Inner Sleeve: Alex Neilson

Bob Dylan – Planet Waves (Asylum/Island 1974)
Artwork by Bob Dylan

Looking back, do you ever get the feeling that your puny life can be readily compartmentalised into a series of depressing episodes that have been triggered by one identifiable faith-shattering moment that has forced you to re-evaluate and systematically renounce everything you once held certain? Yes? Phew!

For me, these processes of skin shedding have always been soundtracked by one inner-landscape-mapping album or other. Whether as a pluke farming teenager sifting through the compulsory dreck of thriftstore shellac in a Leeds charity shop and happening upon a blue label Topic LP called Sea Songs And Sea Shanties. Or having the goalposts of my dope-addled pud exploded into a thousand splinters and wanting to quit music after hearing Albert Ayler’s Live At Greenwich Village. Or finding consolation ’neath the sky-wide canopies of Frank Sinatra’s devastating vocal sweeps on Sinatra Sings For Only The Lonely (after an ex-girlfriend transformed my big pink heart into a pulsating black acorn). But it was Bob Dylan who indicated a way to compact these superficially disparate enthusiasms. Dylan seemed to use an image or melody from an old folk song as a kernel of inspiration to extrapolate his own much more personal creations. He also combines the kind of singing-into-the-pit emotional acumen that I would understand by listening to the Ayler group with the sublime tenderness of Sinatra.

One Dylan album that I would like to offer up as an underrated masterpiece is Planet Waves. Immediately remarkable about this album is that it was only the second (of 14, by 1974) not to use a photograph of the protagonist as the central cover image. Instead we have a strange ink drawing, by Dylan himself, which resembles a sailor’s tattoo as designed by German expressionist painter Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner. This is accompanied by the Guthrie-esque phrase “Cast-iron songs and torch ballads”, which I am to understand is how Dylan himself perceived the album. However, it is the sleevenotes on the back cover which I’m most interested in: how they relate to the content of the album and why this is an important album in Dylan’s oeuvre.

The back cover displays a playful, poetic rap (also penned by Dylan) complete with several crossings out. Here we have a portal to the actual machinations of his creativity and this encapsulates a spirit of spontaneous creation that pervades the whole album.

This is further exemplified by the inclusion of two versions of the same song, “Forever Young”. That the renditions are so startlingly different is testament to the artist’s insatiable sense of conception, as wholly new meanings are teased from the raw material of the song (you can almost hear Dylan mumbling after the first successful take, “OK, now let’s try it like this...”, as on the genuine Basement Tapes).

Further cross referencing of the back cover text with the songs intimates that this is, above all, a transitional Dylan album. An intermediary between the announcementsfrom- the-mountain style of yore (“Gates Of Eden”, “Hard Rain”, “It’s Alright Ma”) and the raw hearted vulnerability of what was to come (“You’re A Big Girl Now”, “Sara”, “Is Your Love In Vain?”). There are many indications toward re-igniting the old enthusiasms of boyhood as the landscapes of Minnesota are invoked – benevolent spectres in whose presence the artist’s heart first opened. Such as in the song “Something There Is About You”, with the lines, “Thought I’d shaken the wonder and the phantoms of my youth/Rainy days on the Great Lakes, walking the hills of old Duluth”. On the back cover text, Dylan recasts these benign regions as quasi-biblical domains, with himself reborn as some wandering Lot of the Midwest: “Cities of the flesh – Milwaukee, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Bismarck, South Dakota, Duluth! Duluth – where Baudelaire lived and Goya cashed his chips, where Joshua brought the house down!” While illuminating fragments of the past, Dylan is cautious of not allowing it to possess him fully and let the future slip past unattended (the text begins with the phrase “Back to the starting point!”, and the album ends with the line “now that the past is gone”), as the group look towards the first Bob Dylan tour for eight years.

Alex Neilson is a Glasgow based percussionist and singer of the group Trembling Bells.