"Bob Dylan - Planet Waves"

Outside of the acknowledged vital Dylan albums, there's a lot of contention amongst fans as to what else you really need. I mean, obviously you need his trio of electric albums (Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde), you probably would do well with at least three of his early acoustic folk records (everything but his self-titled, which isn't essential but still quite good), Blood on the Tracks from 1974, The Basement Tapes with The Band, The Bootleg Series (all six volumes, really), and maybe Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft to represent his latter-day work.

His other work...well, there are those who deride certain albums and those who laud the same records. Some folks think Oh Mercy is an excellent piece of work. Others say Infidels was the best Dylan ever did after '74. Some think that his two country albums--the folky country-inflected John Wesley Harding and the straight-ahead country of Nashville Skyline--were the last truly great albums he cut.

All of which is designed to say this: Planet Waves is not the sort of Dylan album everyone will love or even like. It's an album of modest pleasures, and not at all the incendiary triumphant return that one would expect from the reteaming of Dylan and The Band. Folks who don't like Dylan can point to this album as evidence that he never really tried all that hard, that he just scribbled cryptic lines that really meant nothing and 'sang' them in a haphazard, nonchalant way. Dylan enthusiasts will point out that this is a low-key, simple album, a continuation of the domestic bliss that preoccupied Dylan on New Morning.

And really, this record sounds like New Morning, Mark II. Instrumentation is fairly subdued, and while Robbie Robertson has some nice guitar fills throughout, there's nothing nearly as explosive as his work on Blonde on Blonde. This is a mostly acoustic album, with plenty of piano and organ thrown in. The songs feel like they were recorded live in the studio, which was a common practice for Dylan.

Lyrically, this is not one of Dylan's better efforts. The lyrics are all surface, and some songs ("Tough Mama" being the primary culprit) are downright silly or poor. But Dylan makes up for this towards the end of the first side with "Forever Young," which is reprised on the second side in a more up-tempo version (which I actually prefer, but then again, Clif and my's obsession with playing fast is well-known). It's followed by songs like "Dirge" and "Wedding Song," which are both beautiful and simple.

Ultimately, Planet Waves is a modest, mediocre Dylan album. Its New Morning meets Basement Tapes sound and style are nice, but don't really leave much of an impression. Lyrically, it's nowhere near his '70s twin peaks of Blood on the Tracks and Desire, but you can't hit a homerun every time out, right?

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Bob Dylan, "Dirge"