#Bob dylan time out of mind full#
#Bob dylan time out of mind series#

He writes with the hardened edge of Hemingway, trying to cloak feelings with callouses and sweetening his bitterness with a dash of wit.

#Bob dylan time out of mind full#

Through the cobwebs of his beleaguered voice, Dylan musters all the feelings of losing love, full of pride and insanity and lust and violence and humor, implicitly navigating the five stages of grief. The blues become an emotional state of being. Instead, Time Out of Mind is about dealing with life and its itinerant lows, knowing how it will all end, anyway. In its four-star review, Rolling Stone noted the album “confront his advancing years and the prospects of failing health.” In a moment of too-soon chicanery, Newsweek’s cover joked “Dylan Lives.”īut Time Out of Mind is not merely about death, though its inevitability looms at the periphery of these songs with the certainty of the setting sun sometimes, death even seems for Dylan like the easy, desirous exit.

#Bob dylan time out of mind series#

For weeks between his hospital release and the album’s release, Dylan was bedridden, emerging just in time to play for the pope in Rome and sit for a series of high-profile interviews that inquired not only about his near-death experience but also that of his career.ĭylan’s brush with Elvis made for an easy press hook, especially given the twilit misery of Time Out of Mind. “I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon,” he said later. Instead, acute pulmonary histoplasmosis-a nasty fungal infection caused by bird-and-bat feces in the country’s most fertile river valleys-had inflamed the covering around his heart and nearly killed him. And then Dylan nearly died.įour months before Time Out of Mind arrived and just days after his 56th birthday, Dylan was admitted into a Los Angeles hospital after persistent chest pains that suggested a heart attack. Lanois and Dylan fought like hell in the parking lot of the Miami studio where they recorded, but after more than half a year and many mixes, overdubs, and lyrical revisions, Time Out of Mind-11 songs that would transform Dylan from seemingly obsolete icon to wise, wizened visionary almost overnight-was finished. The next year was a reminder of what Dylan said he despised about making records-extended seaside sessions on the Atlantic and the Pacific, guitars smashed in anger, a militia of Nashville crackerjacks and world-class session players who had to be told more than once to play a lot less. At the last minute, Lanois took Dylan’s blurry snapshot for the cover of Time Out of Mind on tape, that’s exactly how he had captured him. Instead, it is an essential post-modern reappraisal of them, an experimental consideration of what could become of the blues’ sound and spirit and a mutual communion of articulate, exquisite despair. “A new birth with the old dogs under your arm, like a stack of classic books.” In the end, that rebirth was Time Out of Mind, Dylan’s 30th album and one that doesn’t sound much like the basic blues at all. “I listened to these records, and I understood,” Lanois wrote in his memoir, Soul Mining. “I said, ‘Yes, Bob, I think we’ve got a record,’” Lanois remembered with a sly laugh during a recent phone call.ĭylan sent Lanois home with a list of reference records to study- Charley Patton, Little Walter, Little Willie John, a mix of ragged blues and primordial rock.

In a New York hotel room, Dylan read Lanois the lyrics and asked him if he had a record. Since helming the contentious sessions for what many had prematurely considered Dylan’s actual comeback, 1989’s half-stepping Oh Mercy, Lanois had cut U2’s Achtung Baby and Emmylou Harris’ Wrecking Ball, a wondrously atmospheric abstraction of the singer’s gorgeous and aging country vision.

Possibly for the first time in his career, Dylan was beginning to blend into the scenery.īut months after Garcia’s funeral, Dylan approached the audacious producer Daniel Lanois. He had become a legacy act, accruing lifetime achievement laurels and touring his hits for Boomers in khakis. But coffeehouse covers hadn’t made Dylan a spark of resistance in the ’60s or a source of bittersweet reckonings with reality in the ’70s.

He had grown disillusioned with the cycle of writing and recording, he later said, and simply wanted to play.ĭuring the ’90s, he issued two solo acoustic albums of earnest, sometimes poignant renditions of American standards, delighting those who had pined for the lost days of the folk kid from Greenwich Village. Seven years had passed since he had released an original new tune, and that album, Under the Red Sky, was a near-catastrophe, scuttling what had seemed a comeback after Dylan crept through his polarizing ’80s evangelism. What Dylan had left to say or whether he had any enthusiasm left for saying it had, for a while, been unclear.