There are officially 39 studio albums in the Bob Dylan catalogue. Even so, they cover but a portion of his enormous discography. There are numerous Dylan compilations, of course - at least three volumes of Greatest Hits, the career spanning Biograph, the odds and ends collection Side Tracks, and many, many more. Most of them have odd, stray tracks not found anywhere else. Dylan's not a British artist, one who draws a clear distinction between singles and albums. For the most part, he's never been all that interested in issuing singles anyway. Most of his were simply drawn from his regular album releases. Nevertheless, he has issued a few stand-alone singles over the course of his long career and they'll only be found on one compilation or another. You'd sure need a lot of nerve to go without the great 1966 single "Positively Fourth Street."
Dylan has released five official live albums (technically he has also "released" archive sets of many other live recordings from various periods of his career, mainly to protect his copyrights.) As a live performer, Dylan has long been highly unpredictable, bouncing from one extreme to another. You never know what you're going to get or how good he'll be. He can be utterly transcendent, he can be absolutely terrible. The official live albums somehow manage to miss out on all the greatest live performances of his career. Consequently, the only one that is truly essential is Before the Flood which documents his 1974 tour with The Band. Dylan runs total roughshod over his famous old songs like he wants to steamroller them out of existence - his voice is a mighty bellow - and The Band is with him every wild step of the way. Dylan has always brought out the crazy and reckless side of The Band, who left to their own devices can sometimes grow a little too careful and cautious. Dylan pushes them right to the edge in these shows and it's totally awesome.
Dylan's official Bootleg Series now runs into 15 volumes and contains at least 65 discs - it now represents the biggest chunk of Dylan's official discography, and as Dylan is the most bootlegged artist in music history, that's somehow very appropriate. Some of these installments are as essential as his very best official albums; some are strictly for specialists only. Volumes 1-3 were issued together as a single release; they collect stray tracks that he didn't release from the first three decades of his career, and it is indeed required listening. Volume 4 is the legendary 1966 show in Manchester with the Hawks - the "Judas" moment - and it more than lives up to the legend. This is amazing, explosive rock music, all restraint abandoned, always teetering on the edge of utter chaos. Volume 5 collects live recordings from the Rolling Thunder Revue, another period that is not documented nearly as well as its legend would seem to require, and is simply great fun. Volume 6 is a live solo concert recording from late 1964, a fascinating moment in time - it's shortly before he went into the studio to record Bringing It All Back Home, and he previews some of the new songs. Volume 7 is the soundtrack to Scorcese's documentary and not necessary. But Volume 8 collects various out takes and stray tracks from the Oh Mercy through Time Out of Mind years and provides additional proof that Dylan regularly leaves his best work off his official albums. Volume 9 gathers together publishing demos from 1962-64 and is for specialists only, as is Volume 10 which attempts to rehabilitate the Self-Portrait sessions. But Volume 11 provides the legendary basement tapes from the summer of 1967, in two versions (a two disc selection of highlights, and the complete set of recordings) and this dive into the roots of American music is required listening. The 18 discs of Volume 12 archive every recording made during the sessions for the three great 1965-66 albums. It's awesome but it's also for specialists only. Volume 13 documents his gospel years - the live performances are tremendous if you can put up with the material. Volume 14 documents the Blood on the Tracks sessions and I think it demonstrates that for the most part Dylan actually put the right takes on the released album. For once. Volume 15 collects any leftovers from the John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline sessions and is for specialists only.
As for the 39 studio albums, we're going to omit the two that Dylan himself was not involved in assembling. Those would be the 1973 album called Dylan that Columbia assembled out of Self-Portrait out-takes. This was his spurned record company indulging in a bit of petty revenge at Dylan having the gall to temporarily take his services to another record company. And we're going to skip the strange 1975 edition of The Basement Tapes put together by Robbie Robertson, who for reasons of his own (mainly, to play up the role played by his group) added eight tracks by The Band alone that had nothing at all to do with the sessions from the Woodstock basement. Some of them had actually been recorded almost two years later. Robertson also took the original stereo recordings from the basement and remixed them to mono, for reasons that have never been explained. As for the rest of it, while it was certainly good at the time to finally have some of these Dylan recordings available, the eventual release of all the work done in the Woodstock basement - which wouldn't happen for another 35 years, mind you - has finally made this collection completely redundant, and good thing too. It's redundant even if you're a fan of The Band, as they would eventually issue their tracks on expanded editions of their own records, which is where they belonged all along.
Which leaves us with 37 studio albums to consider, and we'll begin at the bottom:
37. Christmas in the Heart (October 2009) - He couldn't be serious. Could he? At least it was done for charity.
36. Down in the Groove (May 1988) - The mid-to-late 1980s were the absolute nadir of Dylan's career. At this juncture, Dylan had little in the way of new songs. He pulled a couple of rejects out of the drawer, recorded some random covers and collaborated with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter on a couple of bad new songs. He no longer even appeared to be trying.
35. Self Portrait (June 1970) - A notorious failure, that shocked and dismayed his audience the day it appeared. Its reputation has improved very little in the half-century since, despite the best efforts of The Bootleg Series to provide a more in-depth look at the project. It's still what it always was - a hodge-podge of random covers, with a few unremarkable live recordings mixed in.
34. Knocked Out Loaded (July 1986) - The title possibly reflects the circumstances of its creation. Dylan was lost artistically, drinking too much, and generally going through the motions. It does have "Brownsville Girl," his wild collaboration with Sam Shepherd, yet another of his weird shaggy dog tales. It's fun but it's not enough to justify the cost of admission.
33. Saved (June 1980) - If Dylan's first religious album confused his audience, this one positively alienated them. His God is still a nasty piece of work, and the songs just aren't there. It picks up briefly in the middle - the trio of "Solid Rock," "Pressing On", and "In the Garden" isn't terrible. But it's not all that good, either.
32. Under the Red Sky (September 1990) - A collection of insubstantial songs, the best of which was left over from the "Oh Mercy" sessions. It actually has a certain charm, but there's really nothing there. It's a little like "Nashville Skyline" in that regard, but even slighter.
31. Shadows in the Night (February 2015) - Yet another left turn, as Dylan records ten songs most closely associated with Frank Sinatra. He waited until he was past 70 years old and his voice had been destroyed by cigarettes, liquor, and a thousand concerts before undertaking this project. That said, his touring band handles the tunes beautifully and the wreck that is all that remains of Dylan's voice manages to negotiate these melodies with skill and sensitivity. I don't much care for the material, as I'm simply not that big a fan of the Great American Songbook.
30. Fallen Angels (May 2016) - And yet he persisted, with another collection of standards and one begins to suspect that he's just showing off. Yes, Bob. You know more about American popular music than anyone who has ever lived. The performances are filled with care and respect and I'm not sure that's always the best path for Dylan to take. But he clearly loves this music, and as always he intends to take ownership of it.
29. Triplicate (March 2017) - The third of Dylan's three albums plumbing the Great American Songbook was a three disc set containing no less than 30 standards. It's actually the best of the three, as Dylan and his band had grown more and more comfortable performing these types of songs.
28. Shot of Love (August 1981) - Dylan's third religious album is noteworthy mostly for its cover, which is one of the dumbest and ugliest album covers ever produced. It's redeemed, slightly, by its closing cut where the artist finally makes some actual art out of his religious preoccupations with the shimmering, gorgeous "Every Grain of Sand." And surprise, surprise - he's mixed in a couple of secular songs. We didn't know it at the time, but it turned out to be an indicator of things to come. His preaching days were just about done.
27. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (July 1973) - By 1973, Dylan was very much at loose ends. He hadn't performed anywhere for years, and he wasn't writing either. He'd actually dropped a one-off single that began "What's the matter with me? I don't have much to say." He'd grown bored with Woodstock, and moved his family back to the Village in Manhattan. That was a disaster - people wouldn't leave him alone - so they lit out again, this time for California. He took a bit part in a Sam Peckinpaugh movie and agreed to provide a soundtrack. The soundtrack isn't much - it's hardly an album at all, just a few guys loosely jamming on the back porch. Dylan barely managed to come up with two fragmentary songs for the project. But one of those songs is "Knockin' On Heaven's Door." Just when you think he's toast...
26. New Morning (October 1970) - Dylan briefly overcame a crippling case of writer's block under the impetus of a planned project with the poet Archibald MacLeish and the pressing need to get the taste of "Self-Portrait" out of everyone's mind. That's the only reason this collection of a dozen fairly slight songs received the hosannas it did upon arrival. He also unveiled yet another vocal approach, one that somehow combines all the various vocal approaches he had tried out over his first decade as a recording artist, and this would sustain him for most of the next fifteen years. Most of the songs are piano-based, which was new - eventually, of course, Dylan would seem to stop playing guitar entirely and only play piano on stage. It does have a couple of winners, namely "Sign on the Window" and "Went To See the Gypsy" and he at least sounds like he's trying a little harder.
25. Nashville Skyline (April 1969) - This does include three significant new songs "Lay Lady Lay," "I Threw It All Away," and "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You," although its mostly noteworthy for the introduction of yet another new Dylan voice. This one is a deep and weirdly affected croon that sounded like a completely different human than the one who had wailed and howled across the world just three years earlier. He claimed at the time that he sounded different because he'd quit smoking. Sure, Bob. He does a duet with Johnny Cash which doesn't work because the two men simply don't sing well together, however much they admired each other. And the other songs are so slight they barely exist. Rather like the album itself, which is so slight - less than 30 minutes - as to be almost inconsequential. What it truly signifies is the beginning of a writer's block that would persist for more than five years.
24. Slow Train Coming (August 1979) - The first of Dylan's three explicitly Christian albums, recorded in Muscle Shoals with Jerry Wexler at the controls and Mark Knopfler leading the great Muscle Shoals players. It sounds just as great as you would expect. The artist is in good voice and the band is outstanding. The trouble is in the songs themselves. The problem isn't that these are all religious songs - the problem is that Dylan's religion was so unattractive. His God is the vengeful prick of the Old Testament, and these are generally nasty, intolerant songs that hector and bully the listener. "Precious Angel" almost rises above this unpleasantness and two other songs actually do - "I Believe In You" and "When He Returns," both of which are carried by two of the greatest vocal performances of the man's long career.
23. Empire Burlesque (June 1985) - Dylan tried to make a contemporary modern record, with a real producer and everything. Unfortunately, he didn't really have any songs worth recording. The best tracks work as sort of "faux-Dylan" - that is, they sound like pretty decent Dylan imitations. The one exception is the one that closes the album, the striking "Dark Eyes", written and recorded at the end of the sessions. Yet one more time, we would see that even when Dylan's lost and stumbling in the dark, he can still jump up and remind you just what he's capable of doing.
22. Infidels (October 1983) - This was greeted with an enormous sigh of relief on on its arrival - he's not singing about Jesus anymore, thank Christ - and it came with a remarkable video made to accompany its leadoff track, the enigmatic "Jokerman." Dylan and producer Mark Knopfler worked long and hard on this, but in the end the artist took over and made a series of very strange decisions. He cut the wild rant "Foot of Pride" and the powerful "Lord Protect My Child" while including the deeply stupid "Neighbourhood Bully." It turned out that he'd left a far superior take of "Jokerman" in the bin for a more cautious, bloodless version. And most stunning of all, he'd also left off a song called "Blind Willie McTell," which is merely one of the greatest compositions in the long career of one of the greatest songwriters who has ever lived, as the world would discover when it finally appeared almost a decade later in the first installment of The Bootleg Series. Dylan would shrug and say they didn't have a good take, and it's true that on the best known version Dylan's piano work is a little uncertain and Knopfler is just doodling along on 12-string, learning the song. But Dylan sang the hell out of it - he has seldom sung better - and of course the song itself is good enough to justify a man's entire career. Just baffling.
21. Street Legal (June 1978) - A weird, frustrating record. The two long tracks that bookend the record - "Changing of the Guards" and "Where Are You Tonight" - are superb, wild passionate tracks full of heat and madness. Unfortunately, and like the rest of the album, they're marred by the extremely slip-shod nature of the recording and the artist's sudden fondness for backup female vocalists who hadn't quite been integrated into his musical approach. The whole record sounds tinny and cheap, somehow. And the rest of the songs are extremely minor, and one - the egregious "Is Your Love in Vain" - is positively offensive in its badness.
20. Desire (January 1976) - By the summer of 1975, Dylan was in the mood for some chaos. He set up shop in Greenwich Village, establishing connections with old cronies and some new faces - Scarlet Rivera, a violinist he saw walking down the street, local musicians like Rob Stoner that he saw performing in bars. He started writing in collaboration for the first time in his career, working with the theater director Jacques Levy (who had previously worked with Roger McGuinn of the Byrds.) Dylan began to form the notion of assembling a kind of travelling gypsy caravan that would go from town to town playing shows. (The fact that Rivera looked like a gypsy may have been part of her appeal.) This would become the weird and legendary Rolling Thunder Revue, and Desire was the album they made while he was pulling it all together. It has its moments - the breezy "Mozambique" and "One More Cup of Coffee" are fine and the bent narrative of "Isis" is better than that. But each side begins with a long topical song, one of which - "Hurricane" - is pretty good, even if it plays a little fast and loose with the facts of the case. However the interminable "Joey" attempts to elevate a recently slain Mafia thug into a kind of Billy the Kid type of hero. It is simply appalling. Billy the Kid was also a psycho killer, but at least he's been dead for a century. He can be more safely mythologized. The memory of the lunatic Gallo was far too fresh to attempt something similar. And the record closes with a song directly addressed to his wife Sara, cut with her in the studio listening to him record it. It actually refers directly to songs Dylan had written earlier in his life, and his new song to his wife flat-out lies about the circumstances of their creation. What a thing to do. What must she have thought?
19. Bob Dylan (March 1962) - Dylan was just 20 years old when he recorded his debut, less than a year after arriving in New York. This first album actually does suggest how he was able to somehow leapfrog past everyone in the town's burgeoning folk scene. He didn't do it with his writing. His debut only contains two of his own compositions, and only "Song to Woody" is still noted at all, and mostly as an acknowledgement of influence, a debt paid. What so impressed everyone about the young Dylan was how he sang. He didn't approach traditional folk music as an outsider, as someone giving due reverence to an honoured tradition. He sang those old songs like he owned them, like they were real to him, as if he had the right and the authority and the supreme self-confidence to sing them. Which is a rare gift indeed, one possessed by only the very greatest rock singers - Lennon and McCartney both had it, Elvis had it - but Mick Jagger never did. Jagger's a pretty great singer himself, but when he sings a Muddy Waters classic he's a man paying homage to a tradition. He doesn't presume to take possession of it. Dylan presumed.
18. Together Through Life (April 2009) - This reminds me, oddly enough, of Black and Blue by the Rolling Stones. It's got the same ramshackle charm. No, the songs don't amount to too much, but it's just fun to hear these guys making music together. The guys are Dylan's ace touring band supplemented by Mike Campbell and David Hidalgo. It's very minor, but quite enjoyable.
17. Another Side of Bob Dylan (August 1964) - The rebellion begins here. Dylan's topical songs had earned him an audience, but that audience - the tastemakers of the early 1960s folk scene - thought the artist belonged to them. They thought he was there to do their bidding and write the songs they wanted written. But Dylan always answered to no one but himself and anyway he regarded himself as an artist rather than a journalist. This collection, recorded in a single night fuelled by several bottles of wine, left the topical songs behind for matters of intense interest to the artist alone. The thing is, for the most part it's not really a great bunch of songs. In particular, the interminable "Ballad in Plain D" which closes the album is a piece of petty and vengeful score settling completely unworthy of the artist (who has had the good grace to admit to being embarrassed by it in retrospect.) But the Byrds did fine covers of two of the songs, "To Ramona" is a winner, and just as "My Back Pages" says goodbye to all that, "Chimes of Freedom" kicks open the door to his future.
16. Planet Waves (January 1974) - This album was a huge event when it appeared - ten new Bob Dylan songs! At last! And he recorded them with The Band, who had supported him on his legendary 1966 shows and worked with him on the equally legendary (but still unreleased) Basement Tapes, but who had never recorded with him. And he'd left Columbia after all these years to record for David Geffen. And they were all going to go out on tour immediately afterwards. It was all a very big deal. It would have been hard for the record to live up to this much hype, and let's be clear - it didn't. Dylan and the Band sound great but the songs just don't amount to much, being mostly random and generic odes to domesticity. There are, as usual, a couple of exceptions: the spooky "Going Going Gone" and the fun romp "Tough Mama" put the Band to good use, and the harrowing "Dirge" is one of the bleakest entries in the man's catalogue.
15. Oh Mercy (September 1989) - Dylan's memoir is a wonderful book, magnificently written and full of sharp insights about the world as he experienced it and the artists that moved him. However - as a piece of history, and especially as a piece of autobiography, it is completely unreliable. This is because Bob Dylan would never, never tell the truth about himself if he had a better story he could tell instead. It wouldn't even occur to him. He does have a story to tell about this record. He claims to have suffered a serious hand injury, which prevented him from playing music. He didn't know if he could write anymore. But he woke up one night, wrote some lyrics and stashed them in a drawer. This went on for a while until he had enough to make a bunch of songs. He claims to have had no idea how to proceed. But Bono suggested over dinner that he hook up with Daniel Lanois to make a record. So he did. Oh Mercy was what they came up with. It was hailed a return to form, in much the same way and for most of the same reasons New Morning had been similarly received almost twenty years before. Once again, it looked pretty good compared with what the artist had been producing in the years immediately preceding. It's by no means a bad record although once again, Dylan made some baffling choices as to what went on and what got left off. This would have been a much better album had it included "Series of Dreams" and "Born in Time." And all the years of abusing his voice was beginning to take a toll. Unlike, say, Mick Jagger, Dylan had never done anything to take care of his voice, his live approach had always alternated between a fierce bellow and a raucous wail, always at the top of his lungs, and he'd played a lot of arenas and stadiums over the previous decade. It's right about now that you can hear his vocal powers beginning to shrink.
14. Modern Times (August 2006) - He's got a lot of nerve to put in copyright claims on such ancient blues tunes as "Rollin' and Tumblin" and "Someday Baby," two songs I first heard fifty years ago. I suppose if they're in the public domain he can get away with it as long as he's inventing a few new verses, which seems to be his usual method. In retrospect, a song like "When Your Deal Goes Down" shows his growing interest in the Great American Songbook, something that would occupy much of his next decade. The second half of this unhurried collection (the shortest song runs 4:56) is especially strong, with "Workingman's Blues #2," the exquisite "Nettie Moore," and the ominous "Ain't Talkin'" which actually begins with an invocation of the famous piano lick from "Ballad of a Thin Man."
13. The Times They Are a-Changin' (January 1964) - Dylan dove even deeper into topical songs on his third album, and one reason this collection works is because he turned out to be really, really good at it. The eminently quotable title track is simply a very good song and the ballad of the family annihilator "Hollis Brown" is terrifying. "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" and "With God on Our Side" point fingers at their targets with style and substance. Everything works but the awkward "Only a Pawn in Their Game" - but interestingly enough, the very best songs aren't topical songs at all, as great as those ones are. The real highlights are "One Too Many Mornings," "When the Ship Comes in" and especially the sublime "Boots of Spanish Leather." And the artist surely noticed this as well. Throughout his career, Dylan has either been completely stuck in the mud - or he's been moving too fast for anyone to keep up. Over the next few years, he would be an absolute blur.
12. Rough and Rowdy Ways (June 2020) - Having got the Great American Songbook out of his system, Dylan coughed up a collection of new songs a year before he turned 80 and a remarkable bunch of songs it is. Like any modern artist, he rolled it out by dropping single tracks as teasers and the first of these was a startling, stream of consciousness meditation running almost 17 minutes in length called "Murder Most Foul." It began with the JFK assassination and gradually transitioned into an endless plea for some cosmic DJ to play the music he wanted to hear, as the band noodled away in support. It sounds unlistenable yet it's utterly fascinating in its bizarre way. The rest is a little more conventional, exploring the usual latter-day Dylan modes - the braggadocio of "I Contain Multitudes," the bloody warning of "False Prophet," a blues romp or two ("Goodbye Jimmy Reed" and "Crossing the Rubicon") and yet another clutch of very weird, very spooky ballads.
11. Time Out of Mind (September 1997) - Between the time Dylan wrote and recorded these songs and the time he released them to the world, a strange thing happened. He very nearly died. Exposure to a fungus led to a case of pericarditis, a dangerous and painful heart infection. While this had no effect on the already recorded album, Dylan's brush with death had an enormous impact on how his next record was heard. It turned out the world was extremely disturbed by the thought of losing Dylan at the early age of 55. The record turned out to be a bleak, sprawling (the 11 tracks have the same running time as Blonde on Blonde) affair, obsessed with loss and mortality, and sounding like it emanated from some blasted post-apocalyptic landscape. The public absolutely ate it up. You never know. Well, this was surely in part because the world was remembering just how much it valued this artist but it was also on merit. This was Dylan's second collaboration with Daniel Lanois, whose production is extremely dense and murky - but that atmosphere generally suits this very strong batch of new songs. Yet again though, he made some very strange decisions as to which songs would be on the record. This is something we should all be used to by now but leaving off "Red River Shore" and "Marchin' to the City" while including "Make You Feel My Love" is just plain weird. Dylan hasn't worked with an outside producer since, taking personal charge of all his subsequent recordings.
10. Tempest (September 2012) - Dylan thoughtfully put the two weakest tracks at the end of this lengthy (69 minutes) work. This made it easy to avoid his interminable (43 verses!) ballad about the Titanic and his lugubrious elegy for John Lennon (of all people.) What's left is an outstanding regular sized album. The fun starts with Dylan demonstrating he can do Western swing as well as any Bob Wills acolyte and from there he growls and snarls his way through rocking and vengeful blues tunes on the one hand - he'll pay in blood, but not his own - and spooky and disturbing ballads on the other.
9. World Gone Wrong (October 1993) - The second volume of his early 90s jaunt through traditional songs, a project that worked as kind of cleansing of the musical palette and a reconnection with the sources of his own music. The two records are of a piece, so which one you prefer depends entirely on which songs you happen to like best. They were made with far more care than Dylan normally expends on the recording process. He may not have bothered to change his guitar strings and he didn't worry all too much about the quality of the recording. But he repeatedly tried out the songs in different keys and tempos before settling on the approaches that worked for him. Both records also demonstrate that he's a far more adept guitar player than he's usually given credit for being. World Gone Wrong also includes Dylan's own liner notes, the first time he'd done that in a quarter of a century. They're certainly playful even if they don't have the wild surrealistic flavour of old, and they're also genuinely informative.
8. Good as I Been to You (October 1992) - At the end of the 1980s, Dylan had begun to reinvent himself as a live performer, but he had also run into yet another of his lengthy bouts of writer's block. So he made two albums in his garage, just him and his guitar, singing some of the oldest traditional songs he knew. It's a familiar pattern. When this particular artist loses his way, he returns to the sources from which his music springs. No one knows more about American popular music than Bob Dylan, no one feels so deeply and so personally the roots from which all the branches of American popular music have grown. It's how he renews himself, and it's how he asserts himself as an artist, by playing music he knows he has a kind of ownership of. These two albums happen to accord with what is probably the general image of Bob Dylan - the solo troubadour, alone on a stage with his acoustic guitar. The image is a complete illusion, of course. That's just not who Bob Dylan is, and it's not how he normally makes music. The received image reflects what was actually a fairly brief moment in a long career, something that happened more than half a century ago. Dylan hasn't performed without a band since 1966, and while he has been performing non-stop for more than thirty years now, he stopped playing guitar on stage almost twenty years ago. But the old image endures, and this record lives up to it.
7. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (May 1963) - Dylan had begun as a singer, and on his second record he became a songwriter. And the songs he was making - well, folks, this is where the legend begins. It begins with "Blowin' in the Wind," the nine rhetorical questions which first made him famous as a songwriter. There's "Girl From the North Country" which turns an ancient English ballad into something modern. There's "Masters of War," which still shocks with its cold-blooded vehemence and rage. There's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," a great kiss-off, another instant classic. And there's "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall," which has enough memorable lines and ideas for a dozen songs. He was 21 years old when he did this. The mind still boggles at how he got this good this fast. He was still working within the folk tradition but the American folk tradition owes far more than it likes to acknowledge to the British folk tradition. As it happened young Dylan had visited England while preparing the songs for his second album, met many of the local folk players, and as always he soaked up everything he learned. He had developed a compositional method of taking the melodies of traditional folk ballads and using them as settings for his own lyrics, and several of the most famous songs on this record - "Masters of War," "Girl from the North Country" "Hard Rain" are based on British models that he heard during his visit.
6. John Wesley Harding (December 1967) - This strange record - 12 acoustic songs recorded with minimal backup - arrived fully 18 months after Blonde on Blonde, which was rather like an eternity in the popular music world of the day. It was also a record completely out of sync with its time, which may have been the point. Between Dylan's albums, the Beatles had released both Revolver and Sgt. Pepper - the latter in particular had caught the zeitgeist like no pop record has ever done, before or since. It had raised the bar on what popular music could represent and also on what it was possible to achieve with the resources of the modern recording studio. Even the Rolling Stones attempted to follow in that vein. Dylan, of course, had sat out the whole moment, missing in action. He was largely holed up in Woodstock with his growing family. He was hanging with his buddies in The Band, reviewing the history of American folk music and trying out a clutch of freshly written songs in the Big Pink basement. Their legend notwithstanding, in the end almost all of these songs never would be recorded and released by Dylan. He seems to have quickly forgotten most of them, having only ever played a couple of them in concert over the years. When he finally returned to the studio it was with yet another new batch of songs, almost all of which were made from three short verses without a chorus. He has claimed that he wrote them out like poems first, and set them to music later, but everything Dylan has ever said about himself and his work needs to be taken with a large grain of salt. (He has also described the composition of the title track, for example, as a completely different type of process.) The wild imagery of his previous work had been stripped away and the metaphors and images are tightly polished, precise and hard as diamonds. It's truly remarkable work - he may in fact have never written a better collection of lyrics.
5. Bringing It All Back Home (March 1965) - Dylan's first record with backing musicians is a bit of a cautious, dip-the-foot-in-the-water way of stepping forward into the future. The electric stuff is all confined to side one of the vinyl, and the backup is just that - backup. He hasn't really begun to explore the possibilities afforded him by a band. None of which matters in the long run, because the record is a stone masterpiece anyway. The side of long acoustic songs begins with the brilliant hallucination of "Mr Tambourine Man" and closes with the searing renunciation of "It's All Over Now Baby Blue." Which is itself preceded by the stunning "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding" which can only be heard, not described. No songwriter had ever written like this before, and no one has since. On the electric side, the generic blues songs "On the Road Again" and "Outlaw Blues" are played for laughs, as is "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream", yet another shaggy dog story from an artist who just loves himself a shaggy dog story. The rest of the first side still amazes - the two exquisite love songs, the blues romp of "Maggie's Farm." And on the opening cut - "Subterranean Homesick Blues" - the man basically invents rap. He was still just 23 years old.
4. "Love and Theft" (September 2001) - Released into the world on the same day the towers fell in New York, this turned out to be a rather unexpected masterwork from an artist who'd just marked his 60th birthday. Dylan finally took over production duties himself, going for the sound of half a dozen people playing together in a room. It suits him. For the first time, he recorded with his touring band, a group of skilled and sympathetic players intimately familiar with their leader's unpredictable ways. Highlights are the furious and frightening "High Water" (even more furious in concert), the gorgeous "Sugar Baby" and the jaunty "Po' Boy." Best of all, he finally let the world hear the wondrous "Mississippi," which is merely one of Bob Dylan's best songs ever. He had originally recorded it multiple times for "Time Out of Mind" but somehow left it off that record.
3. Highway 61 Revisited (August 1965) - By the summer of 1965, the rock band had been fully integrated into Dylan's music and appears on every song except the epic closer, "Desolation Row", which begins with an image of a postcard commemorating a lynching in Dylan's hometown - the postcard exists, by the way - and proceeds from there through an absolute nightmare vision of madness and futility. The two weakest cuts are the two generic blues tunes, "Buick Six" and "Tombstone Blues" - and they're both just fabulous, especially the latter with Mike Bloomfield spinning off wild guitar leads as Dylan delivers his demented and surreal tale. The rest of the album is ridiculously great, from the spooky nightmare of "Ballad of Thin Man" to the twisted travelogue of "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues." The album is actually sequenced in the order the songs were recorded, so it kicks off with with the pistol shot of "Like a Rolling Stone" about which little needs to be said, once you've acknowledged it as one of the greatest songs of all time, one that shattered every norm that had ever been held about popular music. If his previous album had seen him put his foot in the rock'n'roll water, with this one he dove right in and nothing, absolutely nothing, was ever the same again.
2. Blood on the Tracks (January 1975) - Completely out of the blue, after the minor songs of Planet Waves and an arena tour singing his greatest hits, Dylan dropped an absolute masterpiece. The songs were written in the summer of 1974 at his farm in Minnesota, where he was spending time with a new girlfriend as his marriage began to show signs of cracking under a number of strains (a new girlfriend being just one of them). Dylan was also recovering from the intense and strange experience of his massively successful tour with The Band in the first few months of the year. While getting out on the road and playing shows may have got his creative juices flowing once more, it wasn't all that good for his family life. It's unclear whether he'd been kicked out of the house or was merely taking a summer vacation. But Dylan on the road had always been a saga of drink, drugs, and women; his jaunt with The Band was no exception. This record has always been regarded as Dylan's divorce album, which is something Dylan himself has always strongly denied. He actually claims they're based on Chekhov's short stories. Oh really? But I'm actually with Bob on this one. First of all, the man has never, ever been a confessional songwriter. It's just not what he does. And face it - Bob Dylan wouldn't even dream of telling the truth about himself and his life, not for its own sake, not because he regards it as a truth worth telling. The only truths he has ever cared about are artistic truths. Plus his marriage wasn't quite over - it still had some years to run - and most of the songs seem to be about other things anyway. Seriously, if you think "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts" has anything to do with its author's life, there's just no help for you. The original version of the album was recorded in New York in the fall of 1974 and it gets to be a little too much of the same thing. On his brother's advice (!), Dylan wisely recut half the tracks in Minnesota over his Christmas holiday, which sharpened things up considerably. Every last track is a winner, and some are simply staggering in their greatness: the furious rant of "Idiot Wind", the wild and slippery "Tangled Up in Blue," the jaunty "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome." And "If You See Her, Say Hello" cuts about as deep as a song can cut.
1. Blonde on Blonde (June 1966) - Oh all right. You can put the top three in any order you like. Still, to my mind this is one of the three or four greatest albums ever made, by anyone, ever. Which is something everyone already knows, I suppose. Recorded mostly in Nashville with a crew of that city's brilliant session players, it unveiled a new Dylan voice - this one was an off-kilter slightly stoned croon - to go along with the familiar wail. There are a few generic blues tunes - come on, it wouldn't be a Dylan album without a few generic blues tunes - but they work just fine. Dylan had learned just as much from the Beatles as they had learned from him and this is the record where you can hear what he learned. It's easily the most sophisticated songwriting of his career, a remarkable step forward for a writer who'd been strictly a Verse-Chorus guy up to this point. The highlights are stunning: the amphetamine-fuelled fever dream that is "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands", the delicate pop masterpiece of "I Want You," the bitter and precise "Just Like a Woman." All of which take a back step and bow humbly before the astonishing "Visions of Johanna," which after all these years remains about as good as music ever gets.
