Dylan's Latest Masterpiece

For some time now I have been engaged in an intensive study of the music of Bob Dylan. I did the same thing for the Beatles and my study only took me only a year. With Dylan, I am only up to his albums from the early 1980s and it has already taken me three-and-a half-years just to get that far.

What's the difference, you might ask? The difference is that the Beatles were great pop recording artists for ten years, who during a very specific period in their career (1966-1969) bordered on genius, whereas Dylan has been a revolutionary musical artist for the past 45 years. There simply is no comparison.

I promised myself that I would study all of Dylan's albums systematically and chronically one at a time, even committing myself to struggling through his crappy evangelical albums of the 70s and his miserable albums of the 1980s. Absolutely no jumping ahead, I swore. It wasn't a big problem for me to take it slowly: I had no desire to listen to Dylan's current music in which he sounds like someone who has smoked far too many cigarettes for his own good.

But then something horrible happened. Someone gave me a copy of The Bootleg Albums: Volume 8: Tell Tale Signs as a gift. The Bootleg Albums (1-8) contain alternative versions of some of Dylan's songs and songs that, for one reason or another, never made it onto his albums. Volume 8 is mostly tracks from the 1990s that Dylan never used. As I listened to this album, his voice, which once was so off-putting to me, suddenly sounded perfectly suited to the kind of bluesy, gruff songs he was now recording. This compelled me to jump ahead to listen to Modern Times (2006). I was completely amazed. The music on this album is so powerful that it makes 99% of theschlock being recorded by younger artists seem like absolute shit by comparison.

Now Dylan has done it again. His new album, Together Through Life, is currently Number 1 in the music charts in both the U.S. and U.K. So, of course, I had to listen to this one, and, once again, I was devastated by how powerful the music was. Two songs in particular, "Beyond Here Lies Nothing" and "It's All Good" are destined to become Dylan classics.

And what of that gravelly, grizzly, gin-soaked voice of his that I hated so much in comparison to his magical nasally whine of the 60s. I'm ashamed to say it, but I was totally wrong about the voice. If anything it lends a certain gravity and world-weariness to his songs that makes them all the more compelling.

I had a barbecue a week ago and so did my neighbor, Jim. Together we had about 60 people packed into our two tiny backyards, and half the people there were probably under the age of 25. Jim asked me if I had any music that I would like him to play on his booming audio system. I hesitated, but gave him Together Through Life. I waited for the response...and then it came: everyone, and I mean everyone, was ecstatic about the music.

I asked one of the kids in the backyard, who was about 20, what he thought of the music he was hearing, and he said to me with tremendous enthusiasm, "It's f#%&ing great shit, man."

What higher or more eloquent praise can anyone give a collection of music than this?