Bob Dylan's least regarded albums

i still think of it as "minor dylan" tho i guess

Planet Waves is my favorite Dylan album!

As for those rankings above, they came out pretty good, I guess. "Knocked Out Loaded" has a few moments (heck, so does "Red Sky"). I think I've never actually listened to "Down in the Groove" all the way thru. (Also, "Hard Rain" is a kickass live album; seems sort of unfair to rank it alongside studio albums...)

Yes. Real Live should be on there instead of Hard Rain.

Yes. I do like the License To Kill on Real Live though.

Hard Rain is great.

My favorite version of License To Kill is Tom Petty's at the Bob tribute concert in the 90s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CEfNY02n5E

empire burlesque is good as hell

hi, Brad

"MTV Unplugged" is probably the only one I'd sit through again. The four Supper Club shows from Nov. 1993 are much better performances and will supposedly get released eventually, but I can literally see why Dylan would choose to scrap them in favor of "MTV Unplugged" - if he wanted to put out a good TV broadcast of a live performance, "MTV Unplugged" is clearly a much better TV production, with sets and lighting suitable for an ongoing high-profile TV show already in place. Also, "MTV Unplugged" does have a lot of originals that didn't get played at the Supper Club shows, the highlight being "Dignity." Not a great show, it's just an okay, middle-of-the-pack performance from this era.

I tried, numerous times, but I'm not a fan of "Self Portrait," and it's now completely useless thanks to "The Bootleg Series Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait (1969–1971)." The few tracks worth revisiting can be found on "Another Self Portrait" without their choral and orchestral overdubs, and they sound much better for it.

That's pretty much the same story with a few others. "Hard Rain" is nothing compared to either "The Bootleg Series. Vol. 5" or the Rolling Thunder box set (which was overkill but has one or two shows that would be worth owning separately). The few worthy songs on "Saved" are best heard in the live versions found on "The Bootleg Series Vol. 13: Trouble No More (1979–1981)." That's almost true with "Shot of Love," but 'Every Grain of Sand' remains definitive on the original album. ('In the Summertime' is pretty good too, but the bootlegged rough mix without the fadeout is preferable - the closing harmonica solo is beautiful.)

"Knocked Out Loaded" has 'Brownsville Girl,' but 'Danville Girl,' the bootlegged original that isn't as overproduced, is better. "Under the Red Sky" has 'Born in Time' and a good children's song in 'Handy Dandy': the former was far better when it was recorded for "Oh Mercy" (the best version's on the first disc of 'The Bootleg Series Vol. 8') and the latter was much better with Stevie Ray Vaughan playing bottleneck all over it (widely bootlegged in great sound quality). "Dylan" has 'Spanish Is the Loving Tongue' which sounds horrible there but a different and beautiful recording was used as the B-side for 'Watching the River Flow.' "Empire Burlesque" has one keeper, 'Dark Eyes.' Some argue for 'Tight Connection to My Heart,' but the original version recorded for 'Infidels' ("Someone's Got a Hold of My Heart") is much better - not the limp arrangement released on 'The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3' but the widely bootlegged version where Mick Taylor's lead guitar is all over it. Also, 'When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky' is terrible, but a radically different one was released on 'The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3': it has Steve Van Zandt and Roy Bittan so not surprisingly it sounds like a great, lost Springsteen outtake. (Dylan immediately complained that it sounded like a Springsteen rip-off, to which an engineer or producer replied "Then why did you hire the E Street Band???") "At Budokan," "Down In the Groove," and "Dylan and the Dead" are completely worthless, with the first two being utterly horrible - I would never sit through them again.

"(Dylan immediately complained that it sounded like a Springsteen rip-off, to which an engineer or producer replied "Then why did you hire the E Street Band???")"

Lol.

I didn't know Empire Burlesque was so poorly regarded!

Well, Kurt Loder gushed all over it when he wrote the original review for Rolling Stone. He's not really a good critic.

It isn't really. A few die-hards at the time. Christgau liked it, Holy Greil didn't, Rolling Stone was wishy-washy as usual. But I'm not the only person to defend it in the last 25 years.

and I've heard the alternate versions that birdistheword prefers, but I still wouldn't replace the originals.

Yeah, I was a kid when it came out, so Empire has a special association for me -- but I love the album version of "Tight Connection," and I think it's a solid LP all around.

if it helps, it wasn't included in this poll at all

but i agree, it's solid!

"Dark Eyes" and "Never Gonna Be the Same Again" are the duds.

When I saw Dylan in '05 (opener: Willie Nelson), he played "I'll Remember You."

i love "i'll remember you"

he's so good at writing that specific sort of song

"Dark Eyes" and "Never Gonna Be the Same Again" are the duds very good.

"Emotionally Yours" is blank like "To Make You Feel My Love" would be a decade later. It's as if he wrote them to prove he could write faceless ballads like the rest.

"Emotionally Yours" is such a terrible, meaningless phrase.

FWIW, here's Christgau's review. (B+'s are kind of a mixed grade coming from him.) And the Vietnam song he mentions is "Clean Cut Kid" - I'm pretty sure he's alone in his assessment on that one.

The absurd contention that by utilizing electronic horns and soul girls and big bam boom he's finally mastered pop fashion and state-of-the-craft production--I've actually heard this referred to as "Disco Dylan"--proves only that his diehard fans are even more alienated from current music than he is. At best he's achieved the professionalism he's always claimed as his goal. No longer "relevant" enough to make "statements" that mean shit to any discernible audience--vide Infidels or, on this record, "Trust Yourself" (only if you say so, Bob)--he's certainly talented enough to come up with a good bunch of songs. Hence, his best album since Blood on the Tracks. I wish that was a bigger compliment, but debunking comparisons to Street-Legal are also way off--the arrangements and especially the singing are, yes, tasteful enough to support material that puts Elton John to shame. I mean how did he get that ominous calm, that soupcon of prophecy? And how did he come up with the toughest Vietnam-vet song yet? B+

Song's tight.

Yeah I like that one. “He ate Burger Kings, he was well fed.”

that feels like a line from the new album

I've never listened to all of Empire

Tight Connection is good, production reminds me of "Walk of Life" by Dire Straits

The way he enunciates:

Never could learn to drink that blood
And call it wine,
Never could learn to hold you, love,
And call you mine.

is the essence of Dylan

Tight Connection is good, production reminds me of "Walk of Life" by Dire Straits

Ugh.

I mean you know that digital keyboard/gated snare heartland roots rock 80s vibe

As I said, ugh.

Far better song than "Walk of Life"

One would hope so!

I think "Emotionally Yours" is a good phrase, esp for him: alll the emotions babe...
On their album Emotionally Yours, O'Jays did two versions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx5L2mWFwOk&list=OLAK5uy_kLEZ4qMNT6HjZw9foHuDcalVocA6sTB94
(R&B version)

I......
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...
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like Walk of Life

xpost Weird. Oh well, it's on youtube, with the gospel version. Not as good as The Persuasions' "The Man In Me," but Persuasions' voices were younger than EY-era O'Jays', and "The Man" is a better song, of course. Not bad for a faceless ballad tho (more vigorous than "To Feel My Love," although I certainly haven't heard every cover of that).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bsx9YBV9EnM

From 1972----much later, they did a whole album of Dylan.

Their 1972 LP Street Corner Symphony (Lenny Kaye wrote a beautiful little piece somewhere about the brief-lived a capella persuasion, from late-50s to early 60s)

Bettye LaVette did "EY" on her incredible BD collection, Things Have Changed---here she is live, atypically ravaged, but driving through it, as always---"It's like...my whole life never happened...shake me, hold me..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJujOOFQV-c

Not so faceless there!

Wild to realize I’m the same age as Empire-era Dylan... I should get a suit like his.

Tight Connection has the tightest seven-inch art
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/19/Bob_Dylan_Tight_Connection_to_My_Heart_Single.jpg

think i prefer the infidels version though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbhoo_gGkK8

Lou Reed gushed about Empire B in an interview

Wasn't it Down in the Groove? He liked "Rank Strangers to Me."

XP!...and Down In The Groove when talked to Rolling Stone in '89.

He oddly singled out two covers for praise, as if he thought Dylan wrote them.

It's the RS interview promoting New York, collected in a late nineties book of Reed interviews and essays.