The album Bob Dylan didn’t want to release: “I didn’t wanna do that”
When an artist has released 40 albums over the course of their career, you do have to wonder just how much of it is churned-out rubbish that they want to distance themselves from the minute it’s released to the world. There aren’t that many to have achieved this feat, sure, but a certain Bob Dylan has, and anyone who’s ever spent time with a Dylan superfan will know more than enough or have been bored to death listening to each and every one of them in precise detail.
There are classic Dylan records, there are decent Dylan records, and there are some sub-par Dylan records – everyone should respect that and acknowledge that this is a good way to mediate between those who worship him as the king of modern folk and those who can’t stand the guy. Anyone who sits on the fence regarding his Marmite catalogue should be appeased by this rudimentary system as well. Happy? Good. Now, let’s move on to the really bad stuff.
If there’s one Bob Dylan album that gets reviled more than any other, it’s his 1970 double album, Self Portrait. Fans didn’t like it, critics didn’t like it, and you can just about imagine how the middle-of-the-roaders and haters felt about it at the time of its release, and considering that his previous double album, 1966’s Blonde on Blonde, was received with acclaim and is still regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time, this offering was far from the ambitious and long-awaited sequel to the beloved record.
Comprising a large number of covers, traditional songs and a handful of live recordings from his 1969 Isle of Wight Festival performance, Self Portrait is a bloated mixture of blues, folk, gospel, and the country rock that dominated his previous album Nashville Skyline. While this might sound like a riot, it didn’t come off that way to audiences, and many thought that Dylan had either completely lost the plot during the making of the record or was simply taking the piss.
In actual fact, it was a bit of both. Dylan didn’t even want to release Self Portrait, and he looks back on it with as much disgust as everyone else. In a 1984 interview with Rolling Stone, he laid out the story behind the album’s release and how it came to be shortly after he’d been involved in a motorcycle accident. “When I woke up and caught my senses,” Dylan recalled, “I realised I was just workin’ for all these leeches. And I didn’t wanna do that.”
He would go on to speak about how fickle audiences were becoming at the time and how people were constantly in search of a “leader”, something that Dylan himself was reluctant to step up to be. In his hour of despair, he thought to himself, “Well, fuck it. I wish these people would just forget about me. I wanna do something they can’t possibly like, they can’t relate to.”
As a result, Self Portrait was created, and it was every bit as perfect as it needed to be as far as his intentions were concerned. People turned their backs on Dylan following the release of the album, and he wasn’t taken quite as seriously as he had been in the past for some of the classic records he released in the 1960s. When asked about why he chose to make his worst album a double album, he simply replied that “to me, it was a joke,” before adding, “I mean, if you’re gonna put a lot of crap on it, you might as well load it up.” And boy, oh boy, did he load it up.
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