Shrinking with age

Some Bob Dylan albums grow with time while others shrink. Oh Mercy and Good As I Been to You, each hailed upon release as an artistic rebirth, seem slighter with each passing listen; meanwhile, Street-Legal keeps surprising me years after I reviled it for the Vegasy sound — arriving in the middle of the New Wave’s glorious last hurrah — that at the time made His Bobness sound like he was auditioning for The Ed Sullivan Show a decade too late.

Meanwhile, Modern Times, which started out as a disappointment, becomes steadily more irritating because it’s practically inescapable. As Michael Gray points out, this extremely slight collection of songs signaled the start of a sustained marketing push that’s clearly meant to introduce Dylan to a new generation of fans, but which may just end up alienating them. After taking in the pleasant crooning of “Beyond the Horizon,” who’s going to buy into the genius talk, or be interested in seeking out the real work that supports it?

Of course, I was lucky enough to have picked a great year to start exploring Dylan’s work: my first Dylan album was the just-released Blood on the Tracks, purchased with the help of the Sam Goody coupon I got for bringing in a $1 roll of pennies at the Garden State Plaza store, and later that summer the official release of The Basement Tapes arrived like manna from heaven at the very hole-in-the-wall store where I scored Joaquin Antique, the bootlegged original version of Blood on the Tracks. I spent the fall scarfing up Rolling Stone reports on the progress of the Rolling Thunder Revue, and only a few weeks into the bicentennial year I found Desire waiting at that very same Sam Goody. The year of our lord 1975 may not have been too hot for a lot of people, but it was a fantastic time to be a Bob Dylan fan.

So maybe I should cut the record a little slack. I’ve read and heard plenty of hosannas for Modern Times and have yet to hear anything that could change my mind, but this whippersnapper Chris Gregory has enough interesting things to say about the album-closing “Ain’t Talking” to make me hope he’ll see his way clear to writing about Love and Theft, or the records that preceded it.