Dylanology 14 (June 2022): “Planet Waves” Revisited

Planet Waves is squeezed in between the Lost Years and Blood on the Tracks. Eyolf Østrem revisits the album, starting with contemporary Norwegian newspaper reviews.

On 16 Feb 1974, the entertainment section of a Norwegian newspaper reported that Herb Alpert was getting married, that the Swedish contribution to the Eurovision Song Contest was called “Waterloo” and had won a landslide victory in the national final (the name of the group, ABBA, was not mentioned), and that Bob Dylan’s recent album Planet Waves is one of his best so far. Competing with Planet Waves on the charts in the following weeks were Paul McCartney’s Band on the Run and Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.
The guru of Norwegian pop journalism at the time, Yan Friis, summed up his review of Planet Waves by saying that “it is better to get to hear good, gentle music than no music at all”.
One article mentions Dylan’s gigantic comeback, with three albums released in a short time. These were: first the soundtrack album Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid; then the album that was simply called Dylan – which turned out to be Columbia’s version of “revenge porn”, after Dylan had left them; and then Planet Waves – all three described as “good old Dylan style”.
A retrospective article from 1979 concludes that musically speaking not much had happened in the seventies, neither live nor on album, despite decent efforts such as Blood on the Tracks and Desire. Planet Waves is mentioned in passing, but only because of the biographical details it reveals, about Dylan’s happy childhood in Duluth.
There were some things all the reviews agreed upon: that this is Dylan’s best album since Blonde on Blonde, that Dylan has grown up, and that the quick version of “Forever Young” is slightly silly and unnecessary.

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Reading these items of contemporary Dylan reception is a bit like reading the verdict from 1790 – the year before Mozart died – that “the most universally popular of all our living composers is …” – No, not Mozart, but Leopold Kozeluch. Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard about him.

Bottom: Leopold Kozeluch, the greatest composer alive anno 1790. Top: some patzer from Vienna.

Not only is this a strange collection of wildly disparate assessments – above all it is completely wrong, which should be obvious to any Dylan fan! Didn’t they know anything at all about Dylan back then?!
“Good old Dylan style”?!
Not much happening in the seventies?! Come on!

But then one has to remind oneself: they were not necessarily wrong. As a matter of fact, in one essential way, they were more right than anyone now can ever claim to be: they were living in the age when the album came out, so they could actually hear the album in the musical context in which it existed and was created. Herb Alpert and ABBA.

Or even: they couldn’t not hear it in that context! In hindsight, we know what was going on at any point in history, and in a strange way we even know it better than those who actually experienced it, because we know what happened next, what came out of it. The most rewarding exercise in historical judgment (sadly also the most frequently overlooked) is to go back and forth between the two perspectives, the contemporary and the historical, to calibrate our present understanding of the past upon which we build.

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Planet Waves is a strange album, both in historical hindsight and as an album in its own right. I loved it when I first got it, and I still do. But it isn’t played much. So my immediate question is: why is this not one of his most loved albums?

Why is Planet Waves not mentioned in the same breath as Blood on the Tracks, Blonde on Blonde and Time out of Mind?

Why is it one of those albums where one – almost with surprise – says, on the rare occasions that one puts it on: “Hey, this is a great album! Why don’t I listen to it more often?” And then it remains in the pile of rarely played albums – until the same thing happens all over again.

I’ve been trying to find answers to these questions while listening intently to it, and here is what I’ve come up with – mostly in the form of new questions, because I don’t really pretend to have solid answers – and questions to which I welcome discussion and counter-questions. (so go ahead and use that “comment” section below!)

The Band

One batch of questions has to do with the band he was playing with on the album: The Band. The collaboration between Dylan and The Band was legendary, but to the general record-buying public, there was no trace of it anywhere. Planet Waves is the first (and only, if we disregard the anomaly that is Basement Tapes) official studio album with Dylan and The Band.

This might actually have worked both in favour of and to the detriment of the public reception. Could it be that the album was a slight disappointment in the light of the expectations it had to meet? This reaction may in fact seem to be written between the lines in some of the reviews: yes, it is good, but is it really that good?

And if so, I have to agree to some extent. I really like the album, but something there is about it that leaves that same, slightly unfulfilled feeling behind. It’s not that I’m really missing anything, it’s not that it’s not inspired and great music making, but I sense a distance, a void where there might have been a spark.

I have wondered what this is about – and especially after hearing the Basement Tapes which were recorded seven years earlier. I have two possible explanations, again in the form of questions. They go in completely different directions.

Either: have they grown slightly tired of each other? Too familiar, after spending so many years on each other’s porches up in the hills in upstate New York?

The thirteen-minute drive from Dylan’s mansion on the hill to the Big Pink, with Grossman’s studio completing the round-trip.

Or are they just too tight, too perfect, too well acquainted with each other, so that the wild, jester/trickster mood is gone? Clinton Heylin calls “Tough Mama” “one of the very best examples of ensemble playing any Band fan could hope to find,” and indeed: only the musicianship of the Band can make a song such as “You Angel You” sound like a great song, and at times the album sounds more like a Band album than a Dylan album.

This is perhaps my own weightiest criticism of Planet Waves: Musically, the album is so much about the Band that it sometimes stands in the way of Dylan.

In a roundabout way, this actually demonstrates what it is that Dylan does with music. As I have insisted in many of the Dylanology texts, he is not after the perfection of sound, but the necessary connection between sound and idea, song and words. But then there has to be a congruence between the two – between sound and idea – and the fact that they can make me like the sound of “You Angel You”, despite its complete lack of substance, is in a twisted way evidence of the collaboration’s failure. It is insincere, because it sounds too good.

Dylan’s history

The next group of questions are connected to the album’s place in Dylan’s history.

One obvious explanation for the relative failure of Planet Waves is Dylan’s label shopping and defection from Columbia to join David Geffen’s Asylum Records. For whatever reason, the sales were miserable, despite huge expectations and generally good reviews. Dylan’s last-minute decision to rename the album – which meant that the plan to time the release to coincide with the beginning of the tour had to be scrapped – might have been part of an explanation. But the main cause would reasonably have been Columbia’s Dylan album, a successful deflection maneuvre released just a week before Dylan’s tour was announced. That’s how to time an album release!

As the 1974 tour progressed, Dylan stopped playing songs from his new album, which also would not have helped the sales.

The next album after Planet Waves was Blood on the Tracks, and as we now know, this is perhaps his best album. Could it be that Planet Waves was so entirely eclipsed by Blood on the Tracks and the Rolling Thunder Revue that it never recovered, but remained as the “promising (but in hindsight disappointing) precursor”, in the shadow cast by what was to follow?

Or was it the other way around, that the line from New Morning was too evident? The happy-go-lucky Dylan who insists on singing “la la la”; the Family Guy who loves his beautiful wife and lullabyes his kids with tender and happy songs? Glad Dylan?! We don’t like glad Dylan, do we?

Whether one thinks of Dylan as the thundering prophet exposing the injustices of his time and his people, and castigating rulers, or as the quintessential breakup-poet – there really isn’t room for the family father who fixes the fuses and plays with his kids while reminiscing sentimentally about his own childhood.

The Hills of old Duluth

Dylan represents the dissatisfied, the sharp response to the ugly side of life; grim, post-war modernity, recession, troubled love, youthful protest, mind-blowing expansion, the template for the new youth paradigm – not the complacent, narrow-minded patriarch.

Perhaps that is the main problem with Planet Waves? One album like that could have been forgiven as a faux pas, but two…! That is actually something that is mentioned quite regularly in the reviews. What the world needs is not another New Morning.

The Writing

But perhaps it is as simple as this: the material on the album is not strong enough to merit a place among the classics, despite the collaboration with the Band and the occasional brilliancies.

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To be continued: