1001 Albums Summary

First day of the album challenge, and naturally I get one of my favourite albums of all time. It’s a testament to the incredible sonic and lyrical depth of this album that, even on my upteenth listen, I’m still finding brilliant new details I never noticed before. Yet so many of the sounds and lyrics on this album swim around in my consciousness such that hearing them feels like visiting a friend who’s been hiding the whole time. I shake hands with the opening drum signature on “Like a Rolling Stone” as it summons up memories of being in the car with my Dad; of travelling on a school bus with this album for company; of the myriad times I’ve been fed up with everything only to feel a sense of whiplash as that soaring organ regales me its a tale of squalid freedom. I’ve memorised all the lyrics; Spotify says it’s my most played song of all time. The level of polish on each facet of the production is astounding—the counterpoint between the plink-plonk piano and the ringing chord tones of the fender electric—it’s something you can chew and savour or gulp down whole; both making for an entirely pleasurable experience. I should mention that there are four songs on this album that would make my shortlist for the greatest of all time. “Like a Rolling Stone” I’ve already mentioned, but the proceeding “Tombstone Blues” is about as good. The thwacking pulse of a beat on that track would be unorthodox even today; the chugging guitar on the chorus followed by those savage, bending fills. It’s totally manic; and the lyrics… “Put jawbones on their tombstones and flatters their graves”, “The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone”, “to win friends and influence his uncle”. Just brilliant—simultaneously a mind-bending exploration of what can be done with words and their phonetics, and a searing, though subliminal, indictment of the Vietnam war that applies just as well today. Seriously, just listen to it and tell me that it doesn’t perfectly capture the crazed surrealism of the world today—and written in 1965! The use of imagery is just astounding, and continues with what may be Dylan’s magnum opus, “Ballad of a Thin Man”. We all have this experience no one’s ever articulated: you go into a room (could be anyplace), and you don’t know what you’re doing there. You don’t know what anything is or what your place is; people give you clues and they seem fine, but you know it’s far from normal, and it gives you the shivers to think you’re the only one who’s noticed. Or alternatively, maybe you’re entirely at home. Maybe there’s an invader—a stray Mister Jones come to talk his way into being a part of your world—somebody you don’t know and never met, and who you really wish would just leave you alone, but who nevertheless insists on talking at you all night long and won’t let up until he hears what he’s looking for—some magic word or phrase that you don’t know and may never find. Few songs express what you’re feeling (few songs that I’ve encountered, at least), and it helps that the production is as ragged as the lyrics; that the piano looms over you like some hag or ghoul swinging from the gallows as it slowly descends to take its place in the ground; that the organ, which was so bright on “Like a Rolling Stone”, has become gloomy like it’s mourning something it never lost but recently found. It’s a brilliant song, and words can’t express how much I love it. Then “Queen Jane Approximately” (once known to me as “that flowery song which comes on after ‘…Thin Man’”) is in many ways a continuation of the sentiment expressed by the evergreen “Mr Tamborine Man”: the desire to be whisked away from your daily monotony by some romance found in the sound of a tambourine or the embrace of a queen. It may be the most relatable Dylan song to me, if just for the first verse alone. I’ve already banged on so long here that I hardly feel there to be time to discuss the rest of the album, but suffice it to say that “It Takes a Lot to Laugh…”, “From Buick 6”, and “Highway 61” are some brilliant blues/folk infusions into the track list. “Highway 61” especially is chock-full of the absurd and wily application of the folk vernacular that makes a song like “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” as ridiculous as the aforementioned “Tombstone Blues” is biting. There’s a confluence of sounds and influences here that will never be replicated—everything from the Duke Ellington to T.S Eliot to Machiavelli is in the cauldron, and it’s brilliant to see a master alchemist recombine it all into a new and distinct brew. Desolation Row is a ten minute ballad in the make of what Dylan went on to do on Blonde on Blonde with tracks like “Visions of Johanna” and “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”. These songs seem impenetrable to me—they demand so much of you, and are so dense that it feels like reading Kant’s interpretation of some arcane philosopher. The next step in my Dylan-fandom will have to be to really sit down with these songs and pour over them in the way I have with his more digestible work. I tried that to an extent with this listen of “Desolation Row”, but was somewhat distracted and didn’t make much progress in my new project. I’ll have to try again tomorrow.