Favourites : Late Dylan - Time Out Of Mind, Love and Theft and Modern Times

I have been reading this book for the last week.  An interesting look at the inside world of the Dylan crazies.

The book deals with those obsessive fans that need to collect anything connected with Dylan, or the live show and recording addicts and those that dedicate themselves to lyrical analysis.  I am not an obsessive Dylan fan but I do count Highway 61 Revisted, Blood on the Tracks and Oh Mercy as three of my favourite albums and I have about 50 records, CDs or Videos (including duplicates on different media).

I found the section of the book devoted to those that dedicate themselves to analysing every last song most interesting.  It is that section that has had me grabbing Dylan off the shelf and playing and listening anew.  Interestingly the section is not devoted to the early classic Dylan but that Dylan recorded since 1997 now referred to as Late Dylan which is interesting as that started 17 years ago!!  So I am wondering what they call his current out put VERY Late Dylan?

In a lot of respects the lyrics of his song Mixed Up Confusion come to mind.

I got mixed up confusionMan, it’s a-killin’ me
Well, there’s too many people
And they’re all too hard to please

What is particularly interesting to me about this section is how one obsessive Dylanologist started identifying that Dylan had lifted whole lines and sections of his lyrics from old and new books, poems and even tour guides. Some have called Dylan on this and claimed Plagiarism as a result.  However others have been able to identify that Dylan seems to be actually calling up even wider themes than what the songs by themselves suggest or imply.  It seems that Dylan is really trying to stitch together themes within his songs and beyond into the books and poems he is quoting from all while creating some sort of magical mystery tour.  If this is true (and the case is put pretty credibly) then Dylan has once again challenged the music world order by twisting the usual norms. Something he has done time and again throughout his career.

So to the music and to me his late period peak is Time Out Of Mind, Love and Theft and Modern Times. While I have the follow up CDs Together Through Life and Tempest they have never captured my imagination in the same way.

Of these, while Modern Times for some reason captured the collective imagination and became Dylan's biggest selling album ever and is solid it is Time Out of Mind that I enjoy the most of the three.

At the time it was claimed that Dylan wrote it after a near brush with death after a heart infection left him hospitalised for a week. Like most Dylan stories this was bs - it had actually been recorded before that. Whatever the reasons there are some great songs on the album - from the opener Love Sick (which I saw the White Stripes cover,   Trying to Get to Heaven (which Bowie recorded and never released around the time of Heathen), Cold Irons Bound, Not Dark Yet and Til I fell in love with her.


Love and Theft and Modern Times both had good songs but increasingly to me they all started to sound the same.  We had a family trip to see Dylan when he toured Modern Times and like a lot of people we left a little dissappointed.  The old songs had been rearranged to suit his voice and band and while I am usually a great believer in this on live songs - they all sounded the same and frequently it was two versus in before you could pick what song it was.

However in the meantime I can and do listen and enjoy to his music often.