The Bob Dylan album Roger Waters felt betrayed by: “What is wrong with you?”
For most rock stars of a certain age, Bob Dylan is considered the almighty god of songwriting. No matter how often people try to rewrite the book on how to deliver lyrics, masterworks like Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited are still treated like gospel for rock bands for just how much ground can be covered across a few slabs of vinyl. If it weren’t for Dylan, Roger Waters probably would have never started writing music, but he knew his idol was slipping on Triplicate.
However, Dylan was not someone who could be reasoned with in terms of what he would do. The whole reason he worked in the first place was how willing he was to go against the grain and make something that no one had heard of, so it was almost customary for fans not to like his records on first listen.
By the time he emerged again in the late 1990s, his usual approach started to go through yet another shift. After going through being a born-again Christian making gospel records and working with the Traveling Wilburys, hearing projects like Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft saw him rediscovering his knack for writing complex lyrics like ‘Make You Feel My Love’.
That didn’t mean that he didn’t have a few curveballs in his arsenal, and Triplicate was just one of a few left turns he made throughout his career. Since he had been known to have his signature breathy delivery in his later years, hearing him take a swing at some of the biggest hits that Frank Sinatra had was a bit of a strange choice.
It’s not like he can’t do them justice, but this feels like the antithesis of Bob Dylan. Drawing back on traditional sounds worked for lovers of nostalgia like Paul McCartney and Rod Stewart, but for Waters, this felt like a betrayal of the artist he came to love who was always looking forward.
Since Waters had gone through his modern metamorphosis on the album Is This The Life We Really Want, he said that Triplicate was the exact opposite of what he wanted from Dylan, telling Billboard, “I haven’t got time to do an album of Frank Sinatra covers. Bob Dylan, for instance, which is weird. You go, ‘F**k me, Bob, what is wrong with you? Why would you do that?’ I guess it’s because he can’t bear the thought of not being on the road, and he couldn’t think of anything else to do. I can’t believe he really has an affinity for all that schlock.”
At the same time, Dylan didn’t mean to stomp on anyone’s fantasies of what he was supposed to be. He was just being himself in the same way Self Portrait was decades before, and hearing him inhabit songs like ‘Sentimental Journey’ and ‘Stardust’ makes the listener appreciate their writing rather than the cornier aspects.
If anything, giving Dylan time to work on his own vision for a few records might be the key to what makes him endure. And considering Waters has spent more time in recent years putting a steaming pile of musical manure on classics like Dark Side of the Moon, perhaps he could benefit from loosening up like Dylan did to see if he has a ‘Murder Most Foul’ in him.
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