Jinnistan wrote:

I don't know if you've given the recent Bootleg Series set, Through the Open Window, a chance.  It's got some good stuff, and remarkably some early stuff which has never actually been bootlegged, but there's some other things that irk me greatly, mostly about what is and isn't included.  For example, this has a selection of the so-called "Minnesota Hotel" tape (actually recorded at one of his ex-girlfriends apartment) which has been known since the very first rock bootleg, The Great White Wonder.  I have to assume that whoever curated this set already assumes that everyone has that, because two of the best performances there, "Baby Please Don't Go" and "Black Cross", are not included, even though, like, come the fuck on.  I was thinking that maybe "Baby Please Don't Go" showed up elsewhere, as maybe a free download for No Direction Home, but turns out that was a studio take.  Not nearly as gnarly and raw as this version.  And then they stuck that version on here instead!

You know what.  Fuck it.  Ima prove it.



 

The price of the boxsets can't help but keep me at bay, but they are always at the back of my mind. The one I want in particular though would be the basement tapes one. But, honestly, all of them would look pretty good on my shelf.

People who call Dylan's self titled 1973 album terrible are crazy. Lightweight? Sure. But not terrible. I kind of love its polished insignificance. It's carefree and light in a way I've never heard Dylan, and I dig it a lot. Yes, even his version of Big Yellow Taxi, which turns Mitchell's all too earnest plea to protect the environment, into what ends up  sounding nearly goofy enough to be a novelty song, an alteration that it turns out I appreciate.

So nothing is threatening Down in the Groove for its title of being the absolute worst quite yet. I was sure this one would do it, considering its wretched reputation.

Jinnistan wrote:

Well, I still think that Dylan is terrible

Crazy!

mostly because of the cynicism around its release, being basically a cockblocker for Dylan's first LP for rival Arista at the time during his short sorjoun away from Colombia. 

I get the problem with this. I also get not including it as canon. Not to mention that I'm sure every decision the studio made on the production of this album were bad, if not deliberately so. Which is why I just avoided it the million times I saw it for sale. But for whatever reason I grabbed it out of a 'dollar' bin yesterday and put it on this morning while I made coffee and it was a wonderful little noise off in the background as I stared out my window and thought of many other things.

For me there is music that needs to be listened to with some level of intensity, where it is the only thing alive in that moment. And then there is music that functions as something pleasant that is just there in the house with you. Clearly, Dylan isn't a headphones album. Or an album to stake your life on. But I had a decent appreciation of a Dylan that was just there, not demanding too much attention to itself. Which a lot of his lesser albums also seem to demand, and fail because of it, because they can't live up to any kind of critical scrutiny.

And so the idea of a not great Dylan album that doesn't have to be closely tended to is a nice thing, sometimes. I was still getting his weird voice (which I always like, and his occassionally weird arrangements (which I usually like), and then also the added plus of a bunch of clean and inoffensive female singers (overdubbed to one decibel shy of distraction), I ended making a half decent pot of coffee (for once). 

There's a laziness to the whole affair

Unquestionably. I think I read somewhere that these were most just songs they used to warm up to when in the studio, so very little thought is really being put into them as anything that would have posterity. It's just Dylan, not necessarily being as great as they expected him to be, not necessarily putting his guts into the performances, but playing around. Not taking these songs very seriously. And, to me, that is the appeal of it. 

And the best stuff is in better versions on the Another Self Portrait: Bootleg Series #10, most especially the far superior "Spanish is the Loving Tongue". 

Spanish is probably my favorite song on the album, and the song I was listening to when I wrote my first comment. I am also legitimately fond of the first track and one or two others in the middle. And as for the rest, even the probably terrible rendition of "I Can't Help Falling In Love With You", and the completely weird "Big Yellow Taxi", I still found charming. 

But if your point is that this is ultimately a better LP than the worst of his '80s output?  OK, sure.  I don't feel the need to have either of them in my collection.

It's mostly my point. I also think I also prefer it to some of his 70's albums like Saved (pretty bad), Self Portrait (which I think is just too much of a mess) and possibly Planet Waves (even though this one has a couple of tracks I really love, and I know is probably a technically better record). But, yes, probably better than pretty much all of his 80's albums for me, with the exception of Oh Mercy (but not by much, I'm pretty medium on Oh Mercy).

But that said, with the exception of Down in the Groove and Empire Burlesque, I don't think any of his albums are terrible. Sometimes lackluster, due to what we know he can produce when he's on fire, but never terrible. I even like his Christmas album. So to me even middle of the pack records by Dylan, or even lower third records, are never close to terrible. 

And I was expecting this one to be terrible. Like all the worst stuff from Self Portrait, and only the worst stuff, kinda terrible.

........

But speaking of skippable Bob, you may have heard about some renewed interest of late into the notorious bootlegger Mike "the Mic" Mallard, a guy who somewhat questionably would pose as handicapped during these mid-'70s concerts around the L.A. area so 1) he could secure good central seats to the stage, and 2) have an excuse to smuggle in his high-end Japanese tape deck secured under the wheelchair's seat, and 3) have a handy blanket over his legs which helpfully hid his high-powered stereo microphone placed between his legs.  Now we could all quibble over the ethics of all of this, but the fact remains that Mike the Mic happened to record some of the most impressive external microphone concert recordings of his time.  And he largely did this with zero commercial interest - I believe only a couple of his recordings leaked out onto commercial bootlegs, usually the result of his having shared the recordings with less scrupulous friends - and with a focus on sound quality which was not particularly usual for that particular time period.  In addition to Mike Mallard finally receiving more popular recognition recently, the apex of which has been for Pink Floyd to select his personal recording of their April 26th 1975 concert at the LA Sports Arena as an official bonus live disc of their latest Wish You Were Here box set, there has also been a flood of less official "Lost Mike Mallard Tapes", several dozen in fact running from the early '70s through to the early '80s, which have begun to proliferate on archival trading sites.  (Mallard passed away in 1994, and, due to his wishes, these recordings from his private tape collection have largely been made exclusively for 'free trade'.)

I've picked up several of these recordings recently, or at least those which I did not previously have.  I focused on the main stuff first - The Who, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Paul McCartney & Wings, Black Sabbath - as well as a sampling of artists I enjoy but haven't prioritized in collecting - Queen, Elton John, Fleetwood Mac's Tusk tour, etc.  And some tapes sound better than others - the Stones shows have inextricable assholes way too loud for even a seasoned microphone master to excise. 

But one artist I have (so far!) avoided has been Dylan, because most of the shows available are from his 1979-1981 super-Christian era.  Now, I'm familiar with a whole lot of people who stand tall on defending this era, not just for the dogma but because of what they find as Dylan's renewed energy from his faith and particularly from the black gospel traditon from which he is drawing his musical inspiration.  They say that the Budokon live set (surely one of the most ridiculed disasters from all of Dylan's output) was a one-off anomaly, and that the band got better as they got around to the other side of the world.  There has been another Bootleg Series set dedicated to capturing some of these later live performances which I haven't listened to.  I'm scared, people, not for my soul but for my faith in Dylan himself.  I've definitely heard the albums from this "faith" period, so I already know how lame the music is.  Could his live shows really be that much better?  Hey, let me know if you know different.  This is a bridge I have not yet dared to cross. 

I don't mind Slow Train Coming. I can't remember much about Shot of Love, but I definitely find it pretty listening. Saved though I remember being pretty lousy.....so I'm not nearly as adverse to this phase of Dylan as you are, so would probably be happy with the boolegs. I like that he has these detours in his career, that while not always panning out musically, at least paint a larger portrait of the artist, and when I really like an artist, I also sort of like their failures and near misses. I kind of want them. 
 

crumbsroom wrote:

I don't mind Slow Train Coming. I can't remember much about Shot of Love, but I definitely find it pretty listening. Saved though I remember being pretty lousy.....so I'm not nearly as adverse to this phase of Dylan as you are, so would probably be happy with the boolegs. I like that he has these detours in his career, that while not always panning out musically, at least paint a larger portrait of the artist, and when I really like an artist, I also sort of like their failures and near misses. I kind of want them.

Dylan has an awful lot of stuff.  Some people could end up monopolizing all of their listening time to him.  For me, I'm pretty much a completist through to Nashville Skyline (which I don't really care for), and I do try to pick up the live stuff from the '74 tour with the Band and the '75-'76 Rolling Thunder shows but I can't say I have them all.  A couple of years back, they put out a big box set of all of the '74 shows (something like 20-30 discs) and I can't say that I could either afford it or take the time to sit through them all.

When it comes to his Christian period, the real harbinger wasn't the studio LPs but the live set Live at Budokan which as I mentioned is one of the more reviled releases in his catalog.  He had arranged the set list like a Vegas revue, with rather glib medleys of his hits.  This marked the beginning of the tour which would run throughout the '79-'80 period.  Defenders (who do not defend Budokan) will say that this show was early and under-rehearsed during this run, and that by the time the tour had made its way back to the West the band was tighter, the set list was reworked and there are those who swear by some of these shows as among his best.  And there was a Bootleg Series release, #13: Trouble No More, which focuses on live performances from this era (I have a copy and have yet to listen to it).  

I certainly believe that Dylan's spiritual crisis at this time was sincere, following his failed marriage and deeply needing some inspirational shift.  Slow Train isn't bad, probably because it was better produced than many of his later LPs.  Infidels is really the only LP of the '80s that I can say is any good.  And he had a bad habit of leaving his best songs ("Blind Willie McTell") off of his albums, or, at best, burying his best songs ("Brownsville Girl") on some of his worst.  My problem with Oh Mercy is the production by Daniel Lanois who gives it a digital sheen which has dated it badly.

And then you have the so-called "Never Ending Tour", which ran from 1988 through every year right up to the pandemic.  Needless to say, most, if not all, of these shows have at least audience recordings, and, again, you have certain Dylan fans who insist on collecting and focusing on all of these performances as part of his modern renaissance.  Dylan is always fascinating of course, but I've only ever bothered with a handful of these modern concerts (and they're alright).  I don't think that there is a single classic rocker - either McCartney, the Stones, the Who or Dylan himself - who I find the need to so diligently collect their somewhat redundant live concerts into the 21st century.

Jinnistan wrote:

Reggae classic

Probably my favorite of the lot.

It's just so good.

The road that leads from Dylan (the album) apparently heads straight to spending 40 dollars on the greatest hits of perennial, middle of the road, country/rock/pop band Blue Rodeo, because you realized you loved them all along.