing.

There is some kind of weird rattle on the alternate take of "Tangled Up in Blue."

it's the buttons on dylan's jacket, apparently.

Being rattled as the idiot wind blew threw them!

this thread inspired me to order this album on vinyl and it should be here tomorrow. i'm excited. i'm going to give lil, rosemary, etc. a charitable listen this time and see if i can really "get" why an allegorical version of the narrative arc of the rest of the album was necessary.

I missed this poll, but the results seem reasonable to me. The younger me would have voted "Tangled" easily. "Back in my teens Tangled felt impossibly full of the mysteries of life", as someone wrote above and that definitely holds for me as well. In those days, "Idiot Wind" was one of my least favorite tracks - it's so big and ugly, like 1960s brutalist architecture. But now the rawness of it gives me a thrill. My vote for most overrated would go to "Shelter from the Storm" which has always seemed to me to overreach slightly for mythic significance. Most underrated is probably "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" which earns the emotional punch that "If You See Her, Say Hello" tries to grasp a bit too easily.

forgot to vote in this but shout out to that massive buddy cage pedal steel in meet me in the morning.