Music Arcades: Bob Dylan: MTV Unplugged

At the start of his third edition of Song and Dance Man, Michael Gray equivocates terribly about this album:

The dreariest, most contemptible, phoney, tawdry piece of product ever issued by a great artist, which manages to omit the TV concert's one fresh and fine performance, I Want You, but is otherwise an accurate record of the awfulness of the concert itself, in which the performer who had been so numinously 'unplugged' in the first place ducked the opportunityto use television to perform solo the ballad and country blues material of his most recent studio albums. This is what happens when Bob Dylan capitulates and lets overpaid coke-head executives, lawyers and PRseholes from the Entertainment Industry tell him what to do.

I think I may have read that by the time I picked up the CD in 2002, but either I was curious to hear the phoney tawdriness, or the price was low enough to make me think I could overlook it. If I were trying to defend that decision, I'd say the reading of Love Minus Zero/No Limit is borderline interesting (and very difficult to sing along to, as Bob has changed the phrasing again), and maybe I didn't have a version of Dignity.

But Gray's probably right.