Decline and Fall

It’s always tough being objective about music which formed the soundtrack to so much of your childhood. However, I like a challenge, so for this review I’m looking at Bob Dylan’s Street-Legal, an album of which I have strong memories thanks to my Dylan-loving parents. Street-Legal is a particularly interesting prospect as it received poor reviews when it was released in 1978: Dylan was getting a rough ride in the press at the time, and the album was seen as weak alongside Dylan’s mid-’70s studio efforts, the acclaimed Blood on the Tracks (1974) and the more variable, but popular, Desire (1976). In some respects, this is an exercise in seeing if my personal affection for the album - now re-issued in a shiny, remastered SACD-compatible version - is justified, or merely nostalgia.

The reissue is an excellent bit of work, as with all the recent Dylan SACD reissues - the packaging is handsome, featuring a gatefold cover and extra archive photographs, although of course you get no bonus tracks or notes. However, at the risk of stating the obvious, it’s the music that’s important. Personally speaking, I loathe the ’song-by-song’ method of reviewing. Despite its obvious logical advantages, it has such an amateurish feel; but what the hell. This album seems to demand a song-by-song analysis, so this is what you’ll get: but first, a word on the overall ’sound’.

Street-Legal is dismissed by Dylan aficionados even today for its production and arrangements. It’s too slick, they argue; too glossy, Vegas-style, too ‘big’ a sound - browse the US Amazon reviews to see some typical sentiments. In addition, earlier releases of the album were marred by a muddy quality which caused the backing group to merge into an undefined wall of noise. The latest SACD remastering job corrects much of this muddiness, meaning that the interplay between the individual musicians becomes much clearer, and tracks which were condemned as having too unvarying a sound at last start to gain a greater degree of individuality. As for the arrangements and instrumentation themselves, I’d suggest that the jury’s still out. One obvious difference between ‘Street-Legal’ and many earlier Dylan albums is that the former dispenses with the rather intimate sound that characterises the latter: this is certainly a more rock-influenced and somehow impersonal production, the band sounding like they’re attempting to fill a stadium, rather than a small venue. By assembling the musicians he did, Dylan was clearly attempting to build on the big band sound he’d been developing since Desire, and on subsequent tours. One of the reasons that Street-Legal still manages to put people off is that this large group isn’t very tightly arranged. Dylan is well-known for running through songs in one take when in the studio and it’s clear that the efficiency of this group has suffered as a result; similarly, the arrangements are fairly perfunctory (the saxophone often simply doubles the tune; the backing singers merely repeat or mirror Dylan’s phrases; the keyboards are mainly used to fill in chords in the background). Former King Crimson drummer Ian Wallace produces a more foursquare, inflexible, rock-type rhythm than is usually associated with Dylan’s studio work: Steve Douglas’ saxophone (an inclusion that led some critics to suggest Dylan was attempting to emulate the Bruce Springsteen sound) has a throaty R&B style tone and has been recorded in the harsh and unsubtle fashion favoured by conventional rock. In essence, the sound lacks the subtlety that a different style of production or a more sensitive, carefully-arranged use of the individual instruments might have provided, though I would add that the remastering has improved it enormously.

So yes, the medium isn’t always all it could be. The songs themselves, however - as well as Dylan’s performance - are rather better than the album’s reputation would lead you to believe. ‘Changing of the Guards’ is a great opener by any standards, fusing one of Dylan’s more memorable melodies with a slew of cryptic tarot-based imagery. The band settles down into a comfortable chugging groove (you can imagine the drummer staring blankly into the mid-distance), leaving Dylan plenty of room to display the fine vocal form he’s in; though Dylan’s singing isn’t to everyone’s tastes, he’s at the more accessible end of his range here. The female backing singers either propel the song along nicely or moronically repeat Dylan’s last line, depending on your opinion of female backing singers; each verse is punctuated by a cheesy but (after a few repeats) appealing saxophone riff in place of a chorus - ultimately it sounds like a classic.

‘New Pony’ changes the pace dramatically. Unvaried sound, eh? Admittedly, this slow blues is heavy on the electric guitar (though the simple main riff is a compelling one), while Wallace pummels his drums mechanically. Bob sings in a fairly low register, nasally emoting about ponies, a mysterious ‘Miss X’ and ‘great big hindlegs’ in an old-style piece of blues showmanship which despite obvious references to Charley Patton proved to be rather ill-judged, given that the press were currently pillorying him as a misogynist. It’s great, but you’ll need to like Dylan’s voice to like this one; the track fades out on some R&B-style ‘hooting and booting’ from Douglas, which personally I could have done without. Naaaaasty but nice, then.

‘No Time to Think’ is a long track. Very long, in fact. The waltzing rhythm and repeated saxophone-and-violin riff make it feel like it would have fitted well on Desire, but the sound is a little more heavy-handed than the folk-rock of the earlier album. The main appeal here is Dylan’s rhyming gymnastics; always fundamentally a lyrics man, he’s turned in a virtuoso performance. Personally, I’d like to have heard him do it with sparser, perhaps acoustic-based, instrumentation, but we’ve got to allow Bob the licence to reinvent himself periodically, even if this means him going all theatrical from time to time.

Apparently ‘Baby, Stop Crying’ was a Top Ten hit in the UK on release; difficult to imagine such a thing today, although admittedly Bob didn’t have Busted to contend with in those days. While the song’s title makes it sound like it should be addressed to a fractious child, what we actually get is a surprisingly poppy slice of, erm, pop, which gives some ammunition to those Amazon reviewers who feel Bob was secretly hoping for some kind of Vegas career. Although the arrangement is reminiscent of something belted out to accompany a steak dinner and a bottle of crap claret, Dylan’s voice is classy, despite a few pitch issues.

And so, to ‘Is Your Love in Vain’. Yes, this is one of those ‘problem songs’ in the Dylan canon, given that he once again displayed exquisite timing by releasing a song that makes him sound egotistical and self-pitying in the middle of much press discussion of his marriage. Well, I don’t care. The arrangement is perfunctory, the tempo is mid, the lyrics uncharitable, and the backing vocal makes Dylan’s voice sound unnecessarily harsh, but the simple, almost hymn-like melody (which is crying out for a more intimate treatment) sticks firmly in the mind, thereby proving he can still turn out those anthemic tunes. Damn good stuff, really.

‘Se�or’ (or ‘Senior’ as a lot of American reviewers seem to think) is just really, really, really good, so I’ll say no more about it here.’True Love Tends to Forget’ is also enjoyable, despite heavy use of the backing singers, with whom a slightly world-weary sounding Bob blends surprisingly well. Like ‘Baby, Stop Crying’ it sounds very much of its time, the R&Bish pop-rock being redolent of big shirts and bad hair (just glance at the album’s back cover one more time), but doesn’t suffer massively for it.

Drawing near to the album’s close, ‘We Better Talk This Over’ is sometimes dismissed as a small squib amongst Street-Legal’s more heavyweight tracks. This seems unfair: Bob’s well constructed, voice-of-wisdom, end-of-relationship lyrics sit well over a jangling country-style guitar backing, the melody becoming almost absurdly catchy toward the end of each verse. As a relatively frothy piece it also provides an excellent contrast to the album’s closing track, ‘Where Are You Tonight’, which is a far more impassioned effort: despite a low-key opening, this rapidly builds into a full-on Dylan epic, with dense, complicated lyrics, powerfully sung. As if in response to this resurgence of the Dylan Poetic Imagery Generator, the organist suddenly finds his range, hammering out a swirling background that wouldn’t sound out of place on Blonde on Blonde. The backing singers are left floundering in Bob’s wake; he’s unstoppable. A marvellous closing track, then, to complement the opener.

There’s always one infallible test of an album’s quality, and that’s in the amount it’s played subsequent to the first listen. Street-Legal’s barely been out of my CD player since I got hold of it. It has its flat moments, true, and some of the songs might have been more sympathetically presented without the large backing band that Dylan seemed to favour at the time, but it’s still a memorable work, and a damn sight better than much of the stuff Dylan was to produce during the ‘eighties. Many times you’ll carry the tunes of your childhood around in your head for years, only to cringe with embarassment on listening to them again as an adult. Street-Legal, however, only seems to have improved with age; its subtleties (valuable on an album that’s relatively unsubtle by Dylan’s standards) brought out by mature reflection on the listener’s part, a good remastering job on the record company’s part, and by not being played through my father’s shoddy home-made in-car speakers over the noise of a straining engine. Yes, I Love 1978.