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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

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 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 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 ofUnder 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

Under The Red Sky:

Album of the day:

Other September 10:

• Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown (April 18, 1924 — September 10, 2005) was an American musician from Louisiana and Texas. He is best known for his work as a blues musician, but embraced other styles of music, having “spent his career fighting purism by synthesizing old blues, country, jazz, Cajun music and R&B styles” His work also encompasses rock and roll, rock music, folk,electric blues, and Texas blues.

• Ragged Glory is the twentieth studio album by Canadian musician Neil Young, his fifth with Crazy Horse, released in 1990. It was voted album of the year in the annual Pazz & Jop critics’ poll and in 2010 was selected by Rolling Stone as the 77th best album of the 1990s.

  The album revisits the hard rock style previously explored on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and Zuma. The first two tracks are songs Young and Crazy Horse originally wrote and performed live in the 1970s with “Country Home” notably being performed on their 1976 tour. “Farmer John” is cover of a 60s song, written and performed by R&B duo Don and Dewey and also performed by garage band The Premiers. Young revealed that the song “Days that Used to Be” is inspired by Bob Dylan‘s “My Back Pages“. The album features many extended guitar jams, with two songs stretching out to ten minutes and more.

  Released	September 10, 1990
  Recorded	April 1990 at Plywood Digital, Woodside, CA (except “Mother Earth”: The Hoosier Dome)
  Genre	Rock, hard rock
  Length	62:43
  Label	Reprise
  Producer	Neil Young and David Briggs

   

• “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is a song by the American rock band Nirvana. It is the opening track and lead single from the band’s second album, Nevermind (1991), released on DGC Records. Written by Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl and produced byButch Vig, the song uses a verse-chorus form where the main four-chord riff is used during the intro and chorus to create an alternating loud and quiet dynamic.
  

  B-side	“Drain You”/”Even in His Youth”/”Aneurysm”
  Released	September 10, 1991
  Format	CD, cassette, 7″, 12″
  Recorded	May 1991 at Sound City, Van Nuys, California
  Genre	Grunge
  Length	5:01 (album version) 4:30 (single version)
  Label	DGC
  Writer(s)	Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic
  Producer	Butch Vig
  Certification	Platinum (RIAA)

   

-Egil