Stratisfear wrote:
"He occasionally even surpasses himself and does a damn fine job (outtake version of Blind Willy McTell springs to mind)."
Lay lady lay - how he managed to coax that vocal from his voice box I just don't know. Where was that quality the rest of the time?!
Dylan, at least initially, was a contrived vocalist. His style has shifted over the years, and I disagree that it's been a case of him just being a plain bad singer. Early on, when he was heavily influenced by Woody Guthrie, he was contriving a vocal style based on American dust-bowl era "Okie" vocals.
These days we don't think about regional accents, but America is a very big place and there used to be (maybe still are) many distinct local dialects and singing styles. Even by the early 60s his style was no longer mainstream. And he also had to contend with the folk movement of the time which basically asserted perceived universal values in music and held that you could sing just about anything in a sort of college-students-around-the-fire sing-along style (EG The Kingston Trio, EG Peter Paul and Mary).
Later on he changed his style to suit what he was doing at the time - notably on the Nashville Skyline album.
We're all too pre-conditioned in this day and age. All the popular or "normal" pop/rock vocal styles really derive from American Negro styles and anybody who doesn't sound like what we've become used to via radio/MTV/hit parades sounds "odd" to us. The Sex Pistols is a good example - I have read people say that Johnny Rotten was a genius vocalist, but he didn't sound "normal" and so got dismissed as somebody who just hollered semi-tunefully (I'm not a Rotten fan myself, I'm just putting out an idea that I've read).
As I may have mentioned before on this forum, the Better 5/8 and I saw Martin Carthy in London last year. Amazing, captivating performance - but you do have to get past the vocals (or your own internal assumptions about vocals) because he sings in an English folk style (probably West English, based on what I know of his history) and to anybody raised on a diet of Stones and/or Zeppelin and/or Sting and/or just about anything American then that vocal style sounds pretty un-sexy. In reality he has great control over pitch and timing and dynamics, so OBJECTIVELY he's a very good singer, but SUBJECTIVELY, for most people, it's hard work.
I was knocked out by the passion and authority of his performance when we saw him in a pub basement in London, but listening to the CDs when I'm stuck in the traffic in the morning I have to work a little harder.
Coming back to Dylan, I have some of his early albums and I think his performances are marvellous. In particular on "The Freewheeling Bob Dylan". These days I have a lot more problems with him. My own theory is that he is wilfully taking advantage of his own mythology and exploiting the fact that he can do just about anything and people will tell themselves that they're listening to a genius and so there must be all kinds of fantastic things to be heard and understood if they just dig enough. Besides, nobody would dare say that Dylan isn't or no longer is a genius. (Except me. And I get into lots of arguments with two kinds of people - those who think that he was never anything special at all, and those who think that he is the once, the only, the original, constant and unsurpassable lyrical genius.)
I don't believe he sought or created that perception, but I do think he plays it for all he's worth.
Every now and then he still comes out with a great song. Recent (comparatively) examples that I can think of are "Senor (Tales Of Yankee Power)" and "Tweeter And The Monkey Man". Generally I think what he does now is minor compared to what he did in the 60s.
But I forgive him (now he can sleep at nights) because of what he did and what he made possible. Dylan almost single handedly made popular music intelligent, relevant and articulate. His influence has been massive. Just as Hendrix changed the possibilities of the guitar so Dylan changed the possibilities of the song and of pop music in general.
