‘Wiggle Wiggle’

We begin with the easiest indictment in the world. Was this song a joke? Was this some sort of elaborate PR stunt that illuminated the brilliance of his back catalogue by providing a point of such sheer contrast that there is no way to judge it other than with extreme bewilderment, dash it from the mind, and reappraise the magnificence of his past? The equivalent of a family cook, whose dishes have become so routinely brilliant that they have become under-appreciated by virtue of lofty expectations, serving up a shocker to remind folks not to take them for granted—is that what is happening with this absurd aberration?

Did Dylan perceive that his stock had fallen so far that the criticism now seemed outsized when scaled up to his former greatness so like a disgruntled employee, he clocked in and began a day of sabotage to prove that his previous efforts really did warrant a pay rise? None of this is knowable, but it is so bad that it proves mysterious… and that is by no means a redeeming factor for this act of self-Chernobyling.

Even when the tracklisting for his 1990 record, Under the Red Sky, was announced, a song by the name of ‘Wiggle Wiggle’ surely stood out as something that should never be uttered from the caustic mouth of the voice of a thousand generations. The track resides to this day as an unexplainable oddity that should’ve been shot at birth if only to spare the world from the head-scratching that has followed.

‘Ballad in Plain D’

In 1985, Dylan himself expressed a keen desire to have ‘Ballad in Plain D’ scrubbed from the record books. Speaking about the caustic track from his Another Side of Bob Dylan album, he explained: “I look back and say ‘I must have been a real schmuck to write that. ‘ I look back at that particular one and say, of all the songs I’ve written, maybe I could have left that alone.”

It’s a snarling and fierce effort, complete with nasty lines like, “For her parasite sister, I had no respect”. Granted, there’s certainly a place for a bit of caustic exclamation in music, but there’s no reason for anyone’s siblings to be catching strays, especially when the world has a fairly solid idea about who he is chastising.

In this brutal dirge, he seems to encapsulate someone’s entire pitiful existence in one hammer blow of a verse. Then he moves on to the next one in an unending attack against cynics and judgemental folks living vicariously through their own perpetuating scorn. Once again, there is a place for this, but it is ironically upended by its own unironic nastiness.

‘Emotionally Yours’

As soon as the gaudy album artwork of Empire Burlesque was released, an air of discombobulating despair hung over the whole enterprise. Dylan emerged from his rather crass-looking Born-Again era cover art into the garish light of sickly photoshop design. The cover is hell enough to make the Pope turn atheist on the off chance that his religiosity might condemn him to a lifetime with the creator of this defecation on the face of decency, but the music wasn’t much better.

‘Emotionally Yours’ is the musical manifestation of the ungodliness of the sleeve—it embodies everything that was wrong about the worst side of the tacky ‘80s. If the cover offered up roughly the same level of assurance for the quality of music therein as a Prince Andrew interview, then this song was the guilty plea that he had lost his ways and was happy to offer up a pointless bit of radio-friendly nothingness.

It was a time when inspiration had abandoned him. He was out on the road with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and he hated it. He reconciled that it was their day, and he was temporarily lost. That’s only natural, but he would’ve been better off taking a brief break rather than putting out this shallow sack of shit.

‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again’

THIS IS A GOOD SONG; let’s make that absolutely clear from the outset. But there are several reasons why a song should be deleted from history, and a quick edit of the mix would offer a nice chance to bring down the high end of that screeching harmonica.

The instrument forms a vital part of the song—it adds zip and fizz to a fast-moving rocker that helped to further hybridize the blend of folk and rock ‘n’ roll that he was aiming for. However, there is no need for that to come to the fore at the expense of our hearing health. The brutal stabs of his howling harmonica pierced through the instrumentation rather than adding to it. It’s the sonic equivalent of biting into tinfoil with a fresh filling.

With a slight Pro-Tools tweak, this could be amended, and the song could reclaim its place as one of his finer heavy efforts. But for now, it has a screaming asterisk that pushes a potential epic a bit too close to headache material for comfort. Get rid and re-do.

‘I Want You’

Once again, let’s cap it up for clarity: THIS IS A GOOD SONG. It is an excellent song, in fact. However, I would delete it any day for the studio outtake. With sweet honeyed belle flowing through it, the loose early version more closely suits the outpouring of lust.

There is a monumental undertone to hearing Dylan’s first immortalising of a song in acetate, and when it’s a Blonde on Blonde classic, that moment of ether coaxing alchemy is elevated to strangely spiritual heights. In subsequent years, the song has rightfully gone down as a classic, but for my money, it has never sounded as good as the aptly titled ‘I Want You – First Take’ version.

This version of the song, the first take that Dylan and the band laid down, is much rockier with a sweetly sustaining organ sound. Recorded in the early hours of a March morning in 1966, a 24-year-old Bob Dylan steps up to the mic to record a purring sultry classic. “‘I Want You’,” he responds when asked to name the track, and the rest, as they say, is ancient history.

‘Ugliest Girl in the World’

Now, let it be known for clarity that this is most certainly not a good song. It is another oddity akin to Mo Farah running a 20-minute mile. It finds our hero at his lowest ebb.

Dylan’s writer’s block got so constricting in the 1980s that the only options were to either enlist David Hasselhoff with a sledgehammer or contract Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. When it comes to the ‘Ugliest Girl in the World’, the former might have actually been preferable. The song punches down like a bad comic, while the music makes you feel like you’ve been placed in a washing machine on a 4-hour one-paced cycle.

You can’t be at the top forever, and Dylan was far from the only one dethroned by the pitfall of the ‘80s. The times were so gaudy that the question was do you say ‘you go your way, and I’ll go mine’ or join them on the technological picket line, a disillusioned Dylan chose the latter in trying times and offered up his worst work as a result.

‘Too Much of Nothing’

While Dylan’s version of ‘Too Much of Nothing’ with The Band might be a decent addition to their bootleg tapes, it doesn’t justify the fact he first gave it away to Peter, Paul and Mary like a parent entrusting their child with the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood for the weekend. That’s the version we would like to delete… and The Kooks song it inspired. So, if getting rid of the sacred Bootleg tape destroys those two, then it’s a sacrifice the world should make.

When we recently spoke to John Lydon. he explained, “I kinda liked Bob Dylan when he went electric. That’s when it mattered to me. Before then, really, it was like a pale imitation of something that was Arlo Guthrie-ish. Just a waggon driven by horses kind of music. It wasn’t my scene.”

Obviously, that is an unhinged and unnatural opinion to have, but if he was summoning evidence, then he might well say that Dylan was guilty by association when it comes to ‘Too Much of Nothing’, a most rickety and kitsch track.

‘Sugar Baby’

“Sugar Baby get on down the line,” Dylan sings in the song ‘Sugar Baby’, “You ain’t got no brains, no how”. It’s the phrasing of this lesser-known track that proves to be the problem. You see, the anthem ‘Just Like a Woman’ is a misunderstood masterpiece that is often incorrectly dubbed as mysoginitic despite the fact that Dylan clearly takes on the postmodern guise of an unreliable narrator and reflects his own vulnerability in the song. Alas, it is tracks like ‘Sugar Baby’ that reinforce that misreading.

It’s one thing dropping caustic bombs in a verse, but it’s another thing entirely having it land repeated in a chorus. The fact he has sent this brainless woman packing indefinitely imbues the track with a sense that it is not just a break-up song but one shattered beyond all recognition of a relationship. But the shards are a little dangerous.

While the verses show ambivalence, the chorus rings out with his final judgement. And that judgement is as condemning as they come. He spares no feeling for the woman in question and doesn’t even dress up with any poetry or prose; it is as stern a shoot-down as they come. And it proves a little too blunt for comfort, given the conditions of the title.  

‘Neighbourhood Bully’

If this riff was an item of clothing, it would be those pale blue boot-cut jeans that look like two rolls of carpet. As uncool as an ‘80s beer commercial, this daft and repetitive insult to his legacy is cringy enough to snap a weak jaw. And it just won’t shift; it goes on and on in this tedious ’50-year-old cutting loose in a second-hand convertible’ fashion for nearly five unnecessary minutes. 

All the while, Dylan does his best impression of Dylanesque vocals and the whole thing seems like an exercise in fitting the most cliches into a rock song as is humanly possible. It’s as though he has been inspired by a bad Bob Dylan cover band trying an out ‘an original number’ in a social club. Perhaps oddest of all is that Infidels actually does contain some great moments, so the question marks over this odious effort are all the more puzzling.

‘Talkin’ New York Blues’

It is often said that Dylan is surrounded by a lot of myth-making. Well, he would’ve proven himself the absolute master of this art from the get-go if it hadn’t been for one pesky little song.

Picture it: a vagabond wanders into New York City from the wild in search of his hero, Woody Guthrie. He meets the folk legend in a hospital. Brimming with inspiration, he goes back out into the world, gets signed up by Columbia and produces a debut album full of covers, documenting the musical past that led him until this point and, crucially, one original song honouring his leading forefather, calling it the first song he ever wrote, ‘Song for Woody Guthrie’. After that album, he set out his own legacy and changed folk and songwriting in general, for that matter, forevermore.

The only track stopping that beautiful tale from taking hold is the fact that there are two original tracks on that debut album, one of them being the entirely forgettable, ‘Talkin’ New York Blues’. If only it could be forgotten by the record book of history, too, then we’d be living in a much more poetic world.