Category: SACD

Title: Bob Dylan with The Band – Planet Waves (1974) [MFSL 2016]
Genre: Rock
Format: SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

Reteaming with the Band, Bob Dylan winds up with an album that recalls New Morning more than The Basement Tapes, since Planet Waves is given to a relaxed intimate tone – all the more appropriate for a collection of modest songs about domestic life. As such, it may seem a little anticlimactic since it has none of the wildness of the best Dylan and Band music of the ’60s – just an approximation of the homespun rusticness. Considering that the record was knocked out in the course of three days, its unassuming nature shouldn’t be a surprise, and sometimes it’s as much a flaw as a virtue, since there are several cuts that float into the ether. Still, it is a virtue in places, as there are moments – “On a Night Like This,” “Something There Is About You,” the lovely “Forever Young” – where it just gels, almost making the diffuse nature of the rest of the record acceptable.

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Title: Bob Dylan – The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) [MFSL 2012]
Genre: Rock
Format: SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the record that firmly established Dylan as an unparalleled songwriter, one of considerable skill, imagination, and vision. At the time, folk had been quite popular on college campuses and bohemian circles, making headway onto the pop charts in diluted form, and while there certainly were a number of gifted songwriters, nobody had transcended the scene as Dylan did with this record. There are a couple (very good) covers, with “Corrina Corrina” and “Honey Just Allow Me One More Chance,” but they pale with the originals here. At the time, the social protests received the most attention, and deservedly so, since “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” weren’t just specific in their targets; they were gracefully executed and even melodic. Although they’ve proven resilient throughout the years, if that’s all Freewheelin’ had to offer, it wouldn’t have had its seismic impact, but this also revealed a songwriter who could turn out whimsy (“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”), gorgeous love songs (“Girl From the North Country”), and cheerfully absurdist humor (“Bob Dylan’s Blues,” “Bob Dylan’s Dream”) with equal skill. This is rich, imaginative music, capturing the sound and spirit of America as much as that of Louis Armstrong, Hank Williams, or Elvis Presley. Dylan, in many ways, recorded music that equaled this, but he never topped it.

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Title: Bob Dylan & The Band – Before The Flood (1974) [MFSL 2015]
Genre: Rock
Format: SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

Bob Dylan and the Band both needed the celebrated reunion tour of 1974, since Dylan’s fortunes had been floundering since Self Portrait and the Band stumbled with 1971’s Cahoots. The tour, with its attendant publicity, definitely returned both artists to center stage, and it definitely succeeded, breaking box office records and earning great reviews. Before the Flood, a double-album souvenir of the tour, suggests that these were generally dynamic shows, but not because they were reveling in the past, but because Dylan was fighting the nostalgia of his audience — nostalgia, it must be noted, that was promoted as the very reason behind these shows. Yet that’s what gives this music such kick — Dylan reworks, rearranges, reinterprets these songs in ways that are still disarming, years after its initial release. He could only have performed interpretations this radical with a group as sympathetic, knowing of his traits as the band, whose own recordings here are respites from the storm. And this is a storm — the sound of a great rocker, surprising his band and audience by tearing through his greatest songs in a manner that might not be comforting, but it guarantees it to be one of the best live albums of its time. Ever, maybe.

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Title: Bob Dylan – Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid (1973) [MFSL 2019]
Genre: Rock
Format: SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid is the 12th studio album and first soundtrack album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on July 13, 1973 by Columbia Records for the Sam Peckinpah film, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Dylan himself appeared in the film as the character “Alias”. The soundtrack consists primarily of instrumental music and was inspired by the movie itself, and included “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”, which became a trans-Atlantic Top 20 hit.
This album was unusual on several counts. For starters, it was a soundtrack (for Sam Peckinpah’s movie of the same title), a first venture of its kind for Bob Dylan. For another, it was Dylan’s first new LP in three years – he hadn’t been heard from in any form other than the single “George Jackson,” his appearance at the Bangladesh benefit concert in 1971, in all of that time. Finally, it came out at an odd moment of juxtaposition in pop culture history, appearing in July 1973 on the same date as the release of Paul McCartney’s own first prominent venture into film music, on the Live and Let Die soundtrack (the Beatles bassist had previously scored The Family Way, a British project overlooked amid the frenzy of the Beatles’ success). Interestingly, each effort reunited the artist with a significant musician/collaborator from his respective past: McCartney with producer George Martin and Dylan with guitarist Bruce Langhorne, who’d played with him on his early albums up to Bringing It All Back Home, before being supplanted by Mike Bloomfield, et al. But that was where the similarities between the two projects ended – apart from the title song, Live and Let Die was Martin’s project rather than McCartney’s, whereas Dylan was all over Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid as a composer, musician, etc. Additionally, whereas McCartney’s work was a piece of pure pop-oriented rock in connection with a crowd-pleasing action-fantasy film, Dylan’s work comprised an entire LP, and the resulting album was a beautifully simple, sometimes rough-at-the-edges and sometimes gently refined piece of country- and folk-influenced rock, devised to underscore a very serious historical film by one of the movies’ great directorial stylists. It was also as strong as any of his recent albums, featuring not just Langhorne but also such luminaries as Booker T. Jones, Roger McGuinn, and Byron Berline. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” was the obvious hit off the album, and helped drive the sales, but “Billy 1,” “Billy 4,” and “Billy 7” were good songs, too – had any of them shown up on bootlegs, they’d have kept the Dylan semiologists and hagiographers busy for years working over them. The instrumentals surrounding them were also worth hearing as manifestations of Dylan’s music-making; “Bunkhouse Theme” was downright gorgeous. It was the first time since New Morning, in 1970, that Dylan had released more than five minutes of new music at once, and it was a gift to fans as well as to Peckinpah – little did anyone realize at the time that it heralded a period of new recording and a national tour (with the Band), along with a brief label switch, and Dylan’s greatest period of sustained musical visibility since 1966. This record also proved that Dylan could shoehorn his music within the requirements of a movie score without compromising its content or quality, something that only the Beatles, unique among rock artists, had really managed to do up to that time, and that was in their own movie, A Hard Day’s Night. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” may have been the biggest hit to come out of a Western in at least 21 years, since Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington had given “High Noon” to Tex Ritter to sing in Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon in 1952 (and Katy Jurado was in both movies), and he’d also outdone Ritter on two counts, writing the music – a full score, to boot – and getting a cameo appearance in the film. The album was later kind of overlooked and neglected in the wake of the tour that followed and the imposing musical attributes of, say, Blood on the Tracks and Desire, but heard on its own terms it holds up 30-plus years later.

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Title: Bob Dylan – New Morning (1970) [MFSL 2014]
Genre: Rock
Format: SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

Dylan rushed out New Morning in the wake of the commercial and critical disaster Self Portrait, and the difference between the two albums suggests that its legendary failed predecessor was intentionally flawed. New Morning expands on the laid-back country-rock of John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline by adding a more pronounced rock & roll edge. While there are only a couple of genuine classics on the record (“If Not for You,” “One More Weekend”), the overall quality is quite high, and many of the songs explore idiosyncratic routes Dylan had previously left untouched, whether it’s the jazzy experiments of “Sign on the Window” and “Winterlude,” the rambling spoken word piece “If Dogs Run Free” or the Elvis parable “Went to See the Gypsy.” Such offbeat songs make New Morning a charming, endearing record.

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Title: Bob Dylan – Nashville Skyline (1969) [MFSL 2016]
Genre: Rock
Format: SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

John Wesley Harding suggested country with its textures and structures, but Nashville Skyline was a full-fledged country album, complete with steel guitars and brief, direct songs. It’s a warm, friendly album, particularly since Bob Dylan is singing in a previously unheard gentle croon – the sound of his voice is so different it may be disarming upon first listen, but it suits the songs. While there are a handful of lightweight numbers on the record, at its core are several excellent songs – “Lay Lady Lay,” “To Be Alone With You,” “I Threw It All Away,” “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You,” as well as a duet with Johnny Cash on “Girl From the North Country” – that have become country-rock standards. And there’s no discounting that Nashville Skyline, arriving in the spring of 1969, established country-rock as a vital force in pop music, as well as a commercially viable genre.

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Title: Bob Dylan – Love & Theft (2001) [MFSL 2017]
Genre: Rock
Format: SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft is a visionary train ride through the vast American landscape and all its hills, valleys, mountains, river towns, and urban and rural settlements. As they burrow into villages and barrel across trestle bridges, the 2001 record’s songs introduce us to outlaws, outliers, gamblers, brawlers, tricksters, bootleggers, and scoundrels. It is, in effect, a commanding survey of and plunge into American music. Named the best album of the year by Rolling Stone and the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, anointed the second-best album of the decade by Newsweek, and later declared the 385th Greatest Album of All Time by Rolling Stone, Love and Theft remains the Nobel Laureate’s finest effort since 1975’s Blood on the Tracks – and an extension of the jesting, imagery, and free-form looseness present on his seminal 1960s works. Now, it possess knock-out sound.
Mastered from the original master tapes and strictly limited to 3,000 numbered copies, Mobile Fidelity’s transparent hybrid SACD reveals the you-are-there immediacy of Dylan’s production and the colorful textures inherent to every passage. Experienced on this audiophile version, the songs possess a sense of swing and naturalism so sure-footed that they seem to float, with Dylan and his crack ensemble setting up as a live band taking down the house in a deep-in-the-woods Louisiana shotgun shack. Prized aural traits such as presence, imaging, separation, and soundstaging depth don’t come better. This is the very definition of sonic chemistry. Time Out of Mind was a legitimate comeback, Bob Dylan’s first collection of original songs in nearly ten years and a risky rumination on mortality, but its sequel, Love and Theft, is his true return to form, not just his best album since Blood on the Tracks, but the loosest, funniest, warmest record he’s made since The Basement Tapes. There are none of the foreboding, apocalyptic warnings that permeated Time Out of Mind and even underpinned “Things Have Changed,” his Oscar-winning theme to Curtis Hanson’s 2000 film Wonder Boys. Just as important, Daniel Lanois’ deliberately arty, diffuse production has retreated into the mist, replaced by an uncluttered, resonant production that gives Dylan and his ace backing band room to breathe. And they run wild with that liberty, rocking the house with the grinding “Lonesome Day Blues” and burning it down with the fabulously swinging “Summer Days.” They’re equally captivating on the slower songs, whether it’s the breezily romantic “Bye and Bye,” the torch song “Moonlight,” or the epic reflective closer, “Sugar Baby.” Musically, Dylan hasn’t been this natural or vital since he was with the Band, and even then, those records were never as relaxed and easy or even as hard-rocking as these. That alone would make Love and Theft a remarkable achievement, but they’re supported by a tremendous set of songs that fully synthesize all the strands in his music, from the folksinger of the early ’60s, through the absurdist storyteller of the mid-’60s, through the traditionalist of the early ’70s, to the grizzled professional of the ’90s. None of this is conscious, it’s all natural. There’s an ease to his writing and a swagger to his performance unheard in years – he’s cracking jokes and murmuring wry asides, telling stories, crooning, and swinging. It’s reminiscent of his classic records, but he’s never made a record that’s been such sheer, giddy fun as this, and it stands proudly among his very best albums.

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