Greatest Dylan songs

I agree (strongly) is earlier stuff is the best along with BOTT, although he was in top form with the material in The Last Waltz. Cutting it down to five is random and silly so nothing can stop me now short of a server crash. I’m gonna plug the underrated To Ramona, yum.

It Ain’t Me Babe Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright Love Minus Zero/No Limit Visions of Johanna (I was trying to be different, but hey, it IS his best song) I Want You And did anyone else spend a good ninety seconds trying to figure out if Kieran’s gobbledygook was a real Dylan song?

Well, maybe not Tina. Tweeter. You run into the Kieran problem.

Are we all just too sophisticated and jaded to list the standards like “Knockin on Heaven’s Door”? I know I am tired of “Rolling Stone”, but it makes it no less a classic. Visions of Johanna Queen Jane Approximately Desolation Row And I am in the directory trying to pick from “Lay Lady Lay” and “I’ll be Your Baby Tonight” and “Shelter from the Storm” and I don’t want to do this anymore

I’m not the world’s biggest Dylan scholar, but I know what I like when I hear it (my favorite album is “Nashville Skyline”). My top 5 songs are (1) Country Pie (2) Tangled Up In Blue (3) I Threw It All Away (4) Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright and (5) Jokerman, strangely enough.

Re: Visions of Johanna I agree that it is the greatest. I think it’s wonderful that neither of first 3 greatest hits album. I can’t think of any other artist whose output is rich enough that could say that—although Van Morrison’s first 2 Greatest Hits albums didn’t have room for “Madame George”. Bob Johnston is hardly a well-known name, but he produced “Highway 61” and “BonB”, as well S&G’s “Parsley, Sage” and Leonard Cohen’s “Songs from a Room”. Some of those non-Dylan arrangements sound very dated, but “Highway 61” still sounds fresh to me. He should be nominated for Rock n Roll HOF. I put “Hard Rain” as 2nd in Dylan’s opus, and then get confused.

And the other fun thing about this idea is that then we could spend time arguing about which song belongs in which category.

Re: VofJ, I might add that Robert Christgau, I believe, once said in proof that music lyrics rarely could stand alone as poetry that the line “the ghost of ‘lectricity howls on the bones of her face” did not fare well on paper. Although I agree with his general argument, I think he’s exactly wrong in his example. That said, I’m not a “jewels and binoculars” fan myself. It’s his greatest song, but not his most perfect one.

People around here aren’t very good at following voting instructions, are they?! With a large dose of arbitrariness, here’s my vote: Motorpsycho Nightmare Like a Rolling Stone Visions of Johanna Tangled up in Blue Love Sick

Post-1975: Brownsville Girl Isis Changing of the Guard Mississippi Blind Willie McTell

“Well, if you go where the snowflakes storm, When the rivers freeze and summer ends, Please see she has a coat so warm, To keep her from the howlin’ winds” – “I pity the poor immigrant Whose strength is spent in vain, Whose heaven is like Ironsides, Whose tears fall like rain, Who eats but is not satisfied, Who hears but does not see, Who falls in love with wealth itself And turns his back on me” – “Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form. Come in, she said, I’ll give you shelter from the storm.” – “There’s smoke on the water, it’s been there since June, Tree trunks uprooted, ‘neath the high crescent moon Feel the pulse and vibration and the rumbling force Somebody is out there beating on a dead horse. She never said nothing there was nothing she wrote, She’s gone with the man In the long black coat” – “The air is getting hotter There’s a rumbling in the skies I’ve been wading through high muddy water With the heat rising in my eyes Every day your memory grows dimmer It doesn’t haunt me like it did before I’ve been walking through the middle of nowhere Trying to get to heaven before they close the door”

John I, Bob McM- “…and moves on still further from there:” “No, I do not feel that good When I see the heartbreaks you embrace If I was a master thief Perhaps I’d rob them…” Wounded friendship, but it’s still friendship. Or love. Your laughter, as cycnically comforting as it might have been, is now a source of mild embarrassment, or should be.

My Back Pages Idiot Wind Isis Visions of Johanna Tangled Up In Blue

Point taken John. I need monitoring at times.

No worries, msg. You’re always interesting. 60s Dylan is glorious, but he couldn’t write this: If you don’t believe there’s a price For this sweet paradise Just remind me to show you the scars. He was too young. Same goes for TOOM, though I found Love and Theft weak. Needs another listen. Well my baby went to Illinois With some bad-talking boy she could destroy A real suicide case but there was nothing I could do to stop it.

I guess I need to Listen to Love & Theft some more—I haven’t really figured it out yet. I bought it at the concert which was a pretty weak concert (with moments of greatness), that may be biasing me against really listening to it… John, what you say about laughing in a non-cynical way on reading the statement that Positively 4th is about friendship, captures my own reaction pretty well. Meanwhile… I’m thinking that maybe, just maybe, the songs that best capture for me the gestalt of Dylan are: 1. In My Time of Dyin’ 2. From a Buick 6 3. Maggie’s Farm 4. On the Road Again 5. Ballad of Hollis Brown Hollis Brown, he lived, on the out, side of town Hollis Brown, he lived, on the out, side of town With his wife and 5 children, and a cabin fallin’ down

How about this: what would really interest me is seeing people list 5 songs and explaining why they would select each one; defending their lists. Here is my effort: 1. In My Time of Dyin’ This is quite simply, one of the finest songs ever recorded by anyone. Its haunting. Guitar work is breathtaking. Lyrics hang around in your head and wake you up at night. It is not properly speaking a “Dylan song” because (a) he did not write it and (b) it is so very different from the songs that make up the majority of his oeuvre, but it works very well as the archetype of “where Dylan is coming from as he starts his career”. Jesus gonna make up my dyin’ bed. 2. From a Buick 6 Marriage of Dylan’s cerebral lyrics with hard rockin’ beat. You can dance to it! Works great as a surrealistic painting too. If I’m goin’ down dyin’, you know she, bound to put a blanket on my bed. 3. Maggie’s Farm I like this song for similar reasons to “From a Buick 6”; but rather than a surrealistic painting, I think it is more of a naturalistic novel. They say, sing while you slave but I just get bored. 4. Queen Jane Approximately Resentment of an ex-lover is an idee fix in Dylan’s work. (It is also a factor in “Maggie’s Farm” I think.) And this song is its fullest realization. Plus, the beat is great. Won’t you, come see me, Queen Jane? 5. Ballad of Hollis Brown Haunting, eloquent. This song ties a lot of Dylan threads together. Somehere in the distance, there’s seven new people born.

My Back Pages.

Are “Hard Rain” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” almost the same song? I keep trying to remember one and coming up with the other.

I bought Love and Theft the day it came out, but was distracted by bin Laden for a few days before listening to it; I agree with Rolling Stone that, before the release date, it was easier to see it as a flip and comical album, while afterwards, the apocalypticness (exemplified in “High Water”) came to the fore. Asked to name a Top Five, I’d say “On what day?” All kinds of less dramatic events and moods and arguments can affect one’s Dylan preferences. After reading Dylan’s Visions of Sin, I went back to The Times They Are a-Changin’ for the first time in a dozen years and had a new appreciation of it. Okay, how ‘bout using the arbitrary constraint of no more than one per album “Blind Willie McTell” “Desolation Row” “Sugar Baby” “I’m Not There” “Visions of Johanna” . . . Naw, five slots doesn’t work: there’s six or seven others that hit me just as hard as those five.