Dylan Album Project: Time Out of Mind

Time Out of Mind (1997)

All it takes to have a best-selling album in the United States is to have a near brush with death. Shortly before the release of Time Out of Mind, Dylan suffered from pericarditis, a deadly inflammation of the sack around the heart, and, to paraphrase him, he nearly went to see Elvis. Early in his career, Dylan said one of the things he admired about folk music – real folk music – was the way that it accepted death as a natural fact. Death is all over As Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong, so it is no surprise that when he got back to writing again, having undergone his plan to reconnect with his love of music by revisiting the folk songs he fell in love with when he was young, his writing dealt more frankly with death than it had in a long time. It doesn’t matter that he wrote the songs and finished recorded them well before his pericarditis started, the intersection of the illness with the album’s release caused people to see it as about Dylan’s fear of his own impending death, which is kind of counter to what the album should get across, which is that death is an inescapable fact, so there’s no use in fearing it. Just as Johnny Cash’s American Recordings series, which had been brilliant since its inception – failed to generate many sales until he was on his deathbed, the public hadn’t flocked to the last several Dylan records until they thought they might lose him. The sales and accolades poured in. The album received first critical acclaim and then popular approval. It was Dylan’s first top ten album since 1979 and signaled a major return. Many see this as his best album since the mid-70s. I disagree with that assessment, but it is still a damn good album, though it could have been better.

Where the album fails is in its pacing. Dylan likes to alternate between slow and fast tempos, rockers and ballads, even when making an acoustic album – and this was certainly not acoustic. Lanois use of layering and compression, though, gave most of the album a dull sheen. Dylan has complained extensively about this, saying the album didn’t come out the way he wanted it to. In particular, Dylan thought “Cold Irons Bound,” which won one of the album’s three Grammy awards for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance (the other two were for Album of the Year and Best Contemporary Folk Album), had been ruined. Some of the best songs that Dylan wrote for the album were kept off, ostensibly because he didn’t like Lanois’ production. This was certainly the case with “Mississippi,” a song he would give to Sheryl Crow and which would also be a hit for the Dixie Chicks before he released his own version on “Love & Theft,” which Lanois wanted to make sound, according to Dylan, “sexy, sexy, and more sexy” by adding in polyrhythmic drumming. Three different versions of the song from these sessions were eventually released on Tell Tale Signs, a collection of outtakes recorded between 1989 and 2006. Other outtakes included “Marchin’ To the City,” a far superior version of what would later become “Til I Fell In Love With You.” “Dreamin’ of You” had lyrics which made it into several other songs, but had a uniquely jazzy sound to it that would have added to the album’s monotony. Finally, “Red River Shore” would have been the best song on the album had it been included. The song that gets the most attention from this album, “Not Dark Yet,” is one of the weaker tracks in my opinion, even though it is weak on what is overall a very solid album.

Best song: Standing In the Doorway – There are a lot of good songs on this album, and I almost went with “Highlands,” which was originally 35 minutes before Dylan and Lanois edited it down to the 17 minutes it takes up on the album. This song is also epic, though; a portrait of heartache that references several different old blues songs before ending with the great image of “the blues wrapped around my head.”

Worst song: Make You Feel My Love – This was a close one with “’Til I Fell In Love With You,” but “Make You Feel My Love” wins for two reasons – it is definitely the most lightweight song on Time Out of Mind (though musically more interesting than its competition), and because I have a story I want to tell about it. I think it was in an airport – I really can’t remember. Somewhere I met someone who knew Garth Brooks manager and I got this story from him. Given the nature of it, it may be apocryphal, but it has the ring of Dylan truth. Garth Brooks had been approached to record a song for the soundtrack of the Sandra Bullock/Harry Connick Jr. romance Hope Floats. He didn’t have any ideas floating around, so he asked his manager if he thought Dylan would have anything. His manager told him that Dylan hadn’t written anything in years. Garth asked if he wouldn’t just call him up and check, so the manager did. Dylan was about to head out for a tour, but said that he did have something. He was leaving I assume from his house in Malibu and was about to fly out of LAX. Dylan said that if the manager could pick Garth up and meet him at the Burger King by the airport early the next morning (around 4 am), he’d teach him the song before he left. The story ended with the guy saying “can you imagine sitting there chomping on your Whopper when you notice Bob Dylan is schooling Garth Brooks at the next table over?!?” Either way, I heard Dylan later said he regretting letting Brooks have the song. More likely, Don Was, the soundtrack’s producer, got the song based on knowing Dylan through Under the Red Sky or Sheryl Crow, who early in her career was a backup singer for Dylan and who covered the then-unreleased “Mississippi” around the same time gave Brooks the hook up, as she also appears on the Hope Floats soundtrack.

Best outtake: Red River Shore – One of the all-time great Dylan songs, and clearly his best work in the 1990s. While the old folk songs influence is stamped all over Time Out of Mind, this song could have been one of the old folk songs. A strange tale about Jesus and a ghost the boy loved, if the boy was ever alive to begin with. It seems innocuous enough as it starts out, but as the tale develops, it becomes clear one of the two principals is dead, and different parts suggest it may be both the narrator’s beloved and the narrator himself.

Notable live version: Tryin’ To Get To Heaven – On the album, this song was a clear standout. It is one of the stronger tracks, and the lyrics – which recall reconstruction, the Missiouri Compromise, and the sweep of American experience, all in the face of dealing with the stringency of one’s own more turptitude – pop more on the album version than they do here. The album is mostly easy, open chords with a few tricks and licks. In 2000, Dylan completely rewrote it using a bunch of jazz chords and a completely different melody. The result is utterly gorgeous.

Rhymes: thunder/plunder (“Love Sick”); guitar/cigar (“Standing In the Doorway”); disintegrate/wait (“Can’t Wait”); wrong/Erica Jong; dog monologue (4-5 from “Highlands”)

Images: “my brain is so wired and the clouds are weeping” (“Love Sick”); “ice water in my veins” (“Standing In the Doorway”); “every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb” (“Not Dark Yet”); “clouds of blood” (“Cold Irons Bound”); “honeysuckle bloomin’ in the wildwood air, bluebells blazing where the Aberdeen waters flow” (“Highlands”)

Axioms: “Gonna find me a janitor to sweep me off my feet” (“Million Miles”); “I don’t know what alright even means;” “I’ve been to Sugartown and I shook the sugar down” (2-3 from “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven”); “reality has always had too many heads” (“Cold Irons Bound”); “I got new eyes; everything looks far away” (“Highlands”)

Dylan Album Project: World Gone Wrong

World Gone Wrong (1993)

When As Good As I Been To You came out, Columbia not only gave Dylan credit for all of the arrangements, they even gave him credit for writing many of the songs. Leave it to a bunch of label hacks to screw that up. There was a bit of an outcry among folk scholars that Dylan was attempting to make money off arrangements he’d stolen from artists who had been recording in the 20s and 30s. When he put out this sequel of sorts, which I feel features inferior guitar playing to the preceding album and some songs that are better and some that are worse, he decided to cover his tracks by writing his own liner notes. These are what truly give this album the edge. They are inscrutable and entertaining, all at the same time.

As for the songs, there are many stron ones here. Standouts for me include “Jackaroe,” a more feminist version of the themes on “Canadee-I-O” (but not a retelling). In this song, the woman has more agency. In “Canadee-I-O” she wants to go to sea with her man – a military operation but not necessarily a battle. She pays her man to help her sneak into the hold and dress as a sailor. In “Jackaroe,” the man is far away and the woman dresses as a man and successfully enlists. At the end, the protagonist of “Canadee-I-O” is betrayed by her lover, but takes up with the ship’s captain, who stands up for her. After taking up with him, she sublimates her personality and becomes a trophy wife; in “Jackaroe,” the protagonist finds her disenfranchised soldier dying on the battlefield and nurses him back to health, and he loves her because of her courageousness, not in spite of it. “Stackalee” is flooring in its power, and “Delia” is flooring in its quietude – very different than say Cash’s “Delia’s Gone,” Dylan’s “Delia” nonetheless has more pathos than any other take on “Delia” I know. He says it is “two or more versions mixed into one,” but what makes it so unique is the point of view. The story is about a 14-year old girl who gets shot down by her gangster boyfriend. Dylan sings it from the point of view of the quiet boy who had a crush on her – “she loved all them rounders, but never had time for me.” “Two Soldiers,” recounting promises that can’t be kept, is a little-known tragic gem.

Best song: Stack-A-Lee – Great rendition of the murder ballad with the double moral of don’t mess with another man’s hat, and if someone does mess with your hat, don’t be a jerk wad about it.

Worst song: Ragged and Dirty – Good performance of a great song, which shows that the album is probably pretty good overall.

Outtake: Mary and the Soldier – This is a piece with “Jack-A-Roe” and “Canadee-I-O.” The daughter of a rich military commander, Mary falls in love with a soldier her father trains and plans to follow him into battle. Her father, knowing where he will send the soldier, forbids it, and so does the soldier until he is enamored by her determination.

Live rendition: Delia – Dylan has always had periods where he’ll include several old folk songs in his set, and he did a beautiful version of this song in England in 2000.

Five best quotes from the liner notes: “an infantile sensualist – white teeth, wide smile, lotza money, kowtows to fairy queen exploiters & corrupt religious establishments, career minded, limousine double parked, imposing his will & dishonest garbage in popular magazines” (on “Love Henry”); “futurologists would insist it’s a matter of taste. They say ‘let’s sleep on it’ but they’re already living in the sanitarium;” “give me a thousand acres of tractable land & all the gang members that exist & you’ll see the Authentic alternative lifestyle, the Agrarian one” (on “Stack-A-Lee”); “evil charlatans masquerading in pullover vests & tuxedos talking gobbledygook, monstrous pompous superficial pageantry parading down lonely streets on limited access highways;” (on “World Gone Wrong”); “America when Mother was the queen of Her heart, before Charlie Chaplin, before the Wild One, before the Children of the Sun – before the celestial grunge, before the insane world of entertainment exploded in our faces – before all the ancient & honorable artillery had been taken out of the city, learning to go forward by turning back the clock” (on “Two Soldiers”)

Dylan Album Project: As Good As I Been To You

Good As I Been To You (1992)

Finally having given up on trying to be hip, Dylan decided to return to his roots. He recorded an album of covers, mostly of old folk songs, with David Bromberg in early ’92. Unhappy with the results (although what has been released is really good), he decided to record a whole different set of songs in his garage with just him and his guitar. Old murder ballads, songs by Stephen Foster, sea shanties, etc. Dylan would repeat this strategy the next year with World Gone Wrong, though this is known as being the album with more well-known songs. A few – “Frankie and Albert,” “Froggie Went A-Courtin’” – I can see that about, but I certainly didn’t know “Canadee-I-O” or “Diamond Joe” before I picked this up, and I only knew the songs I did know from having studied my folk music. Trying to pick favorites from this is a really tough call. Everything on it is so strong.

While most critics consider this the weaker of Dylan’s two early nineties acoustic folk albums, it has the better guitar work. “Frankie and Albert” and “Step It Up and Go” in particular show off the nimbleness of Dylan’s fingers. The album puts to rest any questions over Dylan’s guitar-playing ability. Usually his guitar sound is hidden behind a sea of more famous guitarists, but here his guitar is naked and on par with his voice, and it turns out to be a thing of beauty.

While the songs here may not be considered quite as unique, there is some really interesting material. The frog-mouse nuptials of “Froggie Went A-Courtin’,” the cross-dressing female naval officer of “Canadee-I-O,” a song about having a crush on a woman simply because she’s liable to drink you under the table then crush your nuts in a vice (that would be “Little Maggie” for those keeping score at home), as well as stuff like the anti-military ballad “Arthur McBride.” A more diverse set would be hard to find, especially on an album of acoustic covers.

Best song: Step It Up and Go – I rarely go back to the album to hear this song – I rarely think about it – but that guitar playing is just amazing. He’s pulling a Leadbelly on this song, playing lead over his own rhythm.

Worst song: You’re Gonna Quit Me, Baby – Good song, but not good enough to name the album after it.

Outtake: You Belong To Me – This song was a hit for Jo Stafford in the mid-50s. Dylan recorded it for this album, then gave it to Oliver Stone for inclusion on the Natural Born Killers soundtrack, where Dylan sat alongside Dr. Dre for probably the first time in his career.

Live rendition: Hard Times – A year after this album was released, Dylan performed two songs at Willie Nelson’s 60^th birthday. He opened with this and then dueted with Willie on “Pancho & Lefty,” which Dylan rewrote the lyrics too. He nailed them both.

Dylan Album Project: Under the Red Sky

Under the Red Sky (1990)

Although Dylan was garnished with critical acclaim for Oh Mercy, he didn’t have the catapult back into the popular spotlight he’d hoped Lanois would be able to give him. So he went to another superstar producer, Don Was of Was (Not Was), who had recently had a huge hit with the B-52s’ Cosmic Thing. It was Was’s job to make the album a hit, which he attempted to do by bringing in a slew of guests stars to record with Dylan, including Slash, Elton John, George Harrison and Stevie Ray Vaughn, among others. Dylan, for his part, brought a group of songs unified around a theme: nursery rhymes. Dylan dedicated the album to Gabby Goo, a nickname for his daughter Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan, born out of Dylan’s second secret marriage that was not to become public knowledge for another decade after the album came out. One view is that the songs were written for her enjoyment, but many of them are dark-edged, just as many nursery rhymes also are. Certainly some of them are based on nursery rhymes. The title track conflates “Four and Twenty Blackbirds” and “The Man In the Moon.” “Handy Dandy” (which not only sounds a lot like “Like A Rolling Stone” but features the same organ player) originated out of Jacky Dandy, which opens “Handy spandy / Jacky Dandy,” but the fortress imagery is also suggestive of the rhyme “King Pippin.” “10,000 Men” alludes to “10,000 Men of Bedfordshire” in both text and theme. This is only a brief skimming, and certainly there is much more worthy of analysis. Some of the songs work and others it is hard to tell.

What is certain about this album is that the production didn’t work. Whether Dylan or Was is to blame is another story. Slash says that he recorded a fantastic solo for “Wiggle Wiggle” that Was enthused over but Dylan wanted left on the cutting room floor. I can’t imagine much making that song good, but more Slash couldn’t have made it much worse. The sound is both thin and cramped, and the whole thing seems canned and inorganic. Even though I realize it is a better album from an objective standpoint than the albums between Infidels and Oh Mercy, I find it less listenable than them nearly all of the time. I find that sad, because I suspect there are some songs I would really like on it.

Despite a truly bizarre music video made for ‘Unbelievable,” which features a pig with piercing hanging out with Bob Dylan and Molly Ringwald, the album was a major flop. Luckily, Dylan finally gave up trying to be popular, which is what allowed him to again become popular.

Best song: Under the Red Sky – George Harrison plays on this, and for that reason it sounds almost like a Traveling Wilbury’s outtake rather than a Dylan song.

Worst song: Wiggle, Wiggle – Basically, its about a penis. “Wiggle till it whispers, wiggle till it hums, wiggle till it answers, wiggle till it comes,” Eek! Well, at least it falls in a tradition I guess, even though dirty blues is a tradition Dylan usually does best to stay out of.

Notable live version: Cat’s In the Well – this has long been a concert favorite. Once a rarity, the last few years have found it being a semi-regular opener. I saw it in 2007 in Kansas City.

Rhymes: soup/hoop (“Wiggle, Wiggle”); stick/quick; dignified/sanctified/satisfied; civilized/analyzed/criticized (“Unbelievable”); pursuits/fruits (“TV Talkin’ Song”)

Images: “the blind horse that leads you around” (“Under the Red Sky”); “smoke that vine, beat that horse, and saddle up the drum” (“Unbelievable”); “the blinking stardust of a pale blue light” (“Born In Time”); “spilling my buttermilk, sweeping it up with a broom” (“10,000 Men”); “a bag full of sorrow” (“Handy Dandy”)

Axioms: “they used to say it was the land of milk and honey; now they say it’s the land of money;” “all the sweethearts you can hold are hanging on a tree” (“Unbelievable”); “who could your lover be? Let me eat off his head so you can really see!” (“10,000 Men”); “grief is showing its face; the world is being slaughtered and its such a bloody disgrace”; “back alley Sally is doing the American Jump” (“Cat’s In the Well”)

Dylan Album Project: Oh Mercy

Oh Mercy (1989)

What an album. After years of slogging through crap, Oh Mercy didn’t even make a blip on the radar of many Dylan fans when it was released, which is a shame because it is his finest album of the 80s. Now the album is usually placed among the best second-tier Dylan albums, even though it probably belongs in the top tier. To make a great album, Dylan took Bono’s advice and hired Daniel Lanois as producer, then opted to record the album in New Orleans backed by many of that city’s musicians, such as Rockin’ Dopsie, Cyril Neville and Willie Green. The result was ethereal, smoky and mesmerizing, and there were enough great leftovers to provide numerous outtakes over the years. This was the first album where it was clear Dylan’s voice had changed, but the music changed to fit it. This music was crafted around Dylan’s older croak, and turns it once again into an instrument.

Part of what allows this album to be so successful is not only the crafting of the sound, but also the thematics. While all of Dylan’s 80s albums have songs that deal with his greatest theme – America – and also with God, greed, etc., they also had songs that didn’t really have any sort of meaning to them. On Oh Mercy, Dylan had songs hearkening back to the best work from all his great periods. “Political World” has all the righteous fury of the songs on The Times They Are A-Changin’. “Most of the Time” would not be thematically out of place on Blood On the Tracks, and an early version was recorded with an arrangement that sounded like it could have come from the New York Sessions recorded for that album. “Ring Them Bells” is one of Dylan’s strongest religious tracks; it is almost a hymn. And even the album’s weakest song – “Disease of Conceit” – manages to tackle issues way beyond the scope of three quarters of what is on the three albums before it.

Best song: Most of the Time – Just heartbreaking. The bass line makes this the best version of this song, which Dylan continued to tinker with. In 1990 it came out as a European single in an almost grunge-rock version that was really hard. It sounded more like Neil Young than Bob Dylan. This version is soft, a whisper, but a powerful whisper. The bass is like a broken heartbeat that will never quite be able to heal itself.

Worst song: Disease of Conceit – The lyrics to this are just cliché, at times bordering on silly. In Chronicles, Dylan’s memoirs, the best part of the book is about the recording of this album and a strange man he meets in the bayou named Sun Pie. In there, though, he talks extensively about writing the lyrics to this song and offers up many verses he wrote but later rejected. They are not only sillier, but they are high school poetry – oh noetry!

Best outtake: Born In Time – This was a close battle with “Dignity,” a film noir detective story set to music where the detective, a Dylan personae, is searching for dignity, which is suspected of murder. It has many great lines, like “someone showed me a picture and I just laughed; Dignity’s never been photographed,” but it doesn’t have the elegance of “Born In Time.” This song was rerecorded for inclusion on Under the Red Sky, but the original is better. Two versions from these sessions have been released, each with a different set of lyrics than the version on Under the Red Sky. The version I prefer, which appeared on the bootleg Deeds of Mercy, has the best set of lyrics of them all.

Notable live version: Ring Them Bells – In 1993, Dylan did a series of concerts at the Supper Club in New York for a live album and concert video that never materialized. I assume he figured he could get more publicity from MTV’s Unplugged series, so when they offered to do an episode on him he dropped this project. That’s a shame because the concerts, as far as I can tell, were rather splendid affairs. This song is hopeful, beautiful and sad. I see ringing them bells as a way of empathizing with pain, and perhaps the most powerful empathy is with those “chosen few who will judge the many when the game is through,” suggesting that those chosen few won’t be the ones who necessarily want to judge, which is a sobering thought I can find a lot of solace in.

Rhymes: plank/bank; microscope/rope (“Political World”); ploughs/vows (“Everything is Broken”); gave/depraved (“Man In the Long Black Coat”); skip/lip (“What Was It You Wanted?”)

Images: “cities of lonesome fear” (“Political World”); “rivers of blindness” (“Where Teardrops Fall”); “broken treaties, broken vows, broken pipes” (“Everything is Broken”); “African trees bent over backward from a hurricane breeze;” “tree trunks uprooted ’neath the high crescent moon” (“Man In the Long Black Coat”)

Axioms: “mercy walks the plank,” “shout God’s name, but you’re never quite sure what it is” (“Political World”); “they’re breaking down the distance between right and wrong” (“Ring Them Bells”); “people don’t live or die; people just float” (“Man In the Long Black Coat”); “If I turn myself off so I can’t hear you cry, what good am I?” (“What Good Am I?”)