Obviously Very Good Approximately (Blonde On Blonde - Bob Dylan)

Member Name: markhobbs

Product:	Blonde On Blonde - Bob Dylan
Date:	02/09/01 (49 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: One of the best records ever

Disadvantages: none, seriously

Very few popular artists are as bold and daring as Bob Dylan. For Bob was the king of the world of folk, his loyal subjects professing Him to be the true commentator of this World Gone Wrong. He was infallible. Anyone else would have carried on in the same vein, going from intimate venue to intimate armed with nothing more than a harmonica, an acoustic guitar and a bucket load of rhetorical questions. This was not the way Bob saw his future, he felt that folk had become stale and had self destructed. He needed a change.

And change he certainly did. He got himself a band and started to write some of the loudest and most drug fuelled music ever to be heard. Bringing It All Back Home begun it, Highway 61 Revisited reinforced it, and Blonde on Blonde perfected it. Game, Set and Match it would seem, but no, he was hated on a grand scale for what he was doing. The more narrow minded of his folk fans were disgusted by the absence of the stone cold reality of old, no more were his characters buying seven shotgun shells, they were using the contents of their pants as collateral.

Just to show far how far ahead Bob was from the rest of the music world, think of this, when the Beatles were arsing around singing Ticket to Ride and the like. It was still absolutely amazing and ahead of it’s time music, but it’s not in the same league as Like A Rolling Stone and It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).

And to give us a hint as to what he uses to fuel his imagination, he kicks it all off with a marching tune with the lyrics, But I would not feel so all alone, Everybody must get stoned. Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35 is not his most ambiguous work. But that is not the mood of the album; Visions of Johanna is perhaps his most amazing song to date. Everything just blends together to make the most beautiful sound you’re ever likely to hear. The lead guitar does what most rock guitarists seem to have forgotten to do, fills the ga
ps while enhancing the vocals. And what vocals they are, immaculately telling the storey of a late night of thinking and reliving moments on the walls of a room.

Sooner or Later, I Want You, and the bittersweet ( but mostly bitter) Just Like A Woman make up the greatest hits, each of them being ridiculously perfect in their own right., but not as fun as Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat. It’s a funny attack on fashion, with lines like, You may think he loves you for your money, But I know what he loves you for, It’s your leopard skin pill box hat. Hooray.

The parody of the Beatles song Norwegian Wood, Fourth Time Around, surpasses the original and Obviously 5 Believers never fails to uplift me, but the album peaks at the epic lovesong Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. It’s shows complete and utter adoration and reverence of his then love. It’s amazes me how he could write something so unashamedly beautiful about one person.

And that is the end of Dylan’s electric period. After an eighteen month break from music because of a serious motorcycle crash, he came back and tried his hand at country-folk again, with results far less impressive than his earlier work. We would indeed have to wait until 1975 and Blood on the Tracks for the next truly great Dylan work.

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