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Title: Bob Dylan with The Band – Planet Waves (1974) [MFSL 2016]
Genre: Rock
Format: SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

Reteaming with the Band, Bob Dylan winds up with an album that recalls New Morning more than The Basement Tapes, since Planet Waves is given to a relaxed intimate tone – all the more appropriate for a collection of modest songs about domestic life. As such, it may seem a little anticlimactic since it has none of the wildness of the best Dylan and Band music of the ’60s – just an approximation of the homespun rusticness. Considering that the record was knocked out in the course of three days, its unassuming nature shouldn’t be a surprise, and sometimes it’s as much a flaw as a virtue, since there are several cuts that float into the ether. Still, it is a virtue in places, as there are moments – “On a Night Like This,” “Something There Is About You,” the lovely “Forever Young” – where it just gels, almost making the diffuse nature of the rest of the record acceptable.

hraudio | allmusic | discogs

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Title: Bob Dylan – The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) [MFSL 2012]
Genre: Rock
Format: SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the record that firmly established Dylan as an unparalleled songwriter, one of considerable skill, imagination, and vision. At the time, folk had been quite popular on college campuses and bohemian circles, making headway onto the pop charts in diluted form, and while there certainly were a number of gifted songwriters, nobody had transcended the scene as Dylan did with this record. There are a couple (very good) covers, with “Corrina Corrina” and “Honey Just Allow Me One More Chance,” but they pale with the originals here. At the time, the social protests received the most attention, and deservedly so, since “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” weren’t just specific in their targets; they were gracefully executed and even melodic. Although they’ve proven resilient throughout the years, if that’s all Freewheelin’ had to offer, it wouldn’t have had its seismic impact, but this also revealed a songwriter who could turn out whimsy (“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”), gorgeous love songs (“Girl From the North Country”), and cheerfully absurdist humor (“Bob Dylan’s Blues,” “Bob Dylan’s Dream”) with equal skill. This is rich, imaginative music, capturing the sound and spirit of America as much as that of Louis Armstrong, Hank Williams, or Elvis Presley. Dylan, in many ways, recorded music that equaled this, but he never topped it.

hraudio | allmusic | discogs

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Title: Bob Dylan & The Band – Before The Flood (1974) [MFSL 2015]
Genre: Rock
Format: SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

Bob Dylan and the Band both needed the celebrated reunion tour of 1974, since Dylan’s fortunes had been floundering since Self Portrait and the Band stumbled with 1971’s Cahoots. The tour, with its attendant publicity, definitely returned both artists to center stage, and it definitely succeeded, breaking box office records and earning great reviews. Before the Flood, a double-album souvenir of the tour, suggests that these were generally dynamic shows, but not because they were reveling in the past, but because Dylan was fighting the nostalgia of his audience — nostalgia, it must be noted, that was promoted as the very reason behind these shows. Yet that’s what gives this music such kick — Dylan reworks, rearranges, reinterprets these songs in ways that are still disarming, years after its initial release. He could only have performed interpretations this radical with a group as sympathetic, knowing of his traits as the band, whose own recordings here are respites from the storm. And this is a storm — the sound of a great rocker, surprising his band and audience by tearing through his greatest songs in a manner that might not be comforting, but it guarantees it to be one of the best live albums of its time. Ever, maybe.

hraudio | allmusic | discogs

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Title: Bob Dylan – Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid (1973) [MFSL 2019]
Genre: Rock
Format: SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid is the 12th studio album and first soundtrack album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on July 13, 1973 by Columbia Records for the Sam Peckinpah film, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Dylan himself appeared in the film as the character “Alias”. The soundtrack consists primarily of instrumental music and was inspired by the movie itself, and included “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”, which became a trans-Atlantic Top 20 hit.
This album was unusual on several counts. For starters, it was a soundtrack (for Sam Peckinpah’s movie of the same title), a first venture of its kind for Bob Dylan. For another, it was Dylan’s first new LP in three years – he hadn’t been heard from in any form other than the single “George Jackson,” his appearance at the Bangladesh benefit concert in 1971, in all of that time. Finally, it came out at an odd moment of juxtaposition in pop culture history, appearing in July 1973 on the same date as the release of Paul McCartney’s own first prominent venture into film music, on the Live and Let Die soundtrack (the Beatles bassist had previously scored The Family Way, a British project overlooked amid the frenzy of the Beatles’ success). Interestingly, each effort reunited the artist with a significant musician/collaborator from his respective past: McCartney with producer George Martin and Dylan with guitarist Bruce Langhorne, who’d played with him on his early albums up to Bringing It All Back Home, before being supplanted by Mike Bloomfield, et al. But that was where the similarities between the two projects ended – apart from the title song, Live and Let Die was Martin’s project rather than McCartney’s, whereas Dylan was all over Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid as a composer, musician, etc. Additionally, whereas McCartney’s work was a piece of pure pop-oriented rock in connection with a crowd-pleasing action-fantasy film, Dylan’s work comprised an entire LP, and the resulting album was a beautifully simple, sometimes rough-at-the-edges and sometimes gently refined piece of country- and folk-influenced rock, devised to underscore a very serious historical film by one of the movies’ great directorial stylists. It was also as strong as any of his recent albums, featuring not just Langhorne but also such luminaries as Booker T. Jones, Roger McGuinn, and Byron Berline. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” was the obvious hit off the album, and helped drive the sales, but “Billy 1,” “Billy 4,” and “Billy 7” were good songs, too – had any of them shown up on bootlegs, they’d have kept the Dylan semiologists and hagiographers busy for years working over them. The instrumentals surrounding them were also worth hearing as manifestations of Dylan’s music-making; “Bunkhouse Theme” was downright gorgeous. It was the first time since New Morning, in 1970, that Dylan had released more than five minutes of new music at once, and it was a gift to fans as well as to Peckinpah – little did anyone realize at the time that it heralded a period of new recording and a national tour (with the Band), along with a brief label switch, and Dylan’s greatest period of sustained musical visibility since 1966. This record also proved that Dylan could shoehorn his music within the requirements of a movie score without compromising its content or quality, something that only the Beatles, unique among rock artists, had really managed to do up to that time, and that was in their own movie, A Hard Day’s Night. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” may have been the biggest hit to come out of a Western in at least 21 years, since Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington had given “High Noon” to Tex Ritter to sing in Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon in 1952 (and Katy Jurado was in both movies), and he’d also outdone Ritter on two counts, writing the music – a full score, to boot – and getting a cameo appearance in the film. The album was later kind of overlooked and neglected in the wake of the tour that followed and the imposing musical attributes of, say, Blood on the Tracks and Desire, but heard on its own terms it holds up 30-plus years later.

hraudio | allmusic | discogs

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