Bob Dylan on the album that got away from him: “Hung around too long”
It’s healthy for any long-term artist to have more than a few clunkers in their catalogue. No one can claim to be perfect, and even if an album is selling by the bucketload, that doesn’t mean that every single song needs to be golden from back to front. It’s oddly comforting knowing that artists are still human, but Bob Dylan did admit that his material on the album Infidels was below his usual standard.
Then again, nothing Dylan ever did was meant to be neat and tidy. He was an artist known for bringing a human aspect to every part of his music, and when listening to albums like The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, you’ll hear a lot of string noise and a few notes that aren’t exactly hit right on pitch but have a wealth of emotion behind them.
Dylan knew how to make perfect pop songs if he wanted to, but that wasn’t a road he wanted to go down for very long. While there were certainly benefits to being at the top of the charts, being a celebrity was never something that the rock god was all that comfortable with. This resulted in him being a little bit cagey in interviews and questioning journalists right back to their faces.
Although he had faded into the background by the 1980s, he still had something to say. After years of delivering his personal drama on Blood on the Tracks, his Christian-evangelist period on Saved and Slow Train Coming left a lot to be desired, with many thinking that he traded in his rebellious nature for abject preachiness.
While Dylan has stood by his faith-filled years, hearing Infidels is a bit of a strange listen. Tracks like ‘Jokerman’ do still have that spark that Dylan started out with, but there are times when it feels like you’re listening to him at a distance, almost like he’s trying to hit on a specific topic and never really landing on it.
It’s one thing to leave songs open-ended, but Dylan thought that he played it a little too coy on the album, later telling Paul Zollo, “[Jokerman]. That’s a song that got away from me. Lots of songs on that album got away from me. They just did. They hung around too long. They were better before they were tampered with. Of course, it was me tampering with them.”
Despite being a lyricist known for being almost clinical with his work, Dylan was always focused on making something a bit more streamlined in the future. In fact, him joining The Traveling Wilburys could have only been a good thing for him, showing him not taking himself all that seriously and putting a handful of silly songs into the mix like ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’.
Since he had more time to get that out of his system, many of Dylan’s songs seemed more lived-in than before. Infidels may have been an uneasy record for him to make, but maybe he had to go through something so jagged so he could end up creating an album like Time Out Of Mind later.
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