Tuesday, October 22, 2019
World Gone Wrong
We wouldn't get too far on my list of the hundred greatest albums of all time (with each individually being the greatest single album ever made) before we ran headlong into Bob Dylan, bashing our heads into him and saying "Huh? Hey, where, what."
And Bob Dylan says...
Watch where you're going, man. You'll hurt yourself.
Bob Dylan is the single greatest songwriter in the history of music. Not every album of his will be one of the hundred greatest albums ever, but I can come up with seven of his like I'm rolling a rock down a road. I mean, as I said, he's the greatest songwriter in the history of music.
So isn't it weird, isn't it a little funny that the greatest album ever made, by the greatest songwriter, is a bunch of covers?
Maybe you're thinking "You just like to pick the weird ones."
I do! I like it sooo much! But what does it matter. That's apocrypha, a side note, irrelevant. Because I mean it. Oh, I mean it. Oh I mean it so bad. Oh. Oh. World Gone Wrong is the greatest album ever made.
And it's all mine. It's all mine! It's ragged and dirty, broke and hungry too.
All the friends it ever had are gone.
Dylan, past his pure, incendiary relevancy, put out an album of folk blues covers called Good as I been to You. People liked it. "That's nice" they said. And it was, I guess. Then he put out another one and people said "Oh, another one." And they turned their heads.
And gave it to me! Dark blues so gorgeous, so torn apart and dark, and so minutely understood that the man who alchemically, musically, lyrically, reinvented western civilization out of them can set them down and present them graciously. They are the 20th Century, his source material in an act of shuddering respect, understanding, revelation, and homage.
He also finished his record contract with it.
It's a piece of work set down by a master. No one bothered to pick it up until I came along. I was shocked to find it just lying there. But believe me, it suits the album.
It's mine. So I give it to you. We can share it.
Blood in My Eyes
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