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.

just read that Penman piece and it really is fantastic

one thing that hit reading penman, that's interesting about dylan, maybe the biggest tribute to him, is that we still EXPECT something from him. like when he puts out an album people will talk about it and debate it and analyze it and call it out as genius or total bullshit (or this book, too) but pretty much every other star of his vintage people just seem happy they are still around.

even someone as legendary as paul mccartney, no matter what he releases there seems to be a general sense of "hey good for him, glad he's still kicking"

neil was maybe like that for a while but i don't get the sense (even I, an obsessive fan) is really expecting much at this point, hopefully some good chord changes from crazy horse for him to solo over.

pinefox in at the wire for post of 2022

Yeah, but I don't think even he (one 60s heavy whose new work people still get het up about, as upper mississippi says) really gets a pass, or meant to, altogether: he must know his beloved interweb don't work like that. Stirring the shit and the flames mean he really DOES still matter, beyond the Nobel Prize/gold star for Grandpa's glorious youth,collectible editions etc., or other new work that's considering good but mostly evidence that he's still breathing, as upper also says.

The "Witchy Woman" spree is by far the most offensive(and only unforgivable) thing in there---and---in part because it's the longest, biggest piece of shit. Otherwise, we get some crusty little speed bumps, like the one earning pinefox's first citation:

in a statement about the mistreatment of Native Americans with which I strongly agree, he manages to swipe at other campaigns for civil rights.

he makes an obvious point about the first Bush War (to use Merle Haggard's term) being (to use my term) less bad than the second, because there was so much less of it. (I'm not surprised that he got there from "Masters of War," which is not that far from the Fugs' "Kill For Peace.")

And yes, some of it is incoherent, or hits a wall, runs out of steam and keeps rolling downhill---but so far I think about 70% of the text is worth re-reading and choice x placement of pix is alllll good for all time.

consider[ed] good but mostly evidence that he's still breathing, as upper also says.

pinefox in at the wire for post of 2022

So this is still ILM, not ILB, but here's one last example (following the condensed past of "On The Street Where You Live," upthread) of why the book is worth reading, and I hope some of the following makes it to into a song (along with several other of his excursions):

This comes from listening to Mose Allison's "Everybody Cryin' Mercy":

...You're high-principled, chivalrous...but you don't have to pretend with me. You're the spoofer, the playactor, the two-faced fraud---the stool pigeon, the scandalmonger---the prowler and the rat---the human trafficker and car jacker. Take your pick and be selective and be honest about it. You're the hardliner for fair play and a square deal, just as long as you've got your irons in the fire and enough on your plate. Muckraking, chaos and bedlam, you're a party to it all.
At the same time, you find the lack of justice intolerable and the lack of mercy even more so. It sets you off, and you wonder if it's even possible in this world...You like to praise it and put it on a pedestal, but it has no place in your life as long as you're employed. Whatever your racket, your shit job, whatever your routine task is, you never had it so good, so let's leave justice and mercy to the gods of heaven. Better to go to the local movie theater, be a movie goer, sit in the opera---some wacky farce, some silly bull-crap stage show, or better yet stare at a crack moving down the wall. Think about kindness and benevolence, giving people a second chance.

This song says let's be just and honorable to the point of our natural ability.

Let's not make empty gestures, or expect people to let up on us, let up on us, let's not expect to be pardoned or forgiven. Mercy may be a trap for fools.

I've never heard all that in the song, but I guess I can see how Dylan, listening who knows how many times, in his head, at least, to this cool, cutting, somewhat Didionesque forerunner of his own occasional approach and more consistently that of early, prime Randy Newman, might come to this characterization (more than I've gotten from many whole novels) and possible insight: are there such people!? That would explain a few things, in part.

Re: the song as song, record as record--he often steps back toward the blackboard toward the end of each entry:

The word mercy comes from the same Latin root that the word mercantile or merchant comes from...This song could easily be the skeleton of the monster that is "Ball of Confusion."...But where the Temps sang a frenzied jumble of words exploding from the center of the frey, Mose is the detached observer of a few extremely carefully chosen words, resigned to our foolish foibles but unwilling to let them pass without comment.

at this point I want to say, "Yeah, fuck, Bob Dylan's overrated."

BBC radio 6music just broadcast a 3-hour special on this book and the songs it mentions. I listened to the last 2 hours with the book, flicking around it and reading while hearing. I realised that sometimes the descriptions just follow along the song lyrics, as on Theme Time; rather as if Dylan put the record on and started typing.

The rereading process somewhat reminded me that I enjoyed the earlier entries more than the later.

I also realised that I'd been quite wrong upthread to say that the latest track cited was 1979. Dylan writes about a Warren Zevon record from 2003 - which did actually sound quite good on radio.

...You're high-principled, chivalrous...but you don't have to pretend with me. You're the spoofer, the playactor, the two-faced fraud---the stool pigeon, the scandalmonger---the prowler and the rat---the human trafficker and car jacker. Take your pick and be selective and be honest about it. You're the hardliner for fair play and a square deal, just as long as you've got your irons in the fire and enough on your plate. Muckraking, chaos and bedlam, you're a party to it all.
At the same time, you find the lack of justice intolerable and the lack of mercy even more so. It sets you off, and you wonder if it's even possible in this world...You like to praise it and put it on a pedestal, but it has no place in your life as long as you're employed. Whatever your racket, your shit job, whatever your routine task is, you never had it so good, so let's leave justice and mercy to the gods of heaven. Better to go to the local movie theater, be a movie goer, sit in the opera---some wacky farce, some silly bull-crap stage show, or better yet stare at a crack moving down the wall. Think about kindness and benevolence, giving people a second chance.

This reads to me like someone's fumbling notes toward the first of many drafts of a piece about Tom Waits. And it tells me that I will never, ever read this book.

Is that from the book itself or part of a pinefox pastiche?

Seems to be from the book itself.

man I am really not trying to hear Bob fucking Dylan, who 100% doesn't know shit about Latin, opine about word origins

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhTCa16Bsno

I mean ... this is the same guy who wrote Tarantula. It's not like bullshit prosody is a new thing for him. It's more surprising that Chronicles is as good as it is.

lol I copied this bit of Tarantula from Genius and got the popup box saying "Sign up to start annotating!" Uh, no.

arethacrystal jukebox queen of hymn & him diffused in drunk transfusion wound would heed sweet soundwave crippled & cry salute to oh great particular el dorado reel & ye battered personal god but she cannot she the leader of whom when ye follow, she cannot she has no back she cannot . . . beneath black flowery railroad fans & fig leaf shades & dogs of all nite joes, grow like arches & cures the harmonica battalions of bitter cowards, bones & bygones while what steadier louder the moans & arms of funeral landlord with one passionate kiss rehearse from dusk & climbing into the bushes with some favorite enemy ripping the postage stamps & crazy mailmen & waving all rank & familiar ambition than that itself, is needed to know that mother is not a lady . . . aretha with no goals, eternally single & one step soft of heaven/ let it be understood that she owns this melody along with her emotional diplomats & her earth & her musical secrets

Chronicles aside, this is my favorite bit of Dylan’s writing.

I like the postcard dispatches interspersed with the other stuff in Tarantula, which I don't remember as well. He delayed publication of the book after the motorcycle accident, sent word that he didn't relate to it so much anymore: different drugs, maybe. But the postcards are funny, would have been good for the backs of album covers, like the story on JHW They'd go well with The Basement Tapes.

His take on Vic Damone's version of "On The Street Where You Live," posted upthread, is more appealing to some readers than the one on "Everybody Crying Mercy," so I'm told. It's different.

That's all.

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