You may be wondering, what is Bob Dylan’s worst album, and why would I want to listen to it?
Well, it’s all right ma if you haven’t heard this one in a while.
We’re not going to talk about most of his eighties albums, because the live bootlegs are where
it’s at if you want to skip the eighties overproduction that never belonged anywhere near a
Dylan record. And we’re not going to mention Triplicate, the triple album of Sinatra covers.
We’re going to set the wayback machine to the New Morning of Dylan’s second decade of
being one of the biggest music stars on this fair planet.
We’re talking about the first real shocker that he ever put out. The year was 1970 and Bob
Dylan was tired of being called the voice of a generation. He went full-on country in 1969 with
the wonderful “Nashville Skyline,” but his next detour of re-invention hit the music press and
fans with the hard rain that finally a’fell when he dropped the double-album bomb of “Self
Portrait.”
Up to this point we’d never heard his love of The Everly Brothers so clearly. And looking back on
what I find to be a very enjoyable, but also very mellow country/folk record, we can see how
Dylan just showed us another side of Americana, a genre he accidentally invented on his first
three “going electric” albums of “Bringing All Back Home,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” and “Blonde
on Blonde.” Those three are some of the most important rock ‘n’ roll albums ever made, where
we still have amphetamine Dylan cramming all those syllables into 32 verses faster than you
can say Subterranean Homesick Blues or Ballad of a Thin Man, rappin’ like you were a beatnick
poet on a black and white New York City rooftop, 1958. But what he also did was mix the music
of Atlantic Records-era Ray Charles with a full rhythm and blues band that was cookin’ up much
faster rock ‘n’ roll licks like a hot skillet on a gas stove.
And that was great and all, but Dylan knew he couldn’t keep doing that forever. So he took that
same skillet to a cowboy campfire with more coals and less flames, but he had to figure out a
way to get there. So he might’ve faked a motorcycle crash to take time off of touring and come
back with the surprisingly stripped back seriousness of “John Wesley Harding” before finding
his way back to that Nashville Skyline for a short, upbeat and fun record where Dylan
supposedly stopped smoking cigarettes and starting singing like Caruso with his newfound
voice, literally and figuratively. This was about 10 Minnesota cornfields removed from the
screaming of 1965’s top hit “Like A Rolling Stone.”
What “Self Portrait” accomplished was putting a lot of distance between 1965 and 1970. To
really drive this point home, this album gives us a live version of “Like A Rolling Stone” from his
1969 concert at the Isle of Wight Festival. This a way more laid back take.
“All the Tired Horses in the sun / how am I supposed to get any riding done?” is asked in every
way it can be sung over the course of three minutes as the opening track. Gone are the Dylan
songs with 19 verses before you get to a chorus. This is all chorus, all the way through. And it’s
catchy. This melody will lasso your memory for days after hearing it.
And with that we are given a mostly acoustic take on Americana music. If any Americana band
released an album like this today everyone would eat it up.
We are also given two Everly Brothers covers, a Gordon Lightfoot cover, a Simon & Garfunkel
cover, “Blue Moon,” and folk and country songs that are so obscure to rock ‘n’ roll fans that
only Dylan and Woody Guthrie himself know whose front porch these songs came from. And
amid all the covers, Dylan gives us a live version of “The Mighty Quinn,” just to keep things
interesting, since that was one of his songs that was a hit for Manfred Mann. “Self Portrait” is
also the first time Dylan’s version was released officially, though it may have been bootlegged.
Another reason Dylan may have released what seems to be such an unusual album is that he
was being bootlegged heavily at the time, mostly what became known as “The Basement
Tapes.” Dylan, presumably an audiophile, claims to have hated the low quality of his bootlegs.
I had always liked a handful of songs off this album, but overall I just didn’t really get it. I like
“Nashville Skyline” and “New Morning” much better, but I’m more of a rock and country fan
that I am an Americana/Folk fan. But what really turned this around for me was the 2013
Bootleg series called “Another Self Portrait,” which ties together the whole Dylan era of 1969 -
1971, and really shows a theme emerging with all the material he recorded in that era. And the
Bootleg series also proves that the material Dylan didn’t release is better than what most artists
at that time were releasing. This guy just had his finger on the creative pulse and never let up,
not even for what many considered his worst album at the time.
So what does it all mean, man? It was shocking then, but it’s not so shocking now.
19 мар 2023
