Owned since: 2022
Genre: Dad rock?
Where I bought it: My Uncle Cast-offs
Year: 1974
Label/pressing: Asylum, Cassette
During the end of 2021 and the start of 2022 my uncle was getting renovations done to the house he has been living in for nearly 40 years now. It also meant, slightly egged on by family members, that he started to thin out his music collection. Mine is nowhere close to it, I think his last guess was around 10.000 CDs and the same, or maybe more, amount for records. Since he barely plays albums anymore he wanted to clean the house and me and my brother got called in to catalog what he was going to resell. At least all his 12-inch maxi singles (around 3000), cassettes (around 4000) and a bunch of his LPs that he didn’t really want to own anymore (around 800). So I spent most of the end of December and start of January sorting through mountains of obsolete audio formats that even included reel to reel tapes to get an index for reselling. I did this on the terms that everything that caught my fancy I could take home. In the end I took home around 150 cassettes, 20 maxi singles and around 160 full length LPs. So the hoard just moved house, partly. Still this was an extremely tiny amount of what in the end got sold. For the first time since the 80’s he got his vinyl downstairs again mostly, which is nice.
The 150 tapes I picked up are, well, pretty much made from the late 70’s till the mid 90’s. Mostly stuff he picked up at record fairs for dirt cheap that are now extremely hard to get a hold of. A lot of filler stuff also: Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, all the Beatles studio records off the cassette box from the 80’s and some odd tapes of Dylan. My relationship with the ornery old harmonica machine has been a bit weird. I’ve read a lot about him, know most of his records quite well, but in the end he never really settled into my musical taste as much like for example Neil Young did. Just too many records, weird myths and allot of those records are just bad. Not a big fan of his much lauded comeback, also, where he seems to have lost any kind of spark I like in his old stuff.
Planet Waves is a weird record. It follows the messy but interesting New Morning and is the first record where Bob Dylan is fully supported by the Band who had been his touring band for a near decade at that point. Of course Dylan had been recording with the band a lot longer, the basement tapes which collects the ‘69-’75 recordings would release a year later, but up to that point you could hear them on weird disjointed bootlegs or the live record Before the Flood released the same year. It’s a record a lot of Dylan fans also don’t like, which I get. There is a real lack of classic Dylan on this, it really feels like a band effort. No overall political folk songs nor drug influenced hysteria found here, just surprisingly straight roots rock. It has some vague notions of the sound that would become Blood On The Tracks a year later, but it just feels very careless and free here.
It’s one of the few Dylan records where the sound legit feels like he is making a love album. While their marriage was already falling apart at this point, it’s full of love songs written for his wife Sara which makes it a real oddity with its place being just before the divorce fueled Blood On The Tracks. It’s just full of well surprisingly radio friendly rock music with heavy use of an upbeat electronic organ that sings through these songs that don’t even feel out of date in 2022. Honestly, a lot of roots rock bands still sound like to this day.
For that reason I think it’s very underrated also. It for sure doesn’t hold a candle to Dylan’s best work, but it is clear that Dylan himself never saw it as that. He just wanted to cut an album full of great roots fueled love songs as a last ditch attempt of trying to get himself to believe in his marriage. Which means of course he is not writing a Stuck in the Memphis Blues Mobile for this but we still get a Forever Young in a wonderful slow and fast version with the last one having the band going full bar band. Forever Young is just such a wonderful little love song and maybe one of the prettiest melodies Dylan ever penned. It has a slightly bittersweet tone to it which might hint at what’s to come, but for the moment he is just a guy in love.
Dirge is for sure the weird track here. An overly dramatic piano with Robbie Robertson playing some wonderful guitar work around it, it is one of the few moments where the album drops its nice facade. It’s a lovelorn, sad song about a failed relationship that isn’t far off musically from Blood on the Tracks. On an album that is so happy go lucky it really puts a sour note in it and honestly I love it. It’s a strangely sparse piano track for Dylan, where he really does his best blues inspired vocals and writes some tremendous pretty straight shooting lyrics. It going on before the near yacht rock of You Angel You after it for sure is whiplash for the mood of the record but honestly it’s why I like Planet Waves a lot. It feels like a disjointed throwaway mess at first, but this really is a guy trying to find a new way to express himself after he got tired of stardom. It goes back to his start (the sparse folk of Wedding Song) but also endlessly hints on what was to come on the next record.
It really captures Dylan at a crossroads for the first time since Highway 61 Revisited. It’s not an at times cheesy tribute to country or folk music like Nashville Skyline or John Wesley Harding. It lacks the really strong tracks those albums spot, but there is a lot to be found in the wonderful relaxed vibe of it all. Sometimes you just want to hang with your friends and jam out. It just isn’t on the level of the best of the Basement Tapes which has allot of the same backing band, let loose from it, Planet Waves is a worthy entry into the Dylan discography and according to me quite overlooked.
Sloot of a Generation: Yeah this doesn’t sound too out of place from what current roots rock is doing. Even with the oddballs thrown at us.