Slow Train Coming
When I was a kid we had this huge Sharp Golden Sound stereo (see exhibit below).
In its day it was considered a good thing.
And it was; you could hear every instrument separately if you chose to.
And I often did.
My parents had dozens and dozens of classical music records and just a handful of more contemporary vinyls.
Amongst the latter were classics such as Credence, Neil Diamond, Simon & Garfunkel, Arlo Guthrie, Peter Paul & Mary, the Woodstock Album and Melanie.
And then one day mum brought home Dylan’s Slow Train Coming.
I must have listened to it a thousand times, at first unwilling and then without awareness.
By which stage I knew every word, but the not the meaning of a single syllable.
And then it stopped being played and then I left for good.
I haven’t heard it since, until the other day.
Sitting in a cafe I heard ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’.
It stopped me doing whatever I was doing.
I listened with a combination of nostalgia and newfound appreciation.
I quickly downloaded the album and have just listened to it properly (for the first time ever) with my very high quality headphones.
And what do you know, Mark Knopfler is on guitar and Tim Drummond on drums.
It’s effectively Bob Dylan fronting Dire Straits when the Dire Strait boys were still session musicians.
No wonder I loved Dire Straits the minute I heard them, some years after I first heard the Dylan album.
This experience me prompted to read the contemporary reviews of the album.
And they are pretty lukewarm based on the view that the album is ‘over-produced’ (unlike the tin can efforts of the folk era) and full of Christian lyrics (Bob was in his born-again period).
Music reviewers must be freaks.
My guess is they simply prefer the earlier Dylan, the anti-establishment poet and everything else he has done pales in comparison.
They have missed the point; Dylan ditched them when they became the establishment.
Of all the big name artists, Dylan has to be the most authentic to himself.
Slow Training Coming is a beautiful bluesy soulful R&B album recorded with some of the best musicians ever known.
The music is wonderful and Dylan could have been singing odes to his cats for all I care.
Even so, his born-again lyrics are wonderfully angry and oddly ambivalent.
He couldn’t help himself.
My favorite track is ‘I believe in you’.
Just that one song makes the album a must have.
offshore westerly 