Is Bob Dylan overrated?

I bet if people (rock 'n' roll fans) heard "Planet Waves" with no preconceptions about **DYLAN,** most of them would have to love it!!

anyone with a career like that surely has to phone it in sometimes.

(x-post)

Self-Portrait might be the most underrated album of all time.

And I agree with Tab. Dylan as fundamentalist spitfire preacher is definitely underrated. That phase of his might be the most dramatic remove from an established image anyone's ever accomplished. It's interesting how Neil Young did his schizo albums right after, which maybe's another example of Dylan's huge sway over everybody else.

This is bad why?

NOT overrated -- and go ahead and strike up another vote for Self Portrait.

Yeah buddy. I've seen him several times over the past 17 years (first in '87, most recently in '02), and the most recent show was the best hands down. His singing was so sharp and (OK, in its own way) *rich*. But the "mystic signifier" thing is true, I guess, because I think loving Dylan's singing vs. appreciating him as a songwriter or "important influence" or whatever is kind of the dividing line on really digging him or not.

I wouldn't call it that. I just think his delivery is really funny! He has a great sense of comedic timing (even when he's being serious) and almost everything he sings is pregnant with some kind of... I don't wanna say "meaning," it's more like "presence of mind." Like you know he wrote the line to be sung a certain way and the fun of getting to sing it justifies the labor of writing it.

I mean, I'd put him with Sinatra and Ella and Billie and ... not many others, maybe Elvis? Bing? Howlin' Wolf? Hank Williams? ... as great American singers of the recorded era.

But then, that's the kind of statement that makes people say he's overrated. Can't win.

And this is important because so many "clever" singer-songwriters have no idea how to emote comedically and their jokes just don't translate well to being sung.

Idiot Wind: Listening to Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan turned 60 this week, and there's been a predictable wave of tributes and analysis and retrospectives and so forth. But I couldn't help noticing that, except for some puzzled mentions, nobody really talked about one of Dylan's most important contributions to American music: his singing.

I understand why, of course. That reedy, nasal, jarring voice, part sneer and part howl, has always been the dividing line between people who "get" Dylan and people who don't, between those who will allow that "he's written some really good songs" and those who consider him one of the greatest artists of the past century. And so it often goes unexplored and unexplained, either tolerated or venerated but not much examined.

So what is it with his singing? What is he up to? What's it all about?

Well, I've been listening to him for years, and I'm still trying to get a handle on it. When I was a kid, Dylan was the one major element of my dad's record collection that I resisted. I loved the Beatles; I sang along with Simon and Garfunkel; I jumped around my bedroom to The Who; I listened with a sense of daring and danger to the Rolling Stones, who seemed steeped in dark and mysterious adult things. But Dylan? He looked weird. More to the point, he sounded weird. "He can't sing," I would say to my dad, and my dad would just say something along the lines of "You'll understand it someday."

I don't know if that's quite true; Dylan to me seems like someone you don't understand so much as live with, constantly revisiting and rediscovering. But the voice does make more sense to me now. It's the kind of voice I think Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg were looking for, a fundamentally American construction drawn from the country's deeply twined and contradictory roots.

He started out as a folk singer, more an imitator than an innovator, working squarely in white traditions drawn from European balladry and squeezed through the Appalachian hills. But once Dylan mastered that idiom—and he did master it, like no one else—he expanded it. When he went "electric," he plugged in more than his guitar. His singing opened up and got rangier and deeper, his phrasing started incorporating blues rhythms and textures. He didn't just want to be Woody Guthrie or Dock Boggs anymore; he wanted to be Howlin' Wolf, too.

I remember seeing an Esquire magazine list of the all-time greatest blues singers several years ago. Dylan was the only white singer on the list, which was exactly right. People talk about Elvis combining white singing with black music, but that's not really true. Elvis liked the feel of R&B, and he got the bump and grind, but he softened it in the process. Dylan softened nothing, not the white mountain whine or the black Delta moan. He's not comfortable to listen to, and he's not trying to be. He's the sound of cultural tectonic plates shifting and colliding, throwing up mountain ranges where they meet.

That a Jewish kid from northern Minnesota could so completely internalize the great ragged musics of the nation, and that he did it at a time when the people and places that produced them were disappearing and assimilating into the great TV monoculture, is what, as much as anything, makes Dylan a great and uniquely American artist. His voice reaches from end to end of the 20th century, echoing where we've been and calling to us from somewhere up ahead.

I saw him play at Chilhowee Park a few weeks ago. He sounded loose and confident and playful. The stage was full of great musicians. But there was no instrument anywhere to match the one Dylan has carried with him, inside his chest and throat and lungs, for 60 years.

as for his voice i'm a big fan who must attest to having trouble with his voice of late--his phrasing is still marvelous, he even does certain things better than he ever did. but there's something in the natural incapacity of his 'new' voice that i can't get past, the mountain of phlegm coughed up with each line, the range that's dwindled to a minor third or whatever...

dylan did some really interesting things with his voice 'back in the day' that don't get acknowledged; i think he really pushed the limits of his natural range for a long time (not so much with the late 60s from-the-throat stuff and the occasional falsetto but the heavy duty mid-60s singing like 'it's all over now baby blue') and that might account for his voice's character now (that and the cigarettes)

yeah, i'm not trying to convince anyone they're brilliant...

seriously though i admire you a lot, for being so goddam sensible and smart when the culture here seems to mitigate against that so often

Is he still capable of doing cool things with it? Yes. Can it be an expressive tool? Yes. Has he even invented new ways of using his voice - ie., adapting his style to what's left of it? Yes. However, the main part of my criticism is that I think he still hasn't completely adapted himself to it- i.e., sometimes it sounds like he's still trying to sing as though he has his old range, and he doesn't. I think he should probably try to use more concision and brevity - do more with less - stick to a narrower range - perhaps go more bluesy - I think the bluesy numbers on Love and Theft tended to be more successful from a vocal performance standpoint. Because those epic ballads are becoming a bit tiring to listen to, and they didn't use to be.

(xpost)

the first band I was ever in in NYC was led by Jeff Slate, the guy who wrote the WSJ piece.

I was 18, a few months into my freshman year at NYU, and me and some pals were the house band for a Late night/letterman style show held for the students living in Rubin hall on 5th ave and 10th st, hosted by this shithead fratboy who thought he was funny, and somehow they would book credible guests. Slate used to be the host of the show, had graduated, gone on to NYU law but showed up to watch the other guy do the show he started, which even then I thought was questionable. while neither a shithead nor a fratboy, he was careerist in a corny way that was evident immediately upon being introduced to him, which occurred cuz he wanted us to be his band, which he called SPQR. He booked gigs at Kenny's Castaways and the Bitter End at the top of 1990, and I wasn't so green that I didn't know that those places fucking sucked, booking only acts that would briefly divert the kind of people who hung out on bleecker st. But whatever, I was going to play my first shows in NYC.

He modeled his songs on…………Paul McCartney's Flowers in the Dirt era (at the very end of 1989, I saw the FitD tour at MSG, my only time seeing McC). And thus having such a servile-to-the-Beatles-and-adjacent-shit orientation to his songwriting and arranging, as well as being such a clean cut apple polisher …well me and my pals thought he was (and I'm really tired of this phrase, but it fits in this case) a douche bag and rolled our eyes when he also had us learn McC's own arrangements of "Don't Get around Much Anymore" and "Ain't that a Shame" and do them EXACTLY like he did, as well as do his own smarmy shit which emulated McC. I was pretty embarrassed to back him up, playing his corny shit at a corny club, but whatever, I shouldn't expect to play at Maxwells with Bullet Lavolta or Rapeman my first time playing in the NY area, should I?

We did the two shows, for me it was a perfectly appropriate rite of passage that…what, tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? of small fry rock and rollers had also done, they were fine! But while the guy was not a prick, we really didn't wanna stick with him, and later I only ever saw him walking around the NYU area and did not feel like engaging with him.

I assume he became a lawyer, and I sustained an existence as a music writer, then music writer/musician, then only musician, in NYC for 20 years after 1990, and now I don't do neither. And then he emerges, getting plum gigs like this one, talking to other great men of rock. which I'm sure is indicative of his profoundly rockist POV. I really don't have anything against the guy, but just wasn't at all impressed with him and am pretty sure he is not bringing any rigor at all to these gigs, only contributing "OMG OMG you're so great, I can't believe I'm talking to you."

^Excellent post!

I actually got Jeff Slate mixed up with Jeff Stein (the director of the Who documentary, The Kids Are Alright), knowing very little of both. It looks like he just made good connections with high profile publications that don't focus on music (Esquire for starters), and after bulking up his portfolio with those freelance articles, parlayed that into the type of liner notes David Fricke would write for reissue projects, which in term got him more opportunities because he was going to be a reliable PR guy without actually being one.

*in turn

xpost indeed great post veronica

booming post

it's a rockwrite tale as old as time!

but v well told

The icing on the cake was the part about the" hundreds of thousands" of "small fry rock and rollers." I wanted to jump up and raise my hand and be counted.

I am reluctant to be seen in any way as potentially competing with such a magisterial rendering of that ecosystem but I may have posted something about that on this other thread in my ILX infancy: I Am Never Playing Live for Somebody Else's Band Ever Again!

pretty sure he is not bringing any rigor at all to these gigs, only contributing "OMG OMG you're so great, I can't believe I'm talking to you."

https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.uP116MshE7b7H_KR3fPVlQHaFj?pid=ImgDet&rs=1

Remember when you were in the Beatles? That was cool.

Lol

I haven’t read any of Rob Sheffield’s interviews with the last two surviving Beatles, but I assume there is a little more depth there when he does it.

But maybe I am just trying to curry favor with RS if he’s reading, although based on my knowledge of his work habits, he’s not.

Elijah Wald on Facebook:

Every piece about Mack McCormick now seems to include his story about unplugging Dylan at Newport... a story that Mack told often, but cannot possibly have happened....this myth has already turned up in the NY Times and Rolling Stone, and I want to shut it down, because it's false and silly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFqG1Oy-wbs

this is a nice cover

https://st.cdjapan.co.jp/pictures/l/03/30/SICP-31623.jpg

https://www.cdjapan.co.jp/product/SICP-31623

It's not overrated!

The Philosophy of Modern Song is hot bullshit.

Compare all the things that could be said about “Blue Suede Shoes” with what Dylan has to say about it

and weep

There's a funny story about "Blue Suede Shoes" in John Fogerty's autobiography, from when they were gigging around Bay Area bars before their first Fantasy record came out. In particular at a place called the Monkey Inn in Berkeley:

There was a lot of beer drinking at the Monkey Inn. In the back of the bar there was a partial wall, and over the top of it you could see the people playing shuffleboard. And whenever we played "Blue Suede Shoes", a fight would break out. You'd see the light over the shuffleboard swinging back and forth. Then the bartender would have to run back there and get everybody calmed down. Until we played "Blue Suede Shoes" again. We did it for our own amusement.

That’s much a more interesting take on the topic than Dylan’s incoherent noodling.

one for songs that weren't a bands biggest hit, but have gone on to be their legacy song and biggest iTunes seller but what a terrible #1 Knockin' on Heaven's Door is, such a mediocre song and vocal delivery no fun at all

it's not even the best track on Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid!

wonder if it's the (even worse) Guns n' Roses cover...

Another side of Bob Dylan there.

Just came across this olde saga recently, looking for background on Robertson's guitar contributions to Blonde On Blonde, which I didn't recall at all, though they were mentioned in several obits. He's briefly noted here, though mainly Daryl Sanders talks to "all but one" of the Nashville Cats who survived those sizzlin' sessions, and everything else up to 2011: https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/looking-back-on-bob-dylans-i-blonde-on-blonde-i-the-record-that-changed-nashville/article_c17cc27e-b6e4-5794-901c-e2e7ce4c5cb9.html

Don’t know about overrated but definitely over priced.

£120! https://superdeluxeedition.com/news/bob-dylan-the-complete-budokan-1978/#comments-193466

One way to avoid becoming a footnote is to outlive your critics.

I think I'll pay nothing and not spend four agonizing hours listening to that monstrous lump of turd. I love Dylan but I fucking hate that era, which mercifully lasted only a year or two. (Not really a fan of the evangelical era that followed, but at least it's tolerable in small doses and occasionally even great.)

the 3cd bootlegs 8 used to be insanely expensive, does contain this absolute gem (which for some reason is not on the new complete TooM sessions thing?):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U0_eQqmqzY
Can't Wait (Outtake from 'Time Out Of Mind' Sessions, Version 2)

I have Fragments and double-checked - it's definitely on there.

my bad!

indeed it's track 10 on disc 5 (deluxe edition)

sublime

https://pitchfork.com/news/bob-dylan-plays-surprise-farm-aid-set-with-tom-pettys-heartbreakers-watch/ Maybe more via Rolling Stone link

Just How Far In Would You Like To Go: Another Book!

Bob Dylan : Mixing Up The Medicine is a career-spanning magnum opus that is the most comprehensive book yet published on the work of Nobel Prize-winning singersongwriter-poet and cultural icon Bob Dylan. It features over 1,100 images by 90 photographers and filmmakers, many never-before seen or published, as well as 30 original essays by leading artists and writers focusing on unseen treasures from the Bob Dylan Archive. The book’s introduction is by Sean Wilentz with an epilogue by Douglas Brinkley. Nearly all the materials found in the Bob Dylan Archive are unique, previously unavailable, or previously unknown. This book contains some of the best of the archive, with carefully curated Dylan draft lyrics, writings, drawings, photographs, and other ephemera. Bob Dylan : Mixing Up The Medicine covers Dylan’s life, from his childhood in Hibbing, Minnesota, and first recordings made in the 1950s, to his most recent albums and every important career milestone in between.

Nope

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8zu0tf8hp4

funny dylan bit here

Speaking of, JAJ got to bust out a full Dylan impression for this online promo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWEpELHZpn4

pretty good!

"The book's dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne!"

JAJ's Dylan strikes again!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHyEQkfpWW4

https://web.archive.org/web/20241209192322/https://www.vulture.com/article/snl-rejected-bob-dylan-we-are-the-world-sketch-for-cost.html

Speaking with Uproxx, he revealed yet another music idea of his that had to be cut after a table read due to being “too expensive” for the show to justify. Transport yourself back to the greatest night in pop and get a load of this:

"One of my most famous “almost on the show” pieces was Andrew Dismukes and I did Bob and Bruce Springsteen standing side by side in the choir on the chorus of “We Are the World.” And we’re chit-chatting about our sandwich orders. I’m really proud of it. It’s one of the hardest we’ve ever laughed writing something, and then it murdered at the table. Bob is like, “I got the herbed chicken breast. That sounds good, right? You ever have that herbed chicken breast?” Then Bruce is like, “I got a meatball sub. I’m still waiting on it.”"

Don’t worry, we would’ve gotten the sandwich orders of a few other soloists:

"Then he goes, “Bob, don’t look now. Looks like Cyndi Lauper just got her muffaletta.” And then it cuts to Sarah Sherman as Cyndi Lauper getting ready to munch on a muffaletta. Then we have to sing the chorus. Then Bob and Bruce notice that Hall & Oates got their sandwich. “Shit!” Then we have to sing the chorus again."

A.J. Weberman, still at it (gift link)

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/nyregion/bob-dylan-nemesis.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ok4.uikM.tOTsniKbmkHA&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Still crazy after all these years

Amazing. I bought and watched this a number of years ago:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0923602/