After pouring over (and over) the recent release of Bob Dylan’s 8th official bootleg collection, Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006, I couldn’t really help but revisit the proper album releases of that period. Oh Mercy was the first and, with the possible exception of 2001’s Love and Theft, the best of what I consider to be Dylan’s 6th major period.
The period before Oh Mercy, starting early 1976 after the spectacular Desire, was unarguably his worst. Street Legal, Infidels, and Empire Burlesque weren’t dire, but Dylan’s career has never been about just not sucking. It’s about being something soul-rattling, something wholly life changing. And, hearing him growl the first two lines of Oh Mercy’s opener, “Political World”, you immediately sense that Dylan is back: “We live in a political world / Love don’t have any place.” He’s not back to his early folk records, or to the free form wordsmithing of his initial electric albums, or to the laidback (but moral) exploratories of his Nashville efforts.
Instead, Dylan returns to the impassioned fire-breather of “Hurricane”. Back to the man who sang, “How can the life of such a man / Be in the palm of some fool’s hand? / To see him obviously framed / Couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land / Where justice is a game”; the man so sick with what his country and his youthful righteousness had brought that he disappeared into drugs and Jesus for the next decade. (Continued in the next post…)
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