So, I feel like I have a controversial opinion on this album. It isn’t that I think it’s bad or mediocre or even just good; it’s certainly a very good album. But I don’t hold it up as the masterpiece many people do. I think the album has some problems and one of them is the album’s length; I do think it’s just too long. And I have to now point to two songs that I don’t care for that I think could have been cut from the record to make it a tighter listening experience. These are two of Dylan’s most beloved songs, so obviously I’m in the minority, but I’m just going to give my opinion. Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 is . . . just a bad song. It’s one of my least favorite Dylan recordings; I just find the raucous brass section really quite annoying and the forced whoops & hollers of the band are just really cringe inducing to me. And from the first song, we leap, shockingly, to the last. That’s right, I find Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands to be a really drab, dire and almost interminable exercise. It’s not that unlike Ballad in Plain D in that it’s simply too long; this one doesn’t have the annoying lyrics of Plain D, but neither does it particularly go anywhere. I find it to just be a very unmemorable and meandering album closer; it feels like its reaching to be as profound an album closer as Desolation Row, but it’s not even in the same galaxy in my opinion. And, right there, you’ve shaved fifteen minutes off the record, making it much more manageable. If there are other issues, it’s mainly with songs just being kind of trivial and easily forgotten; I’d place 4th Time Around & Obviously 5 Believers in this category.
But I’m not saying the album isn’t very good taken as a whole. It does feature a lot of really fine work by Dylan. The acerbic Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat is a snarky, witty blues riff. Memphis Blues Again is a real epic, almost arena-rock in its intensity at times. I Want You, Just Like a Woman, One of Us Must Know & Most Likely You Go Your Way & I’ll Go Mine are all great songs on the topic of sexual relationships, with a classic Dylan twist, of course. Visions of Johanna is a Dylan song that probably comes closest here to operating on the level of Bringing It All Back Home or Highway 61 Revisited; it’s a really haunted song with some of the most elliptical, strangely beautiful lyrics Dylan ever wrote. A song like Visions of Johanna is one I think of when I think of things that I simply don’t understand on an existential level. It really is just difficult for me to understand how a human mind could create a line like “the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.” It just doesn’t seem possible; it kind of feels like I’m listening to a song in a dream, a song that I won’t remember when I wake up, a song that doesn’t really exist in the real world because it just couldn’t.
Anyway, it’s not an album I dislike; it’s an album I definitely recommend and one that, for all its flaws, deserves to be analyzed and considered by any serious music fan. But it just isn’t a masterpiece; not on the level of Dylan’s last two albums for certain. I suppose this boils down to me not liking Rainy Day Women & Sad Eyed Lady – if I rated those songs as most people seem to, probably I would consider the album a masterpiece. As it is, those two very flawed songs really drag the album down for me. It’s an album that is still, I think, really close to a four star album for me, just because of the rest of the music on the album, but ultimately, I just can’t give an album this severely flawed my highest rating. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – flawed & troubled album doesn’t quite reach the level of masterpiece, but it’s an intoxicating and often exciting listen when it does work. 3 ½ stars.