Tag Archives: Clinton Heylin

Today: Bob Dylan recorded “She’s Your Lover Now” in 1966, 48 years ago

Bob Dylan 1966 10

Pain sure brings out the best in people, doesn’t it?
– Bob Dylan (She’s Your Lover Now)

..‘She’s Your Lover Now’, a gleeful masterpiece more redolent of its era than most things that came out at the time..
~Michael Gray (BD Encyclopedia)

Continue reading Today: Bob Dylan recorded “She’s Your Lover Now” in 1966, 48 years ago

Today: Bob Dylan released “Under The Red Sky” in 1990, 23 years ago

bob dylan under the red sky

“It’s just another record,” [Dylan says of Red Sky] “You can only make the records as good as
you can and hope they sell.”
~Bob Dylan (to Edna Gundersen, Aug 1990)

I made this record, Under the Red Sky, with Don Was, but at the same time I was also doing the Wilburys record. I don’t know how it happened that I got into both albums at the same time.
~Bob Dylan (to Jonathan Lethem, Aug 2006)

Anyway, Leadbelly did most of those kind of songs. He’d been out of prison for some time when he decided to do children’s songs and people said oh, why did Leadbelly change? Some people liked the old ones, some people liked the new ones. Some people liked both songs. But he didn’t change, he was the same man! Anyway, this is a song called …, It’s a new song I wrote a while back. I’m gonna try and do it as good as I can. there’s somebody important here tonight who wants to hear it, so we’ll give it our best …
– preface to ‘Caribbean Wind’, Warfield Theatre, San Francisco, November 12, 1980

Born In Time:

From wikipedia:

Released September 10, 1990
Recorded Early 1990
Genre Rock
Length 35:21
Label Columbia
Producer “Jack Frost” (Bob Dylan), Don Was, and David Was

Under the Red Sky is the twenty-seventh studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released in September 1990 by Columbia Records.

The album was largely greeted as a strange and disappointing follow-up to 1989’s critically acclaimed Oh Mercy. Most of the criticism was directed at the slick sound of pop producer Don Was, as well as a handful of tracks that seem rooted in children’s nursery rhymes. It is a rarity in Dylan’s catalog for its inclusion of celebrity cameos, by Slash, Elton John, George Harrison, David Crosby, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Bruce Hornsby.

Reception:

Dylan has echoed most critics’ complaints, telling Rolling Stone in a 2006 interview that the album’s shortcomings resulted from hurried and unfocused recording sessions, due in part to his activity with the Traveling Wilburys at the time. He also claimed that there were too many people working on the album, and that he was very disillusioned with the recording industry during this period of his career.

  • Dylan critic Patrick Humphries, author of The Complete Guide to the Music of Bob Dylan, was particularly harsh in his assessment of Under the Red Sky, stating the album “was everything Oh Mercy wasn’t—sloppily written songs, lazily performed and unimaginatively produced.
  • The album did have some critical support, particularly from Robert Christgau of The Village Voice, who wrote “To my astonishment, I think Under the Red Sky is Dylan’s best album in 15 years, a record that may even signal a ridiculously belated if not totally meaningless return to form…It’s fabulistic, biblical…the tempos are postpunk like it oughta be, with [Kenny] Aronoff’s sprints and shuffles grooving ahead like ’60s folk-rock never did.”
  • Paul Nelson, writing for Musician, called the album “a deliberately throwaway masterpiece.”

More opinions:

  • Clinton Heylin (from “Still On The Road…”):
    under the red sky seems to oppress an awful lot of Dylan fans. Some particularly infantile criticism has been directed at its self conscious use of nursery rhyme-like constructions, largely from people entirely ignorant of nursery rhymes’ centuries-old role in the folk tradition. Dylan certainly received little credit for daring to make a gut-bustin’ R&B record less than a year after leaving the swamplands of Lanoisville. Whatever its failings, the album conveys a real unity of purpose. What it lacked was one song that raised things to a higher plane, preferably at the expense of an album-opener that went, ‘Wiggle wiggle wiggle, like a bowl of soup.’
  • Robert Christgau:
    This Was Bros. pseudothrowaway improves on the hushed emotion, weary wisdom, and new-age “maturity” of the Daniel Lanois-produced Oh Mercy even if the lyrics are sloppier–the anomaly is what Lanois calls Oh Mercy’s “focused” writing. Aiming frankly for the evocative, the fabulistic, the biblical, Dylan exploits narrative metaphor as an adaptive mechanism that allows him to inhabit a “mature” pessimism he knows isn’t the meaning of life. Where his seminal folk-rock records were cut with Nashville cats on drums–Kenny Buttrey when he was lucky, nonentities when he wasn’t–here Kenny Aronoff’s tempos are postpunk like it oughta be, springs and shuffles grooving ever forward. The fables are strengthened by the workout, and as a realist I also treasure their literal moments. I credit his outrage without forgetting his royalty statements. I believe he’s gritted his teeth through the bad patches of a long-term sexual relationship even if he still measures the long term in months. And when he thanks his honey for that cup of tea, I melt. A-
  • Michael Gray (Bob Dylan Encyclopedia):
    The first Dylan album after Oh Mercy shows Dylan characteristically retreating from that album’s mainstream production values and safe terrain, and refusing to offer a
    follow-up. Nevertheless his penchant for recently modish producers has him turn this time to DAVID & DON WAS of Was Not Was, who offer a rougher and less unified sound. It’s a pity Dylan pads out the album with some sub-standard rockism(‘Wiggle Wiggle’ and ‘Unbelievable’) and the ill-fitting, foggy pop of ‘Born in Time’, because the core of the album is an adventure into the poetic
    possibilities of nursery rhyme that is alert, fresh and imaginative, and an achievement that has gone largely unrecognised.
  • Paul Williams (from “Bob Dylan: Performance Artist 1986-1990 And Beyond”):It’s a magnificent album, really, and I love every performance on it. Oh, there have been times over the years when I’ve had my doubts about “10,000 Men” or “2×2,” but as with a good concert, each performance in sequence opens doors in listener and singer and musicians and, because the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, the parts are elevated in dignity and expressive power just by their connectedness to that whole. So I find myself getting into the groove of “10,000 Men,” the easy flow of the language, the surprising shouts and whispers of the vocal, the irrepressible Under the Red Sky humor that chugs along throughout (and catches my attention at different moments every time I listen).
  • Stephen Thomas Erlewine (allmusic.com):
    Dylan followed Oh Mercy, his most critically acclaimed album in years, with Under the Red Sky, a record that seemed like a conscious recoil from that album’s depth and atmosphere. By signing Don Was, the king of mature retro-rock, as producer, he guaranteed that the record would be lean and direct, which is perhaps exactly what this collection of simplistic songs deserves. Still, this record feels a little ephemeral, a collection of songs that Dylan didn’t really care that much about. In a way, that makes it a little easier to warm to than its predecessor, since it has a looseness that suits him well, especially with songs this deliberately lightweight. As such, Under the Red Sky is certainly lightweight, but rather appealing in its own lack of substance, since Dylan has never made a record so breezy, apart from (maybe) Down in the Groove. That doesn’t make it a great, or even good, record, but it does have its own charms that will be worth searching out for Dylanphiles.

Track listing:

All songs written by Bob Dylan.

  1. “Wiggle Wiggle” – 2:09
  2. “Under the Red Sky” – 4:09
  3. “Unbelievable” – 4:06
  4. “Born in Time” – 3:39
  5. “T.V. Talkin’ Song” – 3:02
  6. “10,000 Men” – 4:21
  7. “2 × 2” – 3:36
  8. “God Knows” – 3:02
  9. “Handy Dandy” – 4:03
  10. “Cat’s in the Well” – 3:21

My fav songs from the album:

  1. Born In Time
  2. God Knows
  3. Under The Red Sky

Personnel

  • Bob Dylan – acoustic and electric guitar, piano, accordion, harp, vocals, production
Additional musicians
  • Kenny Aronoff – drums
  • Sweet Pea Atkinson – backing vocals
  • Rayse Biggs – trumpet
  • Sir Harry Bowens – backing vocals
  • David Crosby – backing vocals
  • Paulinho Da Costa – percussion
  • Robben Ford – guitar
  • George Harrison – slide guitar
  • Bruce Hornsby – piano
  • Randy “The Emperor” Jackson – bass guitar
  • Elton John – piano
  • Al Kooper – organ, keyboards
  • David Lindley – bouzouki, guitar, slide guitar
  • David McMurray – saxophone
  • Donald Ray Mitchell – backing vocals
  • Jamie Muhoberac – organ
  • Slash – guitar
  • Jimmie Vaughan – guitar
  • Stevie Ray Vaughan – guitar
  • Waddy Wachtel – guitar
  • David Was – backing vocals, production
  • Don Was – bass guitar, production
Technical personnel
  • Dan Bosworth – assistant engineering
  • Marsha Burns – production coordination
  • Ed Cherney – engineering, mixing
  • Steve Deutsch – assistant engineering
  • Judy Kirshner – assistant engineering
  • Jim Mitchell – assistant engineering
  • Brett Swain – assistant engineering

It’s Unbelievable:

Album of the day:

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Continue reading Today: Bob Dylan released “Under The Red Sky” in 1990, 23 years ago

Bob Dylan’s best songs – It Ain’t Me Babe – #46

bob dylan 1964

You know,  It Ain’t Me Babe was on the radio the other day and it never really occurred to me how different it was as a hit to how it was in my repertoire.
~Bob Dylan (to Adrian Deevoy, Oct 1989)

Save for a faux-reggae arrangement ten years on—one of the absolute highlights of the Renaldo and Clara film—the song has usually relied on the sparsest of acoustic accompaniments in live performance, often serving as a set closer, which tempts one to suggest it addresses the audience—specifically that element that wants the man to stay the same. That ain’t him.
~Clinton Heylin (Revolution in the air)

#46 on my list of Dylan’s 200 best songs. Recorded on June 9th, 1964 @ Columbia Studios – NYC. This was the one & only recording session for “Another Side of Bob Dylan”

Bob_Dylan_-_Another_Side_Of_Bob_Dylan

It Ain’t Me Babe” is a song by Bob Dylan that originally appeared on his fourth album Another Side of Bob Dylan, which was released in 1964 by Columbia Records. The song, along with others on the album, marked a departure for Dylan as he began to explore the possibilities of language and deeper levels of the human experience. Within a year of its release, the song was picked up as a single by artists who were forging the folk rock movement, including The Turtles and The Byrds.
Wikipedia

Go ’way from my window
Leave at your own chosen speed
I’m not the one you want, babe
I’m not the one you need

Spotify:

Continue reading Bob Dylan’s best songs – It Ain’t Me Babe – #46

Today: Bob Dylan recorded “Shooting Star” in 1989 – 24 years ago

bob-dylan-oh-mercy

“Shooting star” was his first album closer since “Every Grain of Sand” to share that slightly somnambulant feel, a gorgeous melody, caressed vocal and an abiding conviction that there are two kinds of people, good (i.e. saved) and lost people.
~Clinton Heylin (Still On The Road)

MTV Unplugged version:

Grooveshark:

Spotify:

Where:

The Studio
New Orleans, Louisiana
14 or 15 March 1989
6th Oh Mercy recording session, produced by Daniel Lanois

Songs:

  1. Everything Is Broken
  2. Everything Is Broken
  3. Everything Is Broken
  4. Jam
  5. Three Of Us Be Free
  6. Three Of Us Be Free
  7. Shooting Star
  8. Shooting Star
  9. Shooting Star
  10. Shooting Star
  11. Shooting Star
  12. Shooting Star
  13. Shooting Star
  14. Shooting Star

Master version of “Everything is Broken” was also recorded @ this session.

Lyrics:

Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of you
You were trying to break into another world
A world I never knew
I always kind of wondered
If you ever made it through
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of you

Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me
If I was still the same
If I ever became what you wanted me to be
Did I miss the mark or overstep the line
That only you could see?
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me

Listen to the engine, listen to the bell
As the last fire truck from hell
Goes rolling by
All good people are praying
It’s the last temptation, the last account
The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount
The last radio is playing

Seen a shooting star tonight
Slip away
Tomorrow will be
Another day
Guess it’s too late to say the things to you
That you needed to hear me say
Seen a shooting star tonight
Slip away

Check out -> Bob Dylan “Oh Mercy”

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Continue reading Today: Bob Dylan recorded “Shooting Star” in 1989 – 24 years ago

Bob Dylan’s best songs – Mr. Tambourine Man – #12

bob dylan mr tambourine man

My thoughts, my personal needs have always been expressed through my songs; you can feel them there even in ‘Mr Tambourine Man’.
~Bob Dylan (to Sandra Jones – June 1981)

Even a song like Mr. Tambourine Man really isn’t a fantasy. There’s substance to the dream. Because you’ve seen it, you know? In order to have a dream, there’s something in front of you. You have to have seen something or have heard something for you to dream it. It becomes your dream then.
~Bob Dylan (to Bill Flanagan – March 1985)

Original version from youtube:

Spotify:

#12 on my list of Dylan’s 200 best songs. The original version from “Bringing It All Back Home” was recorded on January 15 – 1965 @ the third recording session.

….and proceeded to record the final versions of “Mr. Tambourine Man”, “It’s Alright, Ma” & “Gates Of Eden” in a single take* with no playback between songs… it’s as though all three songs came out of him in one breath, easily the greatest breath drawn by an American artist since Ginsberg & Kerouac exhaled “Howl” & “On The Road” a decade earlier..
~Paul Williams (BD Performing Artist 1960-73)

*although this has been found not to be entirely true (after PW wrote his book).. It’s still a GREAT quote.

Bob Dylan - bringing it all back home

The specific Tambourine Man he had in mind was Bruce Langhorne, the magnificent multi-instrumentalist who would usher in Dylan’s electric era with some spellbinding guitar playing on Bringing It All Back Home (notably on “Mr. Tambourine Man” itself).
~Clinton Heylin (Revolution in the air)

Live at the Newport Folk Festival – 1964:

Continue reading Bob Dylan’s best songs – Mr. Tambourine Man – #12