Bob Dylan - 3 Studio Albums (1963-1976) [MFSL, 2012-2013]

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Bob Dylan - 3 Studio Albums (1963-1976) [MFSL, 2012-2013]

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Bob Dylan - The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963). It’s the album the ignited sea changes in pop culture, music, songwriting, poetry, and the social consciousness. It’s the creation of a 22-year-old visionary still years away from casting a jaundiced eye to the media. It’s the sound of change, the feeling of ground shifting beneath one’s feet, and the entrance of an entirely new way of thinking. It’s the effective beginning of what’s arguably the boldest career in music history, the yawning vortex into the complex mind, supernatural wordplay, and folk techniques of a vocalist/guitarist whose name is forever associated with transformation. It’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.
Exponentially surpassing the potential he demonstrated on his debut, Dylan became a mirror of the concerns, issues, and feelings confronting the nation. Writing and singing with penetrating honesty, observational wit, moral conviction, and scathing emotion, he digs into the madness of war (“Masters of War,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”), hypocrisy of segregation (“Oxford Town”), urgency of civil rights and freedom (“Blowin’ in the Wind”), and multiple angles of unrequited love (“Girl From the North Country,” “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right”) with a literate astuteness and depth that, nearly 50 years later, still leave audiences slack-jawed. Satire, absurdist humor, and traditional blues also pepper the album, which rests upon graceful melodies and sparse, poignant patterns.

Bob Dylan - Blood On The Tracks (1975). A start-to-finish cycle that documents a lover’s pursuit of, entanglement with, and loss of a woman, the bracingly intimate 1975 effort remains one of the most encompassing break-up albums ever made and ranks as the most personal statement of the Bard’s career. To hear it is to experience the agony, frustration, trauma, highs, lows, confusion, sadness, and, ultimately, requisite redemption associated with intimate relationships gone astray. Dylan maintains it’s a work of fiction, but it’s evident close-vested autobiographical premise is what helps make it universal: It’s the icon singing through tears, going out of his mind, battling hallowing emptiness, firing shots across the bow, and accepting culpability. It is, in short, a consummate expression of love’s darker sides and the consequences of what happens when dreams unravel.
Throughout, tunes come on and proceed as if they could continue forever, Dylan spinning poetic verses and conversations amidst finely tied knots of acoustic notes, chords, and fills, the deceivingly simple architecture conjuring the intertwined refractions of a bezeled jewel, various angles, colors, and textures conjoining into a gorgeously inseparable whole. Backed by Tony Brown’s flexible albeit subtle bass, Buddy Cage’s country-streaked pedal-steel guitar, and Paul Griffin’s soul-baring organ - an instrument used to shadow, tuckpoint, and illuminate here as effectively as any time in rock history - Dylan pours soulful emotion, open his veins, and bleeds.

Bob Dylan - Desire (1976). Bob Dylan cut Desire flanked by more than a dozen musicians, aided by a producer averse to multitracking, and bent on tequila. Reeling from the effects of his disintegrating marriage, the singer penned several of the most heartfelt songs of his career, including “Sara,” the most overtly public broadcasting of his private life and emotions committed to tape. Straddling lines between haphazard and organized, loose and planned, Desire lives up its title, a masterwork that Dylan would not equal in creativity, performance, and lyricism for another two decades.
Surging with a nothing-to-lose disposition, Desire juggles myriad styles and owns up to no single theme. Disappointment and loss related to Dylan’s broken relationship surfaces directly and metaphorically, but the album isn’t mired in depression or sadness. More often than not, it howls, the sprawling canvas needlepointed with complexity and diversity. In pairing with lyricist Jacques Levy, Dylan invites narrative collaboration he never again repeated, as well as an eclecticism that gives the effort its fascinating charm.
Desire finds Dylan at an evocative peak. With the tour de force single “Hurricane,” he composes his first protest song in years, the enraged verses aimed squarely at maintaining the innocence of boxer Ruben Carter, falsely convicted of murder, as a violin melody swirls in the background. He finds similar inspiration in gangster Joey Gallo, turning “Joey” into a beautiful epic outfitted with Emmylou Harris’ transcendent backing vocals. Flashing a sense of humor, “Mozambique” relishes an irreverent quirkiness that balances the more serious fare.
And in the nakedly biographical “Sara,” Mediterranean-flavored “One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below),” fragile “Oh, Sister,” and swirling fable “Isis,” Dylan develops a series of loosely related songs at once flawless, timeless, and tireless. Rarely has the folk-rock icon addressed love, romance, and loss more openly, eloquently, or universally.

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Bob Dylan - 3 Studio Albums (1963-1976) [MFSL, 2012-2013]

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Bob Dylan - 3 Studio Albums (1963-1976) [MFSL, 2012-2013]

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Bob Dylan - 3 Studio Albums (1963-1976) [MFSL, 2012-2013]

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