Coming, as it does, after the creative peaks of Blood On The Tracks<\/i> and Desire<\/i> but before the evangelical sermonising of Slow Train Coming<\/i>, the Street Legal<\/i> album is an often overlooked chapter in Dylan\u2019s recorded oeuvre. This is something of a shame because it’s actually a pretty good record in its own right. Recorded and mixed in just a couple of weeks with essentially the same band that featured on the Bob Dylan At Budokan<\/i> live album, Street Legal<\/i> is heavy with the dense wordplay and apocalyptic, biblical imagery that we\u2019ve come to expect from Dylan at his best.<\/p>\n
The album\u2019s opening salvo is the excellent \u201cChanging Of The Guards,\u201d a song that appears to be a summing-up of Dylan\u2019s own musical career up to that point. The first clue is the song\u2019s opening exclamation of \u201cSixteen years!\u201d which is roughly how long it had been since Dylan began his musical career, at least publicly, with the release of his debut album in 1962. This may just be coincidence of course, but lines like \u201cFortune calls \/ I stepped forth from the shadows, to the marketplace\u201d and cryptic references to \u201cwheels on fire\u201d certainly seem to betray the song\u2019s autobiographical intentions. Additionally, its hauntingly dynamic chord progression and memorable saxophone refrain serve to make \u201cChanging Of The Guards\u201d as strong an album opener as any Dylan produced during the Seventies.<\/p>\n
Next up is the strident riffing of \u201cNew Pony,\u201d a brazenly erotic and lascivious song hiding behind a well-worn horse metaphor. It\u2019s a song that\u2019s strangely full of foreboding and malevolence. Throughout the track, a trio of female backing vocalists repeat the question \u201chow much longer?\u201d, giving the piece a sinister air of urgency and serving to heighten its general aura of uneasiness. <\/p>\n
Unfortunately track three, \u201cNo Time To Think,\u201d is something of a letdown after the potency of the previous two numbers. Lyrically it\u2019s very good indeed but the song\u2019s slight melody along with its excessive length, means that it actually works better as poetry on the page than it does as a song.<\/p>\n
Things get back on track again with \u201cBaby, Stop Crying” though, a song in which Dylan plays the role of consoler to a despairing woman, somewhat alarmingly asking for a pistol in the opening verse, claiming he “can’t tell right from wrong.” Interestingly, the lyrics are allegedly inspired by Robert Johnson\u2019s \u201cStop Breaking Down Blues.\u201d In fact, the influence of the legendary Delta Blues musician looms large over much of Street Legal<\/i>, with Dylan copping lyrics from several of Johnson\u2019s songs and dropping them into his own compositions throughout the album. Of course, Robert Johnson had long been a musical hero of Dylan\u2019s but his influence has seldom been as explicitly conspicuous in Dylan\u2019s work, especially lyrically, as it is on this record.<\/p>\n
Of all the tracks on Street Legal<\/i> though, perhaps the most well known is \u201cSe\u00f1or (Tales Of Yankee Power).\u201d Personally, I\u2019ve always felt that there\u2019s something lacking from this song, which prevents it from being a totally successful piece. It tends to idle lackadaisically rather than grab the listener and I can\u2019t help finding myself distracted and taken out of the mood of the song by the slightly comical way in which Dylan sings the word \u201cse\u00f1or.\u201d <\/p>\n
The album comes to a close on a high note however with \u201cWhere Are You Tonight (Journey Through Dark Heat).\u201d It\u2019s a memorable song with a solid musical arrangement and some fantastic lyrical couplets, like the bravely resolute \u201c In that last hour of need \/ We entirely agreed \/ Sacrifice was the code of the road\u201d or the unflinchingly confessional \u201cI fought with my twin \/ That enemy within \/ \u2019til both of us fell by the way.\u201d <\/p>\n
All in all, Street Legal<\/i> is an overlooked gem in Bob Dylan\u2019s body of work from the Seventies. Sure, it might not quite hit the rarefied heights of Blood On The Tracks<\/i> or Desire<\/i>, but there\u2019s still more than enough good art to be found amongst its nine tracks to warrant greater attention from Dylan fans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":29170,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5866],"rating":[5615],"class_list":["post-40706","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-bob-dylan","rating-rating-b"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40706\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=40706"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=40706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}