Thursday, October 05, 2023
Bob Dylan's Desire is oddly popular among some people, which suggests to me that with Dylan a person's point of entry matters a great deal. I think there are three of four solid songs on it. I think "Hurricane" slaps along, but is minor Dylan- it got a lot of airplay, and was popular with old hippies who liked Protest Song Dylan, but I've never trusted it.
The real low point on Desire is the song about Crazy Joey Gallo, an endless, tuneless dirge that gets so much wrong that it calls into question Dylan's reliability about everything else he ever wrote that was supposedly fact based. Interestingly this is one of the songs he wrote collaborating with Jacques Levy. Someday I will finish the piece I have in my Dylan files about Dylan's collaborators. In the meanwhile here's an excellent article by Lester Bangs about "Joey".
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