MEDIA: Bob Dylan – "When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky" (Official Music Video)

EVENT: your humble author avoids using capital letters while advocating a counterintuitive point.

Analysis: the other night emilie and i were aimlessly walking around the bella vista neighborhood of south philly, just taking in the air, when we heard really loud dad-style music blasting out of what appeared to be a house with way more open windows than usual. inside was a kinda hippie-looking middle-aged man, alone in an industrial kitchen, cooking furiously, listening to a bob dylan recording that was very much a live bootleg from the 80s. obviously we ordered food from him; the burrito i got was so good that ever since i ate it i’ve been listening to 80s dylan nonstop in tribute.

i’m not really a huge dylan fan in general; every few years i’ll give blood on the tracks or the basement tapes a few spins, be like “damn man bob dylan was kinda cool,” and then kinda forget that he ever existed. (which i feel like is most people’s relationship with most musicians these days?) but now that i’m in Bob Dylan Exists mode i’m discovering that 80s bob is just a whole different ball game. it’s way less “I’m A Songwriter,” wayyyyy less “I’m Doing Drugs And Also Doing A Conceptual Tour (While On Drugs),” more just pure unadulterated vibes. no longer was the dude making these records Dylan, this mystical living legend who could just say shit and spur a thousand critical analyses, and instead just Bob, a crank stoner dad in malibu who mutters to himself and is so very clearly annoyed about having to go to work (to be clear, his work is making bob dylan albums so that he can go on bob dylan tours). 

just so we’re clear on framing: “80s bob” lasted from approximately 1983 to 1993, bookended on one end by his “christian period” and on the other by his record world gone wrong, which while not his generally acknowledged “comeback” album (that’d be time out of mind from 1997) did find bob wearing a top hat on the cover and eventually won him a grammy. christian dylan, meanwhile, is sort of its own thing, especially because while those albums were a real left turn they’re immaculate for what they are, and bob’s giving it a hundred percent on them to try to convince people not to hate them. and once he fully hit Comeback Bob mode, he sort of decided his mission was to bring the great american songbook to the masses, or at least make records where he’s only influenced by music that came out before he was born. 

what differentiates “80s bob” from the other bobs, then, is that 80s bob is just sort of screwing around and doesn’t really give a shit about the actual music he’s singing over, which kind of allows his producers to just “do whatever.” as you might expect, this yields some incredibly funny results. on down in the groove, a thing that bob called an album in 1989, he starts out by covering wilbert harrison’s “let’s stick together,” a song — both the original as well as the version by the all-time weirdo bryan ferry — whose greatness is defined by its nervy intensity, so naturally, bob lilts through it at half-time like he’s fronting a bar-blooze cover band in myrtle beach. the opener of empire burlesque, probably my favorite Bad Bob album, has him singing over synths with a gospel choir; “emotionally yours” is a woozy prom ballad; “seeing the real you at last” feels halfway between huey lewis and a rhino blues sampler in the best possible way. meanwhile, “when the night comes falling from the sky” is a seven-minute answer to the question of ‘what would bob dylan sound like if he did a talking heads impression?’ the answer is exactly what you’d expect. please refer to the top of this post for the single version, which while unfortunately shorter than the album cut comes along with a music video that features bob dylan riding a school bus and then performing at what appears to be a punk warehouse.

i should be clear that none of this is bad per se, because by this point bob had been recording music professionally for over two decades and definitely knew what he was doing. the fun part, though, is that as a listener it’s really hard to figure out why he was making these choices (and in some cases, why he made the choice of letting other people dictate his sound for him). i was initially going to end this paragraph with, “i am both grateful and disappointed that 80s bob somehow never hit up a rapper for a collab,” and then i googled it to double-check and oh my god 80s bob once rapped four bars on a kurtis blow track. 

thinking about all of this, i feel like the official Advanced Music Hipster stance probably should be to proclaim that the only good bob dylan albums are the christian ones and then the 80s bob ones. there are enough good songs in them to justify such overly strong contrarianism, they’re not super over-exposed, and also 80s bob kicked off his run by taking a quorum of the la punk band the plugz with him onto letterman, where they proceeded to absolutely rip it. keep in mind that after this performance, bob dylan never spoke to the plugz again.

HIGH-LEVEL TAKEAWAY: commit to the bit above all else.