For many, Self Portrait was the beginning of the end of Bob Dylan. A self-indulgent mess of a double-album (which is packaged as a single CD in the Complete Album Collection, which I mention for no real reason other than to note that Blonde on Blonde was two discs), apparently it has been ranked as one of the worst albums of all time.

So, first, that seems nuts to me. I’ve been listening to it for a couple of days now and I still like the four live tracks from Isle of Wight (my affection for “Minstrel Boy” is starting to fade…), and I’m not sure how any album could be a “worst of all kind” contender if it has at least four good songs on it. So that’s four of twenty-four – let’s see what we can add to the total.

The album also includes seven covers of “traditional” songs or “folk songs”. Dylan hadn’t been doing covers since his very first album and the home recorded tapes that appeared around the same time. This was a harkening back to his roots from the twenty-nine year old songwriter, and not necessarily what people expected from him or wanted from him. Ironically, covers of traditional songs is one of the hallmarks of the basement tapes as they appear on A Tree With Roots (though not on the material from those sessions that was circulating in 1969 and 1970), and also on GWW. The bootlegs proved that there was still a strong demand for Dylan covering traditional music. Funnily, the same Rolling Stone critics who adored GWW were the ones who also crapped all over Self Portrait.

The fact is that not all of these covers are good, but, in all honesty, they’re at least as good as the material on A Tree With Roots, and generally better than that on GWW. And, yes, that doesn’t make them good in an absolute sense.

One of the real oddities of Self Portrait is that Dylan included two songs twice. “Alberta #1” and “Alberta #2” are different takes on the same song originally made famous by Lead Belly. The second one is the stronger version, with better guitar and harmonica, although the back-up vocals don’t really add that much to it. There is an “Alberta #3” on Another Self Portrait that also has a nice harmonica opening, and which is much more spare. It’s probably the best of the three versions, because it is the least produced. It’s no Lead Belly, but it’s listenable.

Similarly, “Little Sadie” shows up twice on the album (once as “In the Search of Little Sadie”). This is one of my favourite banjo tunes – I have more than thirty different recordings of this currently on my phone, most featuring only banjo and fiddle. It’s a song that I can play this pretty passably. When we would play this as a class at my banjo class we would always annoy our instructor by singing it the way Dylan does, which is, frankly, insane. The first version of the song on the album is fine, but “In the Search of” version is just quite terrible. There is a stripped down cut of the latter on Another Self Portrait – it doesn’t improve it much at all. This is pretty close to everything that annoyed me about the worst parts of A Tree With Roots. So no points for these two.

Of the others, “Days of 49” is actually pretty good. This version sounds like it comes from later in his career by about a decade – if this had been on one of the Christian albums it would have seemed more at home. It trails off somewhat bizarrely at the end, but I’d have to count this as a pretty good version of this.

“Belle Isle” doesn’t have very much to recommend it – it is literally “fine”. “It Hurts Me Too” is another dud.

Hmm. That doesn’t strike me as a very good record of quality. I’d keep “Alberta #2” (#3 if I can take tracks from the Bootleg Series) and “Days of 49” and probably jettison the rest. What is interesting, though, is that pretty much of all this (well, maybe not “In the Search of”) is just as good, if not better, than the basement material that people were scrambling to get. It has been suggested that Dylan saw Self Portrait as his authorized bootleg – like A Tree With Roots it combines traditional covers, covers of pop hits, and some new compositions. I’m not sure if that’s correct, but the traditional songs on this are pretty akin to the others he was doing at the time, and all are better produced.

Now the pop covers, that’s an entirely different matter….

Try Clarence Ashley on “Little Sadie” – this is near perfection (seriously, this could not be improved one little bit):

There’s not much video of Bob Dylan from 1970, because he barely appeared in public, with the exception of receiving an honorary doctorate from Princeton in June. He played no shows at all, and the only real document of his playing that year other than his two albums (and the recently released Bootleg Series album) is his appearance in a documentary about the great banjo player, Earl Scruggs.

Dylan recorded two songs with Earl and two of Earl’s sons in December 1970, and the film was released in 1972. It’s available on YouTube (below) and the whole thing is really worth watching. The Dylan parts – “East Virginia Blues”, a traditional tune, and “Nashville Skyline Rag” – are the first two things on the video if you only want to see his part. Of course if you turn it right off you’re missing out on Scruggs at the home of Doc Boggs, and it really just gets better from there.

Scruggs was an amazing musician and his influence on banjo may be stronger than any other musician’s influence on the playing of any other instrument. To say that almost all bluegrass banjo players fashion their playing style after Scruggs is an understatement. The first time I attended American Banjo Camp, which has more bluegrass players than clawhammer players (the style I play), I innocently asked someone at lunch why all the bluegrass players use two metal finger picks and a plastic thumb pick (why aren’t they all metal?). He stared at me dumfoundedly and said “that’s what Earl uses”, like I had just fallen off the back of a turnip truck. “That’s what Earl does” was all the reason any banjo player needed for any decision they made, and the desire to achieve the Scruggs sound is powerful among amateur players.

For much of the 1960s Scruggs and Dylan would have been seen as occupying enemy camps, and indeed many might see them as such even today. Their playing here is great, even if on his own composition Dylan has an intimidated look in his eyes that says “man, this guy is a real player!”.

I woke up this morning at 3:00am, or, as my body clock knew it, 6:00pm Singapore time. To pass the time with the rest of the household asleep, I caught up with Robert Shelton’s biography of Dylan, No Direction Home. Yesterday I said that he largely ignored the Isle of Wight concert – that was incorrect. He actually does give it four or five pages, and notes that he was there, watching from the back about a quarter mile away. That said, he didn’t like it much.

Shelton also didn’t much like Self Portrait, but then again nobody else seems to have either. Actually, the album sold quite well (peaking at #7 on the charts), but it was reviled by the critics. When I posted the album cover as my Facebook avatar last night it immediately generated a discussion about how terrible this album is.

Self Portrait is, in many ways, the album that inspired this particular project. I downloaded Bootleg Series 10: Another Self Portrait when it came out last year, and listened to it a few times and thought it was pretty good. That album made me acutely aware of how little I knew of Self Portrait and New Morning, Dylan’s two 1970 albums, other than the fact that one was detested and one adored, and that they were recorded in quite close proximity to each other. I thought maybe I should sort that out, and that in turn led to this year long project.

When I was done with the Shelton (well, not done, but I’m up to the 1974 chapter and don’t want to read ahead), I turned to Dylan’s own autobiography, Chronicles v. 1. He has a shortish chapter in that about New Morning, although the chapter is almost as much about Self Portrait. It’s a great chapter in a great book. Dylan’s concerns are voiced in his own words very convincingly: after Woodstock became Woodstock ™ his “fans” and people who wanted things from him began to descend on the town where he lived with his five children, showing up on his property (he says on his roof). He acquired guns to protect his kids, and, finally, was forced to flee the town for New York. There he had to deal with people like A. J. Weberman leading protests against him in front of his house. Weberman felt that he’d sold out. Dylan is very eloquent about one thing: He didn’t want to be the spokesman for this generation, or any other one. I guess when a group like The Weathermen name themselves for something you wrote and then start blowing people up, you might want to just spend more time with your children too.

Dylan writes in Chronicles that he was aware that Herman Melville died almost forgotten. Moby Dick pushed the limits and nothing else he ever wrote was paid the attention that it was. He aspired in 1969/1970 to Melville’s status: kill the beast. Just disappear. Don’t tour. Don’t perform. Just escape into obscurity. He argues that Self Portrait was his effort to dump his fame.

It didn’t work, of course, but it did upset a lot of people. Greil Marcus famously opened his (insanely long) Rolling Stone review with “What is this shit?” before going on for about twenty pages about the album’s highs and lows. Marcus’s distaste is funny to me in retrospect, given that he wrote a whole book about The Basement Tapes, which are far more uneven (Marcus’s review is the second chapter in his collection Bob Dylan: Writings 1968-2010, and his New York Times review of New Morning is the third). Look, Self Portrait is uneven, but it isn’t a complete disaster.

The whole of Self Portrait is too long, too contradictory, too fascinating to deal with in one post. I already dealt with four of the songs, all of which are from the Isle of Wight concert. I’m going to write three other posts breaking the album into sections: pop song covers, traditional songs, and new Dylan songs.

In the meantime I’m going to have a nap. Did I mention that I’m still on Singapore time?

Bob Dylan sort of famously didn’t play Woodstock, a concert that was held not far from where he was actually living in 1969, but did play the Isle of Wight Festival two weeks later. It was his first complete concert in just over three years, and only his second live performance in that time (the other being at the Woody Guthrie Memorial shows). The festival attracted 150,000 people, and Dylan headlined the final night. Robert Shelton, in his biography of Dylan, basically downplays the entire thing, devoting only a couple of sentences to it, while other fans note that it was a widely bootlegged performance. Wikipedia makes it out to be quite the party, with a VIP booth near the front of the stage that included three of the Beatles (not Paul), three of the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, Jane Fonda, Elton John, Syd Barrett and others. The show drew considerably larger crowd than the previous year, partly based on the rumours that the Beatles were going to join Dylan on stage and not just at the after party (where, apparently, they played an early acetate of Abbey Road).

Dylan’s set was only an hour. He reportedly had another eight to ten songs rehearsed and would have played them if the audience had seemed to want it. The British press reported that he was semi-chased off the stage by an audience that (once again) didn’t get what he was doing, but other reports indicate that Dylan thought the whole thing went really well and that he was in a good mood after it, but that he performed for just an hour because the crowed seemed burned out. They do seem a little tired. They respond well to (the remarkably awesome version of) “She Belongs To Me”, the first song of the show, but their enthusiasm noticeably tails off as the evening progresses.

The whole show was released last year as a bonus disc on the triple CD Another Self-Portrait. The recording is excellent, but it’s hard to gauge the audience response. The way that it is recorded it sounds like a small, appreciative crowed – certainly not 150,000 people. They react tremendously well to the older material like “Mr. Tambourine Man”, but seem a bit lost at the country versions of some of the material.

While this wasn’t the first time that Dylan had performed new arrangements of established hits – something that has been his hallmark as a live performer for the past forty years – many of these versions are quite different than the recorded versions. “Like A Rolling Stone” is unrecognizable to the crowd from its musical intro – no one claps until the end of the first line as it is clear that they don’t see the song coming. Dylan messes up the lyrics, which is probably a function of the three year hiatus. I really like this version, but it is clear that the crowd doesn’t. I do laugh every time Dylan and Robbie Robertson forget the lyrics to the chorus.

Speaking of Robertson, The Band is really great here, and it’s another example of how unfortunate it is that Dylan wasn’t regularly touring for this eight year period. Musically, this is a very strong show, and given that almost every Dylan tour begins with a fairly weak show but gets stronger as it goes on (although some of them then burn out by the end), one can only imagine how good this group would have been had they done a dozen or more shows.

The show featured a lot of recent Dylan from the John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline era, material that otherwise didn’t get a lot of live performances, plus very unusual versions of “Maggie’s Farm” and “Highway 61 Revisited”. Three songs from the show wound up on Self-Portrait, including “Minstrel Boy”, which received its public debut at this show.

I’m a fan of this show. I wish that he had done the other eight songs. I wish that it had been the launch of a tour. I wish that we didn’t have to wait until 1974 for more live Dylan with The Band, and that we didn’t have to wait for Planet Waves for a full album by Dylan and The Band. The collaboration between Dylan and The Band has another six years (weeks) to run, but this is that rare glimpse of how great things could have been. How good is it? It’s so good that I even listen to the version of “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” that ends the set!

—

A few words on this video. First, I have no idea where it came from or what its purpose was. It’s an almost twelve minute documentary from French television about people going to the festival. It spends more time filming people on the ferry than it does on anything else. Second, I have no idea why they use the insanely dramatic music to show hippies getting off of a ferry! Third, I like the fact that the voice-of-god narrator calls Dylan “their pope”. Talk about dramatic over-statement. Fourth, the bongo playing! Fifth, footage of people sleeping through The Who’s set (they performed the entirety of Tommy, I’d have slept through it too), which indicates that maybe the crowd was truly dead by end of the weekend for Dylan. Finally, they devote twelve long minutes to Dylan’s comeback show, and then the only footage of him they use (beginning at 10:30 if you want to jump directly to it) is of “The Mighty Quinn”? Really? “The Mighty Quinn”?!?! I guess it was a hit at the time for Manfred Mann…

—

A word on the second video. Colour footage (though no sound) of Dylan performing as seen from the VIP box to the side of the stage. You get to see all three of The Beatles in this clip (what the hell is on Yoko Ono’s forehead?), but not the other celebrities. Sort of a bizarre thing, but there you have it.

—

A word on the third video. Handheld footage from close to the stage of “I Threw It All Away” credited to Bobby Dylanski, presumably in an effort to end run Columbia’s lawyers trolling through YouTube. Then the sound drops out and you can watch Dylan perform “Maggie’s Farm” without hearing it. You can sync it with your recording if you really try. Then the sound comes back for “Highway 61 Revisited”, “One Too Many Mornings” (sound quality is brutal here), “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” . I do wish the bootlegger would have invested in a tripod….

It’s been a rough week for blogging, what with a trip to Singapore, jet lag and a conference taking up most of my time, and then a trip back from Singapore. I haven’t had as much time to think about Dylan as I would have liked. Fortunately, Nashville Skyline is a really short album.

How short? Just 28 minutes, with no song longer than 3:43. Throw in the fact that the album contains Dylan’s first instrumental release (“Nashville Skyline Rag”, which is one of the longer songs on the album) and it’s just under 25 minutes of songs (if we want to hold to the song/tune division). Throw in the fact that the lead track is a cover of an earlier song (“Girl from the North Country”) and now we’re down to about 21 minutes of new material to consider. Hell, it’s almost an EP.

I listened to Nashville Skyline a few dozen times this week, mostly at departure lounges. Unlike John Wesley Harding, with which I was generally unfamiliar, this is an album that I knew reasonably well, and it’s one that I have long enjoyed. After a string of albums with songs that I began to skip every time I would play the album, there is nothing on Nashville Skyline that deserves to be skipped. If there are no songs that I would rank as all time greats, there are also none that I actually dislike. It’s a really solid effort that helped usher in the country-rock genre. It may have seemed odd from Dylan at the time, particularly given how many of his contemporaries were turning towards psychedelia, but it was also a hit, and one of his best-selling albums.

I’ve covered a few of the songs already, including “Girl From the North Country”, “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”, “Lay Lady Lay” and “To Be Alone With You”. That doesn’t leave an awful lot still to discuss. “Nashville Skyline Rag” is fine. Given his prominence as a lyricist and songwriter, this is an odd inclusion for any album, but it a solid enough piece. “I Threw It All Away” was the first single from the album (and the only one that I didn’t bother to write about as a single), with its heavy organ tones and slowly methodical crooning. It’s a really simple, but effective, song about loss and regret – one of the few downbeat songs on an album that is otherwise a statement about a man who is content with his life at the time.

“Peggy Day” is a song that gets very little attention, but is probably the one that I enjoyed most this week – “Peggy night makes my future look so bright”. Everything works well on this exceedingly slight love song from the piano to the guitars. It’s the type of song that sounds like it was written in the 1920s, and I mean that as a compliment.

“One More Night” is a hyper-country song, particularly with the guitar picking. This song desperately called out for a banjo. “Tell Me That It Isn’t True” is another classic country song, this time a cheating song. Kris Kristofferson was a Nashville studio janitor at the time Dylan recorded this, and this is the kind of thing that you could have imagined him writing. Finally, “County Pie”, the shortest song on the album and one of the shortest that Dylan ever officially released, is, by far, the slightest thing not only on the album but one of the least significant things Dylan ever recorded. It’s not really good, but it’s so short that you can’t really object to it, and the guitar playing is good.

So: good album. Not in the “greatest of all time” category, but almost completely devoid of bad songs. Better than John Wesley Harding, but it’s not a blow-out or anything. Starting tomorrow I’ll be shifting to the two 1970s albums – the disastrously received Self-Portrait and the return to form New Morning – neither of which I’m expecting to enjoy as much as this one.

Here’s “I Threw It All Away” from the Johnny Cash Show, June of 1969 (two weeks before I was born!):

In his Rolling Stone interview with Jann Wenner in November 1969, Dylan said about “To Be Alone With You”, from Nashville Skyline: “I wrote it for Jerry Lee Lewis. The one on “Nashville Skyline.” (Laughter.) He was down there when we were listening to the playbacks, and he came in. He was recording an album next door. He listened to it… I think we sent him a dub.”

I have absolutely no idea if Dylan is telling the truth here – the interview is chock full of obvious mistruths – but it at least sounds plausible.

This is a very slight swinging song of the kind that Lewis made famous more than a decade earlier, full of little piano fills and simple, lively lyrics: “They say the night time is the right time to be with the one you love”. It doesn’t get any more sophisticated than that, and neither did Lewis.

The only unusual bit in this brief little nothing is the voice of the producer coming across at the beginning, asking “Is it rolling, Bob?”, an, at the time, unusual remnant of the human process of the recording process that gives the song a tossed-off feeling.

I don’t think that interviewing Bob Dylan in 1969 was any more fun that it was when he was tormenting his interviewers in 1965. Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone, scored the coveted “major interview with the reclusive Bob Dylan” as the cover feature of the second anniversary issue of his magazine in November 1969, and it is just a horrible read.

The best part of the interview comes near the end:

WENNER: That’s the awkwardness of this interview.

DYLAN: Well, I don’t find anything awkward about it. I think it’s going real great.

Does he? Does he really think that it’s going great?

At this point Dylan’s relationship with his manager, Albert Grossman, was disintegrating, and he was contemplating leaving Columbia Records (which he would do), although he doesn’t really want to talk to Wenner about either of those things. Wenner asks him about touring and he suggests that he’ll go on the road shortly, but it would be another four years before Dylan would tour again (he did play Isle of Wight between the time this interview was recorded and when it was published). So he lies about the one topic, and just dissembles about the others. This is going great?

One of the most interesting things is that Wenner, who comes across as the nerdiest of nerds here, wants to talk about the specifics of Dylan’s work and Dylan sometimes can’t even remember what songs are on what albums. Either he just didn’t care about this interview (likely) or he has a very unusual relationship to his creativity (possible).

One of the best answers for why he was taking so many drugs while touring in 1965 and 1966:

“My songs were long, long songs. But that’s why I had to start dealing with a lot of different methods of keeping myself awake, alert… because I had to remember all the words to those songs.” If you consider how short most of the songs on John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline are, I’m sort of tempted to believe that this might actually be a genuine answer.

The interview does have Dylan explaining that the change in his voice, which is at its most notable on Nashville Skyline, was a result of his decision to stop smoking. This could also be true (apparently Dylan still smokes to this day, and when he tours he often has to stay in low end hotels because they allow smoking). His comment, “I tell you, you stop smoking those cigarettes … and you’ll be able to sing like Caruso.” is probably the high point of the interview.

A lot of the rest of it is Wenner asking Dylan his opinion on other bands of the period, which was probably of interest to the editor of a music magazine (and maybe the readers) but not so much to me. It is interesting when Dylan notes that he doesn’t really know the music of The Grateful Dead, given that they will later tour and record together. This interview does paint a picture of a man who is pretty cut off from the scene he helped generate though.

My take away from all this was that in 1969 Wenner seemed to know a lot more about Dylan than Dylan knew about Dylan, or at least about the public part of his life. Clearly, people spend more time thinking about Dylan than Dylan does. I guess that now includes me.

The third, and final, single from Nashville Skyline was “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”. This is another Dylan in full crooner mode, but it’s also a great polished love song. The last song on the album, the band is tight and sharp and I’m at the point that I like any Dylan song that has a steel guitar in it.

This is a very different love song for Dylan. It’s not a rambling man in search of his one true love song, rather it’s a song of devotion and settling down, which was probably appropriate for a young married man who was focused on raising his young children at the time.

This is a song I really love from some of the live performances from the mid-1970s, and I can hear Dylan belting out “I can hear that whistle blowing”. The train motif is a common one for Dylan, and this is all about a man missing that train.

It’s a simple song, but I think it’s the best one on Nashville Skyline.

Did you know that Tina Turner did a cover of it? Me neither! Here you go:

People send me things about Bob Dylan now, and that’s awesome. Lots of them are only semi-interesting, but this one is great, and I wished I’d had it three weeks ago when we were doing 1966.

Metro in the UK tracked down eight of the ten children who appeared in this iconic photo of Dylan form Liverpool in 1966. Great job, Metro!

Bob Dylan wrote “Lay Lady Lay” too slowly for it to be included in the film for which it had been solicited: Midnight Cowboy. That was good news for Fred Neil, whose song “Everybody’s Talking At Me” is played about a half dozen times on the soundtrack, and which went on to become a significant hit for Harry Nilsson, and won a Grammy.

As luck would have it, Midnight Cowboy was one of the in-flight options on my Air Canada flight to Hong Kong (along with The Deer Hunter, Deliverance, Dog Day Afternoon, and Taxi Driver – someone was having a dark day at the programming office), so I watched it for the first time in at least two decades. It’s a hard film to imagine without “Everybody’s Talking”, which fits the opening and closing bus ride scenes so nicely, though it is possible to imagine it in the middle. When Jack plays Scribbage with Brenda Vaccaro and he can’t think of a word that begins or ends with a Y, since he is illiterate, one of the words that she suggests is “Lay”, and I imagine that perhaps the song was meant for that scene.

As a song it has always been one of my least favourite. The crooning Bob Dylan doesn’t really work for me, and here he is at his crooning-est. The song has always had a creepy late-1960s, early-1970s vibe to me (perfect for Midnight Cowboy!), particularly the way he intones “big brass bed”, hitting those three Bs so forcefully.

I read somewhere once that at this time Dylan had a dog named “Lady”. I don’t know if that is true, but I hope that it isn’t, because that would just make the song all the more creepy.

I might be a minority opinion on this one – “Lay Lady Lay” was the successful single off of Nashville Skyline (hitting #7 on the US charts), but for me it’s far from the best song. That’s probably fitting though – Midnight Cowboy isn’t that great as a movie either. It’s only the second best movie of the decade that ends with a dead-eyed Dustin Hoffman on the back of a bus.