obviously 85 bob dylans

you know him, he’s his

dedicated to the memory of Timothée Chalamet

If I can make my sister wait a few days for her birthday post, Bob Dylan can certainly hold his tireless horses. After all, Dylan is the one who taught me that you don’t do it until you feel like it, and when you do you do it your way or there’s no reason to do it. Bob has spent eighty-five years on his own timetable, and still hopes you follow suit.

Bob not only proved to me the value of the spontaneous and the irreverent, he stirred up in me a sense of vitality about these things, and now that’s how I live. Skeptical of authority on a spectrum from bemused to outraged (thirsty for the moments I can get under its skin), and absolutely certain that only when I feel absolutely certain should I do the thing. Not that foot-shooting deliberation; that treating the calendar and clock like two more policemen — pull their hats over their eyes and duck back in the alley. I know from him the value of being wholly yourself, of sifting around inside yourself for that self and making the lifelong cause to reify it and find out where you can deploy it.

Practically no one in history better taught a lesson most of us still resist at every turn — it doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be brilliant, and different than anything else before it. If you put it out in a condition no one’s ever witnessed before instead of achingly calculating to meet some standard hanging over you like a sword, that, that is how you get something that sets the world on fire, you clown. That is how you shatter these molds weighing our tread like leg irons. That is how you freak the king out and get the whole world laughing at him. That is how you create a sea of masterpieces full of mistakes. That is how you get to bug out of expectations after just a quarter century.

The storied ‘66 crash was of course the pyre on which Dylan burned the idea that he’d ever have to chase anyone’s standard again, even the standard he created after a series of magic tricks he was designed to take for granted. Nobody that scruffy, untutored or reckless should win a record contract quicker and fatter than his more studied Village peers; no upstart crow should cut a masterpiece as monumental and sagacious as The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. But as I ran down in the only other JACKALS! cut about my old hero, tallying up all of what Bob influenced (the Civil Rights movement, the Fab Four, psychedelia, anti-psychedelia) is easier than tallying what he didn’t (uh, James Brown).

Dylan’s work is a series of automatic lurches toward those elusive zones where vision and instinct meet, and nobody does it better. And what I love is how he showed us for good that getting close is as good as getting it right so long as you say it loud; the rest is silence. What a day it’s gonna be when the troubadour leaves this realm for another dimension’s adventures. Everybody’s gonna strain and scrape for those right words — and while many will come close, they’ll still sort of miss his big point. Irreverence, babe — that’s what suits a statue. Chisel out the verse on the stone: if Dylan’s ghost sees it, he’ll probably graffiti something like “Wiggle Wiggle” beneath his own hollow eulogy.

Today, because Bob shouldn’t have to celebrate making it eighty-five years for just one fleeting 24-hour period — that he’s here is a miracle, though living your way and your way alone is probably the secret — I’m gonna sit right here at my desk like he’d do at his typewriter and see what comes out. Rhythms of unpoetic distortion, I suspect, not what Bob does. Coz it’s so hard to be that rhythmic and that imprecise, that distorted and that clarifying, that unpoetic and that unbelievably brilliant and beautiful. But fie on my doubt. The exercise today is to click shuffle on a playlist some mad saint made called “The Complete, Chronological Bob Dylan” and see what I hear, and what I say.

#1 MISSISSIPPI (live 2001, Bootleg Series Vol. 17)
I’ve never been thrilled with the idea of the Bootleg Series. What Bob threw out led to what he kept, and the corporate greed behind it is only partially justified by beautiful curation and plum liner-note opportunities. His voice here the equivalent of the word rattlesnake, this is a strut through Love and Theft’s prettiest, shapeliest, toughest, most modern song, one of his best. It’s a pre- (or circa-; L&T came out that fateful Tuesday) 9/11 song in a post-9/11 world; its fight and hope have expanded, and feel unstoppable.

#2 LITTLE MAGGIE (Good as I Been to You)
Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, the acoustic-cover resets, are mysterious records perfectly timed — Dylan beat political machines in the ‘60s but couldn’t best those of his own industry in the ‘80s. So he stripped things down so much it’s almost unprofessional: undisciplined strumming-plus-frills (the sound of the guitar’s pickup screams “evolving tech”), and his voice finally untouched by effects after too long. Its level of ruin in that harsh light had to be startling. You still have to pull the song out from under this stuff — all he conveys is frustration, weariness, and ageless authority.

#3 JUST LIKE A WOMAN (Live at Royal Albert Hall, May 26 1966)
The song’s sexism, which was always balanced a little by its clearly sincere sweetness, was never served well by the somewhat corny 12/8 time and the wild mercury frosting. Here, as usually thereafter, he strums it in 4/4, echoing the lyric’s real-time realization — and that’s what really balances out the sexism, that by design the singer pretends to certainty but at the “I can’t stay in here” reveals his doubt, with music fashioned to fit. The overwhelming hush and echo in the Not The Albert Hall Hall does wonders for it.

#4 MISS THE MISSISSIPPI (1992 outtake, Bootleg Series Vol. 8)
I know before he about-faced into the covers albums he was trying some sessions with David Bromberg; I assume this is from that. What’s startling about this cover, which is golden-age rural-dream pop as opposed to old weird folk, is how good it sounds — he wouldn’t recapture its warm, sweet organicity until Modern Times, the album where he really, finally seemed to escape into a past he imagined (or cobbled together) for good.

#5 DREAMIN’ OF YOU (Time Out of Mind outtake, Bootleg Series Vol. 17)
Put this forth as evidence at the trial Daniel Lanois’ was never called in for. How that guy got the idea he was the right producer for Dylan, rather than an insider who could maybe reinvigorate some commercial interest, we’ll never know. Bare of any post-prod laboring, the trip-hoppy trend-chasing, most audible in the drums, distracts from the already-meager song. But it does flesh out the sexiness in Dylan’s time-ravaged voice. You could convince yourself this is groovy or soulful, and it does nod at same, but the truth is clear — Lanois is using commercial tricks, and it has zilch to do with Zimmy.

(in retrospect this entry is unfair, Time Out of Mind is really good and that does depend on an atmosphere that very much bears Lanois’ idiosyncratic stamp, but he came from cornier stuff and that’s why Oh Mercy sounds like that; Time sounds like Froom/Blake)

#6 BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND (live 1975, Bootleg Series Vol. 5)
This folly is all Bob’s, and his own showbiz machinations, which no A&R man’s idea of same matched, through the late ‘70s still mystify. The tentative-to-triumphant ‘74 to ‘5 moves made ice-thawing sense — Planet Waves’ is-what-it-is state of affairs, Before the Flood’s Band revenge tour, Blood on the Tracks’ doing-consciously-what-I-used-to-do-unconsciously, The Basement Tapes’ Band olive branch. Rolling Thunder’s victory lap feels strangely complacent, unguarded and indulgent. Yeah, it led to a lot of very cool footage, which nobody (not even Scorsese) could edit coherently, and cool stories, not to mention cameos like this. But whether it’s “Diamonds and Rust” or this classic, the Baez stuff is pure nostalgia-as-egotism. They got to the heart of nothing on that tour.

#7 MR. TAMBOURINE MAN (Concert for Bangladesh)
Not four years before, an entirely different person than he was in ‘65 or ‘75, he showed up at a similar superstar extravaganza and was instantly, clearly the most honest thing onstage. It’s mostly just him and his guitar — the bloated sessioneer band would only bury the selections, all of which take on the fragile optimism and political passion of “Blowin’ in the Wind” even if only the Freewheelin’ tracks are actually political (and he almost didn’t play them out of disinterest in looking back — recall his retort when his favorite Fab asked him for “Wind”: “are you gonna play ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’?”)

#8 I DON’T BELIEVE YOU (Last Waltz)
Waltzing from one star-studded context to another, here we find yet another side. His “I Shall Be Released” at this concert is overblown and listless, sodden with musicians, its only highlight Richard Manuel’s far-fallen passage. This is screaming and electric even before Robbie R. conjures demons he’d rarely revisit after “Who Do You Love” — his bitter sense of rejection sounds as fresh and strangely empowering as it did when he was a kid who knew how to catch but not hold a lover’s attention. We never say this outright about Bob, but it’s true: before punk, nobody was better at singing “fuck you”.

#9 SUMMER DAYS (Love and Theft)
Speaking of punk, here’s a gutbucket rave-up at a pace Steve Jones would have trouble keeping up with. Lyrics spill off the edges like drinks on a platter in a busy speakeasy. Dust flies off the floor with every drumbeat and hits your nose like smokehouse meat. To think he came on in Time Out of Mind like it was all over — this dude just don’t die.

#10 RING THEM BELLS (live 1993, Bootleg Series Vol. 8)
Lifted by a live band that still knows how to lilt, as well as the cheers of fans wrapped up in its new sense of climax, this version sounds rather more like “Mississippi” than the gospel piano version on Oh Mercy. Accordingly, our man’s voice sounds both closer to death and a lot more alive. Dylan’s gospel soars on the wings of its own earthiness.

#11 BLUE MOON (Self-Portrait)
Basically as worthless as Elvis’ is a treasure. Even if he was already cynically hip to the public’s game in 1970, you can’t blame him for expecting an audience who adored him that unreservedly would also get his jokes. You also can’t blame him for loving a song so much he takes it this straight. But then sing it honestly, cowboy. The violin is nice.

#12 LET ME DIE IN MY FOOTSTEPS (1962 outtake, The Bootleg Series Vols. 1—3)
Seven or eight light years back in time to an unimaginable hero, one who didn’t even have to work to be the most stunning thing in the room. Majestic, felt, restrained and abundant with empathy, not to mention poetic, how in the world this didn’t make the cut for the first record, which is full of ungainly trivialities, is one of those mysteries Bob attracts like shit does flies. Long ago, The Bootleg Series was a true public service.

#13 DELIA (World Gone Wrong)
The casual human beauty he works up on that last one survives, intact, three decades later. Except now that he can’t hide the creaks in his voice, he doesn’t hide the creaks in his heart either. Why should he? It isn’t his song, so you can’t pin the tears on him. But actors use their texts for real catharsis. A few choruses in, you start to realize that this record is probably not about who the song is. “All the friends I ever had are gone.”

#14 SAD-EYED LADY OF THE LOWLANDS (take 1, Bootleg Series Vol. 12)
On its way more lyrically than sonically — not sure if “your mercury eyes” is a mistake or he only realizes by the third line he’s got two “eyes” so close together, with his own warehouse eyes ready to repeat ad nauseum. Given how often those three brilliant LPs came together on the fly musically, it’s actually pretty cool how much this one sounds like its future self on arrival; a rare victory for Dylan the arranger. But he clearly cared about it — the first valentine he ever labored over, and probably last until Blood on the Tracks, so close to what he meant no matter how little we get it that he boasts about it in “Sara”, his most petulant and poorest valentine until the dark wood of the ‘80s. The vocal is ragged — it’s 4 AM — and these words are fresh from the next room. I’ve long thought what’s magic about this track, besides the easy way it bears the weight of (and outdoes) the rest of Blonde on Blonde, is how close it gets to sentimental without injury.

#15 WE BETTER TALK THIS OVER (Street-Legal)
As I say in “Ain’t That Just Like My Heart, Babe” — that this LP arrived so soon after Blood on the Tracks is proof growth isn’t liner. Everything about this cut is dead wrong: the arrangement, the backup ladies, the rhythm, the sentiment, the syllabic emphasis.

#16 CAN YOU PLEASE CRAWL OUT YOUR WINDOW? (take 1, Bootleg Series 12)
Maybe the Band didn’t prove the right band for Blonde, but when they were right for our man they were right in the pocket. When they were usually the rightest for Dylan was when he was immeasurably pissed off. This lazy, disinterested take is a long way from that, and I bet the second he reminded himself of the slight that inspired it the right take took no labor at all. The Band needed a spark and a guide to hang together, which is why they basically spent their career failing to, even if the most beautiful or profound or culturally unifying places they ventured were necessarily de-Dylanized.

(in retrospect this entry is a little unfair to Robbie Robertson, but not by a whole lot)

#17 FIXIN’ TO DIE (Bob Dylan)
Dylan conveys what he believes this means by putting every ounce of tension he can into his own body. Cute and annoying like only a kid can be. This dude just don’t die.

#18 SEE YOU LATER ALLEN GINSBERG (Bootleg Series Vol. 11)
The seismic achievements of pop musicians in the 1960s often belie how much of the activity amounted to young people fucking around. It’s true The Basement Tapes’ value, inconceivable via lysergic aid, has something to do with souls so old and in tune with their muses you can’t see them ever being careless tykes. Here’s proof they still were.

#19 I AND I (2004 “reggae remix” by Doctor Dread)
This was already a reggae song, if not a good one — Infidels is drenched in strain and self-pity, which Mark Knopfler’s überprofessional production provides an interesting context for but does few favors. What this remix does, unexpectedly but shrewdly, is strip it down, rag it up and clear some space, so that it sounds much closer to “Blind Willie McTell” than “Jokerman”. The dub remix is likely an even bigger improvement.

#20 IT AIN’T ME BABE (Bootleg Series Vol. 11)
From The Complete Basement Tapes — which along with The Cutting Edge dissolves the line between art and archaeology. But as you can see, there’s some interesting stuff to sift out of there, stuff you couldn’t blame any artist for treating like garbage no matter what A.J. Weberman says. This isn’t a good version of “It Ain’t Me Babe” — think the Isle of Wight tracks but worse, sloppy and strangely crooned — yet its value is, as is so often the case with Bob, conceptual. This was in his head when he laid that bike down.

#21 MISSISSIPPI (Love and Theft)
The gem in the flesh, its only drawback that it sounds contemporary where the rest of Love and Theft sounds timeless. He only wrote melodies this pretty when he felt like it, but when he did they were the belles of the ball. I’ll take another seven version of this.

#22 I SHALL BE FREE (Bootleg Series Vol. 9)
Sometimes these old versions give lie to the idea that Bob did everything offhand; the subtle differences between this one’s lyrical/vocal virtues and the Freewheelin’ one’s are what happens when you stop and think it through a little. It’s still essentially the same work of art, though. But the idea of him submitting this to a publishing company (Vol. 9 is the Witmark demos, but if you’ve made it this far you already knew that), as if any other human being could do it, tickles me like any of its one-liners. We do get the cute little bit at the end where he marvels that he can remember all the gags in one go. I’m still not sure how he got the “country’ll grow” joke on a record album in stuffy old ‘63.

#23 MAN GAVE NAMES TO ALL THE ANIMALS (live 1981, Bootleg Series Vol. 13)
What I love about this song is how it proves beyond all doubt that the Christian phase was a matter of a person utterly losing his marbles. This forces the unsettling thought that prior to 1979, Bob Dylan was sane, even more troubling than contemplating what death is like if there’s no afterlife. On the other hand, I really love the way it could be an out, all contrary testifying aside, that that whole wrong turn was one giant prank. (Sort of a shame Dylan’s team didn’t slip this one to Doctor Dread for good measure.)

#24 SLOW TRAIN (rehearsal with horns, Bootleg Series Vol. 13)
But then there’s the fact that, although he should’ve outsourced the lyrics to Carolyn Dennis (or Helena Springs) (or Mavis Staples), in the wake of his Pentecostal overhaul he figured out how to conjure a song so forcefully soulful it’s worthy of Muscle Shoals. Miracles happen all the time — really, his whole career to date had been proof of that.

#25 BLUES STAY AWAY FROM ME (Doug Sahm and Band)
Dylan never felt more MIA than in 1972, and it seems like that’s because it was when he most Could Not Be Bothered. Ergo, Doug Sahm’s stubbornly rough and laid-back music shack was the perfect place for him to shamble into and dick out an oldie. Not exactly Basement Tapes indolent genius — but more fun than, oh, Music from Big Pink.

#26 MR. TAMBOURINE MAN (live 1981, Bootleg Series Vol. 13)
From the same show (I think) as the above “Man Gave Names to All the Animals”, this is a sub-Budokan reading of a classic. Not only is the arrangement painfully irrelevant, the vocal is completely disinterested — he sounds impatient to get to his next sermon.

#27 SHE’S YOUR LOVER NOW (take 15, The Cutting Edge)
And at a hairpin, a public failure gives way to a private masterpiece; obviously, that’s just how Dylan works. This is the same “She’s Your Lover Now” on The Bootleg Series, in its most complete state, but the record is necessarily ragged and inchoate. Even if he insisted on spontaneity, Dylan was also always calculated — that’s the formula — and the candor and hurt in this performance is like all that love-starved bitterness strewn throughout Blonde on Blonde but inverted to show the pain that powers it. It’s like one of those real-life cinematic moments you steal from somebody slipping through your fingers, where you finally seize an attention close to what they used to pour over you, and the sense of stakes rises around you in a deafening hum. The urgency of his love trips over inescapable resentment, yet there’s still an uncanny gentleness here, like he left all his assurance in the pile of jackets in the other room. That this is addressed to a friend only complicates a mystery whose facts we were never offered in the first place. Like all good mysteries, it leaves you hanging — a six-decade-old unfinished sentence.

He turned this into “One of Us Must Know”, still one of his few truly affectionate and openhearted songs. It validated his instincts — clearly, he hadn’t worked out enough what he wanted to say for his first try. But that you can play the pair side by side and “One of Us Must Know” sounds like the lie is proof something was never recaptured.

#28 BALLAD IN PLAIN D (Another Side of Bob Dylan)
Ah yes. I won’t do the constant scrapegoat the injustice of skipping this ripped-from-the-headlines dirge, which in a way we owe for the Ten of Swords bootleg (grazie mille, Parasite Sister Records). I’d be lying if I said my heart was entirely hard to it — I, too, had a Suze Rotolo, a brilliant girl who believed in and loved me, to whom I was unkind and of whom I was possessive, and the heartbreak I doled sent me deep into waves of self-pitying reflection. So you hear the love in this, and you hear the hurt, and even the melody does some work to convey it. But the lyric is bad, down to the memorable “are birds free from the chains of the skyway”, and not only bad, but terribly unfair. Dylan realized this, and admitted it in print, and maybe minus a few bottles of Beaujolais it would’ve stayed inside. A solid case for his insistence on elusion, lo these many years.

#29 ON THE ROAD AGAIN (Bringing it All Back Home)
Ah, but there’s the twist — moving on, sure, is chaotic and frustrating, but it can also be bizarre kinds of fun and affirmative. Not only are few of its surreal images easy to connect to symbolic possibilities, they’re a little offhand even for him — gotta trudge frog-socked through some okay-maybes to get to “even the butler, he’s got something to prove”. Yet anyone who’s ever shacked up with in-laws will feel stinging familiarity.

#30 HEARTLAND (from Willie Nelson’s Across the Borderline)
A co-composition from these two men — I had no idea this existed — from the early ‘90s. So while Willie sounds, typically, more confident than anybody who sounds that relaxed should, and live-r than you’ll ever be, Dylan sounds like he’s singing from his hospital bed. I’m trying to do this without looking anything up, so I do wonder exactly how they went about writing this. The music is an august trudge, pretty and dolorous, while the lyrics are a litany of heartland horrors — I’d say “if they only knew”, but they do, and are gonna evade the upcoming worst of it one way or another. And if you told me David Crosby wrote them, my only question would be why it’s called “Heartland”.

#31 O’ LITTLE TOWN OF BETHLEHEM (Christmas in the Heart)
This selection from Dylan’s only release consciously designed as a comedy album tells you how much he loves Brian Wilson in the choral opening. Then a grizzly bear joins the carolers, and as with all his vocals on this record, you become instantly unable to focus on anything the lyrics are telling you to celebrate. Still, he sings like he means it.

#32 A FOOL SUCH AS I (Bootleg Series Vol. 11)
Free access to occasional privileged scholars makes more sense than a $100-plus price tag for everybody. What was great about the 1975 Basement Tapes is how it intensified the mystery it was purporting to solve. I love many of the japes and toss-offs the full set features. I’m just not sure I need to hear the merely shitty covers the guys taped. I get enough from the sound of Dylan looking back — with the most barely perceptible emotion, yet such clear awe — on how performers like Al Jolson and Johnnie Ray and Webb Pierce captivated him as a young boy, the old weird America recalled as if still in innocence by the world’s most interesting old weird man. I get enough from the fun idea that “Went to See the Gypsy” is about Elvis, a washed-up Elvis who still gets the better of a Dylan who doesn’t know he’s washed up yet. But this is just Dylan ‘73 chaff.

#33 SOMEONE’S GOT A HOLD OF MY HEART (Bootleg Series Vols. 1—3)
Probably put out, in a slightly less invested and much less produced edition than the Empire Burlesque version that sent so many diehards into snickers or that old “Judas!” despair, because it’s less produced. But it’s still just a really nice little song. Melody-wise it dances at the upper end of a bright major key like diamonds on the water at five o’clock, while lyrically, unlike the similarly comely “Jokerman”, it at least gives you a few indications that it’s so pretty because it’s thinking fondly of another human being.

#34 TO MAKE YOU FEEL MY LOVE (Time Out of Mind)
Meanwhile, this one absolutely refuses to disguise that it’s thinking fondly of another human being in any of the usual ways. I like some of how its forthrightness shows up — “you ain’t seen nothin’ like me yet” is worthy of Tunnel of Love — but honestly, this would’ve ended up nowhere if Billy Joel hadn’t turned it into a power ballad, on one of the pop songs he’s cut since retiring early, which you can count on a six-fingered hand.

#35 I THREW IT ALL AWAY (Nashville Skyline)
Dylan is obviously not a paragon of authenticity — even this, his most beautiful and least ambiguous (lyrically or in terms of its commercial ambition) album, is sung in a Muppet voice throughout. But I think the reason it’s the only time he was able to slip comfortably into a pure-pop mode, besides its proximity to his still-unbroken heyday, is because Nashville pop makes a lot more sense to Dylan than the other kinds. “I’ve always wanted to write these kinds of songs,” he told an interviewer, though possibly not in those words (not tryna Jonah Lehrer you here), and their simplicity is just the John Wesley Harding trick turned outward rather than inward. If Dylan didn’t have his finger on a few pulses, he would never have connected with millions. And he’d been in love enough to know how to write sweet, and out of it enough to nail true heartbreak.

#36 I AND I (Infidels)
This is closer to that reggae remix than I remember it — rawer and more atmospheric than a lot of Infidels is when I play it in my head, as opposed to on a set of speakers. So let’s have a look at the lyric, which borrows a title from the Rastafari concept (cultural appropriation, check), starting out with a strange woman sleeping in Bob’s bed, and a few verses in catching his mind so far off track she probably got up to pee a while ago and he didn’t notice. His words are as allusive and into words as ever, but are not two things he always was: clever, and interested in their audience. He’d get the knack back — but that’s why nobody clamors to claim classic status for Infidels like they did in ‘83.

#37 2 DOLLARS AND 99 CENTS (Bootleg Series Vol. 11)
Haha, I knew this exercise would involve a lot of grungy basement tapes vignettes — and yes, there are worse things than hearing Bob Dylan and the Band indifferently go through blues and folk standards in 1967. Turns out this isn’t even a standard, it’s an original, but it’s a long way down from “Apple Suckling Tree”. Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that the list price of the six-CD set was originally fifty times the title amount.

#38 COVENANT WOMAN (Saved)
Can you think of a less auspicious title from Bob Dylan’s early ‘80s? I either forgot or didn’t know this existed, and Dylan certainly doesn’t sing it like he believes in it at all, with the band following suit. Some prophet. You kind of need Saved, though — if he’s gotta have a whole Christian trilogy, it makes a lot more sense for Robert Zimmerman if he stops believing in it by the album #2, setting up Shot of Love’s delighted sacrilege. And anyway, if you make it to the chorus of this one, you hear him get onto something.

#39 EDGE OF THE OCEAN (Bootleg Series Vol. 11)
Either it’s “Goin’ to Acapulco” on its way to the border or it’s just another rough little diamond that came out when Bob scratched his hair down in that basement. Its use of seagulls as an apocalyptic image is amusing given the horrific ascendance of Jonathan Livingston not too long later. Mostly, though, it’s just lovely and lightly soulful, which one is often reminded were not among Bob’s big strengths before that summer of love.

#40 EMOTIONALLY YOURS (alternate take, Bootleg Series Vol. 16)
One of my least favorite Dylan hooks in the way he sings it and the melody he picked. Like most of the Empire Burlesque outtakes, though, it’s much less extra, to its massive advantage. Between the way the piano and organ feel through the space and the little variations he puts on that melody, so turgid and saccharine done straight or without real feeling (as on the record), this is actually really nice. It’s not even that few people are as capable of both greatness and awfulness as Bob Dylan — it’s that the area his gifts encompass borders both, and it’s all about how he’s elected to navigate it today.

#41 VOMIT EXPRESS (Allen Ginsberg, Holy Soul Jelly Roll box set)
I haven’t heard this song, which is miles from the first thing I’d recommend by either artist, since I played this whole set in ‘11, gently high on pot up in the most fearsome roads on the Smoky Mountains. My initial attempts to lock love and life in had fallen apart; I was 23, unemployed, undesired and unsure of where to go next. Then I heard that my grandparents were looking for another set of hands on their crew on their NJ irrigation company. I didn’t relish the idea of working the earth or telling people what I did for a living, yet something about impulsive cross-country leaps got me dreaming.

After all, Jersey’s just a car trip to The City, and I’d been wearing out my DVD of Don’t Look Back. That Dylan is at the perilous tip of the zeitgeist, but hadn’t he gotten there with little more than prayers in his pockets? Hadn’t he hitchhiked out to The City, on a wild whim to claim the fate he’d decided long ago was his? There was, sure, so much right-time-right-place to how he did it — history a blanker canvas, NYC a much more penetrable fortress. But the sheer daring capriciousness of it all felt like a suit I’d love to slip into. While Dylan and I ultimately created different results for ourselves, I felt perhaps more than ever like I was writing my own unbelievable destiny — all my shit packed haphazardly into that little Ford Focus, the life I wanted begging for my grasp.

I have mixed feelings about the period I spent installing sprinklers — plus fitful forays to New York for occasional fabulous anecdotes or encounters with luminaries, and not creating art or believing in myself at the necessary rate to turn a great notion into the real thing. But I’ll never forget that road trip, whose soundtrack was Greil Marcus’ “30 Records About America” list, burned on a set of CDs because everything has changed already. It turns out my promised land was less a place than a time. But I outran a cop in the heartland to Springsteen’s “State Trooper”, got high on a college town pit stop to Skip Spence’s Oar, and let Allen Ginsberg explain every last facet of life, so much of it still foreign, through the Smoky Mountains. On the way back, I played Lana Del Rey.

#42 THE BALLAD OF THE GLIDING SWAN (Bootleg Series Vol. 18)
That within two years of his own great leap Dylan was set to star in a televised British play called Madhouse on Castle Street — now lost, which is neatly mythic — is another testament to how ready the culture was to be upended. As with Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid ten years later, they hired him assuming he could pull anything off, and instead he got promptly uncomfortable (couldn’t even learn lines) and asserted his own marginal but vital approach. For Pat he responded to the request for a soundtrack with no effort beyond one of the greatest songs ever written; for Madhouse, by “Swan”’s evidence, he didn’t even write good songs. It was still exactly right — irreverence, all the way down.

#43 COME BACK BABY (Carolyn Hester, Carolyn Hester)
Our boy’s first-ever recording session — yes, that’s him on harmonica, sounding solid but terrified, hanging mostly on one chord and allowing himself a few easy blues licks and a solo that consists, safely, of a single held note. He goes up and down in the mix, and you suspect some of it is the engineer hiding him. The effect is precisely the same as teasing out Miles Davis on his very first session, no shape of things to come in sight.

#44 PLAYBOYS AND PLAYGIRLS (with Pete Seeger, Newport Broadside)
“All you playboys and playgirls ain’t a-gonna run my world,” he insists, but that wasn’t exactly true of his dizzying youth, was it? A field recording, not a studio one, its music is the usual hallowed old tricks, and the lyrics hit faintly at the right ideas. Yet here he is already, with the king of folk music, who’d worked his ass off honestly for years for that crown, whereas Dylan’s suddenly at Woody Guthrie’s bedside because he decided that’s where he had to be. Bob’s heroes were welcoming this opportunist in with wide open arms, before he represented any kind of opportunities for them (and really, who killed the folk movement? We know who, if not why and what’s the reason for). Me, I couldn’t even get Christgau to hang out past sundown. It takes more than a big idea.

#45 COUNTRY PIE (take 2, Bootleg Series Vol. 15)
Not even Nashville Skyline’s most thrown-away track — there’s that rag! — but still a part of why it’s easy to underrate how effortful the LP was for Dylan. Nashville Skyline, after all, was the first album he’d skipped a year to get to. He probably didn’t spend two years writing this, he was probably with his kids, but I think it’s fair to assume it took more than it does for the usual human for Bob to focus up and strip it on down.

#46 LOVE MINUS ZERO / NO LIMIT (take 1, Bootleg Series Vol. 12)
Unaccompanied, and abandoned in just a minute and a half, this one really needs the band, and though it’s a criminally underrated song — truly, one of his most gorgeous and upstanding love ballads — it’s also a criminally underrated arrangement, boasting a pop luminosity that’s neither Beatlesque nor the gonzo blues-punk of the other cuts. “—do any song as good as I can do it the first time!” he asserts in a cut-off slice of idle chatter, and your guess really is as good as mine if he started with “I can” or “I can’t”.

#47 CROSSING THE RUBICON (Rough and Rowdy Ways)
This supple slow shuffle from Dylan’s surprise most recent release — you didn’t think he’d go out on Sinatra, did you? — proves his prowess at two things pretty much none of his peers, such as they survive, remain capable of. One is making blues records that sound like those which influenced them — raw and right there in the room, Chicago in the ‘50s in the flesh. The other is at just holding his fucking own — this tomcat is still cool as ice and not about to give a single thing up, at least not for anyone asking for it.

Even mistaking Mikal Gilmore’s water for a Bloody Mary, in a Rolling Stone interview he clearly hated doing, is the equivalent of Dylan reaching across the table, grabbing MG’s nose and going “bbbbrrrrrp!” Same with his response to the guy who wondered if Tempest’s title might clue it as his last album because Shakespeare’s last play shared it: “that was The Tempest. Different titles.” Anyway, Rough and Rowdy Ways will not be Bob Dylan’s last album — even in death he’ll surely find a way to clear those two steps ahead of us. As for this song, nobody should sound this sexy and this like shit at once.

#48 LAY LADY LAY (live 1969, Bootleg Series Vol. 10)
Levon Helm, never Bob’s biggest fan, stages his own small rebellion (or just fights his boredom with the tempo) by going crazily creative on his toms — “the only drummer who could make you cry” indeed. As for the performance, it’s a little shambolic, but it beats the Wight cuts that made Self-Portrait — has something of the stately slowburn in that version of “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” with the [b]and, the really slow one and impassioned one, where he’s all the way inside its raw desire.

#49 WHEN THE NIGHT COMES FALLING FROM THE SKY (Empire Burlesque)
Making all your fans weep and New Order laugh at you — I mean, don’t you figure? — in the same fell swoop is yet another formidable achievement. Every time that “snare” hits I can’t help but feel like the production is, yeah, a foolish tragedy. (Also, what the hell kind of pose is he trying to strike on the godawful cover?) But there’s an obvious urgency you’d figure demands attention to at least the lyrics. So I looked them up just now, and all I found was “but you're disappointed now with those who did not deliver, but it was you who set yourself up for a fall” — another sad-sack letter to his ‘80s self.

#50 I’M A FOOL FOR YOU (Bootleg Series Vol. 11)
On this marginally soulful takeoff from the “Like a Rolling Stone” riff, Dylan has gone from denouncing a female person to announcing his surrender, a surrender which was probably behind the previous entry, and any number of hangdog missives throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s. Ah, but if you’re gonna be any kind of fool, might as well be this kind.

#51 TALKIN’ JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY BLUES (live 1963, Bootleg Series Vols. 1—3)
“There ain’t nothin’ wrong with this song,” he asserts to laughter before he begins. Its deadpan joviality doesn’t conceal Dylan’s sharpest barb — this isn’t “Who Killed Davy Moore” or “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie”, it’s more a list song and one good joke about dumb paranoia (the bit about the toilet bowl ending with “they got away!” is the first really inspired line, and the Betsy Ross thing works too, plus the point that every paranoia eventually turns against its source). He’d really got at these jokermen already, with that one line on “Talkin’ World War III Blues” — “I didn’t blame him, though, he didn’t know me” — and I suppose this was a time when we thought communists more likely to drop the bomb than us (though that “us” excluded many, Dylan among them).

Of course, from song to influence, Dylan did a hell of a lot more than most in the ‘60s to push the left-wing cause. But though he’s hardly one of the boomers who turned to Trump, and he’s still ribbing Republicans in verse to this day, it’s a bit strange to still have him around when things are so much worse than they ever were. We really only got to breathe for a split second, didn’t we? Liberation: always more illusory than not.

#52 I PITY THE POOR IMMIGRANT (live 1969, Bootleg Series Vol. 10)
The Self-Portrait version you never wanted to hear, with no sense of composure and his Muppet voice again, somehow passionate and indifferent and yet neither. Once more, the key to enjoying it is to heed Greil’s and Mike Nesmith’s advice: listen to the Band. You’ll still forget that the lyric is another version of “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues.”

#53 I SHALL BE FREE NO. 10 (Another Side of Bob Dylan)
The fact of the matter is, if Noah Kahan could just come up with records as winsome and trenchant as Dylan LPs #2 thru #4, it’d do wonders for our sense of apocalypse. It isn’t beyond his reach, and maybe he’s just one more victim of an escalating jading. It also could be the audience — nobody bats an eye at the bits of political chagrin Kahan likes to spice his songs up with — or how, like Bob, he’s better at letting a girl get the better of him than getting the better of an issue. It’s also that Kahan lacks a boundless vision, and that zillions now make bank being as silly as this. “I got a million friends!”

#54 ROMANCE IN DURANGO (live 1975, Biograph)
Smarmy and lusty, as he was through the entire Rolling Thunder tour. Sometimes his vocal approach there was like Before the Flood’s, except with emotional dynamics and investment, which is less punk but at least as interesting. The arrangements and — as with this one — songs were sometimes worse. But in its most gripping performances, you’re almost proud of Bob — instead of being evasive or aggressively strange, he’s for once claiming his superstar status and strutting around like he buys into it too. There wasn’t a pleasant morning after awaiting him, but you’re only in your life-prime once. Also, Scarlet Rivera’s violin really was dynamite — especially on a genre song like this.

#55 LIKE A ROLLING STONE (live 1995, MTV Unplugged)
The ultimate pop kissoff, so brilliantly conceived you often forget it’s a little sexist (or I do, anyway), climaxing a very ‘95-sounding live CD with no screaming Fenders, the one where the audience takes a while to discern which classic they’re listening to (though sometimes it’s hard to blame them). It pales beside its source, of course — almost all recordings do — but this is one of the better live versions available to buy. At the tail end of his wilderness era, unflattering production and anemic singing nearly behind him for good, he not only respects his hit a little but reclaims some of its old passion.

#56 BLACK DIAMOND BAY (Desire)
This is basically “Romance in Durango” with less indulgent cross-cultural inflections, and I have more or less the same things to say about it (and Desire, an overstuffed mess where Blood on the Tracks was all care, but also lively in a way that sounds like it might well reflect his real life). Still, as I hook into its vivid and detail-rich romance, it comes to mind that Jacques Levy co-wrote some of these songs, most likely the lyrics. If there weren’t so many asterisks, Desire might be worth a musical deep-dive, as Bob so rarely composed like (or was as catchy as) this. But that smarm is just so hard for me to clear.

#57 NEW DANVILLE GIRL (outtake, Bootleg Series Vol. 16)
Certainly one of the more interesting glimpses of how the sausage was made in these later Bootleg Series, which I don’t even think I knew there were so many of until today. And unlike “Brownsville Girl”, an 11-minute oasis in a real fallow time for Bob Dylan fans, this isn’t compressed until it’s thin as a sheet of foil, though you miss the mixed-higher backing vocals a little. I wonder what exactly Sam Shepard, a terrific actor and eventually terrific playwright who at his worst was a cad and a wannabe Dylan, did to kick Bob into life like this. All those old virtues are alive and well indeed: it’s funny as hell, for one thing, and even if it gives up few of its secrets — in fact it probably soars like it does because it was “just one for Bob” — it definitely has the audience in mind.

#58 I DREAMED I SAW ST. AUGUSTINE (John Wesley Harding)
As I did for some of “Parlophone Pharaohs”, another listicle for those of you who like such things, I turn to “Treasure Island Vacation”, a 72-page .pdf wherein I dare to fuse Marcus and Christgau — the entire Stranded discography in four-line capsule reviews. So what all did I say about this uncanny gem of an album? “Skeleton-rock, naught but riddles on top. You can never quite suss out whether he’s parodying proverbs, parables and the other antique sources he draws upon, or inventing his own — but it’s to Bob’s credit that both could be true. A master class in economical scene-setting.” I stand by every word, but do want to mention that this song is lovelier and sadder than the rest.

#59 WIGGLE WIGGLE (Under the Red Sky)
Spray it on the walls of whatever fortress your oppressor hides in — irreverence all the way down, pal. A master class in purely covert geniusing. “Wiggle till it cums”, indeed.

#60 SIMPLE TWIST OF FATE (live 1975, Bootleg Series Vol. 5)
Somehow there aren’t umpteen musicians all over this, so this is a cool trick — it’s not the late-night desolation the original perfectly renders, but that new Rolling Thunder confidence leads him into rich and rewarding emotional territory. Dig that, BBC — he finally learned to act. (He does wander off a little in a fresh verse, spontaneity curdling into mugging — but would it be a Bob Dylan recording if it didn’t wander off a little?)

#61 HERE COMES SANTA CLAUS (Christmas in the Heart)
I never want to listen to this, not even on Christmas, but I’ll always be thrilled it exists.

#62 IT AIN’T ME, BABE (Real Live)
Once again, his anthem even in his most trying times — the most apt moment is when he just lets the crowd sing the hook for him. Real Live is only really alive when Dylan is getting a charge-up from his professional friends. Acoustic, it’s easier to tell how he’d rather be somewhere else. But then take that ridiculous harmonica solo — yet another dose of pure idgaf, but the crowd loves it, and you can tell he does too, and before you know it that little miracle of convergent elements happens. Baby, that is rock ‘n’ roll.

#63 FOURTH TIME AROUND (Blonde on Blonde)
“They used to say that if Dylan heard a song he liked, he’d find a way to put it on his next album,” Grandpa told me. That, of course, is exactly how the Beatles and Stones worked too, and in the ‘60s the process described was more likely to occur in reverse. But yes, this is a “Norwegian Wood” parody with a little wild mercury makeup on it, and savagely funny, though once again women are on the receiving end of what goes wrong. But at least in this one no one’s house gets burned down — ends well, in faith.

#64 DIXIE (Masked and Anonymous soundtrack)
Well, it’s hardly the worst idea he had for this movie, and not at all a bad performance of a vile song. I suppose at this point I need to make my peace with the unlikelihood of Sp*tify’s shuffle gremlins putting Articolo 31’s “Come una petra scalciata” on this list.

#65 SHE’LL BE COMING ROUND THE MOUNTAIN (Bootleg Series Vol. 11)
The basement tapes didn’t need to be anything more than this, perfectly indifferent shuffles through the most obvious folk standards, for nobody other than the central, recovering figure and his woodshedding buddies, and maybe some partners or dogs. But then they also profoundly updated folk music, and totally upended rock without rock having any idea what was going on or about to befall it. Ahh Dylan, you scamp.

#66 ONE TOO MANY MORNINGS (Bootleg Series Vol. 11)
Why, is that Richard Manuel? Yearning through one of the best brokenhearted ballads young Bob ever came up with? Nay, it’s better — it’s a duet with the man himself! You can guess how the rest sounds — proudly shambolic yet impossibly soulful. Music from Big Pink was a year from setting the world on fire, and in less than a decade these guys would be up onstage doing “I Shall Be Released” for the Last Waltz, Dylan soured and Manuel doomed. I’m not sure decades move quite as quickly as they once did anymore.

#67 A HARD RAIN’S A-GONNA FALL (Complete Budokan 1978)
On the commercial equivalent of punching your mom in the face, Columbia allows us a version of this song with a minute-long disco intro, and that’s before the saxophone comes in. Dylan doesn’t even sing for the entire four-and-a-half-minute track. Unreal.

#68 GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY (30th Anniversary Concert Celebration)
They’ve been canonizing this motherfucker for going on most of his life; Biograph was four decades ago. The songs they let Dylan do himself for this shebang do make a kind of sense: “It’s Alright Ma”, his manifesto for everyone, “My Back Pages”, his manifesto for himself, and this one, one of the loveliest things he ever came up with, devastating as ever on the 63-year-old, kaleidoscopically brilliant album on which it first came out.

#69 WHAT WAS IT YOU WANTED (Oh Mercy)
Going through the motions in a strenuously curated atmosphere, on a road to find out.

#70 HONEY JUST ALLOW ME ONE MORE CHANCE (Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan)
I can’t remember if it was Robert Christgau or Michael Tatum who singled this out as something special on its parent album. Now, since everything is not just special but a fucking masterpiece on Freewheelin’, I don’t know if I agree it soars to the top. But its gleeful, sloppy refusal of anything like decorum is definitely something its parent LP would suffer without. “Hard Rain” puts a lot of weight on the other side of the effect.

#71 I AND I (alternate take, Bootleg Series Vol. 16)
Is another and think therefore I am. (I confess — I and I didn’t listen to all of this one).

#72 JUST LIKE A WOMAN (live 1981, Bootleg Series Vol. 13)
It beats listening to Tinsel Town Rebellion, but not by much and not “Fine Girl”. I note so far no tracks from the only Bootleg Series I stand by every moment of, Vol. 14, which is the complete Blood on the Tracks sessions. No other album by Bob exists in warring perfect versions (actually, that’s probably not true, given these all these ‘80s outtakes). In any case, if you still haven’t read my piece on that material, the link is way up there.

#73 MY OWN VERSION OF YOU (Rough and Rowdy Ways)
All these decades in, he’s found a way to be tender and funny about being weird about girls. The sound of this record still blows my mind — it collapses so much history into a single timeless sound, like many of Rough and Rowdy’s lyrics including this try to too.

#74 AIN’T NO MAN RIGHTEOUS, NO NOT ONE (live 1981, Bootleg Series Vol. 13)
Not even you? Nah, that’s hardly a zing; Bob only pretended to righteousness when he knew the cause was bigger than him, and after Civil Rights, what was left? (Quite a lot in fact, but the only one that seemed to get him hot under the collar was God himself.)

#75 TOO MUCH OF NOTHING (Basement Tapes)
Flawless wisdom from a young man who’d fail to heed it for a giant chunk of his own life. But it all comes down to lost loves, lost wages and the waters of oblivion anyway.

#76 PLEASE MRS. HENRY (Bootleg Series Vol. 11)
This is the exact same record as on The Basement Tapes, having made it to the big time untampered — what artist did more than Dylan, however wittingly, to pioneer “lo-fi”? One of his best lyrics, and that rare sonic reward of him making himself laugh with it.

#77 DAY OF THE LOCUSTS (New Morning)
I never really understood Planet Waves — its ardor and discontent both halfway to the next album, by which point he’d had time to consider those feelings a bit (and also the validation of that ‘74 tour’s success, however much he didn’t enjoy it). Even for Dylan, its sloppiness is pretty unapologetic, and none of those songs sound like they couldn’t stand another draft. But on the other side of the divide is New Morning, which sounds a lot like it — except it has a muscle, grit and composure most often (and most credibly) attributed to the conjugal bliss he spends much of it alluding to, or outright telling us about. It feels small-scale, and not everything works, which is also why it reminds me of Planet Waves. But this cut, about getting an honorary diploma (a pop star subject if there ever was one) and too high, is all cracker-barrel soul and surrealistic jubilation.

#78 HERO BLUES (Bootleg Series Vol. 9)
What a find — pre-fame Bob bemoaning a lover who reads too many books (isn’t that your type, fella?) and thus has an overly romanticized (read: overly masculine) view of what a dream guy should be. Not sure anyone ever fixed that problem more decisively — and though you catch my easy drift, let’s restate: Bob Dylan completely reinvented his culture’s idea of what a “hero” looked like, sounded like, behaved, or could achieve.

#79 MR. TAMBOURINE MAN (1974 Live Recordings Sampler)
In ‘65, this sounded hopeful (to say nothing of visionary); in ‘71, it sounded desperate (to say nothing of hopeful); in ‘74 it sounds crowded (to say nothing of desperate). And maybe it’s just right at another show, but I doubt it was a song to burden with a [b]and, which nine years ago he got right even when he had the option right at his fingertips.

#80 SAVING GRACE (live 1980, Bootleg Series Vol. 13)
He’s still not sleeping in a pine box for all eternity, but it’s astounding how much more alive he sounds on this than on the same set’s London show a year later. The box was released in the first place to prove that Bob’s Christian faith, such as it was, was most alive onstage, and it’s certainly where to experience anything on Saved. Yeah, the voice is weakened and the band conventional. But there’s a real power behind both, and the voice especially captivates — he sounds almost childish, near tears, and honestly glad, so glad, a power greater than himself is out there to look after him when he still can’t.

#81 OBVIOUSLY FIVE BELIEVERS (take 3, Bootleg Series Vol. 12)
Back when his philosophy was that the righteous man served nobody as a rule, a punk-blues anti-love and anti-gospel song. Nominally Blonde on Blonde’s #1 throwaway, this rules in any edition, the guitar coruscating and the vocals contagiously self-convinced.

#82 AIN’T GONNA GO TO HELL FOR ANYBODY (live 1980, Bootleg Series Vol. 13)
“I can manipulate people as well as anybody,” he finally admits in the opening line of this outtake, after an uncommonly gorgeous intro featuring only his backing singers. The whole thing turns out to be an odd, frenetic confessional, with a couple melodic turns as nice as “Precious Angel”. But though the actual belief in Hell is new — and it was rumored back in the Village days that he’d made a pact with the devil to advance so frighteningly quickly — this is what he’s been singing the whole time: I’ll go there on my own terms, Jack (he hadn’t the self-control to just take a Joni-style look around).

#83 GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY (Real Live)
Proof this number is too pretty for whatever cold fish is singing it not to start to feel it.

#84 I SHALL BE RELEASED (take 1, Bootleg Series Vol. 11)
Back in the day, it was treated by many high-profile coverers like automatic gospel — a “Let it Be” or a “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, a song to tackle with a reverent hush, though the Band’s version inspired some wonderful things (ever heard Joe Cocker’s?). Already tired of this, Dylan did it dusty and plain on Greatest Hits Volume II, robbing it of some of its power even if that’s a wonderful recording. Here, working it out beside people who’d depend on its power, he finds the balance — the devotedly earthbound gospel of “Goin’ to Acapulco” or “Tears of Rage”. A classic, and due for a resurgence.

#85 MOONLIGHT (Love and Theft)
Magic in the you know what, our man having ducked back in the ersatz Tin Pan Alley. The worst thing you can say about it is it pales next to the later “Spirit on the Water”, though it’s more concise. Thirty-odd years before, he’d sung about that big, fat moon shining like a spoon, and both the lyrical and musical clichés were genuinely enough. But Love and Theft really did take things to another level — as the century changed, he took stock of all he’d loved and stolen from it, and came up with his own golden mean.