Wednesday, July 4, 2012

CD Odyssey Disc 414: Bob Dylan


Back to true random rolling my albums, with my 9th Bob Dylan review.  This one made for some pleasant walking to work the last couple of days.

Disc 414 is…Another Side of Bob Dylan

Artist:  Bob Dylan

Year of Release: 1964

What’s up with the Cover?  Ah, the sixties – that golden era of record album covers where they listed the songs on the front.  I don’t like it, but at one time it was the industry standard.  I am more of a seventies guy – I want a crazy piece of art on the cover, and you can put the songs on the back.  That said Bob looks good enough, with a fine head of hair.  He kind of looks like me here, only brilliant.

How I Came To Know It: This was just me drilling through Bob’s early records many years ago, unearthing gem after gem from this golden period of his career.

How It Stacks Up:  I have seventeen Bob Dylan albums, and competition is fierce among them.  I’ll put “Another Side of Bob Dylan” at 9th, just edging out “Bringing It All Back Home” – the album that immediately follows it.

Rating: 4 stars

After releasing the morose “TheTimes They Are A-Changin’” earlier in 1964, Bob Dylan clearly needed to lighten up, and that’s exactly what he does on “Another Side,” mostly with good success.

Many of these songs stray from protest folk rock well across the line into comedy.  Dylan warms up his funny bone with the rambling and playful “I Shall Be Free – No. 10” where he daydreams about boxing Cassius Clay and punching him “out of his spleen.” Since this album was recorded in June of 1964, and Ali announced his name change after beating Sonny Liston in February of the same year, I wonder why Dylan didn’t call him ‘Ali.’  My best guess is ‘satire.’  He is playing the fool here, after all.

In fact, “I Shall Be Free – No. 10” is some fine and fun-loving satire throughout, as Dylan takes on the voice of a blowhard and unloads a torrent of impotent threats and odd observations.  It is deliberately provocative in places, but mostly rambling and playful.  At the same time, it is a bit too rambling, mixing brilliance with lazy rhymes, and while Dylan loves a lot consecutive rhymes, he isn’t usually this lazy with them.

Much better in the same genre is “Motorpsycho Nitemare,” a song about someone who needs a place to stay and gets a farmer to give him a place to lay his head, as long as he doesn’t touch his daughter and ‘in the morning milk the cows.’  With the daughter coming on to our protagonist, he realizes he is in trouble and needs to get out of there.  However:

“Well I couldn’t leave unless the old man chased me out.
‘Cause I’d already promised to milk his cows
I had to say something to strike him very weird
So I yelled “I like Fidel Castro and his beard!”

This predictably works, and the song ends with the character fleeing from the farm, sun coming up and the farmer chasing in the distance with a shotgun.

Motorpsycho Nitmare” remains one of my all-time favourite Dylan songs, and “I love Fidel Castro and his beard” one of my favourite non sequitur exclamations (I don’t – but damn it’s a funny expression).

Dylan isn’t all laughs on this record, however and he has some beautiful and tragic love songs.  These include “To Ramona” with its lilting and catchy melody, and just Dylan singing in earnest over a gently strummed guitar and restrained interventions on harmonica.  This is a song that reminds us that whatever you think of Dylan’s voice (I like it) the man writes beautiful songs that sound just as fresh 50 years after their release.  Not to mention that on top of the timeless tune, are lyrics to one of the greatest and gentlest break up songs ever, beginning:

“Ramona
 Come closer
 Shut softly your watery eyes
 The pangs of your sadness
 Shall pass as your senses will rise
 The flowers of the city
 Though breathlike
 Get deathlike at times
 And there’s no use in tryin’
 T’ deal with the dyin’
 Though I cannot explain that in lines.”

Um…I think you just did, Bob.  And the effort is matched later in the more famous, “It Ain’t Me Babe” which opens:

“Away from my window, leave at your own chosen speed.
I’m not the one you want, babe, I ‘m not the one you need.”

Another song that shows no matter how gently it happens, an ending relationship is almost always sure to hurt someone. 

Dylan also delivers one of his greatest social commentaries on “Chimes of Freedom” which is simultaneously uplifting and heart-wrenching.  Caught out in a storm, Dylan sees the lightning in the sky flashing like the harbingers of freedom for the oppressed, the marginalized and even the simply lonely. 

“Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
 An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
 Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
 Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
 Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
 For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
 An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
 An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.”

Dylan artfully reminds us that the chimes of freedom don’t ring easily, and you have to always be listening if you’re going to hear them – even in the midst of a thunderstorm.  As an artist, he’s always been willing to pull their chords, and help us hear them, and he delivers his gift again on this powerful track.

“Another Side of Bob Dylan” is well titled, with its greater measure of humour and satire, but it is still a seriously good record.  There are rare places where his rhymes miss or he laughs while singing a lyric that calls for greater gravity, but overall this is a worthy entry in the musical lexicon of one of the great artists of our time.

Best tracks:  All I Really Want To Do, Chimes of Freedom, To Ramona, Motorpsycho Nitemare, My Back Pages, It Ain’t Me Babe.

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