Not a great Dylan record, but not nearly as bad as I had been led to believe.



 

Jinnistan wrote:

I saw where one of these entertainment blogs referred to Under The Red Sky as "among Dylan favorites".  I'm calling their bluff.  Hum a few bars or admit that you're just picking random shit now.

One of the many later period Dylan's I don't know a thing about
 

crumbsroom wrote:

One of the many later period Dylan's I don't know a thing about

For good reason.  Even ardent fans consider the Knocked Out Loaded, Down in the Groove, Under The Red Sky period a particular nadir.  And even though Oh Mercy is in middle there, and it was warmly received on release, it's fallen into a fairly lukewarm status as well.  He needed a reset and he knew it, starting with Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong, spare and acoustic affairs with a dip into his folk roots, and he stopped trying to put out an album every year when he clearly lacked inspired material.

crumbsroom wrote:

New Morning and Street Legal are the two absent Dylan albums I'm mostly looking for, and they are always overpriced for being the dollar bin albums they were until a few years ago

Pretty sure my copies were cheap.  It's an interesting question....

I don't have Times They Are A-Changing on vinyl, oddly enough.  My parents had Nashville Skyline but I didn't bother to inherit it.  I did pick up Self Portrait in the dollar bin (50 cents each!).  I did hold on to my parents' Slow Train for some reason.  After that, nothing on vinyl, except the official Royal Albert Hall show (the real one) when they put it out a few years ago.  I have the old RAH (Manchester) concert which has an acoustic set from the last actual RAH set (the one where he prefaces "Johanna" with "I don't write druuug sooongs, I never have, I wouldn't know how to go about it...") and Great White Wonder (an original blank white label - maybe my most valuable vinyl) and a couple other boots.  I would like to get any of the Bootleg Series stuff on vinyl.

In fairness, I imagine Sting was frequently chased down the street by mobs of people crying out for Andy Summers.

It's a mistake anyone could make.
 

I guess I'm a sucker for argument-starters, but a real tasty one is this list from Rolling Stone, "50 Terrible Songs on Great Albums".  Well now, let's see...

Some low-hanging fruit here, like The Beatles' "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and "Run For Your Life".  Not a lot of debate there.  But it becomes clear pretty soon, with the inclusion of tracks like Pavement's "Hit The Plane Down", the Velvets' "Murder Mystery", Floyd's "Take Up Thy Stethoscope" and "Seamus" or the Police's "Mother", that this writer simply is very square and doesn't care for anything slightly strange.  Or by including Dylan's "Rainy Day Women" and the Who's "Squeeze Box", as if they have no sense of humor at all.  (And "Temporary Like Achilles" is clearly the weakest track on Blonde anyway.)  Worse is focusing on such non-songs as Simon and Garfunkel's "Voices of Old People", which is just that, a collage verite adding tot he scrapbook quality of Bookends.  It reminds me of Albert Goldman trying to make fun of Lennon's "My Mummy's Dead".

But there are other stone-cold errors here from these tin-eared bastards: the Pixies' "Silver"?  One of my favorites actually.  Dylan's "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts"?  The fuck out.  The Who's "Silas Stingy"?  When you have "Our Love Was, Is" sitting right there?  The Stooges' "We Will Fall"?  Take a piss, will ya.  The Beatles' "Bungalow Bill" and "Good Morning"?  Why are you wasting everybody's time?  Michael Jackson's "Lady in My Life"?  Like you never heard "Girl Is Mine"?  And we all know the drama behind Dylan's "Ballad in Plain D", it was petty and bitchy and cruel, but it's still a lovely, if monotonous, melody.

And it's clear that they're shooting for the icons here, but isn't it odd that there's no representation from the Rolling Stones?  Oh well.  I guess "Yesterday's Papers" gets to live another day.
 

Among the reasons why I love John Fahey's City of Refuge is that it sounds eerily similar to my bedroom demos at the time, complete with Stereolab playing in the background.  A lot of fretboard wandering.  But I'm also pretty sure that Fahey is using the same D6 tuning that was my preference at the time, completely unrelated.  For guitar nerds, this is D-A-D-F#-B-E.  I wish I could claim this record as an influence, but I wouldn't hear it until maybe about '99-'00, but it struck very close to that '96-'97 vein when it was recorded, and it gave me a sense that maybe I was on the right track after all.