May 2011 sees the 70th birthday of Bob Dylan. To celebrate, we're taking you on a journey through the lesser celebrated avenues of his back catalogue. A journey down Highway 61 that won't stop off at 'Blowin' In The Wind', 'All Along The Watchtower' or 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door' but will call by...
Tweeter And The Monkey Man (1988)
With the best will in the world, it’s hard to convince anyone that Bob didn’t go off the boil a bit in the middle of the 80s. I think the problem was partly that he thought he could still compete in the pop market and have another hit. You could look at the songs he inexplicably left off ‘Infidels’, pondered in the last post here, and conclude that at least two may have echoed the Blues too much to be compatible with these speculated mainstream ambitions. But then two other tracks were pretty radio friendly in sound and style so that theory isn’t exactly watertight. Still, the excursions into some of the eras electro production techniques clearly wasn’t a comfortable match and you’d be hard pushed to compile a single great Dylan album from the material offered up between 1984 and 1988. As Bobs autobiography ‘Chronicles’ recounts, it took Daniel Lanois and the vague concept for how the ‘Never Ending Tour’ could pan out to help him relocate a direct route towards the more consistent unlocking of that genius muse; and it also took the Traveling Wilburys. If nothing more than providing a forum for scratching that mainstream itch he’d been irritated by for the past few years, the Wilburys brought Bob some fresh impetus. The other positive knock on effect being that standing shoulder to shoulder with two legends (George Harrison and Roy Orbison in case you weren’t sure) ensured that any new material Bob threw into the mix was anything but sub standard. And so ‘Tweeter And The Monkey Man’ stood out as a highlight of that first Wilburys record, and quietly became one of the often over-looked gems in Bob’s expansive back catalogue.
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