mistersloane
heavy heavy monster sound
Bob Dylan is fucking awful.
"He ran down a verse and a chorus and he just quit and said, 'We'll do a verse and a chorus, then I'll play my harmonica thing. Then we'll do another verse and chorus and I'll play some more harmonica, and we'll see how it goes from there.' That was his explanation of what was getting ready to happen. Not knowing how long this thing was going to be, we were preparing ourselves dynamically for a basic two‑ to three‑minute record. Because records just didn't go over three minutes.
"If you notice that record, that thing after, like, the second chorus starts building and building like crazy, and everybody's just peaking it up 'cause we thought, 'Man, this is it. This is gonna be the last chorus and we've gotta put everything into it we can.' And he played another harmonica solo and went back down to another verse, and the dynamics had to drop back down to a verse kind of feel. After about five, six minutes of this stuff, we start looking at the clock, everyone starts looking at each other, we'd built to the peak of our limit and, bang, [there] goes another harmonica solo. After about 10 minutes of this thing we're cracking up at each other, at what we were doing. I mean, we peaked five minutes ago. Where do we go from here?”
Bob Dylan is fucking awful.
The next weekend Sara took me uptown to a record shop she said carried everything, and I bought two Bob Dylan albums. The second one, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, had “Don’t Think Twice” on it. Listening on the phonograph in Sara’s bedroom I realized the words were only half the story: the song was at least half attitude, acting, role-playing… something. As if James Dean had merged with Rimbaud and Raymond Chandler and strapped on a flat-top Martin. And I realized something else. You couldn’t duplicate this; this was a one-time thing. Spend a lifetime learning the picking, and you couldn’t get it the same way twice. Learn every shading and nuance of voice, and this would still be the only one in the world. Even Dylan couldn’t duplicate it—try to Xerox it and the machine would short-circuit and smoke and burn. I felt there was no precedent for this—that you could trace folk music back through its entire history, and you would not hear anything like this. The song and the song’s performance came out of someplace raw and powerful, painful as an open wound. It was a way of looking at things in a single frozen moment of time.
wish i had a more interesting answer than blood on the tracks lol, but its just as good as advertised. still have a ton of love for street legal, oh mercy, love and theft, time out of mind, tempest, and rough and rowdy ways. in a 60+ year long career his song writing has never faltered, pretty much every album, there is a spark of the master's pen, from Johanna to Idiot Wind to Jokerman to Not Dark Yet to Mississippi and then to Murder Most Foul. Thats just the decades, You can do it by albums too.
Blood on tracks is the best really
It's just as goodI prefer Highway 61.
It's just as good