8:26am: Knocked Out Loaded to Love And Theft
"Check out the wild, twelve-minute Dylan-Sam Shepard road song "Brownsville Girl" (from 1987's Knocked Out Loaded) or the hallucinatory Oh Mercy outtake "Series of Dreams" (from the revelatory, career-spanning three-CD set The Bootleg Series) to hear the best of the latter-day Dylan. Then there are the two fast and funny Traveling Wilburys albums, which catch Dylan--along with superstar pals George Harrison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, and (on the first record) Roy Orbison--in an uncommonly lighthearted mood. He followed up 1990's Under the Red Sky with two albums' worth of old folk and blues covers: 1992's Good As I Been to You and 1993's World Gone Wrong. While both are largely satisfying efforts, they didn't win him many new fans.
Early in 1997, though, those who lived in hope of an artistically born-again Dylan had cause for optimism: musician Jim Dickinson told a Memphis newspaper that he had played on some recent, Daniel Lanois-produced Dylan sessions featuring new material Dylan had composed while stuck at home in Minnesota during a blizzard. According to Dickinson, one cut was seventeen minutes long, and overall the material was "so good, I can't imagine he won't use it. The seventeen-minute song turned out to be "Highlands," the closing cut on the critically acclaimed Time Out of Mind, which was released in September and became Dylan's first gold record of the decade.
The success of the album was noteworthy, but 1997 will go down as the year that Dylan knocked on heaven's door, literally: in May, on the eve of a European tour, he was hospitalized with histoplasmosis, a potentially fatal infection that creates swelling in the sac surrounding the heart. Happily, the songwriter made a rapid recovery, and was back on the road by August and continued to tour through the remainder of the year, including a September date in Rome at the behest of Pope John Paul II. In early December, Dylan was one of five recipients of his country's highest award for artistic excellence, the Kennedy Center Honors." (Bio courtesy of BobDylanBiography.8k.com)
Since then, and last, but not least, Dylan's 2001 release "Love And Theft," and not to forget his Academy Award Winning song "Things Have Changed" from the soundtrack of "Wonder Boys."
All in all, the most astonishing and influential career in music history, and you could look it up.
(Coming tomorrow...Dylan's birthday, a look back at personal favorites and reminiscences.)
Posted by cronish at May 23, 2002 08:50 AM