Bob Dylan: New Morning - 1970

 

"I didn't say, 'Oh my God, they don't like this, let me do another one,' it wasn't like that. It just happened coincidentally that one came out and then the other one did as soon as it did. The 'Self Portrait' LP laid around for I think a year. We were working on 'New Morning' when the 'Self Portrait' album got put together"  - Bob Dylan

Around 1970-72 was the time many artists put out laid-back, contemplative, rustic country rock - Van Morrison's Tupelo Honey, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's Deja Vu and this, from Bob Dylan. It is a beguiling piece of work. 

It has been praised a lot, especially in comparison with Self Portrait, which I feel is wide of the mark, slightly. Personally, I much prefer the latter. This album I find somewhat stark and unrealised. It came only four months after the reviled Self Portrait, yet it avoided the brickbats and was hailed as a refreshing breath of fresh air by many critics. That was surprising as Dylan said that most of the material for both albums was recorded at least within about a year of each other (see the quote above). Certainly the two albums were created with Dylan in a similar state of mind so I am not quite sure why this one received such comparative praise. It has always seemed throwaway and lightweight, to me. As I said, I think there is better stuff on Self Portrait, by far. 

Let's go and see the gypsy.... 

If Not For You (covered by George Harrison on All Things Must Pass and made a hit single by Olivia Newton-John is appealing and country-ish. Day Of The Locusts was a bit of a bizarre, staccato song about Dylan receiving an honorary degree, while Time Passes Slowly is very much in the Nashville Skyline country vein. 

Went To See The Gypsy is one of the best cuts, a full, bassy, pounding tale of Dylan visiting Elvis Presley in concert in Las Vegas. There is a better version of it on Another Self Portrait, however. Winterlude has a waltz beat and sounds like an old country song from the 1940s. 

If Dogs Run Free is quite a rarity among Dylan songs - it is a piano-driven jazzy number with Dylan throatily croaking some cod-philosophy while backed by some intensely irritating "Scooby-doo-dooo, bah, bah, bah..." "scat" vocals. At times, this really is quite awful, yet it has a strange vibrancy of sound about it the gives it a sort of perverse appeal. 

New Morning features some excellent organ and bass work and has a lively, upbeat refrain. One of the album's best tracks. Sign On The Window is very much a Self Portrait type song - a plaintive piano-driven ballad, featuring some intrusive "woo-woo" backing vocals at times. It has Dylan ruminating about living in a cabin in Utah, catching rainbow trout and having a bunch of kids who all him "Pa". All very relaxed. 

The best (and only) blues rocker on the album is the punchy One More Weekend, this is probably my favourite and is a throwback to the mid sixties. It is good to hear him rock and sing about seduction, as opposed to bucolic pleasures, for the first time in a while. The Man In Me is not at all bad either - a slow soulful groove. Less of the country, more of the Band-style rock ballad. However, Three Angels is a bizarre oddity. Dylan narrates some surreal lyrics about what, I am not really sure. Father Of Night is one of Dylan's first devotional songs, a precursor to his 79-82 "born again" material, but, as yet, he had not seen the light.

A non-album track dating from 1971 is the country ballad, Wallflower, which is an ordinary-enough song not to trouble one either way wondering whether it should have been on the album or not. There is also the version of If Not For You that was recorded with George Harrison. Harrison recorded his own version for his triple album, All Things Must Pass. Watching The River Flow was a 1971 blues rock single recorded with Leon Russell.

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