One of our culture's favorite lies is that Bob Dylan started to suck in the late 1970s, or even, some say, at the end of the previous decade. The motorcycle crash, the retreat into obscurity—it was all so concise and clear. How could Dylan hope to top Blonde on Blonde? There is no need to take these people seriously when a more cunning and dangerous breed exists: the 70s apologists, who point to the great albums of that decade—Blood on the Tracks and Desire—as evidence that Dylan hit his prime while all of the cool kids were hanging around in discotheques. But I am a wholesale revisionist. I think that Dylan started getting good right around 1978.
The foundation of what I lovingly dub "Bad Dylan" is Street Legal, the 1978 halfway house between the acceptable Dylan of the 1970s and the persona non grata that emerged in the 1980s. "Changing of the Guards," the opening track and my all-time favorite Dylan song, took typically opaque lyrics (the song is vaguely about lost love and religious conversion, but largely about witches, dog soldiers, renegade priests, and a captain who falls in love with a black maiden) and added something that was revolutionary for Dylan: female backup singers. These singers would come to define the following years—the much-maligned Jesus period. Songs in which Dylan describes the future time when "men will beg God to kill them, and they won't be able to die" should give the essence of the era's underlying attitude. And, yet to watch a concert from the period is to understand how fully Dylan came to live inside that idiom; his solo recording of "When He Returns" is one of his best recorded performances to date.
Still, Bad Dylan's apex didn't emerge from his yen for Gospel music, but from his ability to make that generic 80s pop sound (drum machines!) the Bad Dylan 80s Sound. For this, look no further than 1985's "Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love?)," which is also the source of Dylan's greatest foray into that most-80s of media, the music video. Directed by Paul Schrader, the video features a bare-chested Dylan in a leather jacket, massive amounts of footage of a Slinky descending stairs, and frighteningly literal interpretations of lyrics like "they're beating the devil out of a guy who's wearing a powder-blue wig."
Post-Jesus Dylan also returned to writing straightforward protest songs that matched the biting, visionary quality of his classic 60s work with a half-baked insanity and lyrical clumsiness that would prove inspirational for opponents of globalization and space travel alike. Oh Mercy's "Disease of Conceit" taught us that conceit would "turn you into a piece of meat" and Infidels' "License to Kill" reminded us that "they" (the man? the system?) would sell listeners' bodies "like they do used cars." Late Bad Dylan marked the most radical departure of all, when he stopped writing his own songs and fans reaped the benefits of collaborations with Kris Kristofferson and Sam Shepherd, as well as Dylan's own guttural slogs through standards like "Shenandoah."
Like any good rock star, Bad Dylan went down in flames. Dylan had
My love of Bad Dylan is not ironic—though it started out that way. But the honesty of the misbegotten lyrics, the abortive attempts at originality that occasionally succeed and often fail splendidly, caused me—in Dylan's words about Jesus—to "change my way of thinking." If you take the plunge, I assure you that you will too. "Every day of the year's like playin' Russian roulette," Dylan crooned in '78, "true love, true love, true love tends to forget."
