The one Beatles album Bob Dylan never liked: “I thought that was a very indulgent”
Bob Dylan was never into the idea of making complex art pieces for the hell of it.
All of his work had to have some meaning beyond the kind of finer details, and he would have been just as comfortable making a record that was completely ramshackle than cowering to whatever trendy soundscapes were out at the time. And that wasn’t even limited to the kind of heroes that he rubbed elbows with in his prime.
Even Dylan knew from an early age that he wasn’t going to stay in folk music for too long. If he wanted to reach people, he had to meet them at their level, and bringing in electric instruments was the best way for him to make the best impression that he possibly could on the new generation of rock and roll fans. It might have bothered the rest of his fanbase, but as long as he was keeping everyone guessing, he was always going to be in the space that he wanted to be in.
When someone carries the burden of being an idol for that long, there comes a point where they’re going to want to do literally anything else. Self Portrait at least confirmed that Dylan desperately wanted to be less famous than he was, but when putting together the tracks for The Basement Tapes, there was a lot more of a fly-on-the-wall energy to hearing how he and The Band worked off each other.
Nothing about the record was meant to be refined in any way, but that’s part of the beauty of it. Dylan wanted to create music that felt much more authentic to himself than whatever the rest of the world was spitting out, and since we had seen the likes of artists like The Carpenters by the 1970s, hearing ‘Zimbo’ put out a record this raw from old tapes was a lot more refreshing than going back to bog-standard rock and roll.
At that point, he had grown sick of the idea of using the studio as an instrument. There were plenty of ways for people to capture unique sounds, but since Dylan was focused squarely on the song over anything else, it got more and more frustrating seeing acts like The Beatles make tunes that had more to do with the musical trickery than anything remotely live.
They weren’t trying to play their tunes live anymore, and Dylan felt that his British friends crossed a line on Sgt Pepper’s, saying, “I didn’t know how to record the way other people were recording, and I didn’t want to. The Beatles had just released Sgt Pepper’s, which I didn’t like at all. I thought that was a very indulgent album, though the songs on it were real good. I didn’t think all that production was necessary.”
While he did have a more lighthearted listen to the record when Paul McCartney first showed it to him, it was clear that even the band didn’t want to go down that road. George Harrison and John Lennon always wanted to distance themselves from it, and given how raw Plastic Ono Band sounded, it felt like Lennon wanted to go as far away from those layers of production he possibly could.
It seemed that Dylan never eased back on the promise of having a live performance on the record. There might be the occasional synthesiser on one of the records that he worked on, but even as late as the 1990s, on records like Time Out of Mind, he still wanted to make sure that fans knew they were hearing him before anyone else.
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