The band that Bob Dylan thought didn’t do his songs justice: “We just couldn’t”
Bob Dylan has never been known to take the easy route on any of his records. He does have his moments where he can make something that’s more straightforward, like his country records, but given his status as one of the most beloved songsmiths in the world, he’s more than happy to toy with what his audience expects out of him, whether that’s going electric in the 1960s or making an album that was meant to be bad on purpose like Self Portrait. Even if there are some dogs in his catalogue, Dylan was always a stickler for good musicianship, and that meant surrounding himself with the right people.
Then again, a lot of Dylan’s raw musicianship and strength as a bandleader could come down to his work with The Band. While they might have been called The Hawks when Dylan took them under his wing, any member of the roots rock legends had fond memories of Dylan flying off the handle whenever the time called for it, either trying songs in a different key or changing the tempo in the first few seconds of the track.
While that sounds like a gig from hell, the true professionals were never afraid to take on that challenge. Bringing in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as his backing band in the 1980s may have been a strange fit in the beginning, but after years of playing for their lives onstage, hearing them do justice to ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ when performing felt like the most authentic version of Dylan.
Although Dylan could rein it in when working with The Traveling Wilburys, his greatest moments in the late 1990s and early 2000s had a lot more to do with the way the songs were presented. Even though an album like Time Out of Mind feels incredibly lowkey compared to his earlier work, it was all done in service of the song. Whereas ‘Make You Feel My Love’ was meant to be a touch on the slow side, “Love and Theft” was the album where Dylan was always on the fence.
“I felt extremely frustrated because I couldn’t get any of the up-tempo songs that I wanted.”
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Outside of the fantastic songs on the record, much of the music behind him was more downtempo than usual. While no one was expecting him to pull out another version of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ by this point in his career, Dylan pointed the finger squarely at the musicians he was working with when laying down the tracks.
Despite their reputation as some of the greatest musicians in the session musician scene, Dylan felt that a lot of the songs felt off when he heard them back, saying, “We started to use some musicians that [Daniel] Lanois would choose and a couple that I had in mind: [keyboardist] Jim Dickinson; [drummer] Jim Keltner; [guitarist] Duke Robillard. I started assembling people that I knew could play. They had the right soulful kind of attitude for these songs. But we just couldn’t… I felt extremely frustrated because I couldn’t get any of the up-tempo songs that I wanted.”
However, Dylan’s frustration may have been caused by his slightly different way of looking at his own material. No one playing for as long as Jim Keltner had was going to try to grandstand when they got behind the kit, but even when making subtle changes to make things more uptempo, trying to get inside Dylan’s head is like trying to unlock a treasure chest without knowing where the key is.
That’s not to say that “Love and Theft” is even that bad of a record. In fact, it’s among one of the better albums that Dylan would release from this period of his career, but this felt like one of the few times where he felt that the version that he heard in his head and what made it onto the record didn’t align properly.
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