“Non-commercial”: Bob Dylan’s favourite Bob Dylan album
From the outside looking in, it would seem that Bob Dylan‘s favourite pastime is staying two steps ahead of the rock and roll crowd. As soon as he was labelled the ‘voice of a generation’, he turned his back on political songs and as soon as Joan Baez championed him as the messiah of acoustic folk, he plugged into an amp, and, just as everyone thought he had finally hung up his boots, he released the triumphant Blood on the Tracks, then Love and Theft, and then Rough and Rowdy Ways.
In short, he’s reinvented himself so many times that he gives Frank Abagnale, the real-life protagonist from Catch Me If You Can, a run for his money. So, it’s perhaps no surprise that when it comes to the freewheelin’ troubadour selecting his own favourite Dylan record, he proves to be equally difficult to pin down.
If you were to ask most fans to pick their favourite Bob Dylan album, they would most likely choose one from his 1960s heyday or perhaps Blood On the Tracks from ’75, maybe even New Morning or Oh Mercy for those fonder of a deeper cut, but the vast majority would steer well clear of his born-again Christian phase from 1979 to ’81.
As it happens, religion has always been the basis of his work—songs don’t get much more biblical than ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ or ‘All Along the Watchtower’, but during this period, he raised it from the subtext to the perfunctory surface and suddenly had John Lennon quipping, “He wants to be a waiter for Christ” in response to ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’. But Dylan, knowing spiritualism was as potent in his celebrated early works as his more evangelical days, had a different point of view, championing the final LP in this biblical trilogy as his own favourite: Shot of Love.
“For me, I think it’s the most explosive album I’ve ever done,” he announced in a radio interview upon the release of the record. Far from a flippant piece of promotion, this is not an opinion that Dylan has wavered from over the years. He has stood by Shot of Love as the overlooked jewel in his crown of thorns.
In 1983, two years after its release, he was asked if he enjoyed listening back to his old stuff, to which he perhaps naturally replied, “No, no. It’s unbearable to hear some of them, for me. I hear them, and I want to shut them off. […] It’s not like I sit around and listen to Bob Dylan stuff. I like Freewheelin’, and I like my first album.” Before announcing the big ticket prize: “Shot of Love is my favourite, actually.”
Once again, in 1985, he stood by his assertion, telling Cameron Crowe, “People didn’t listen to [Shot of Love] in a realistic way. […] The critics wouldn’t allow the people to make up their own minds. All they talked about was Jesus this and Jesus that, like it was some kind of Methodist record. I don’t know what was happening, maybe Boy George or something, but Shot of Love didn’t fit into the current formula,” Dylan laments with evident disdain.
In the past, Dylan had always been one step ahead of the times. His earliest songs took folk traditions and made them prescient. When a revolution was spawned, he not only joined it by going electric but furthered it by adding profundity to the zip of the amplified zeitgeist. Then, with the flame of counterculture blazing, he turned his finger on the folks he had helped drum up, urging them to check their own virtues before putting the world to rights with the masterpiece ‘Like a Rolling Stone’.
But by the time of Shot of Love, he went from one step ahead to out-of-step. He had been a poet of enlightenment for a generation, and that generation had decided that religion was void. Now, the prophet that had led them to this hill was suddenly in opposition, and the record was shot down in a flurry. As Dylan put it: “People were always looking for some excuse to write me off, and this was as good as any. I can’t say if being ‘non-commercial’ is a put-down or a compliment”.
He has made similar remarks in several other interviews, touting the simple fact that the record didn’t fit neatly into the typical notion of his back catalogue behind its critical and commercial failure. “People couldn’t see the logical extension,” he explains. The truth, however, is a little murkier than that.
The album itself, produced by Chuck Plotkin and Bumps Blackwell, sees Dylan take on a more polished tone than fans are typically used to. Dylan describes it as producing a paradoxically “old but new” sound. Most of the songs are backed by an ensemble of angelic female voices, with the heavily reverberated keyboard forming the most prominent instrument throughout. This gloss imbued his godliness with a sense of pomposity that failed exactly where the likes of Freewheelin’ had succeeded.
The final track, ‘Every Grain of Sand’, proves to be the standout, but nevertheless, it would seem that the record remains out of place in most people’s eyes. It has its stirring moments, and there are more than enough flashes of brilliance to hint at the master behind it, but with the best will in the world, it still doesn’t manage to tie the bootlaces of Highway 61 Revisited.
The best art of the 20th century shaped culture in some way. Highway 61 Revisited did this, as did Freewheeilin’ before it and, indeed, many others in his back catalogue. But Shot of Love did not. So, perhaps if Dylan approaches the record in pure artistic isolation, he may very well appraise it as one of his best, but the very fact that the world rejected it is, to some extent, testimony to its fatal untimely flaw.
It is, however, one of Bono’s favourite records so Bob is not alone in his adulation, and it seems fitting that he has the most pompous man in pop onboard with this one.
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