Bob Dylan's "Street Legal" - Classic or Dud?

It's generally considered to be the beginning of his long schlocky period. Some of the songs are real bad. But some aren't.

Changing Of The Guard is in my Top 10 Bob songs. Never get tired of hearing it. The Jack White band Dead Weather actually did a very credible job covering New Pony.

This is the mid-life crisis album after his divorce was finalized. Where Desire was filled with hope-against-hope and a romanticizing of The Past (outlaws, love in far-off lands/times, and of course "Sara, Sara, don't ever leave me, don't ever go"), Street-Legal is a lot more miserable, self-loathing and looking for a way out. I totally agree with tyler about it being the first of the "born-again" albums, it's leading directly into the religious trilogy.

I have it on old vinyl, sounds great to me, was it the CD that was bad or something?
i guess the OG mix was a rush job for one reason or another -- the producer phil ramone went in and re-did it in the late 90s. it was definitely an improvement, did more justice to the bog-ness of the band.

is street legal remaster CD available for single purchase or is it only as a part of the complete albums box set?

i think the remix has been used in all reissues from 1999 or so on (also it was don devito not phil ramone, my badddd)

Actually I'm listening to this on my better stereo now and it is a little ragged sounding.. Though I don't necessarily mind

O
M
G

amazing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrDr7wKp-Ss

the guy dress up as dylan on the cover is amazing, not to mention that this is a opera metal cover of "senor (tales of yankee power)"

My take, from the thread Dylan's Christian Period, incl. some points made earlier in this thread, which I've never seen before, but def. see he needed and knew he needed some kinda change from this state of mind--still, it's listenable, and yet another nobody-but-Dylan type experience, in this case, his own kind of midlife crisis ("Middle-Age Crazy," as a country song of that era put it):

I finally listened to Changing of the Guard: good singing (the choral group is used effectively, for the most part), good music (except for the drums); but lyrics incl brain of homeless prophetic imagery and serenades which start suavely but quickly go so wrong ("Can ya cook and sew, make the flowers grow," he sounds like even he knows this is hopeless as soon as he hears it--and/or he already knew it, but it's still like,) "No? Course not, but come 'ere and show me what you can do, then.") Performance-wise, the most successful (and stylistically, the most unusual here) is "New Pony," which morphs into bizarre bluesoid porn, though not in a good way (to my taste). Overall, sounds like he's really moving toward some desperate change.
(Before this album came out, Renaldo and Clara incl Dyl paying much attention as Ginsberg tells him about Jesus and the ladies---think some of this was from the Apocrypha, but some from the Protestant-approved Gospels).

― dow, Friday, April 11, 2014 5:27 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

brain *stew* of homeless, Ah meant to say.

― dow, Friday, April 11, 2014 5:28 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not that all the lyrics are bad, but this set incl. recurring, off-putting syndromes.

― dow, Friday, April 11, 2014 5:31 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oops, I should've read this whole thread---my repost is superflous--sorry.

I might have said this before, but holy shit "changing of the guards" is terrifying and insane and amazing

The whole album is, really. Forensic carnival fun.

Roky and Daniel got nothin on him.

Actually, they do at their best, but, considering how far from his best this is, its amazingness is even more amazing. it may be his best bad album. Is it? I haven't heard them all.

listening to this for the first time

see you on the other side!

señor

godspeed!
not much footage of the 78 tour -- this is a blast though, you get a good sense of the weird vibes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsgHi_DvmM8

oh my goodness

that is awesome

yeahhhh. i would love to see a whole show ... seems weird that there wouldn't have been some kind of film of at least one show.

he's in really good form there! surprising, most of what i've read about that time is that he was pretty miserable (pre-born again years which 'renewed' him)

also i just want a put in a little plug for 'baby stop crying'

it is terrible but also really wonderful

also i don't know how often it is acknowledged but his background singers from this period through the eighties are all really great imo, even the shitty songs they just do a marvelous job

idk what version of this I have in terms of remastering or not but ... mmm the backing vocals all over this are really awkward. not all the way through it yet (had to go to a meeting)

feel like the work better on the gospel stuff

they

that's a terrible clip! The horns, Dylan's stepping on the backup singers' lines, the hair.

He got better at employing the backup singers....but not on SL.

that's a tremendous clip! The horns, Dylan's stepping on the backup singers' lines, the hair.

i kind of love that the backup singers have to sing bizarro/awkward things in changing of the guards -- "RENEGADE PRIESTS!"

without collapsing into laughter

oh yea that is so great

it's like he's backed by the Saturday Night Live band n that clip

you know what this is reminding me of is not so much "Death of a Ladies' Man" as Lou Reed's "Take No Prisoners", or maybe "Rock n Roll Heart". the old lyricism is there but so are the saxophones, the r&b backup singers, the air of exhaustion. basically it sounds like the late 70s boomer experience.

is Senor typically cited as the standout track cuz it sure feels like it

that's really the only one that became a live standard post 78...

even that has this terrible saxphone line. Feel like this was the dawn of the classic saxophones-in-everything era of pop music

changing of the guards i always thought was the standout, at least its the one that made it on the greatest hits vol iii selecton

like 1978 was the year the saxophonists union finally got their big contract

xp

Springsteen / E-Street Band influence?

dylan denied it at the time, but it can't have hurt that broooce was doing so well at the time w/ clemons

Did Lou ever dare deny it?

having never been able to stomach Springsteen that would never have occurred to me but the E Street Band as ground zero makes sense. Probably where Lou got the idea too (altho Rock and Roll Heart is two years earlier than Street Legal)

xp

i'm sure lou denied it. but he also said "springsteen's alright" (grudgingly!) on take no prisoners...

...and Bruce cameos on "Street Hassle"

that was lou influencing bruce, not the other way around. "c'mere bruce, i'm going to influence you!"

ok gettin to the end here - lol has anyone sampled the opening of Where Are You Tonight yet

Well, isn't that the blatant "Like a Rolling Stone" rip off?

"Senor" isn't bad and I saw him do a ripping version in '05 but it's like a parody of a Dylan song.

I remember my mom looking at the album cover after I bought it in the early '80s and remarking, "What a sexy photo." I was slightly grossed out.

Well, I think when I saw him in Birmingham in the late 70s, it was on a long, maybe international tour, maybe to promote this album? Whole thing was very metamorphic, judging by concert reviews and pix: started out with this Hot August Night Neil Diamond look---they had some of the same people, like same lawyer and management, I think, of course Neil was in The Last Waltz, Robertson produced Beautiful Noise---and reportedly was using scripted stage patter, like, "Well, as my friend Jerry Garcia says, I must be getting down the road." Then (at campus paper ect) starting getting pix where he's in sort of Blonde On Blonde cover mode, only tailored, and some times with eyeliner etc like his Rolling Thunder look, total effect getting toward Prince--though some on campus swore he had all the signs of going toward **transexualism** (transgender)---he certainly seemed to be going some kind Period of Transition (toward the Lord, for instance, but we didn't know that til Slow Train Coming, soon enough).

And when he finally got to B'ham, came out in this Cisco Kid outfit (which I later saw him wear in every show of a VHS collection at a record show; there's plenty of documentation of this era somewhere), with dirty white tennis shows and the side of his poodle coiffure flattened, like he just got up, and no makeup. He and the chorus were the only constants up front, but he had different subsets of musos upstage, and people he'd call out from the wings as well. I've heard of Ornette Coleman and Doug Sahm doing this too, and for the same reason: to shift styles at will. None of it sounded like the original studio versions either: the gospel singers got all of "Rainy Day Women," a flute player accompanied Dyl's finger-picking (and voice, in good tuneful shape) on "Blowing In The Wind," proto-speed metal big band got "Masters of War," kind of a rockabilly bluegrass "Tombstone Blues," "Senor" (or was it "Silvio"?) between mariachi and Gil Evans.

Actually some of the versions weren't *that* different from the originals, he just brought selected elements way forward and dropped others, like mixing with live players (tempted to say "on the fly," but most of these rearrangements sounded fairly polished).