"You may call me Bobby, you may call me Zimmy."
No one much seemed to listen to Dylan at school, between 1978 and 1982. I knew he was doing this Christian stuff, but he wasn't fashionable. I don't think NME and Sounds had much to say about him. It was in my last term that I decided I need to get up to speed. I borrowed three albums — Slow Train Coming, Desire and Blonde on Blonde — from a bloke called Justin (unspellable surname, now big in advertising, so Jeremy tells me), and put my favourite tracks from each of them on a C90.
Until 2002 (from Fopp for a fiver), that tape was all I knew of this album. I did listen to it a fair bit, though. My favourite song has always been I Believe in You. Fantastic, indignant but righteous lyrics where Bob recognises that this new direction is going to be very unpopular, but he's not flinching. Whether or not he's technically a great singer, the way he performs the song with his phrasing and intonation is just phenomenal. Most 'I Believe in You' songs are hetero-pair-bonding (cf. Neil Young's). Bob confounds this by singing about God, but then slips in, "I believe in you, even on the morning after", and you can just imagine him, bible or no bible, having a sly little smile about that.
The other thing remarkable thing about this album is how different the band sounds from Street Legal, recorded only a year earlier. There's a real Stax/Muscle Shoals sound to a lot of the keyboards and percussion. I can't think of a Dylan album that sounds half as funky as this one — can you? (On the downside, there are also the Mark Knopfler guitar flourishes that punctuate a few of their songs, but mostly they're just a minor irritant.)
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
|
Comments