The albums Bob Dylan called his most powerful: “The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind”
Bob Dylan never sought to be a pop star when he started. He only wanted to write songs that meant something, but when he finally managed to have his finger on the pulse of a generation, his songs took on an entirely new meaning. Even if he got off the musical rollercoaster, there were some highs he would always be chasing.
But it’s in Dylan’s nature to always shift from one album to the next. He never meant to have one project sound exactly the same as the one before, and even if there were similarities in the way that he approached some of the songs with an acoustic guitar in his hand, it was much more interesting for him to start changing up his style than give the audience what he knew they wanted.
So when he went electric for the first time, people being outraged may as well have been a compliment to him. He wanted to see the tolerance people had for rock and roll at those shows, but even if it managed to do a number on folkies that saw their favourite artist prostituting himself, Dylan knew there was something greater going on here. Folk music had all the powerful words but with none of the punch, so with rock music in his hands, he had the capacity to change the music landscape.
While his millions of copycats often did that for him, the stretch from Bringing it All Back Home to Blonde on Blonde is still considered some of Dylan’s best work. ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ could easily be the watershed moment of this era of his career, but each record his a different sonic face, with Home being the flirtation with rock, Highway 61 Revisited being the point of no return, and Blonde on Blonde eventually stretching his songwriting out to include some sounds even he wasn’t aware of.
And when looking back on all those albums, Dylan felt that he wanted the same kind of punch on his later records, saying, “The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It’s that thin, wild mercury sound. It was in the album before that, too.
“Also in Bringing It All Back Home. That’s the sound I’ve always heard. Later on, the songs got more defined, but it didn’t necessarily bring more power to them. The sound was whatever happened to be available at the time. I have to get back to the sound, to the sound that will bring it all through me.”
Then again, getting that exact sound again would have been impossible. Dylan simply wasn’t the same kind of person who wrote songs like ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ anymore, and while his turn towards downtempo material on Nashville Skyline stood out as a little bit strange, there would always be room for him to evolve in other ways that didn’t exactly cater to any one political or social matter.
Blood on the Tracks is all about measuring the kind of heartache one feels after losing the love of their life, and even if he didn’t intend for it to be this way, an album like “Love and Theft” captured the same kind of feeling that people felt at the turn of the century as America was collectively reeling after the effects of 9/11.
But, really, why should Dylan aim to match the intensity of something like Blonde on Blonde or Highway 61 Revisited? Those records are practically historical documents more than they are albums at this point, and the reason why they work so well has more to do with their place in the great story of rock rather than anything that one person did.
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