The era Bob Dylan called one of his career low points: “I was over the hill”
There are only a precious few years that most people can have in the limelight if they’re lucky. As much as artists like the idea of constantly evolving and trying out new directions in their music that they hadn’t tried before, it only takes a few bad decisions before everyone stops caring and moves on to the next flavour of the month. Although Bob Dylan did give the rest of us mere mortals time to slow down during his prime, he knew enough to realise when the engine was running out of steam as well.
Then again, Dylan was one of the few celebrities who tried to have a little bit of fun with the idea of celebrity when he started working on his classics. He had tried alienating his fans multiple times, but when that only made him more interesting, he knew that he should go in the opposite direction and start making music that deliberately went against the audience’s notion of what a ‘Bob Dylan’ album was supposed to be.
So instead of doing detours into folk music or making the occasional country tune, there would be albums like Self Portrait, which didn’t seem to have a real point other than to piss people off. But if the public could tolerate his time of becoming a born-again Christian and talking about his faith on albums like Slow Train Coming and Saved, chances are nothing was going to stop him from being one of the biggest artists in the world.
That is, until the end of the 1980s. Although the era of MTV was never known to be that kind on the heroes of the 1970s, Dylan had a more awkward tightrope to walk than most. He was still firmly into preaching when he entered the decade, but by the time he began working on Down in the Groove, all of the passion that people had once seen had all but melted away, being replaced with the kind of cover tunes that Dylan was up to in his early days.
Is it all bad? Well, it’s a Bob Dylan record, so the official answer is no, but when looked at next to Highway 61 Revisited, this feels like him trying to either get out of a contract or reminisce on his early days. Some of the originals are fairly good, but looking through his covers of ‘Shenandoah’ and ‘Let’s Stick Together’, it sounded like he was more inclined to tone things down in his older age.
And it’s not like Dylan didn’t pick up on the criticism, either, eventually writing in his memoir Chronicles, “I was what they called over the hill. The mirror had swung around, and I could see the future – an old actor fumbling around in the garbage cans outside the theatre of past triumphs.” While Dylan proved himself to even be a clever wordsmith when putting himself down, that mirror of judgment started swinging in the other direction only one year later.
Although no one predicted the Traveling Wilburys would be one of the greatest supergroups a year prior, everyone’s genuine fun putting their two records together may have re-energised Dylan for a little bit. He did spend some of that energy doing some strange experiments on albums like Under A Red Sky, but if that got him to make an album as human as Time Out Of Mind, it was well worth the wait.
Because, above all else, Dylan was always going to be honest with his audience. That didn’t always make for the best music every time he walked into the studio, but he would rather be someone who went down saying what he wanted to say than have to worry about being a dancing puppet for a record company.
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