There has never been a clearer attempt to shed an audience than Self-Portrait. At least, that's one way of looking at this baffling double album, a deliberately sprawling affair that runs the gamut from self-portrait to self-parody, touching on operatic pop, rowdy Basement Tapes leftovers, slight whimsy, and covers of wannabe Dylans from Paul Simon to Gordon Lightfoot. To say the least, it's confusing, especially arriving at the end of a decade of unmitigated brilliance, and while the years have made it easier to listen to, it still remains inscrutable, an impossible record to unlock. It may not be worth the effort, either, since this isn't a matter of deciphering cryptic lyrics or interpreting lyrics, it's all about discerning intent, figuring out what the hell Dylan was thinking when he was recording — not trying to decode a song. There are times where it's quite clearly played for a laugh — if his shambling version of "The Boxer" isn't a pointed parody of Paul Simon, there was no reason to cut it — but he's poker-faced elsewhere, and the songs (apart from such earthed gems as "Mighty Quinn," which aren't presented in their best versions) are simply not worth much consideration. But, in a strange way, Self Portrait is, because decades have passed and it still doesn't make much sense, even for Dylanphiles. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's worth the time to figure it out — you're not going to find an answer, anyway — but it's sort of fascinating all the same.

I may jump on board just for this one. I've never heard it.

Any chance of getting pt. 2 uploaded somewhere besides Rapidshare? It's a real bitch about not allowing back-to-back downloads.

So…will the real Bob Dylan please stand up?

Or, better yet, sit out.

To understand “Self-Portrait,” you have to understand where Dylan was at this point in his life and career. Having created such an impressive body of work, he was saddled with the baggage that comes with straddling the cusp between man and myth. When people are gaining notoriety for simply rifling through your trash for “clues,” you’ve officially got problems.

Here’s Dylan in 1984 again:

This was just about the time of that Woodstock festival, which was the sum total of all this bullshit. And it seemed to have something to do with me, this Woodstock Nation, and everything it represented. So we couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t get any space for myself and my family, and there was no help, nowhere. I got very resentful about the whole thing…There’d be crowds outside my house. And I said, ‘Well, fuck it. I wish these people would just forget about me. I wanna do something they can’t possibly like, they can’t relate to. They’ll see it, and they’ll listen, and they’ll say, ‘Well, let’s get on to the next person. He ain’t sayin’ it no more.’


Of course, it wouldn’t be Bob Dylan if there weren’t also indications that contradicted the idea as “SP”-as-joke. For example, in Anthony Scaduto’s 1971 bio “Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography“, Dylan says flat-out: “It’s a great album. There’s a lot of damn good music there. People just didn’t listen at first.”

This kind of kaleidoscopic reasoning may strike some as endlessly aggravating, but back in 1970 Dylan was laying the groundwork for the mercurial, you-can’t-catch-me approach that artists like Eminem later took, defying their audience to peg them down with each turn of phrase. To a true artist, this is a crucial step – not just donning a series of costumes, a la Bowie, but confounding expectations to a point where all that one has worked for is potentially razed to nothing, to be built back up from scratch. Forget aesthetic truth, this seems like an imperative to the maintenance of sanity when a level of fame like Dylan’s is taken into consideration. If he’s not one step ahead, if he just doles out all the answers like a good little monkey, we will swallow him whole, given half a chance.

Thus, ”Self-Portrait” is as crucial and important a record as “Blonde On Blonde.” The latter built the house, and the former knocked it down. And “New Morning” was, well…a new morning. Those with discerning taste know all too well the difference between “good-bad” and “bad-bad.”

In a 2005 interview, Dylan said, “Well my wife and kids and me would sit around after supper on a Saturday night, and we’d all put ideas into a hat. I picked a slip of paper out of the hat, and that would be the week’s activity. One time it might be to get myself photographed at the Western Wall so people would think I was a Zionist. Another time it might be to get a job pumpin’ gas in Paramus, New Jersey, so the press would report I was crazy, or a sicko, or a Mormon.”

On the week of August 31, 1969 , Dylan seems to have pulled a particularly interesting slip of paper out of the hat. I’m guessing it read “Desecrate the classics.” The “Self-Portrait” version of “Like A Rolling Stone,” in particular, truly captures an artist setting fire to his muse. It’s in this deflation of his biggest classic that the album is best captured in miniature. Only three short years after utilizing the provocation of the notorious “Judas!” heckler to reach celestial heights with the same tune, backed by the same Band, Dylan reclaims “Rolling Stone” as his possession fully, to do with what he will. Whether that means bestowing upon us the incendiary fulfillment of rock’s potential, or mischievously scrawling moustaches on his own Mona Lisa, it’s a decision that is only Dylan’s to make. Here, he’s bringing it all back home, all right. He drives the song into the ground, underscoring the valid point that if an artist can create a masterpiece, it should be entirely up to him to fuck it up if he should so desire. What better way for mojo to be recycled back into the canon of artistic creation than to create fertilizer out of it?

P.S. Even stranger than anything involving the actual “Self-Portrait” is the fact that there’s another album called “Dylan” that’s actually partially composed of “Self-Portrait” outtakes! That’s like taking out your trash, deciding it stinks way too bad to be placed with the rest of your garbage, and finding a whole new dumpster in which to throw it away.

The story goes that Columbia released “Dylan” in 1973 as a revenge tactic after Bob changed labels.

But me? I’d like to think it was Dylan’s decision.

Thank you, Bob Dylan!

This version of "Like A Rolling Stone" is epically bad.

That instantly enraged me. Of all the fucking artists to mention, he drops the hip-hop equivalent of Weird Al.

Yeah, no kidding. I dumped hot coffee on my hands to distract myself.

If it was a calculated attempt to destroy his reputation

I don't buy this notion that Dylan calculated anything. For whatever reason, people like to hear bad Dylan and assume that it's Dylan intentionally trying to be bad, as if good and bad were a switch on a circuit board. If that switch exists, it's fairly curious that he's had it set to OFF for 40 years.