Worst Dylan Songs -- sez TIME Magazine

god, I just remembered what a fucking coffin that Dylan cover album recorded by Ferry was.

I love that album! Yeah, it wasn't some profound exploration of the Dylan songbook, it was a dude running his live band through a bunch of chestnuts - irreverent but loving, I almost want to call it a sequel to Before The Flood.

alfred you were so otm in this thread and then you had to hate "sad eyed lady" ;_;

i could do without "just like a woman" which i gather is pretty challopsy

i wouldn't lose a single song on blonde on blonde.

'rainy day women' and 'leopard-skin pillbox hat' are the only ones i ever skip on that album -- i used to find them funny but boy does the joke get old when you actually have to LISTEN to them every time you put the album on.

tho i actually love most of the 'comedy' numbers on the earlier albums, like '115th dream' and the one where he doesn't want to let barry goldwater move in next door and marry his daughter.

i could do without "just like a woman" which i gather is pretty challopsy

It's a dumber song than "Sad Eyed Lady...," which is just long.

so dumb!

All the Tired Horses is one of my top 10 Dylan songs >:(

y'all just like a woman haters are nuts.

i love "leopard-skin pill-box hat". "just like a woman" is pretty bad. "ballad in plain d" is The Worst.

but i'd never get rid of it because i'd never want to live in a world without that last verse which is so spectacularly beyond parody.

I'm not that big on "Pillbox" either--because of the sound, not because it's jokey (again, love "Rainy Day Women"). Like "Just Like a Woman" a lot (it's about Edie Sedgwick, right?), although I think "She Belongs to Me" is even better.

i like that pillbox has the same doctor-steals-girlfriend plot in one verse as l. cohen's "one of us cannot be wrong". maybe this is a common trope i am unaware of?

also

YOU KNOW IT BALANCES ON YOUR HEAD JUST LIKE A
MATTRESS BALANCESONABOTTLEOFWI-UH-IIINNNEEEE

That's a good line, yes.

anyway the "comedy" early dylan songs are usually the least callow and most moving. "talkin john birch society blues" is worth a billion "masters of war"s or (worse) "with god on our side"s. as he got older he learned to be funny more often, like most people.

and "love and theft" is the funniest.

I will turn my eyes into narrow slits if I meet any so-called Dylan fan who won't accept L&T's awesomeness.

it's the easiest good album to warm up to.

special place in my heart for it too because it was the first dylan album to come out when i was an active dylan fan. i would have bought it the day it came out except as you may recall there was a distraction; i'm sure i got it that week though. cheered me right up.

I mean do I really want to listen to Froggy Went a Courtin...

― metally ill (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, 25 May 2011 17:33 (4 hours ago)

Peter Buck swears by "Froggy", sez it's scary as hell...

funny, i kinda love "Sad Eyed" because it's so interminable. like when you say a word over and over and it starts to sound funny and lose its meaning.

Narrow away. It's not that I don't "accept" Love & Theft's awesomeness--are we talking about an album here, or the theory of evolution?--it's that it doesn't appeal to me personally, for the reason I've already indicated: I simply do not like the way he sings anymore. It doesn't matter to me if the words or the jokes are great (I'm sure they are), and it doesn't matter if you can come up with a well-crafted explanation of how that voice suits that particular set of songs. If you don't like a voice, you don't like a voice. It's music. As they saying goes, he could have sung the phone book in 1965, and there's approximately a 93% chance I would have loved it.

You know we're joking, right? If you don't like it, cool. Hyperbole is what one does on a message board.

You are a vile person, however, if you admit to loving "Joey."

Oh yeah, I know. It was the "so-called" that pressed a button.

"Just Like A Woman" is an amazing song, particularly the version on Live 1966, amongst my five favorite Dylan moments: he sounds so alien, fragile, predatory, as though his cruelty is the only thing preventing him from blowing away like a piece of trash. His pronunciation of "aches" in the chorus turns that word into onomatopoeia. And there's a lovely bridge too, which I think is pretty rare for Dylan in those days?

I don't know Dylan's records post Desire much at all, but "If Dogs Run Free" is one that I will usually skip on New Morning mostly as the scat singing doesn't really fit.

yeah, dylan singing the bridge to just like a woman on live 66 is top 10 dylan moments for me. one of those things where it's hard to believe he's standing in front of several thousand people. dude is practically whispering. in a lot of ways that acoustic set is more out there and radical than anything he and the hawks did.

yeah I love the acoustic set of that show more than just about everything. The chorus too of that take on Just Like A Woman, the twists in his voice on the last line make the cuts even worse, like he's grinding in his jab.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

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

I had the lasagna.

Most poll results more or less make sense to me; this is the occasional #1 that really does mystify me.

yeah - only seven people, but it is funny. the lead track on what is generally considered the guy's masterpiece (at least a top five career record) is the worst song he's ever written?

And an actual #2 hit single from a moment in time when Dylan ruled the entire universe--I almost wish I were about five years older, so I could know what it felt like to turn on the radio in 1966 and hear "Rainy Day Women." It (and "Stuck Inside of Memphis," and even "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat," which as I said upthread I don't care for) seem so crucial to the coloration of Blonde on Blonde--if they weren't there for balance, "Visions of Johanna" and "Sad-Eyed Lady" would be diminished.

Leopard is a highlight, such a lewd performance, like the dark comic heart of the album (even Johanna's a joke but Sad Eyed isn't so I can get thinking it a bad fit, though I still love it).

i mean, i get not liking rainy day women to some extent -- it's kind of the go-to song to make fun of dylan if you hate bob dylan. and i've probably not been crazy about it at times. but actually, getting into the nashville scene at the time has made me appreciate RDW more as an example of session dudes gone haywire, sort of the ultimate after hours nashville weird scene.
& yeah, leopard skin pillbox is great, i even love dylan's mangled opening lead guitar line. version on no direction home is out of this world, too.

sit around in a room full of boring throwback twats playing "Rainy Day Women" on a loop and giggling at how hilarious they are and you soon find out why this is the worst song ever

ha, well, yeah, that sounds bad. but couldn't that be any song?

it has to be some annoying shit about "teehee he said 'stoned'" i think

Yeah, sorry, speaking as someone who discovered Classic Dylan in '93: "Stuck Inside of Mobile..." and "I Want You" were much better introductions than fucking "Rainy Day Women."

rightfully "Tight Connection..." got no votes.

gonna bet that a lot of these got no votes because barely anyone has really heard them. rainy day women on the other hand .... everyone's heard that.

it has to be some annoying shit about "teehee he said 'stoned'" i think

Yeah...I can see where that might be annoying in 2011. But I think you've got to give the song some context; a #2 pop hit in 1966 gleefully urging everyone under a certain age to go get stoned--by someone who had quite a bit to lose at that moment, but who was way beyond such mundane calculations--to me that's insurrectionary. I'd say the same thing of Jefferson Airplane extolling everyone to "feed your head" a year later. At a certain point not too far down the road, yes, such gestures became meaningless.

I'm being hypocritical, though. On the Dylan birthday thread, I was writing about how Love & Theft doesn't do a thing for me. And that has quite a context too. If you don't like something, context ain't going to save it.

bbbut it's stoned as in shirley jjjackson

"Rainy Day Women" is the worst? Are you motherfucking kidding me? Like srsly?

Also, "what a fucking coffin" comment from upthread is fucking classic.

Wow, lot of fuckings in this post. fuckingfuckingfucking

One of the greatest things about hearing "Rainy Day Women" on the radio in '66 [I would imagine, since I was a year away from being born] would've been realizing that it opens EXACTLY like "They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha Ha" and that AM radio could find airtime for both in the same summer.

And, of course, "Mouldy Old Dough"

(although that was not the same summer, of course)