Music Arcades: Bob Dylan: Desire

It's the quality of the singing, and the other band performances, that I think make this album. Everyone knows that Hurricane is a great song: you only have to compare it with the film to be impressed by how Bob achieves more in eight and a half minutes, and more memorably, than others' words and pictures can accomplish in two and a quarter hours. Arguably, however, Joey is not such a great song: it's even longer than Hurricane, and I think it was Michael Gray who argued that, by taking a gangster as his hero, rather than an innocent and dignified boxer, Dylan undermined his own moral standpoint (Gray was writing pre-Sopranos!). Particularly with the lines "And someday if God's in heaven overlookin' His preserve / I know the men that shot him down will get what they deserve". But the way Bob sustains the animation in the words makes the song zip along at a fair old rate and convince you of its righteousness.

And the intro to One More Cup of Coffee, just those first twelve bars or so, aren't they just great — in a very 1975 way? Robert Plant's cover is good, but can't match that intro.

I so much prefer these performances to those on the Rolling Thunder revue. Lucy likes it too: she came in to the music room to say so.

I still group this album with Slow Train Coming for several reasons. I think the singing is great on that album, too. I got to know both albums at first through the C90 cassette that I recorded from a friend's LPs in 1982. And I bought both on CD about 20 years later as part of the great Fopp 'Fiver' Feeding Frenzy.

So what do you make of Bob ripping off the cover idea from John Phillips? Why?