If you know me, you know this was pretty well unavoidable. There was bound to be some Bob on this list somewhere. But even if I weren't a touch obsessed with our boy Zimmy, this album was bound to be contender regardless.The 1980s and '90s were a difficult time for Dylan. He was releasing terrible albums, his live shows were a shambles, and he was well on his way toward squandering his status as a rock pioneer. Plenty of people my age and younger were writing him off altogether. But then something extraordinary occurred -- Bob Dylan found his voice again. In 1997 he released Time Out of Mind, a dark rumination on mortality that stands among his very best work.
Of course, Bob's done this to us before; he's followed up rubbish with brilliance and then just as quickly reverted back to rubbish. So while optimism was cautious at best when the time came for a follow-up, there was good reason to be cheerful when he released Love and Theft, a far lighter affair that replaced the swampy bubblings of Time Out of Mind with dashes of rockabilly, gutsy, uptempo blues and pre-rock croonery.
I'll never forget the morning I first heard it, in fact. It was the day the album came out. I drove along under a cerulean blue sky, my fingers tapping on the steering wheel as I made my way to my job as a news guy. As I moseyed in, still humming a bit of "Summer Days," I was puzzled by the tension in people's faces. September 11, 2001.
03 Summer Days.mp3
It's a little hard not to link the two in my mind, but Love and Theft was the album that I'd turn to when the 9/11 news, and the ensuing "analysis," got to be too much. With its references to knock-knock jokes, booty calls and Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, it still offers a welcome respite.
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