Bob Dylan

• Self-Portrait [Columbia, 1970] C+
• New Morning [Columbia, 1970] A-
• Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Volume II [Columbia, 1972] A
• Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid [Columbia, 1973] C+
• Dylan [Columbia, 1973] E
• Planet Waves [Asylum, 1974] A-
• Blood on the Tracks [Columbia, 1975] A
• Desire [Columbia, 1975] B-
• Hard Rain [Columbia, 1976] B-
• Street-Legal [Columbia, 1978] C+
• Bob Dylan at Budokan [Columbia, 1979] C+
• Slow Train Coming [Columbia, 1979] B+
• Saved [Columbia, 1980] C+
• Shot of Love [Columbia, 1981] B-
• Infidels [Columbia, 1983] B-
• Real Live [Columbia, 1984] B
• Empire Burlesque [Columbia, 1985] B+
• Knocked Out Loaded [Columbia, 1986] B
• Down in the Groove [Columbia, 1988] C+
• Oh Mercy [Columbia, 1989] B
• Under the Red Sky [Columbia, 1990] A-
• The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare and Unreleased) [Columbia, 1991] **
• Good As I Been to You [Columbia, 1992] B+
• World Gone Wrong [Columbia, 1993] A-
• Greatest Hits, Vol. 3 [Columbia, 1994] B+
• Unplugged [Columbia, 1995] *
• Time Out of Mind [Columbia, 1997] A-
• Live 1966 [Columbia/Legacy, 1998] B+
• Love and Theft [Columbia, 2001] A+
• Modern Times [Columbia, 2006] A+
• Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006 [Columbia/Legacy, 2008] ***
• Together Through Life [Columbia, 2009] B+
• Christmas in the Heart [Columbia, 2009] *

See Also:

• Bob Dylan/The Band
• Dylan & the Dead
• merge all

Consumer Guide Reviews:

New Morning [Columbia, 1970]
In case you were wondering how definitive that self-portrait was, here comes its mirror image four months later. Call it love on the rebound. This time he's writing the pop (and folk) genre experiments himself, and thus saying more about true romance than is the pop (or folk) norm. Two side-closing throw-ins--a sillyditty about a gal named "Winterlude" and the scatting beatnik send-up "If Dogs Run Free"--almost steal the show. And the two other side-closers, which make religion seem dumber than it already is, damn near give it back. A-

Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Volume II [Columbia, 1972]
Yet another self-portrait. With all of Dylan's overexposed stuff relegated to Volume I, it unlooses one indubitable classic after another, and because it spans a decade without pretending to (or bothering with) thematic/stylistic coherence, the only overall impression it creates is a staggering, unpredictable virtuosity. Mixed into the star persona are protest ("Hard Rain") and antiprotest ("My Back Pages"), callow ass man ("All I Really Want to Do") and manly ass man ("Lay Lady Lay"). And just in case you think you already own it all, five of the twenty-two cuts are previously uncollected or unreleased. Three of them have been established as indubitable classics by other artists, and the other two begin and end the album. From "Watching the River Flow" to "Down in the Flood"--now what can that mean? A

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid [Columbia, 1973]
At least the strings on this soundtrack are mostly plucked and strummed, rather than bowed en masse, but it's still a soundtrack: two middling-to-excellent new Dylan songs, four good original Bobby voices, and a lot of Schmylan music. C+

Dylan [Columbia, 1973]
Listening to this set of rejects from what used to be Dylan's worst album does have its morbid fascination--if you'll forgive the esoteric reference, it's like watching Ryne Duren pitch without glasses. Not only are the timbre and melody off--he was always wild--but he also doesn't phrase cogently, and the songs just hit the dirt. All of which is CBS's punishment after Bobby had the bad manners to sign with another label. I wonder how he could imagine that Columbia is less than benevolent. E

Planet Waves [Asylum, 1974]
In a time when all the most prestigious music, even what passes for funk, is coated with silicone grease, Dylan is telling us to take that grease and jam it. Sure he's domestic, but his version of conjugal love is anything but smug, and this comes through in both the lyrics and the sound of the record itself. Blissful, sometimes, but sometimes it sounds like stray cat music--scrawny, cocky, and yowling up the stairs. A-

Blood on the Tracks [Columbia, 1975]
The first version of this album struck me as a sellout to the memory of Dylan's pre-electric period; this remix, utilizing unknown Minneapolis studio musicians who impose nothing beyond a certain anonymous brightness on the proceedings, recapitulates the strengths of that period. Dylan's new stance is as disconcerting as all the previous ones, but the quickest and deepest surprise is in the music itself. By second hearing its loveliness is almost literally haunting, an aural déjà vu. There are moments of anger that seem callow, and the prevailing theme of interrupted love recalls adolescent woes, but on the whole this is the man's most mature and assured record. A

Desire [Columbia, 1975]
In the great tradition of Grand Funk Railroad, Dylan has made an album beloved by tour devotees--including those who were shut out of Rolling Thunder's pseudocommunitarian grooviness except via the press. It is not beloved by me. Although the candid propaganda and wily musicality of "Hurricane" delighted me for a long time, the deceitful bathos of its companion piece, "Joey," tempts me to question the unsullied innocence of Rubin Carter himself. These are not protest songs, folks, not in the little-people tradition of "Hattie Carroll"; their beneficiaries are (theoretically) wronged heroes, oppressed overdogs not unlike our beleaguered superstar himself. And despite his show of openness, our superstar may be feeling oppressed. His voice sounds viscous and so do his rhymes, while sisters Ronee and Emmylou sound distinctly kid, following the leader as if they're holding onto his index finger. More genuinely fraternal (and redeeming) are the pained, passionate marital tributes, "Sara" and "Isis." B-

Hard Rain [Columbia, 1976]
The only reason people are disgusted with this record is that they're sick of Dylan--which is understandable, but unfair to the record. The palookas who backed him on this tour sure ain't the Band, and the music and arrangements suffer accordingly--these guys are folkies whose idea of rock and roll is rock and roll clichés. But the material is excellent, and on a few occasions--I gravitate to "Oh Sister" and "Shelter From the Storm"--Dylan sings very well indeed. B-

Street-Legal [Columbia, 1978]
Inveterate rock and rollers learn to find charm in boastful, secretly girl-shy adolescents, but boozy-voiced misogynists in their late thirties are a straight drag. This divorcé sounds overripe, too in love with his own self-generated misery to break through the leaden tempos that oppress his melodies, devoid not just of humor but of lightness--unless, that is, he intends his Neil Diamond masquerade as a joke. Because he's too shrewd to put his heart into genuine corn, and because his idea of a tricky arrangement is to add horns or chicks to simplistic verse-and-chorus abcb structures, a joke is what it is. But since he still commands remnants of authority, the joke is sour indeed. C+

Bob Dylan at Budokan [Columbia, 1979]
I believe this double LP was made available so our hero could boast of being outclassed by Cheap Trick, who had the self-control to release but a single disc from this location. Although it's amazing how many of the twenty-two songs--twelve also available on one of the other two live albums Dylan has released since 1974--hold up under slipshod treatment. And not only that, lyrics and poster are included. C+

Slow Train Coming [Columbia, 1979]
The lyrics are indifferently crafted, and while their one-dimensionality is winningly perverse at a time when his old fans will take any ambiguity they can get, it does serve to flaunt their theological wrongheadedness and occasional jingoism. Nevertheless, this is his best album since Blood on the Tracks. The singing is passionate and detailed, and the pros behind him--especially Mark Knopfler, who has a studio career in store--play so sharply that his anger gathers general relevance at its most vindictive. And so what if he's taken up with the God of Wrath? Since when have you been so crazy about the God of Love? Or any other species of hippie bullshit? B+

Saved [Columbia, 1980]
In case you were wondering, Slow Train Coming wasn't Jerry Wexler's album, or the former R. Zimmerman's, or Jesus Christ's. It was Mark Knopfler's. Anyway, the first flash of faith is the deepest. May Bobby never indenture soul sisters again. C+

Shot of Love [Columbia, 1981]
Dylan's abandonment of Muscle Shoals for the fleshpots of El Lay--Benmont Tench! Ron Wood! Ringo Starr on tom tom!--has a reassuring aura of apostasy, which may be why I think this year's born-again boilerplate "sounds better" than last year's. But two songs that belong in the lower reaches of his canon don't hurt. "Property of Jesus," about how bad it is to mock born-againers, has Staple Singers written all over it. "Lenny Bruce" is apostasy down to its reverent setting. B-

Infidels [Columbia, 1983]
All the wonted care Dylan has put into this album shows--musically, "License to Kill" is the only dud. His distaste for the daughters of Satan has gained complexity of tone--neither dismissive nor vituperative, he addresses women with a solicitousness that's strangely chilling, as if he knows what a self-serving hypocrite he's being, but only subliminally. At times I even feel sorry for him, just as he intends. Nevertheless, this man has turned into a hateful crackpot. Worse than his equation of Jews with Zionists with the Likud or his utterly muddled disquisition on international labor is the ital Hasidism that inspires no less than three superstitious attacks on space travel. God knows (and I use that phrase advisedly) how far off the deep end he'll go if John Glenn becomes president. B-

Real Live [Columbia, 1984]
Hitch Mick Taylor to a locomotive, make sure the songs are twenty years old, and you could get shit. But you could also get a decent live album if the auteur happened to be interested that night. "Maggie's Farm" and "Tombstone Blues" are the keepers, "License to Kill" and the ludicrous white reggae "I and I" are the ringers, and "Tangled Up in Blue" gets some new lyrics--or maybe they're really old ones. B

Empire Burlesque [Columbia, 1985]
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+

Knocked Out Loaded [Columbia, 1986]
Automatic horns and Dylanettes echoing every chorus, covers and collaborations--sounds like something he threw together in a week and away forever. But throwing it away is how he gets that off-the-cuff feel, and side two is great fun. Tough rocker with Tom Petty, lissome popper with Carole Bayer Sager, and with Sam Shepard one of the greatest and most ridiculous of his great ridiculous epics. Doesn't matter who came up with such lines as "She said even the swap meets around here are getting corrupt" and "I didn't know whether to duck or run, so I ran"--they're classic Dylan. And on side one we have automatic horns and Dylanettes echoing every chorus, covers and songs he wrote all by himself. B

Down in the Groove [Columbia, 1988]
Where Self-Portrait was at least weird, splitting the difference between horrible and hilarious, now he's forever professional--not a single remake honors or desecrates the original. All he can do to a song is Dylanize it, and thus his Danny Kortchmar band and his Steve Jones-Paul Simonon band are indistinguishable, immersed in that patented and by now meaningless one-take sound. And yet, and yet, there's a glimmer--the Dylan-Hunter throwaway "Ugliest Girl in the World," guaranteed to remind the faithful how much fun the one-take ethos used to be. C+

Oh Mercy [Columbia, 1989]
His seventh studio job of the decade is the third he didn't just churn out and thus the third to get hyped as a turnaround, but really, there is a difference. Daniel Lanois's understated care and easy beat suit his casual ways, and three or four songs might sound like something late at night on the radio, or after the great flood. All are modest and tuneful enough to make you forgive "Disease of Conceit," which is neither. So I forgive him. B

Under the Red Sky [Columbia, 1990]
This Was Bros. pseudothrowaway improves on the hushed emotion, weary wisdom, and new-age "maturity" of the Daniel Lanois-produced Oh Mercy even if the lyrics are sloppier--the anomaly is what Lanois calls Oh Mercy's "focused" writing. Aiming frankly for the evocative, the fabulistic, the biblical, Dylan exploits narrative metaphor as an adaptive mechanism that allows him to inhabit a "mature" pessimism he knows isn't the meaning of life. Where his seminal folk-rock records were cut with Nashville cats on drums--Kenny Buttrey when he was lucky, nonentities when he wasn't--here Kenny Aronoff's tempos are postpunk like it oughta be, springs and shuffles grooving ever forward. The fables are strengthened by the workout, and as a realist I also treasure their literal moments. I credit his outrage without forgetting his royalty statements. I believe he's gritted his teeth through the bad patches of a long-term sexual relationship even if he still measures the long term in months. And when he thanks his honey for that cup of tea, I melt. A-

The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare and Unreleased) [Columbia, 1991]
Dylanology--the thinking man's philately ("Catfish," "It Takes a Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train To Cry," "Blind Willie McTell," "Quit Your Low Down Ways," "Call Letter Blues," "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie") **

Good As I Been to You [Columbia, 1992]
Dylan's last cover album confused his followers mightily, not least because he called it Self-Portrait. And maybe he tossed this one off as per contract too--his boyish tenor and nimble acoustic guitar don't rescue "Frankie and Albert" or "Sittin' on Top of the World" from the taxidermist, and though "Tomorrow Night" could be a mean parody of Lonnie Johnson's sour-voiced original, it probably just sucks. But most of these old tunes he gooses or caresses to some kind of arousal--he clearly knows the sensitive spots of Stephen Foster's "Hard Times" and the antiredcoat jig "Arthur McBride." Not that he thinks such intimacy yields a self-portrait. Older than that now, he merely explores a world of song whose commonness and strangeness he knows he'll never comprehend. B+

World Gone Wrong [Columbia, 1993]
Dylan's second attempt to revive the folk music revival while laying down a new record without writing any new songs is eerie and enticing. He cherishes the non sequiturs, sudden changes of heart, and received or obscure blank spots in these buried songs--all usages he's long since absorbed into his own writing because he believes they evoke a world that defies rationalization. Me, I'm not so sure it doesn't just seem that way because there's no way we can be intimate with their worlds anymore. And while only a crank could resist his liner notes, that doesn't mean it isn't cranky in the extreme to hold, for instance, that the two-timing aristo who gets his in "Love Henry" is "modern corporate man off some foreign boat, unable to handle his `psychosis' responsible for organizing the Intelligentsia," und so weiter. We do not live in "the New Dark Ages." And if we did, Dylan would call out for rationalization right quick. A-

Greatest Hits, Vol. 3 [Columbia, 1994]
He can climax with "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" if he wants--Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is a piece of crap, the song a work of genius, which is the basic idea on this living testament to random forethought. But shaggy dog story or no shaggy dog story, "Tangled Up in Blue" doesn't belong, and neither does that supernal piece of crap "Forever Young," because both are classic tracks from albums that precede Rolling Thunder and Desire, events that marked his epochal commitment to hackdom even if no one dreamed it at the time. On 14 cuts employing 57 session musicians, four of whom appear twice and none thrice, this collection celebrates that commitment. Its sonic trademark is the soulettes who back "Changing of the Guards" (Street Legal, 1978), "The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar" (Shot of Love, 1981), "Silvio" (Down in the Groove, 1988), and the magnificent 11-minute Sam Shepard collaboration "Brownsville Girl" (Knocked Out Loaded, 1986)--all obscure, all compelling, all cockeyed flights of prophecy or mythic narrative, and all featuring the backup pipes of Carol (sometimes Carolyn) Dennis, who I bet has been feeding him lines for two lost decades. B+

Unplugged [Columbia, 1995]
excellent songs pronounced with gratifying clarity ("Knockin' on Heaven's Door," "Dignity") *

Time Out of Mind [Columbia, 1997]
A soundscape as surely as Maxinquaye or The Ballad of Tom Joad, only more tuneful and less depressive--that is, merely bereft, rather than devoid of will or affect. Lyrically, it splits the difference between generalized El Lay schlock and minor Child ballad; a typical couplet goes, "You left me standing in the doorway crying/In the dark land of the sun." So the words are good enough except on the Billy Joel-covered "Make You Feel My Love," yet rarely what you come back for. The hooks are Dylan's spectral vocals--just his latest ventriloquist's trick, a new take on ancient, yet so real, so ordained--and a band whose quietude evokes the sleepy postjunk funk of Clapton's 461 Ocean Boulevard without the nearness of sex. Special kudos to Augie Meyers, the Al Kooper we've been waiting for. A-

Live 1966 [Columbia/Legacy, 1998]
What no one ever mentions about this legendary Manchester concert is that the folk set stinks. It's arty, mannered, nervous, as if Dylan is sick of these songs, although three of the seven haven't even been released yet. And when they are, on Blonde on Blonde, they'll be band- if not Band-backed like all the others except "Mr. Tambourine Man," and as such relaxed, confident, committed, meaningful. Appallingly ideological though it is that anyone could have preferred this static display to what followed, the rock set is warmly received. This is not to say, however, that it lives up to its myth. You'll hear some of the most freewheeling, locked-in live music of the '60s--far more detailed and responsive than comparable Stones and Who, with Robbie Robertson so cockeyed funky he almost careens off the stage. You'll also hear some folkie fool shouting "Judas" and Dylan calling him a liar and, if you strain, somebody muttering "play fucking loud." But you will not hear the times a-changin' or Robert Zimmerman jousting with destiny. That stuff's for historians. And if we owe the historians for the terrific electric disc, they owe us for the awful acoustic one. B+

Love and Theft [Columbia, 2001]
Before minstrelsy scholar Eric Lott gets too excited about having his title stolen--"He loves me! Honey, Bob Dylan loves me!"--he should recall that Dylan called his first cover album Self-Portrait. Dylan meant that title, of course, and he means this one too, which doesn't make "Love and Theft" his minstrelsy album any more than Self-Portrait's dire "Minstrel Boy" was his minstrelsy song. All pop music is love and theft, and in 40 years of records whose sources have inspired volumes of scholastic exegesis, Dylan has never embraced that truth so warmly. Jokes, riddles, apercus, and revelations will surface for years, but let those who chart their lives by Dylan's cockeyed parables tease out the details. I always go for tone, spirit, music. If Time Out of Mind was his death album--it wasn't, but you know how people talk--this is his immortality album. It describes an eternal circle on masterful blazz and jop readymades that render his grizzled growl as juicy as Justin Timberlake's tenor--Tony Bennett's, even. It's profound, too, by which I mean very funny. "I'm sitting on my watch so I can be on time," he wheezes, because time he's got plenty of. A+

Modern Times [Columbia, 2006]
It took Dylan five years to create this conservative album even if he laid it down in a week, and I doubt he could have gotten it done at all without cribbing rhetoric from a shallower conservative, Confederate poet Henry Timrod. When not calling his new nation to arms or locating Satan's domicile north of the Mason-Dixon line, Timrod had a gift for genteel sentiment that's essential to the old-fashioned tone here, and Dylan grabbed what he needed. But note the intrusion of his old friend deliberate barbarism when, for instance, Timrod's "logic frailer than the flowers" produces Dylan's "more frailer than the flowers." Without such touches, the conservatism would be stultifying. The blues tropes help, too. Then again, without the '30s pop, the blues grooves would be stultifying. Instead, the entire construction is a thing of grace--conservative, and new under the sun. A+

Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006 [Columbia/Legacy, 2008]
Out of 29 tracks, not counting the dozen in a deluxe edition that'll run you another hundred smackers, I count two or three stunners, eight or nine keepers, many outtakes, and a few live versions and movie songs ("High Water [For Charley Patton]," "Series of Dreams"). ***

Together Through Life [Columbia, 2009]
The singer isn't up to tenderness and the accordion gets annoying. But the first two tracks are standards in the making, the last two tracks are prophetic and mean, and the blues in between are as pointed as the pop songs are long-winded. Plus he's got Robert Hunter playing the humanizer, which on a love album is always a good flavor. B+

Christmas in the Heart [Columbia, 2009]
Funnier than the Chipmunks, give him that ("Must Be Santa," "Winter Wonderland"). *

See Also

• Any Old Way: Four Pieces about Bob Dylan [1971-06]
• Weird Scenes After the Gold Rush [1971-12-16]
• The Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan Goes Public [1975-08-04]
• Dylan Back: World Goes On [1990-10-30]
• Not Dead Yet: Bob Dylan [1998]
• Bobby and Dave: Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk [2005-11-15]
• Bob Dylan: Modern Times [2006-09-01]
• The 40 Essential Albums of 1967 [2007-07-12]