Songs from Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits (1967) that appear on DYLAN: 9 out of 10Songs from Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 (1971) that appear on DYLAN: 11 out of 21Songs from Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, Vol. 3 (1994) that appear on DYLAN: 13 out of 14Songs from The Essential Bob Dylan (2000) that appear on DYLAN: 27 out of 30Songs from The Best of Bob Dylan (2005) that appear on DYLAN: 15 out of 16Previously unreleased recordings that appear on DYLAN, unless you get it from iTunes: 0
Bob Dylan's recording career has been compiled and re-compiled so many times that his new 3xCD box set needed to have some kind of serious reason to exist-- it's got the responsibility to give us some kind of fresh take on him. Instead, it's the same damn songs they've been feeding us over and over for 40 years. (There was originally some talk about how the tracklisting would be determined by the votes of fans; that doesn't seem to have happened.) We don't even get that not-bad new Mark Ronson remix of "Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)". DYLAN is just his brittle canon of "classics," undigested and unreconsidered, with stuff from his lesser records thrown in to fill it out. But half the point of Dylan is that he doesn't have a neat canon-- the first pop musician to be bootlegged has been spilling out around the edges since he gave himself his name and started trying out poses and masks. DYLAN (the title is all caps: you cannot escape from him) attempts to frame his body of work as a linear arc, and Dylan isn't a linear kind of guy. Think of him in an each-thing-leads-to-the-next way sense, and you end up with something like the spiel his concerts introduce him with: reading the headlines, missing the story.
Back in 1985-- roughly halfway into Dylan's career-- his label released Biograph, a retrospective box set that does the best job in his discography of explaining what's so special about him (it's not his best record, but his most well-rounded). Biograph also includes 9/10 of Greatest Hits (no "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"), but it's packed with otherwise unavailable material and meticulously sequenced: not chronologically, but thematically. And it's meant for listening, refreshing overfamiliar songs by presenting them in a new light.
DYLAN, on the other hand, is meant to sit on a bookshelf. It's unutterably boring, which is a rotten way to frame the achievements of one of the least boring musicians alive. It tries to represent his entire studio career in chronological order, which means it spends its first half-hour droning through some of his most embroynic and underdeveloped material. In the middle, a marathon set of his wordiest songs are assembled into an impenetrable block-- "Changing of the Guards" is a magnificent song, but preceded by "Hurricane" it's almost unbearable. Finally, it excerpts "representative" material from crummy 1980s and 90s records, concluding with a couple of indifferent tracks from last year's Modern Times.
Treating Dylan as a studio artist completely misrepresents the post-Biograph period, when he's essentially been a stage performer who puts out a record every so often-- Dylanophiles describe the 2000-plus shows he's played since 1988 as the "Never Ending Tour". What he plays on any given night has virtually nothing to do with the greatest-hits canon as it's represented here; his most recent gig, as I write this, included exactly three of the songs from DYLAN. A decently curated set of live stuff from the past 20 years would be a welcome addition to the discography, a portrait of the artist as the fascinating mess he really is.
In fact, the selection here is boring because it's so un-messy. The Bob of DYLAN is almost entirely the Serious Crafter of Fine Popular Music who wrote "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" and "Make You Feel My Love", not the burning-eyed mystical horndog who wrote "Oh, Sister", the self-righteous blues jukebox who wrote "Gonna Change My Way of Thinking", the absurdist comedian who wrote "On the Road Again", or the zombie clone of Luke the Drifter who wrote "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest". There's more of a sense of Dylan's hilarity, passion and dizzying weirdness in any episode of his "Theme Time Radio Hour" than there is here.
It's hard, in some ways, to argue with an album that has a lot of these songs on it, and a few of the handful of tracks that haven't made it to a greatest-hits before are nice left-field choices-- the rusty lament "Dark Eyes", the zydeco goof "On a Night Like This", the post-vaudeville ramble "Po' Boy". The problem comes down to this: If you're more than faintly familiar with Dylan's stuff, you have no use for this collection. And if you aren't, and you're looking for a place to start, it will put you right off him. It's cold, dry and dusty-- a sarcophagus for an artist who deserves a bazaar instead.
