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Dylan’s Shadows of the Night Revisited

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I’ve had a shit of a week. Work has been quite unpleasant. Just emerging out of the tunnel after a virus and I’ve got the heater on, it is 16 degrees outside , yesterday was 32 and it is supposedly the start of summer.

So what to put on ? Why not that Bob Dylan bloke? Why not the record you bought and have kept in the current play rack rather than filing in the big box? Yep good idea, and a glass of red too.

So on it goes and it is just the ticket.

Superb song selection, great band ,great recording. AAAHHHH but the voice, I hear you say. Well here is the thing, tonight, I’m not up for some master like Frankie gliding over the notes,making the caper sound oooh so easy. No here is Bob, great phrasing, great diction but just struggling in his life worn, cigarette ravaged voice just struggling to make the notes just get close to them.

Yep croaky melancholy, at certain times, is just the ticket.

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  2. Once I have finished playing the “Best 100 Christmas Carols Ever Ever” (it’s the 1st of December, it’s a tradition!) I will take Shadows of the Night out of trash and give it another go: that’s cos I like you two, nothing else.

    I shall report back

    • I know it’s Bob and we can’t listen to this record in splendid isolation but….

      First two tracks are pleasant enough – if your old Dad stood up at the end of the wedding feast and started singing I’m a Fool To Want You there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the house. If the old geezer from down the road at Open Mic night at the Tap & Spile finally made his way through The Night We Called It A Day there would be a polite smattering of applause from the seventeen disinterested punters

      But, sweet jesus in heaven, how can anyone make it all the way through Track 3 Stay With Me??
      It’s like watching in horror as a doddery elephant staggers to the cliff edge, stands there swaying before in awful super-slow motion topples to its inevitable death down in the canyon below, it’s last flailing bellow of despair drifting upwards to heaven.

      Shiver, shiver.

  10. If you’d told me back in 1963 when I was grooving to Masters of War that 50-odd years later I’d be listening to the Zim crooning his way through Autumn Leaves, I’d have given you a slap.

    But I love this album. I listen to it often. Every time you think he’s finally gone completely off the rails he pulls off some genius little bit of phrasing or nails a note dead centre when you’ve been thinking he was drifting way off beam. And the band is sensational.

    So another fan here.

    • I can see I’m going to have to give this album another chance.

      I played it just the once and filed it (in its correct chronological place) alongside the other 40-odd Dylan albums with a dismissive “harrumph”

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