Bob Dylan – Planet Waves

“Planet Waves” marks Dylan’s return as a committed artist, the first time since “John Wesley Harding” that he has truly allowed an album-in-progress to be an open canvas for the expression of whatever he is seeing, thinking, and feeling as he works on it.
~Paul Williams (BD – Performing artist 1960-73)

I particularly like the song ‘Something There Is About You’,….. It completes a circle for me, about certain things running through my pattern.
~Bob Dylan (John Rockwell Interview, Jan 1974)

Something There Is About You:

The recording of “Going, Going, Gone” is definitely soaked in an atmosphere of acute desperation. Maybe they turned the air-conditioner off for this one, because the guy really does sound like he is “hanging on the ledge.” And though Robertson again excels himself, it is all about Dylan’s frayed performance.
~Clinton Heylin (Revolution In The Air)

Going Going Gone:

Except for the immediate “Forever Young” (anyone with at least some brain cells set aside for music loves this one), I feel the key to loving this album is to “get” the sound… Dylan & The Band creates a wonderful & complex mood…. it grows on you…. and when you’re in… you’re in for life!

One of Dylan’s most underrated albums..

From Wikipedia:

Planet Waves is the fourteenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released in January 1974 by Asylum Records (Island Records in the United Kingdom).

Dylan is supported on the album by longtime collaborators The Band, with whom he embarked on a major reunion tour following its release (documented on the live album Before the Flood.) With a successful tour and a host of publicity, Planet Waves was a hit, enjoying a brief stay at #1 on the US Billboard charts—a first for the artist—and #7 in the UK. Critics were not negative, as they had been with some recent Bob Dylan albums (namely Self Portrait and Dylan), but still not enthusiastic for the album’s brand of laid-back roots rock.

The album was originally set to be titled Ceremonies of the Horsemen, a reference to the song “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”, from the 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home; the release was delayed two weeks when Dylan decided to change the title at the last minute.

Hazel:

spotify:

Artwork

The cover art is drawn by Dylan himself. Written on the right side of the cover image is the phrase, “Cast-iron songs & torch ballads,” apparently signaling Dylan’s own conception of the album. On the left side is written “Moonglow”, which is sometimes interpreted as a subtitle. The initial release also included an insert which reportedly set out excerpts from Dylan’s personal journals.

Recording Sessions

In the summer of 1973, Robbie Robertson, lead guitarist of The Band, relocated to Malibu, California, not far from Dylan’s residence. According to Robertson, the idea of collaborating with Dylan evolved from a conversation that took place sometime after July 28, when The Band played to hundreds of thousands of people at Summer Jam at Watkins Glen in upstate New York. After much discussion about that experience, the idea of touring again “seemed to really make sense,” says Robertson. “It was a good idea, a kind of step into the past…The other guys in the Band came out [to Malibu] and we went right to work.”

I hate myself for lovin’ you and the weakness that it showed
You were just a painted face on a trip down Suicide Road
The stage was set, the lights went out all around the old hotel
I hate myself for lovin’ you and I’m glad the curtain fell

Dirge:

There were 6 recording sessions for Planet waves: 2, 5, 6, 8, 9 & 14 of November 1973, and every session produced at least one master version…

For details Check out:

• Olof’s – Still On The Road website – 1973 Recording sessions
• Bob Dylan recorded “Wedding Song” in 1973 @ JV
• Bob Dylan recorded “Forever Young” in 1973 @ JV

Aftermath

Planet Waves was Dylan’s first ‘proper’ album in three and a half years. With a planned tour to follow (his first since 1966 and backed by the same band that supported him on that legendary tour), the media coverage was enormous. Asylum Records planned on releasing Planet Waves the same day the tour began, but an album title change (from Ceremonies of the Horsemen) and a last minute substitution in liner notes (also written by Dylan) pushed the release date back two weeks.

The critical reception was generally positive, if a bit muted.

• The consensus was ultimately strong enough to secure Planet Waves at #18 on The Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop Critics Poll for 1974. “In a time when all the most prestigious music, even what passes for funk, is coated with silicone grease, Dylan is telling us to take that grease and jam it,” wrote critic Robert Christgau. “Sure he’s domestic, but his version of conjugal love is anything but smug, and this comes through in both the lyrics and the sound of the record itself. Blissful, sometimes, but sometimes it sounds like stray cat music—scrawny, cocky, and yowling up the stairs.”
• Ellen Willis of The New Yorker wrote, “Planet Waves is unlike all other Dylan albums: it is openly personal…I think the subject of Planet Waves is what it appears to be—Dylan’s aesthetic and practical dilemma, and his immense emotional debt to Sara.”
  

Michael Gray:
…For the first ten minutes after it came out, this 14th Dylan album was hailed—as New Morning had been—as ‘the best thing he’s done since Blonde on Blonde’. Like New Morning, it then suffered a disappointment backlash from which it never fully recovered. Put in the long back-projection of Dylan’s recording career it now seems a potent, open album. Warm, musically sumptuous yet tense, and emotionally rich, it points down no new road; asserting the artist’s right to prefer minor work on old canvasses to doing no work at all, it is drawn from the inner resources of memory and a determination to record faithfully the artist’s current state of mind in spite of tiredness, an unpopular grownupness  and some lack of self-confidence.
(from The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia)

 

“The crashing waves roll over me,” Dylan sings in what might be the most startling and seductive performance on the album (Never Say Goodbye)
~Paul Williams (BD – Performing artist 1960-73)

Twilight on the frozen lake
North wind about to break
On footprints in the snow
Silence down below

You’re beautiful beyond words
You’re beautiful to me
You can make me cry
Never say goodbye:

Track listing

All songs written and composed by Bob Dylan.

1. “On a Night Like This” 2:57
2. “Going, Going, Gone” 3:27
3. “Tough Mama” 4:17
4. “Hazel” 2:50
5. “Something There Is About You” 4:45
6. “Forever Young” 4:57
7. “Forever Young (Continued)” 2:49
8. “Dirge” 5:36
9. “You Angel You” 2:54
10. “Never Say Goodbye” 2:56
11. “Wedding Song” 4:42

My ratings:

1. Forever Young (long version) – 9,5 (0-10)
2. Wedding song  - 9
3. Never Say Goodbye – 8,5
4. Forever Young (short version) – 8
5. Dirge – 7,5
6. Going, Going, Gone – 7,5
7. You Angel You – 7,5
8. Something There Is About You – 7
9. Tough Mama – 7
10. Hazel – 6,5
11. On a Night Like This – 6

“So, I don’t know. I think so. It’s all in the heart, whatever keeps you that way. Keeps you forever young. Forever young doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t grow old, but you just have some contact with what put you where you are. You know, keep some type of contact. Anyway…”
~Bob Dylan (to Marc Rowland in Sept. 1978)

“This song should be sung every morning by every child in every school in every country”
~Allen Ginsberg

May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful
And may your song always be sung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young:

Forever Young @ Supper Club, NYC – 1993/11/17

Personnel

• Bob Dylan – guitar, harmonica, piano, vocals
• Rick Danko – bass guitar, violin
• Levon Helm – drums, mandolin
• Garth Hudson – keyboards, organ, piano, accordion, saxophones
• Richard Manuel – piano, keyboards, drums
• Robbie Robertson – guitars, bass guitar

Technical personnel

• Rob Fraboni – production, engineering
• David Gahr, Joel Bernstein – photography
• Nat Jeffery – assistant engineer
• Robbie Robertson – special assistance

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“Wedding Song has a quick, easy flow to it, lyrically and melodically, and the contradictory message conveyed by both words and performance are fascinating. “When I was deep in the poverty you taught me how to give” is a fine tribute. But the next verse is a catalog of horrors: “eye for eye and tooth for tooth” is a phrase that always refers to a pattern of retaliatory punishment; “your love cuts like a knife” is odd praise, odder still because it’s sung without sarcasm or irony.  …. The last line of the verse is particularly scary, given its form as part of a pledge of love: “I’d sacrifice the world for you to watch my senses die.” …
~Paul Williams (Performing Artist 1)

Wedding song:

The performance is so strong that one can’t help but hope the guy in the song manages to win his bride over again. Yet that sense of being written in the moment, and a certain self-serving justification of his
own actions, makes its closest kin “Ballad in Plain D,” another song he wrote in haste and regretted at leisure.
~Clinton Heylin (Still On The Road)

Other Bob Dylan album posts here @ JV:

• Category archieves – Bob Dylan Albums

-Egil