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.
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.
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.
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 it 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?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Dylanology to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.