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...Sign On The Window (1970)
The whole motivation behind this 30 day trip has been to shed a little light on the less celebrated but no less deserving corners of the Dylan back catalogue. To that end our penultimate offering is a real giant amongst buried treasures. It seems perverse now that there is a hidden masterwork in the man’s back pages but there is and that album is ‘New Morning’. Along with ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ and ‘Time Out Of Mind’, this was one of the albums deemed unworthy of inclusion on the remastering project imposed on the Dylan catalogue a few years ago, but fewer people questioned the exclusion of ‘New Morning’. Why so is unclear but you can piece together an idea. It followed a matter of months after the legend airbrushing mystery that was ‘Self Portrait’, so expectations on Bob had been significantly lowered by his own hand at this point. Also, the album lacks a defining signature moment, a landmark statement piece or anything that screams ‘major new Bob Dylan work’ from its’ pages. There are great songs here but their charms are subtle, modestly dressed in a coat of laid back production and musical understatement. And let’s not forget, Bob stayed underground almost totally until 1974 without tours or new albums (other than the ‘Pat Garrett’ soundtrack) so the ‘New Morning’ record just kind of got lost amidst the wilderness years that were Bob’s early 70s. It was as if both he and his audience needed a few years grace to properly digest everything that had gone down in the 60s. But important work it is. There are great songs such as ‘If Not For You’ and ‘Time Passes Slowly’ and the rocking ‘Man In Me’; only really appreciated by more than a handful of Bobcats after it featured heavily at the start of the film ‘The Big Lebowski’. And there’s the sound of the album too; all muddy analogue soul, eloquently picked George Harrison guitar parts and pounding Bob piano chords that sound like they’re being bashed on a slightly out-of-tune village hall upright. That’s the 1970-71 sound in essence actually, you hear it on everything from Paul McCartney’s solo debut to Neil Young’s ‘After The Gold Rush’ and this is a period piece to match any of those great records. Then there’s Bob’s voice, huskier again apparently thanks to a heavy cold he was suffering during sessions, but a welcome return after the unsettling country-croon adopted in 1968. And of course the albums centre piece (although you need to live with the record a while before it shows itself to be the centrepiece) is ‘Sign On The Window’, where you can hear the extent of his throat strain on a line like “Brighton girls are like the moon”. Again we’re talking about a restrained little number, one of the few instances on record where Bob’s piano playing takes the lead. Initially we’re dealing with alienation, then an arrival and awakening in the big city. But the songs curveball is in where it ends up, with Dylan concluding that living the rural and domestic idyll with a wife and bunch of kids is really what life is all about. Crucially, at the time it would appear, that’s exactly what it was all about for Bob and in typical fashion he manages to capture that fleeting state of mind magnificently in song.
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