2:05am: Freewheelin' to Planet Waves
"Promising as that first album was, it didn't prepare anyone for the masterpiece that came next. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, released in 1963, contained two of the sixties' most durable folk anthems, "Blowin' in the Wind" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," the breathtaking ballads "Girl From the North Country" and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," and nine other originals that marked the emergence of the most distinctive and poetic voice in the history of American popular music. Cementing his reputation was Peter, Paul, and Mary's folksy cover of "Blowin' in the Wind," which went to No. 2 on the pop singles chart.
Dylan's next album, The Times They Are A-Changin', provided more of the same: the title cut and "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" were the standout protest songs, while "Boots of Spanish Leather" was his saddest and most graceful love song so far. At the same time, Dylan seemed to be tiring of his position at the forefront of the protest movement: in "Restless Farewell," the record's last song, he concluded that he'd "bid farewell and not give a damn." Sure enough, his next album, pointedly titled Another Side of Bob Dylan, was his most introspective and least topical to date, and its finale, "It Ain't Me Babe," was an even more explicit goodbye to the folk movement he had helped reinvigorate.
The most revealing song on Another Side was "Ballad in Plain D," which painted a harsh, one-sided, blow-by-blow picture of Dylan's breakup with his longtime girlfriend Suze Rotolo, who can be seen on his arm in happier days on the Freewheelin' album cover. (More than twenty years later, Dylan said this was the one song in his catalogue that he wished he hadn't released.) Shortly after his split with Rotolo, he became involved with the world's most famous folk diva, Joan Baez. The relationship proved beneficial for them both, as Baez raided Dylan's unreleased material for her albums and introduced him to thousands of fans at her concerts.
At the same time, Dylan was itching to move beyond the acoustic musical constraints the folk movement imposed. Early in 1965, he went into the studio with a nine piece band and recorded Bringing It All Back Home, a half-electric, half-acoustic album of complex, incisive, biting songs like "Subterranean Homesick Blues" (featuring the trademark line, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"), "Mr. Tambourine Man," and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue. A week after Dylan cut Bringing It All Back Home, the Byrds electrified his acoustic "Tambourine Man," and by the time it reached the top of the charts the term "folk-rock" had become part of the contemporary lexicon.
Dylan's own transition from folk troubadour to rock bard was not quite so smooth: debuting his new material with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, he was famously booed off the stage. Such resistance notwithstanding, Dylan's fame had long since eclipsed Baez's, and their relationship was starting to crumble. (D.A. Pennebaker's documentary Don't Look Back was filmed during this period, and it clearly shows the tension between Dylan and Baez.) He had begun to see Sara Lowndes, a friend of his manager Albert Grossman's wife, and by the end of the year would marry her. In the meantime, he recorded and released the album Highway 61 Revisited, which contained the monumental single "Like a Rolling Stone." Clocking in at more than six minutes, it was the longest, angriest song ever released on a 45, and it reached No. 2 on the Billboard singles chart.
Next up was Blonde on Blonde, a two-record set recorded in Nashville in early 1966, which took the stream-of-consciousness lyrics and edgy rock sounds of Highway 61 Revisited to the next level of artistry. From the raucous party rock of "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" to the rambling, hallucinogenic folk 'n' blues of "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again" to the poignant, apocalyptic balladry of "Visions of Johanna" and "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," Blonde on Blonde took rock and roll to places no one else had even dreamed of. A tour of England with the Hawks (who would later change their name to the Band) produced music that was even wilder and more astonishing, though many of Dylan's old fans continued to be baffled. The tour reached its peak at the Manchester Free Trade Hall on May 17, 1966, when the combo recorded a live set that was bootlegged--and mis-titled--as Live at the Royal Albert Hall. (If you're lucky enough to find the two-CD bootleg Guitars Kissing & the Contemporary Fix-- which features a pristine recording of the entire show--buy it; it's the greatest album never released.)
By this time, Dylan was routinely being hailed as the most important voice of his generation, but he was reaching a breaking point; he was, after all, only twenty-five years old. "The pressures were unbelievable," he would later tell biographer Anthony Scaduto. "They were just something you can't imagine unless you go through them yourself. Man, they hurt so much." A near-fatal motorcycle accident on July 29, 1966, proved a blessing in disguise, allowing Dylan to retreat to the solitude of his home in Woodstock, New York, with Sara and their newborn son Jesse to reevaluate his career and priorities. (The Dylans would ultimately have four children, with Bob adopting Sara's daughter from a previous marriage; Jakob, the youngest, is now the leader of the popular band the Wallflowers.)
A few months later, the Hawks joined him at Woodstock, and they began recording the loose, country-flavored tracks that would be bootlegged (and released eight years later) as The Basement Tapes. Dylan's next official release, though, was the even more low-key John Wesley Harding. Recorded in Nashville with a three-piece backing band, John Wesley Harding was widely considered to be Dylan's pointed reaction to the Beatles' musically and technically complex landmark LP Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band--an interpretation he naturally denied.
While John Wesley Harding earned glowing reviews and reached the No. 2 spot on Billboard's album chart (making it his most commercially successful album to date), it also painted Dylan into an artistic corner. Gone was what he called his "thin wild mercury sound," and gone were his outlandish, visionary lyrical flourishes; the simple, often elegant songs that he was now writing could not support the hype that painted Dylan as one of the twentieth century's great poets. Nashville Skyline, his next album, seemed to revel in disappointing fans' expectations: it was a straight country record, and despite some lovely songs (especially "I Threw It All Away") and a hit single ("Lay Lady Lay") it was seen as Dylan's first real artistic misstep.
As it turned out, Nashville Skyline was just the beginning of Dylan's slide in the eyes of the critical establishment. Self Portrait, the two-record set which followed in 1970, was viewed as a genuine disaster: "What is this shit?" Greil Marcus asked in his Rolling Stone review. New Morning, released four months later, was a comeback of sorts--it was at least listenable--but it was a far cry from Dylan's best work. The release of his long-awaited book Tarantula in 1971 didn't do anything to rehabilitate his reputation in hip circles. Even his inspiring set at the George Harrison-organized Concert for Bangladesh- Dylan's first American concert appearance since his motorcycle accident five years earlier--seemed to hint at artistic confusion: he didn't perform a single song written after 1966.
Seemingly floundering, Dylan accepted an invitation from legendary Western filmmaker Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch) to appear in and compose the score for his new film, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which was filming in Mexico and would star Dylan's friend Kris Kristofferson. The shoot was not a pleasant experience: the Mexican location proved difficult, Peckinpah was preoccupied with studio politics (the film was eventually taken out of his hands and recut), and Dylan floundered in the role of Billy's sidekick, Alias. But the soundtrack album was a success, and the single "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" broke the Top 20 (and went on to become one of Dylan's most covered songs).
At this point, it had been seven years since Dylan's motorcycle accident, and he had not mounted a full-scale tour since. In the summer and fall of 1973, he and the Band started rehearsing the Dylan songbook for a comeback tour, and in early November they took a few days off to record the album Planet Waves. It was a hasty, underwritten effort, but that didn't stop it from shooting to the top of the charts after Dylan and the Band hit the road for a nationwide tour in January of 1974. (Planet Waves was, in fact, Dylan's first No. 1 album ever.) The concerts were the stuff of legend, and promoter Bill Graham said that there were mail-order requests for more than twelve million tickets, though only 658,000 seats were available for the forty shows. An acclaimed two-record live set, Before the Flood, came out within a few months of the tour, and made it to No. 3 on the charts." (Bio quoted from BobDylanBiography.8k.com)
(coming tomorrow...Blood On The Tracks)
Posted by cronish at May 21, 2002 02:17 AM