I remember the first Dylan record I got. It was Live at Budokan. Not a great record, but had an assortment of songs that I thought would make a good introduction. I was in high school at the time and an avid metal head. I liked Ozzy and Iron Maiden and classics like Led Zeppelin, so Dylan was a little out of my pond. I always liked a wide variety though so it wasn't unreachable. At first, I didn't care for it. His voice was really hard to digest and hard to understand. For some reason I was drawn to it and kept going back to it over months it spent more and more time on my turntable. Once you get to the place where his voice dosen't sound so strange and different, you really start to appreciate how much it elavates his words and the more you pour over his words...for hours and hours. That is what Dylan does, he manages to write, even in his most bizarre stream of consciousness ways, things that you can relate to and make some sense of. and you wonder... does he mean this or that? In the end, I think he really just wants to raise the question and cause the confusion.
This album is simply brilliant. Dylan delivers every word like it is the most important word on the album, and it propbably is. Everything just works. If you are uninitiated to Dylan, you may need to spend some time on this, but I assure you that it will pay off. Once you get it, you won't stop. After finally getting Budokan, I became a rabid Dylan fanatic, aquiring even his most obscure albums and spending days listening to them.
I will always treasure the time that I discovered Bob Dylan.
1 Comments
Apr 20, 2014, 7:46:30 PM
dean squishman - Where to begin with this album. Had I been solely in charge of making this list I might have placed this at number one. But who cares---it has earned it's rightful place in rock history and enough ink has been spilled talking about it to fill an ocean. It was the first real Dylan I had been exposed to and it was shocking to me after being raised on a diet of mostly country music that I had somehow never heard it. I mean---Dylan and Johnny Cash were friends after all---but it never entered the radar of the family car radio which by that time had devolved into it's terrible pop crap period of the early 80's when all the stars of the time were singing about their divorces and we were all supposed to be relieved when the Oak ridge boys came on the scene. It was a musical breaking point for me and I would avoid country music for the next 15 years at least. When I first heard Highway 61 I couldn't get enough of it and even now is a mainstay on my ipod for those moments that I need a musical cleansing on a long drive singing at the top of my lungs---yes I know every word of this album. The final song on this album---Desolation Row absolutley nails it for me every time. A long series of absurd imagery inviting the listener to sit back and enjoy the movie he projects with his words---ending with the long pretty guitar work of Charlie Mc coy and long blowing notes on the harp---lending a real folksy / country feel to the album. Makes me feel like I'm on a train to destiny. Discovering this record pulled me out of a dorm room where my room mate would only listen to Judas Priest and home visits with family stuck on Kenny Rodgers sound track. It was a deliverance to a sane place.