Does the world need another Bob Dylan multi-CD retrospective? Columbia’s new three CD collection isn’t exactly hitting the market at a Dylan-deficient point. Besides a highly successful satellite radio show, the first book of his Chronicles memoirs series, and a new album, Modern Times, were all released within the past couple of years. If the three CDs contained many unreleased or hard to find rarities, like Tom Waits’ recent Orphans, Bawlers, and Brawlers, maybe I could find the collection more exciting. As is, the nearly seventy dollar set seems like a high-priced greatest hits album from an artist who already has a few to his name.
However, for Dylan fans that think everything he recorded between 1976’s Desire and 1997’s Time Out of My Mind were weak or uninspired, the second and third CDs in the Dylan collection will come as a rude (but eventually wonderful) awakening. While the music sometimes sounds overdone or the production slicker, Dylan’s 70s and 80s recording output features an artist far more at home with himself and his mysterious, often mystical view of the world. Songs like Changing of the Guards, Precious Angel, and The Groom’s Still Waiting At the Altar unfurl like lost Gnostic texts, with only Dylan’s diction and singing to help the listener make sense of lines like “The palace of mirrors/ Where dog soldiers are reflected/ The endless roads and the wailing of chimes/ The empty rooms where her memory was protected.”
On earlier, still inarguably brilliant albums like Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan still sounded a little high on his own poetic faculties, whereas his work in later decades displays a far less excitable artist and, in many ways, a more interesting one. Even Dylan’s born-again Christian album, Slow Train Coming, contains a lot of great songs (Precious Angel and Gotta Serve Somebody are featured on Dylan), mostly because there has always been a love of gospel hymns in Dylan’s music.
Blind Willie McTell, a song found on The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3 and on the third disc of the Dylan collection, finds Dylan at his most apocalyptic, singing of a world whose lone truth is that no one plays the blues like Blind Willie McTell. Many of the other songs on the second and third discs of the set, including Dark Eyes, Jokerman, Dignity, Everything is Broken, follow the same pattern as Blind Willie McTell, using one mysterious image to unite disparate places, people, and moods. One after another, the songs’ scope and drama can begin to seem overwhelming, and in the worst case, clichéd, as if Dylan is writing one dark, prophetic song after another.
It’s a little difficult to recommend the Dylan collection to hardcore fans, but I’m sure they wouldn’t be interested anyway. Ultimately, the set is geared for either teenagers or others unaware of Dylan, or for those fans that only own Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde and need reminding of how interesting an artist Dylan has been his whole career.
TrackList: CD 1: Song to Woody, Blowin’ in the Wind, Masters of War, Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Alright, A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall, The Times They Are A-Changin’, All I Really Want to Do, My Back Pages, It Ain’t Me, Babe, Subterranean Homesick Blues, Mr. Tambourine Man, Maggie’s Farm, Like a Rolling Stone, It’s All Over Now Baby Blue, Positively 4th Street, Rainy Day Women #12 and #35, Just Like A Woman, Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine), All Along the Watchtower
CD 2: You Ain’t Goin Nowhere, Lay Lady Lay, If Not For You, I Shall Be Released, Knockin On Heaven’s Door, On a Night Like This, Forever Young, Tangled Up in Blue, Simple Twist of Fate, Hurricane, Changing of The Guards, Gotta Serve Somebody, Precious Angel, The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar, Jokerman, Dark Eyes
CD 3: Blind Willie McTell, Brownsville Girl, Silvio, Ring Them Bells, Dignity, Everything is Broken, Under the Red Sky, You’re Gonna Quit Me, Blood In My Eyes, Not Dark Yet, Things Have Changed, Make You Feel My Love, High Water, Po’ Boy, Someday Baby, When the Deal Goes Down.
– Daniel Krow
