After my my first flirtation with Bob, this was, five years later, his current album when you sat me down and got me hitched to him more permanently. It's a long time since I've listened to it.
Who is it that said Jokerman was Bob's best song of the last 30 years? Whoever it was, I wonder if they still feel that way, and how they compare it to, say, Sugar Baby, one of my favourites over that timespan.
I thought it might have been Michael Gray. I gave up on his 900-page Dylan treatise less than a ninth of the way through, but I skimmed the chapter titled Jokerman while listening to this record yesterday afternoon. He does like the song, but he hates the album.
The French and the Americans hailed Infidels as a major return to form on Dylan's part. It wasn't. With the marvellous exception of Jokerman, it is so far short of representing on-form Bob Dylan that anyone who makes such claims for it has simply forgotten what thrilled them about him in the first place. It yields none of the heart-leap, delirium, amazement, laughter, joy-in-truth, turmoil or awe that can surge through you when you hear great Bob Dylan. Infidels gives off very little feeling of anything.
He goes on, page after page, accusing Bob of lack of candour, dissembling, self-imitation, sloppiness, mawkishness. The album is a "mudcake creature, failing in a small-minded, cheating way", spattered with a "rash of lumpen-filler words" and suffering from poor music and poor production.
I rather enjoyed it yesterday, but maybe that was just respite of at least having an album with an identity after yesterday's blindfolded dip in the scrabble bag of music. And I think I like the production — or at least the way Sly and Robbie's rhythm section sounds — more than the more-or-less-universally praised Oh Mercy.
Reading Michael Gray also sent me back to the outtakes from Infidels that ended up on the first Bootleg Series. Blind Willie McTell, obviously — another contended for best Bob song of the last 30 years, and his "single greatest achievement" according to Caspar Llewellyn Smith — but more particularly Lord, Protect my Child.
When the whole earth is asleep
You can look at it and weep
Few things you find are worthwhile
And though I don't ask for much
No material things to touch
Lord, protect my child
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