Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid (1973)

So much of the narrative of the last few LPs has been Dylan, apparently, trying to struggle free of the burdens of expectation by releasing a series of perplexing albums. If that was true, it hadn't worked. Partly because, Self Portrait aside, the releases were actually quite good and partly because it would take a great deal more than that to make the Webermans of this world lose interest. I'd always wondered that, if Dylan really wanted it all to go away, why he didn't just stop releasing albums instead.

Then, after New Morning, he did. And that didn't work either.

So, following a two-and-a-half year absence, with the public whistle more than wetted, Dylan returns with Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid. For those eagerly anticipating a new release, it was a disappointment for the same reason that makes it difficult to pass judgement on here - that it is a film soundtrack LP. Not one of those Easy Rider type jukebox albums but songs and music written specifically to soundtrack a film. Music that is, mostly, designed to be in the background.

So you get Cantina Theme, Bunkhouse Theme, River Theme; pieces of incidental music erroneously elevated to the status of songs by their presence on a 12 inch record. While they are all understandably short, Final Theme - which has something that sounds suspiciously like a pan-pipe tootling throughout - goes on for more than five minutes. These are all perfectly pleasant melodies but, when plucked from their cinematic context, are, frankly a bit dull. Up to this point, whatever you think of the direction Dylan's music has taken, it has never been dull.

There is merit elsewhere on the album. Knockin' On Heaven's Door is, of course, the stand-out track and one which deservedly is now considered a Dylan classic. Billy is also a fine tune but do we really need one, two, three... four versions of it here? I love his voice on the final Billy 7 - sung at the bottom of his range, giving us a low down and dirty growl, fitting for a Sam Peckinpah western  - but by that point we really have heard this before. Three times before. Add to that Turkey Chase - a throw-away, jaunty, toe-tapping, banjo-picking, fiddle-fiddling romp that raises a smile - and that's about it.

And that's that, really. It's a film soundtrack with a couple of good songs thrown into the mix. There's not much else to say.

Out of five?
Three

Favourite track?
[With all due respect to Knockin' On Heaven's Door] Billy 7

Next up?
It should be Dylan but we're skipping right along to Planet Waves.

New Morning (1970)

Hot on the heels of the ill-received Self Portrait comes the 'that's much more like it' New Morning. On its release it was widely hailed as a welcome return to sanity, with some suggestions that its quick appearance represented a mea culpa on behalf of his Bobness for the inadequacies of Self Portrait. Since then, I think its fair to say, New Morning has become somewhat of a forgotten, under-rated LP, skulking in the much ignored hinterland of the time between the heights of Highway 61-Blonde On Blonde and the renaissance of Blood on the Tracks. In Chronicles, even Dylan seems underwhelmed by the release, saying it sounded "okay".  It is a shame as this is a rough diamond of an LP with a couple moments of near greatness, some good material, two that don't quite work, a few curios that do, before, frankly, fizzling out at the end.

Let's start at the top. Opening with If Not For You, Dylan supplies the strongest start to one of his albums since Highway 61; a lovely song with a gentle Nashville Skyline-esque swing, complemented by a slight mellowing in Dylan's voice. Even though this LP was written at a time when Dylan was still trying to wrestle free from the expectations his earlier successes had placed upon him - and that frustration comes through on several of the songs here  - the opening track, along with the equally fine title song New Morning, smack of new love and optimism.

Ah, New Morning. One of my very favourite Dylan songs. I have a particular sentimental attachment to this track as it was the song that my wife and I walked down the aisle at the end of our wedding ceremony to, but even without that personal memory, this is such a top tune.

Can’t you hear that motor turnin’?
Automobile comin’ into style
Comin’ down the road for a country mile or two
So happy just to see you smile
Underneath the sky of blue

That little vignette right there just sums up the delight of this song. The romantic, rustic imagery that pops up throughout the LP, the use of different parts of the middle line to rhyme across the verse and - most of all - musically, with the contrast of a falling guitar, a rising organ while the voice holds steady until just at the end, sends a shiver down my spine every time. This is a great song. This is a happy song. And in places this comes across as a really happy album.

In others it doesn't. The theme that runs though the album of a remote rural life shouts of Dylan's desire to escape from the 'voice of a generation' tag that, despite his best effort, continued to dog him. Day of the Locust - a good, almost Van Morrison-like, song - ends with him fleeing from a degree ceremony (apparently based on a recent experience at Princeton) "Straight for the hills, the black hills of Dakota. Sure was glad to get out of there alive." If Dogs Run Free ("then why not me?") is a blunt cry along similar lines:

The best is always yet to come
That’s what they explain to me
Just do your thing, you’ll be king
If dogs run free

[It is difficult to work up a great deal of sympathy with anyone who strives for success and recognition and then, when it comes, complains about having too much. But, on the other hand, I've never had to experience people rummaging though my trash or traipsing through my garden at all hours in the hope of discovering some great unspoken truth. Well, at least as far as I know.]

If Dogs Run Free along with Winterlude are two odd little songs that work despite themselves - probably because there has to be a great deal of tongue-in-cheek about them both. The latter is a sweet little waltz - "Winterlude, this dude thinks you're fine" - while the former is the first and (I'm sure) only appearance of scat on a Dylan LP. It is throw-away but highly enjoyable for that (although at one point it does sound like the scat singer is coughing up fur-balls which we could probably do without).

Back to the more orthodox tracks, the other highlights come with Sign on the Window - a wistful paean to domesticity - One More Weekend  - a twelve bar blues that would have sat happily on Blonde on Blonde - and The Man in Me - a quality tune which takes him into Van Morrison-esque territory once more. Tracks three and four on the LP - Time Passes Slowly and Went to See the Gypsy - are not so strong but they are, y'know, as Dylan said, okay.

The only bum note is the way the album finishes with by far the two weakest tracks. Father of Night is just not very good, whereas Three Angels is a lot of faux-gospel nonsense with a solemn Dylan intoning about angles, dogs and pigeons. Ah, well.

The ending aside this is a nice bit of work. It's not a great Dylan album by any stretch but it is a very good one. And right now, that'll do for me.

Out of five?

Four.

Favourite track?

New Morning.

Next up?

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid