The 1985 album Bob Dylan wanted to delete from history: “I didn’t care”
Bob Dylan didn’t like the idea of ever being told what to do by his record company.
Although he wasn’t the kind of maverick that put everyone in their place the same way that Neil Young did, you could tell that he had a lot better idea of what his audience wanted than those who were clamouring for whatever flavour of the day that he needed to jump on. But even when Dylan was making some of the finest records that he could, even a legend of his status wasn’t safe from his record company doing what they wanted with his tracks.
Then again, the story of the record company not caring about someone’s artistic integrity is a tale as old as time at this point. Some of the biggest names in the industry are only worried about the amount of numbers that are on the end of their royalty checks, and if they can’t get what they want out of original material, it’s only natural for them to put out a quick and easy album while the iron is hot.
It’s happened to The Rolling Stones, it’s happened to Van Halen, and it has happened to Dylan on more than a few occasions. Although a lot of the compilation records, like his early greatest hits, are still a great encapsulation of what Dylan was all about, it was never about how he looked at his music. He liked the idea of pushing himself forward on every record, and when he changed his sound around in the 1980s, he wasn’t in love with the idea of his label giving the public another compilation of his hits.
For one thing, Dylan was a much different animal than the one singing ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ by the mid-1980s. He had already gone through one of the stranger detours in his career by making gospel records, but even after he started to put his spirituality on the shelf and working with Daniel Lanois, the record Biograph was the one record Dylan felt never needed to exist.
The album is great if you want a legacy version of what Dylan’s greatest songs were, but considering Dylan had an album to promote, he never willingly tried to sign off on it, saying, “Columbia wanted to put out a (retrospective) album on me a few years ago. They had pulled out everything (from earlier albums) that could be classified as love songs and had it on one collection. I didn’t care one way or another, but I had a new record coming out, so I asked them not to do it then.”
If you look at the record itself, though, it’s not like the label didn’t know what they were doing. This is a fine example of what Dylan sounded like at his most heartfelt, and when combing through the songs, you get a much better look at what made him tick, as well as the more caustic side of him that everyone knew him for whenever he brought out the more political material.
But it’s easy to see why Dylan would have been more than a little bit pissed off as well. There was no reason for the rest of the world to see him at that point in his life anymore. He had tried his best to start working on something, and even when he was willing to embrace pieces of his past by working with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, it would have been impossible for him to promote one of his own records only for his label to remind everyone how great the old version of him sounded.
But the fact that Dylan had enough material to fill out that many greatest hits albums isn’t necessarily a bad problem to have. Most people would kill to have a good half of that compilation in their songbook throughout their whole career, but Dylan was clearly looking at all of his classic periods as just another stop gap in between the next classic he hadn’t written yet.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Bob Dylan Newsletter
All the latest stories about Bob Dylan from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.