Hello,
Yes, Bobby D is da man!
It did take me a while to get into this great man, but now he's also up there in my universe. Initially I did not think much of Bob Dylan. Yeah, he was supposed to be this legend of the Sixties generation, but so what? This was around 1990 and I saw the video for his song Unbelievable (from his Under The Red Sky album) and I thought it sucked. That voice! How can anyone be excited about this?
Luckily, a friend of mine was a big Dylan fan, so he let me hear some of his sixties albums/songs (most notably Highway 61 Revisited). I liked those songs, so I thought "Hey may be not much today, but back then he was pretty good." So eventually I got some of his '60s albums (the 'trilogy') and Volume 1-3 of The Bootleg Series (with all those incredible outtakes).
Then Time Out Of Mind was released and I was blown away. I heard Lovesick quite a lot on the radio and I really dug that song. So I went out and bought the album and thought it was superb. So now I'm a fan of the whole Dylan, he's as relevant today as he was in the past. I still don't have that much Dylan albums (Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde On Blonde, The Bootleg Series 1-3, Time Out Of Mind, Love And Theft and a bootleg from 1997), but there's a lot I still want to have (Blood On The Tracks and Live 1966 immediately come to mind).
As I said, Dylan's voice was something which caused my initial reservation about him. But I now I always remember a quote a Dutch journalist wrote after his concert in the Netherlands in 1998 and I do not want to withhold it from you. I'll try to translate the quote as exact as possible.
"In the end it will probably turn out that under the shower Dylan's voice is as crystal clear as it ever was. However, until that time it is one of the greatest mysteries on earth how a voice, sounding between a screaming goat and a ripping telephone book, can sound so beautiful."
C ya!
Marty
