UNNECESSARY DOUBLE ALBUMS: Bob Gives Us the Finger

There are several different types of double albums. Some contain an awkward marriage of brilliant material with dreck (see yesterday's entry). Some ramble in ways that are consistently bizarre and fascinating (the "White Album"). Some feel too long not because any of the material is weak, but because the strong moments aren't strong enough (Foo Fighters, In Your Honor). But there is one kind of double album that most fascinates: the double album that shouldn't have even been a single album.

Bob Dylan's Self Portrait is the most notorious example. I won't dwell too much on the album's many faults, as rock critics have spent the last 38 years finding new ways to say it sucks. (The great Greil Marcus said it best when he simply asked, "What is this shit?") Instead, I'd like to explore the reasons Dylan would even release this inscrutable jumble of covers, remakes, and oddball experiments.

Dylan has given several reasons over the years, but the most compelling is that he was angry at his fans and wished to punish them. While living in Woodstock with his family in the late '60s, Dylan saw his property overrun by unwashed admirers who trespassed just to get a look at him. Years later, he wrote, "Roadmaps to our homestead must have been posted in all fifty states for gangs of dropouts and druggies." I wouldn't want those people pitching tents in my yard either, but was he really surprised? What did he think his fans looked like, George Plimpton?

This is how Dylan describes the making of Self Portrait: "I just threw everything I could think of at the wall and whatever stuck, released it, and then went back and scooped up everything that didn't stick and released that, too." There is no better way to explain the almost shockingly slapdash quality of the record. The covers are mostly incompetent; if his recording of "The Boxer" is a joke, it's not funny, and if it's serious, God help him. The originals are lightweight and poorly sung, in a jokier permutation of his Nashville Skyline croon. And the remake of "Like a Rolling Stone"? Let's just say it is hard to rob that song of its bite, but Dylan figured out how to do it.

Okay, "Alberta" sounds fine, but we didn't need two versions. And the Band provide enough energy to carry "Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)." But a great artist can stumble onto something good by accident. Most of Self Portrait seems designed to irritate and confuse. As the album hit stores, Dylan was already completing the far superior New Morning. Only four months passed between the release of the two records, and I don't believe that was an accident. I think Dylan wanted to see what people would do if he immediately followed a terrible album with a solid one. Like a coy lover, he started a fight just to make up. This is one of the reasons Bob Dylan is one of the most challenging and dynamic artists of our time, and why I wouldn't want to have dinner with him.

TODAY'S RECOMMENDATION: "Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)" by Bob Dylan
AVAILABLE ON: Self Portrait; iTunes