Bob Dylan - Street Legal (1978)

Bob Dylan’s 1978 album Street Legal reminds me of driving past a violent car accident; you can’t look away. I buried a lot of love to this tune of this album. The promise of the Rolling Thunder Revue tours turned to ashes in the mouth following a woozy, often tortured 1976 trek and Dylan’s epic vanity film project, the incomprehensible four hour Renaldo and Clara, crashed and burned before ever seeing widespread theatrical release; even a following cut to 2 hours failed to revive the film’s fortunes. The crowning indignity came with a bitter divorce and ensuing child custody battle with his wife Sara. Dylan rarely knew, to that point, such a low ebb in his personal and professional life and Street Legal’s nine songs reflect it. Don Devito’s production, an unenviable role in the best of times, resulted in the album sounding like someone placed pillows in front of the amplifiers. There’s no snap. Dylan drafted top flight sessions musicians like saxophonist Steve Douglas and bassist Jerry Scheff on bass guitar at enormous expense and to no audible benefit. There’s an air of desperation hanging over these songs, however; this is an album from someone backed in a corner and alive like a raw nerve ending. It doesn’t always work, it isn’t always pleasant, but you can’t stop listening.

“Changing of the Guard” raises more questions than it answers. Dylan is writing the songs alone this time out, unlike the preceding studio album Desire, but the influence of his co-lyricist on Desire, Jacques Levy, is still apparent. There’s a conscious artistry at work, however; the symbol laden lyric is open to a variety of interpretations (by 1978, it had been 16 years since Dylan’s debut album; the song’s opening lines refers to that exact time span), but the predominant themes revolve around a journey. The travel ends in personal apocalypse. Douglas’ horn touches on the song are largely superfluous, but the arrangement is otherwise inventive. The clanging, grinding blues “New Pony” needs a drummer who can actually swing and former King Crimson drummer Ian Wallace isn’t the guy. Dylan, however, rips out an inspired, practically lascivious vocal and Douglas’ saxophone leaves a memorable mark. The waltz-like arrangement of “No Time to Think” gives an appealing musical spin to one of Dylan’s darkest lyrics, but it runs on far too long and self-indulgence increasingly takes over.

“Baby Stop Crying” is nonsense. Dylan wails about bad men, paying his lady’s fare, and wild-eyed pistol wielding defense of turf over a serviceable arrangement and performance. Schmaltzy instrumentation weighs down the steady pacing of “Is Your Love in Your Vain?”during its first half, but melody and invention enlivens the playing during the song’s second half. Dylan gets good backing vocals on this track, but it can’t redeem the self-pitying and misogynist lyrics. “Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)” remains one of Street Legal’s more durable songwriting achievements. If there wasn’t a single redeemable moment elsewhere in the song, hearing Dylan’s pained anguish on the song’s payoff verse redeems everything. Listeners are treated, instead, to an evocative and towering performance. There are some great bridges in “True Love Tends to Forget”, but longtime listeners will detect Jacques Levy’s influence on the lyrics once again. It results in a lot of glossy couplets, but you’ll ultimately wonder if the songwriting adds up to any real significance. The album’s one unvarnished moment of spartan simplicity is “We Better Talk This Over”, a twangy blues with great crescendos and a loose, easygoing assurance throughout. Street Legal concludes with another extended song. The heavy handed title, “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)” can be heard multiple ways in light of upcoming career developments like his religious period, but sounds like a white-knuckled, impassioned requiem for his marriage and a midlife crisis cry for help. It ends Street Legal on a decidedly hopeless note with a clever musical arrangement undermined by lack of production attention. There are lots of reasons, however, to love an album. Street Legal is a poorly handled cathartic exercise, but its still bleeding wounds are impossible to ignore.

Grade: B-

Bob Dylan - Under the Red Sky (1990)

1990 seemed to herald a new, clearer dawn for Bob Dylan after nearly a decade in an artistic wilderness. Working with producer Daniel Lanois on 1989’s Oh Mercy delivered Dylan his best notices in years and his collaboration with The Traveling Wilburys garnered him renewed mainstream attention. The follow-up to Oh Mercy, 1990’s Under the Red Sky, short circuited his new found momentum.

Things do not begin auspiciously. “Wiggle Wiggle” is, arguably, the nadir of Bob Dylan’s songwriting career and the problems are manifold. Producers Don and David Was recruited a bevy of guest stars to widen the drawing power of Dylan’s newest release, but there’s little rhyme or reason to their selections. Guns ‘n’ Roses guitarist Slash appears on this track, but his neutered presence means he might as well played accordion on the song. The lyrics are absurd and Dylan’s delivery never rises above more than a slurry mumble. The title track is one of the album’s few lasting achievements. George Harrison contributes some evocative slide guitar and the style Dylan adopts for the lyric, quasi-cribbing from the fairy tale tradition, helps invest its subject matter with an added poetic veneer. It’s a clean, uncluttered production job here as elsewhere on Under the Red Sky and it provides a perfect frame for the track. “Unbelievable” attempts aping the romping blues blast of Dylan’s seminal Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited period but, despite a smattering of interesting lines, sounds like a pale imitation. Dylan musters up a mild amount of vocal enthusiasm, but it’s far from enough to elevate the song past middling
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It isn’t enough. The album’s sole love song, “Born in Time”, originally hails from the Oh Mercy sessions and is a hit and miss affair. There are some well turned couplets and phrases scattered through the song and a sympathetic band performance, but the song’s point of view never settles and ultimately makes too diffuse of an impact to really stick with listeners. There’s some more flirting with the past on “T.V. Talking Song”. The song is cut in the mold of “talking blues” from early in Dylan’s career, but lacks much of the same charm. Much of the problem, lyrically at least, lies with the increasingly dour world view weighing down his words. The same man who, during this period, took to recording and appearing in public with a hood pulled over his head so people couldn’t take his picture (when asked about it during this timeframe, Dylan referred to the American Indian belief that cameras make ghosts of people) uses the song’s “storyline” as a thin cover to rail against the evils of television. There’s very little art here, just polemic, and its one grace note of humor comes when Dylan refers to Elvis shooting his TV. It isn’t enough.

“10,000 Men” is a throwaway. This is the sort of track that, on stronger albums of yore, wouldn’t have made the final cut and once again leans heavily on a “cataloging” lyric style to get over. It doesn’t work. “2x2” relies on the same approach, but there’s much more substance here and he’s joined by some additional star power, namely David Crosby singing backing vocals. The song has some nice lyrical turns and the subject matter can be interpreted a variety of valid ways. “God Knows” is another leftover from the Oh Mercy sessions that has remained a recurrent feature in Dylan’s set list over the years. Cataloging, again, but it’s effective here thanks to the obvious effort he’s invested in making it work and one of the album’s few truly inspired vocals. Another of those inspired vocals comes with the album’s penultimate track “Handy Dandy”. There’s a little self-referential winking going on with guest organist Al Kooper’s echoing of his legendary riffing in “Like a Rolling Stone”, but the wordplay is dazzling and Dylan proves he is equal to the task. The final track, “Cat’s in the Well”, conjures up some more of the album’s recurring nursery rhyme language, but there are also some of Dylan’s apocalyptic conceits working their way into the track. It ends a relatively mediocre album with an emphatic exclamation point. Under the Red Sky sputters too much, but there’s some memorable moments preventing it from being completely disposable.

Grade: C+