Essential Albums
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The 1990s had not been particularly kind to Bob Dylan. He began the decade with <i>Under the Red Sky</i>, a star-studded record with some strong songs that might be best remembered for “Wiggle Wiggle,” a nursery rhyme from hell. An <i>MTV Unplugged</i> set, a greatest hits collection, a 30th-anniversary concert, a bootleg series, and two sets of covers not only cemented him as a legacy star, but also suggested that this once ceaseless well of new American standards had perhaps run dry. But has there ever been a better jumpstart for the heart than love and losing it? 1997’s <i>Time Out of Mind</i>—a return to originals so strong and singular, and finished under circumstances so dire that it’s fair to call it a resurrection—says no. As the decade entered its second half, Dylan found himself holed up in his native Minnesota, writing reams of heartsick lyrics as the winter pounded outside. Months later, he rendezvoused in a New York City hotel with Daniel Lanois, the imaginative producer who had helmed the sessions for 1989’s strong <i>Oh Mercy</i>. Dylan read him lyrics, handed him a stack of old blues records he loved, and told him that he loved Beck, too. Might they do something with all of that? Yes, Lanois said, and set off to work. Their early sessions in California moved in fits and starts, prompting Dylan to move the entire operation to Miami at the start of 1997. One of the greatest rock ensembles ever assembled soon joined him—two supreme drummers (Jim Keltner and Brian Blade), dual Southern swamp legends (Jim Dickinson and Augie Meyers), and a murderer’s row of guitarists (Cindy Cashdollar, Duke Robillard, Bucky Baxter) among them. They moved with the flexibility of a jazz band, shifting keys, tempos, and textures as Lanois and Dylan tried to take these blues—these testaments to dark nights of the soul—to new places. The sessions were fraught and the tempers short, but they eventually succeeded, flying back to California with the blueprints of Dylan’s first masterpiece in at least two decades. As Lanois finished the record, Dylan nearly died from a rare fungal infection, acquired while motorcycling across the Midwest. That was a proper setting for the arrival of these 11 songs, many of which seemed transmitted from the doorstep of hell. Dylan swayed like a willow in brutal wind during the lugubrious “Not Dark Yet,” and mustered just enough strength to plea for the next phase of his life—whatever that brings or means—during the warped waltz of “Trying to Get to Heaven.” He is stranded and haunted during “Cold Irons Bound,” and obsessed but feckless during the gorgeous “Make You Feel My Love.” And in proper Dylan fashion, he ends with a nearly 17-minute epic saga, “Highlands,” in which he seems to float on the periphery of reality, so over it all he can’t even order breakfast. But with Grammy wins, bigger tours, and resuscitated sales, <i>Time Out of Mind</i> would throw open the doors on the next phase of Dylan’s staggering career, resulting in some of the best and most singular work of his life. Dylanologists remain divided over the legacy of <i>Time Out of Mind</i>—how does it square with the rest of his work? But it barely matters: For Dylan, it set up the next quarter-century of prolific and dauntless music. - Bob Dylan’s motorcycle crash in 1966 ended one of the great streaks of rock ’n’ roll history, one that found the singer churning out masterwork after masterwork. In the decade that followed, there had been plenty of good records—<i>Nashville Skyline</i> and <i>New Morning</i> among them—interwoven with plenty of head-scratchers, like the infamous <i>Self Portrait</i> or the 1973 sink strainer <i>Dylan</i>. Was Dylan a country guy now? A soundtrack guy? Or was he simply confused about what was next? But in the mid-1970s, Dylan went on yet another stellar run, with his epic love quandary <i>Blood on the Tracks</i> followed in short order by the brilliant post-crash collaboration <i>The Basement Tapes</i>. And then, in the middle of June 1975, in his old New York City haunt The Other End, he marveled at a young poet and performer named Patti Smith, and had a thought: Why not form his <i>own</i> band? The result was what is perhaps Dylan’s quintessential rock record: 1976’s <i>Desire</i>. Dylan’s quest to put together a band in the summer of 1975 had been messy and chaotic, with sessions that sometimes included two-dozen ringers, and invitations extended to folks like Scarlet Rivera, a violinist Dylan had happened to see walking down the street. But as the singer’s marriage to Sara Dylan famously wobbled, and his own career and life entered a state of confusion, Dylan bore down on a set of cinematic tunes he’d crafted alongside the theater director and writer Jacques Levy. Some of these songs’ protagonists were real, like Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the boxer imprisoned for murder, and “Crazy Joe” Joey Gallo, a New York mobster. Others were imagined, like the wandering romantic always at the edge of disaster in “Isis,” or the couple fleeing across the desert toward Mexican salvation during “Romance in Durango.” The nine tracks that emerged were heavy and daunting, fueled by speed and the need to make these songs feel like testimonials. “Hurricane” is as direct a political diatribe as Dylan had ever written, while “One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)” is as brooding and stormy as anything he’d ever committed to tape. Where Emmylou Harris’ voice had been a natural fit with that of Gram Parsons, it creates impossible friction with Dylan, with dangerous sparks flying as the two explore tales of mercenary love. These songs, and the band that muscled through them, would become the basis of Dylan’s landmark Rolling Thunder Revue—his face painted white, his eyes electric, his mind a-tangle. <i>Desire</i> brilliantly captured the complications of his life and imagination at that moment, lit up by the early promise of punk rock.
- When Bob Dylan finished a worldwide tour in England in 1966, he was too exhausted to entertain The Beatles, passing out in the bathtub rather than talking tunes with his new famous friends. A month later, that enervation would come to a head when Dylan crashed his Triumph motorcycle on the twisting roads near Woodstock, an accident that purportedly almost killed him. The break that followed gave Dylan time to reckon with his head, and allowed the members of The Hawks—the band that had backed him during those brutally polarizing shows—to figure out a sound of their own at last. After struggling to find an affordable practice space in New York City, The Hawks decamped to a garish pink house with four bedrooms and a basement in West Saugerties, setting up a makeshift recording setup in that lower lair. They’d been there only briefly when Dylan arrived with Robbie Robertson and his dog, Hamlet. Dylan loved their amateur studio, and began returning almost every day between June and October 1967, feeling so at home with Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson that he began leaving his typewriter and Martin guitar there. They played new songs that he or The Hawks wrote on the spot, and dug into centuries of traditional music from the United States and Europe. These sessions were so unfettered and fun that they eventually lured Hawks drummer Levon Helm—who’d become disenchanted with working for Dylan—back into the fold. For nearly a decade, these recordings were whispered about among Dylan fans, existing only in pirated recordings. But in 1975, Robertson eventually compiled a 24-track set dubbed <i>The Basement Tapes</i>, beating the bootleggers at their own game. The album became a road map for the future of roots-rock—for just how far and how wild American music rooted in country, blues, and jazz could go. The origins of The Hawks’ titanic debut, <i>Music from Big Pink</i>, are here in a fitful take on “Tears of Rage” and a magnetic version of “Ain’t No More Cane.” (Of course, by the time <i>Big Pink</i> arrived, The Hawks had become The Band.) And Dylan reaches splendid new levels of experimental absurdity here, from the piano clap-along “Apple Suckling Tree” to the pun-rich “Open the Door, Homer.” Some of his most aching work is here, too, like the brooding testimonial “Nothing Was Delivered” and the haunted “Goin’ to Acapulco.” The sound quality of <i>The Basement Tapes</i> is often rough, and its focus is mostly nonexistent. The release of these songs would prompt existential questions about what it meant to make an album—and what right fans had to the material their heroes had made in private. But more importantly, <i>The Basement Tapes</i> threw the doors open to what folk, rock, jazz, and blues could do when they were treated like a single playground, open to everyone with an imagination and a little place to jam.
- Whether <i>Blood on the Tracks</i> was inspired by the Russian author Anton Chekhov or Dylan’s crumbling marriage to Sara Lownds or that private store of composites and impressions from which all artists inevitably draw is beside the point: By 1975, listeners should have known better than to expect a straight answer from Bob Dylan. Still, the yen to get to the bottom of the album’s inspiration makes sense—an emotional payload this heavy and you want the reassurance it actually happened to <i>someone</i>. Part of the allure was that <i>Blood</i> was the first time in years Dylan had sounded so serious. <i>Self Portrait</i>, <i>New Morning</i>, <i>Nashville Skyline</i>, <i>John Wesley Harding</i>: For years after his 1966 motorcycle accident, almost everything Dylan did seemed like an attempt to subvert people’s expectations of what it meant to be Bob Dylan.<br /> The irony was that as the persona got muddier and his sense of it more elastic, the material got clearer and simpler. Not that <i>Blood on the Tracks</i> laid Dylan bare—if anything, the album’s grace is how carefully it walks the line between confession and allegory, wallowing and reflection, the folksy and the cryptic. In some cases (“Idiot Wind,” “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”) Dylan’s vocals are so exaggerated it’s impossible to believe he’s singing about himself; in others, it’s so naturalistic and lived-in (“Simple Twist of Fate,” “Buckets of Rain”) that it’s hard to believe he’s singing about anyone else. Interestingly, Dylan’s early sketches of the songs—some compiled on 2018’s archival release <i>More Blood, More Tracks</i>, some only surviving as notes—are more lyrically direct than what ended up on the album. And then there’s Dylan’s decision to scrap several of the album’s stark early sessions for takes recorded in Minnesota with a hired backing band Dylan barely knew—a gesture that made the final product sound livelier and more self-assured, but also strangely impersonal. In other words, what you hear on <i>Blood on the Tracks</i> is, in part, an artist negotiating how thick they want to make their shell.<br /> By the time the album came out, the singer-songwriter phenomenon Dylan had been unwittingly lumped in with had mostly dispersed, or—in the case of artists like Paul Simon and James Taylor—become part of pop more generally. Meanwhile, younger artists like Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith were taking Dylan’s approach to poetry and the romance of the American myth in new directions, with <i>Born to Run</i> and <i>Horses</i>, respectively. You could see how it might be reassuring to hear an artist as willfully impenetrable as Dylan sing something as humble as “Buckets of Rain,” or a line like “You’re an idiot, babe/It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe”: The genius—he’s finally letting his guard down. But as much as <i>Blood</i> is remembered as the postmortem of an ordinary human marriage, it also kicked off a decade for Dylan that included the Rolling Thunder Revue, an embrace of backing vocalists, a radical conversion to Christianity, and, eventually, synthesizers. There are moments of stillness here, moments of reflection and purity. But in the end, the only constant was change.
- By the end of 1965, Bob Dylan was on an unprecedented tear. That year, he’d shocked the folk faithful by turning electric and inward, with both <i>Bringing It All Back Home</i> and <i>Highway 61 Revisited</i> finding him howling questions about how he fit inside the world—and, as a result, fending off resulting accusations of heresy. Only two months after the release of <i>Highway 61</i>, Dylan returned to a New York studio with his new backing band, The Hawks, for a series of frustrating sessions that resulted in very little. But in early 1966, at the behest of producer Bob Johnston, Dylan decamped to Nashville alongside guitarist Robbie Robertson and keyboardist Al Kooper to try again with a set of country aces. In relatively short order, <i>Blonde on Blonde</i>—a gargantuan statement of love, loss, and longing, built with some of Dylan’s best barbs and most beautiful phrases—was finished. <i>Blonde on Blonde</i> opens with “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35,” an outlier that became a hit. The ragtime piano and jubilant singing about everybody being stoned made for an easy sell, but it was a defiant little curio, too, with Dylan shrugging off those who were stoning him for his wild artistic turns. The album’s remaining 70 minutes toggle among happiness, horniness, and hopefulness, as the newly married Dylan sorts through his back pages of failed relationships and lurid affairs, trying to cast them aside like old skin. Dylan ponders his ideal lover, even as he lingers in the clutches of Louise, during the graceful “Visions of Johanna.” He scoffs at his past foolishness in “Temporary Like Achilles,” finding kinship with an old lover’s new suitor (who’ll surely be pushed aside sooner than he expects). And he hilariously beats on his own trumpet during the walloping “Absolutely Sweet Marie” and spies on an old flame making love in a dilapidated garage for the brutal “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” a kiss-off of the highest order. Then there’s the striking “Just Like a Woman”: Inspired by the soul music stirring from Memphis and Detroit, the song defines the double-edged joy and danger of any relationship, anchoring Dylan’s lyrics to one of rock’s definitive hooks. Both <i>Bringing It All Back Home</i> and <i>Highway 61 Revisited</i> had found Dylan straying from politics and folk forms—but he’d yet to cut the tether. <i>Blonde on Blonde</i>, the first double-album masterpiece of the rock ’n’ roll era, would slash that tie with glee and aplomb. Its 11-minute finale, “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” was a worship song of sorts for his first wife, Sara Lownds, indulging in his sense of wonder over her and her mystery. His previous work could have never held such a personal testimonial, cloaked in poetry and guided by an attentive Nashville crew.
- “I need a dump truck, baby, to unload my head,” Bob Dylan howls toward the middle of his epiphanic 1965 album, <i>Highway 61 Revisited</i>, shooting out of a ragged harmonica solo during the rollicking “From a Buick 6” to diagnose his own condition. At that moment, the twenty-something Dylan—the unofficial youth poet laureate of the United States, as well as the sneering voice of an emergent counterculture—had a lot on his mind, and perhaps more on his professional plate. When he returned stateside after a breakneck British tour in May 1965, he was exhausted, having released five albums—including four certifiable landmarks—in just three years. Was he out of things to say, out of the drive to say them? But, as legend has it, a long stream-of-consciousness manuscript later that month yielded “Like a Rolling Stone,” an anthem of youthful restlessness and grit aimed at a world of know-it-all cynics. Dylan cut it early that summer above Al Kooper’s roaring organ line, then headed to Newport to debut his electric band to a crowd incensed by his folk volte-face. When he returned to the studio just a few days later with a fresh producer—the largely unproven Bob Johnston—he indeed had a lot to unload, and he’d air his grievances via his newly perfected, warped blues-rock sound. Dylan’s frustration comes through on these nine songs, which find him railing against the world’s barbaric weight (“Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”), against high society’s superficial wisdom (“Ballad of a Thin Man”), and against the heart’s tangles and briars (“It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry”). The direct appeals of his earlier works have yielded to deeply referential poetry, resulting in a self-made associative universe in which lovers walk like Bo Diddley, God dispatches Abraham to the Blues Highway along the Mississippi River, and where Einstein slips into Robin Hood’s garb. These were the images of an overheated mind, acting out the theater of human experience—youth versus age, freedom versus oppression, joy versus anxiety—in rock song. As controversial as it may have been to some, Dylan’s electric pivot on all of these songs, save the brilliant capstone “Desolation Row,” could not have arrived at a better time. The dancehall crackle of the title track, the gothic groan of “Ballad of a Thin Man,” and the amphetamine shimmy of “Tombstone Blues”—they all ground these songs in magnetic rock ’n’ roll trappings that gave listeners something to hold onto as the language, lessons, and landscape of rock shifted in real time—something that absolutely happened on, and because of, <i>Highway 61 Revisited</i>.
- The alarm bell rang two seconds into Bob Dylan’s 1965 masterpiece, <i>Bringing It All Back Home</i>. Sure, the opening acoustic chord was nervy, even angular. But it was that high electric lick that sliced beneath the start of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” that signaled Dylan’s true unrest—not to mention a sea of change in his so-called folk music. For four albums, Dylan had been almost entirely alone, his heavy-handed acoustic strums and occasional piano supporting his famously nasal tone and whining harmonica. But if his champions had been disappointed by the singer’s turn from politics to the personal on 1964’s <i>Another Side of Bob Dylan</i>, then <i>Bringing It All Back Home</i>—with those Edisonized licks, walloping drums, and charging band—must have indeed felt like Judas’ betrayal of Jesus. Still, the album’s electrified first half is one of rock ’n’ roll’s great gambits, condensing tales of urban excitement, bohemian beauty, socialist resistance, racial protest, and even an alternate history of the United States into little more than 20 minutes. “Outlaw Blues” is an escapist outburst, pounding ahead like a No Wave premonition, while “She Belongs to Me” reigns as one of folk-rock’s first true gems. And for anyone who demanded that Dylan forever remain in <i>Freewheelin’</i> mode, there was “Maggie’s Farm,” an assault on capitalist cruelty that doubled as an unfond farewell to anyone holding you against your will—like, say, folkies of a certain vintage. The band stepped away for the four songs of the second half, but it somehow felt no less electric. “Mr. Tambourine Man” is an anthem of generational liberation, aimed at those “ready for to fade/into my own parade.” And Dylan’s consecutive and consummate epics, “Gates of Eden” and “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” are poetic fever dreams, the swirling imagery of the former giving way to the heady and ceaseless aphorisms (“He not busy being born is busy dying”) of the latter. Dylan—and for that matter, much of rock ’n’ roll, punk included—would rarely sound so aggressive. And as soft landings go, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” arrives as a slap in the face, a love-me-or-leave-me edict for anyone who doubted Dylan’s new direction. There’s a common conception that Dylan left political songwriting behind on <i>Another Side of Bob Dylan</i>, a move affirmed by <i>Bringing It All Back Home</i>. But even apart from radical screeds like “Maggie’s Farm” or the stunning and playful “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” these 11 songs are acts of radical freedom—of taking convention not as a direction but as a challenge. In many ways, <i>Bringing It All Back Home</i> is Dylan’s most political work, putting the ideas of his past to use in his own work.
- Bob Dylan’s third album, his first to contain all original songs, reveals a revolutionary-minded 22-year-old leaning to the political and social. He’s his generation’s reporter on both the anthemic title song and the lamenting-yet-urgent “With God on Our Side.” On the heartbreaking “North Country Blues,” he tells of a wife who loses her loved ones to the town mine. Dylan’s genius here is how he blends complex ideas of poverty and racism with beat poetry and sturdy acoustic-folk traditions, while making it all easy to sing along to.
- Life changed for the 20-year-old Minnesota transplant named Bob Dylan after he cut his self-titled debut for Columbia in 1961. Sure, there was some modest public attention and a prominent new perch within New York’s folk community. But mostly Dylan fell in love and into radical politics, both due in part to Suze Rotolo, the smiling brunette famously clutching the kid’s arm as they paraded down a street in the West Village on the cover of his 1963 breakthrough, <i>The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan</i>. On his debut, released just a month before sessions for his second record began, Dylan had included only two original songs—little oddities tucked among <i>Bob Dylan</i>’s 11 covers. But on <i>The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan</i>, the numbers were reversed, with two traditional songs at the end offering a reprieve from the intensity and intricacy of Dylan’s political invective and romantic longing. <i>Freewheelin’</i> is not only a masterpiece, it’s the bona fide beginning of Bob Dylan proper. Much as he would remain his entire career, Dylan was still in the thrall of antique songs on <i>Freewheelin’</i>. He was a magpie who pulled bits from traditional English ballads, American folk numbers, and hardscrabble blues. But now, rather than just play those tunes, he used them as templates for anti-Vietnam screeds like “Masters of War,” generational volleys like opener “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and lovesick laments like “Girl From the North Country.” In very short order, Dylan had become a singer-songwriter, not merely a folk singer who sometimes set some of his own verses to strums. It was, in many ways, a new paradigm. Dylan experimented with supporting musicians during these sessions, spread as they were across a year. He gets a little help on the lovely “Corrina, Corrina,” too, with shuffling drums and a spritely guitar lifting up his little song of love. Otherwise, the songs on <i>Freewheelin’</i> mostly consist of Dylan’s voice, guitar, and emphatic harmonica, so that each song is a perfect distillation of intent. Maybe it sounds silly, but “Talkin’ World War III Blues” is an unstoppable plea for solidarity. Maybe it sounds jaunty, but “Oxford Town” sets the grim evening news to a graceful melody, giving the Civil Rights movement another song to share—and providing another invitation for the coalition. Dylan was a wide-eyed idealist in 1963, supercharged by the potential power of old tunes bearing new ideas, and <i>Freewheelin’</i> was his introductory contribution to the revolution of his age.