Occasional Albums Thing 028 - Bob Dylan “Greatest Hits”

My Dad is a Bob Dylan fan, my Brother is a Bob Dylan fan, my Mom really doesn’t like him at all. Me, I’m somewhere betwixt those two positions. I understand and appreciate his importance in the grand scheme of things, he’s a masterful songwriter although I tend to prefer other people’s interpretations of his songs, his “singing” voice leaves much to be desired.

I’m also not much of a fan of that attitude that says “you have to own this record”, allegedly because it’s important. The only records you SHOULD own are the ones that you like or want to own for whatever your reason is, not because some cloth-eared journo wrote another fecking list of the same old 20 dull “classics” ! But after recently rescuing a very beaten up copy of Dylan’s album “The Times They Are A-Changin’” I got me a hankering to grab a copy of this first volume of his Greatest Hits, cos I should.

Whether you claim to like Dylan or not his songwriting prowess is undeniable. Just a cursory glance at the track list reveals “Blowin’ In The Wind”, “The Times They Are A Changin'”, “Mr Tambourine Man”, “It's All Over Now Baby Blue” (check out the version by The Chocolate Watch Band), “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, “Like A Rolling Stone”, “I Want You”…classics all. I often wonder whether after sweating literary blood over that expansive lyric in “Mr Tambourine Man” whether Bob felt a bit miffed that The Byrds dispensed with 3 of his verses and used the remaining one and the chorus to turn it into what must have been, at the time, his biggest earner ? Some of the lyrics The Byrds felt they could live without most songwriters would give up a limb to have written, like

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky,
With one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea,
Circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate,
Driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow

…Phew ! Hopefully Bob just sat back and enjoyed the royalty cheques arriving.

If you just read the lyrics to “The Times They Are A Changin'” you could imagine it being a Punk Rock anthem “Come mothers and fathers throughout the land, And don't criticise what you can't understand, Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command…”, but no it was a folk-hippy anthem. “Blowin’ In The Wind” was taken up by protesters around the world.

The man can only described as a genius. I don’t want anything else of his other than what I have. I do love to hear the occasional random song, “Hurricane” perhaps, or “The Man In The Long Black Coat”, “Tangled Up In Blue” or “Positively 4th Street”, there are so many. And as much as I dislike those lists of records you MUST own, if you appreciate great songwriting you SHOULD own a bit of Dylan.

Mr Tambourine Man - https://youtu.be/oecX_1pqxk0?si=26RAr_8j1FzBHwtT