773. Bob Dylan
774. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
775. Bob Dylan: The Times They Are A-Changin'
776. Another Side of Bob Dylan
777. Bob Dylan: Bringing It All Back Home
778. Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited
779. Bob Dylan: Royal Albert Hall
780. Bob Dylan: Blonde on Blonde
781. Bob Dylan: Great White Wonder II
782. Bob Dylan: A Rare Batch of Little White Wonder - Volume 3
783. Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits
784. Bob Dylan: John Wesley Harding
785. Bob Dylan: Nashville Skyline
786. Bob Dylan: New Morning
787. Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II
788. Bob Dylan: Planet Waves
789. Bob Dylan: Blood on the Tracks
790. Bob Dylan and the Band: The Basement Tapes
791. Bob Dylan/the Band: Before the Flood
792. Bob Dylan: Desire
Mixworthy: "She Belongs to Me," #777; "Like a Rolling Stone," "Just Like Tom Thumb's
Blues," and "Desolation Row," #778; "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35," #780; "I'll Keep It
With Mine," #781; "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" #782; "Positively 4th
Street," #783; "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere," #787; "Tangled Up in Blue," #789. I rea-
soned earlier that if the Beatles were the gold standard with 10 songs, then Dylan
would warrant nine. Well, not only does Dylan require the maximum 10, choosing his
10 turns out to be much tougher for me than choosing the Beatles' 10. I think that
may mean I've elevated my favourite Beatles songs to heights that even they them-
selves can't reach the rest of the time, or maybe it means that Dylan's genius is
distributed a little more equitably across his dozen or so greatest songs. I don't
know--I'm not sure if the second half of that last sentence even means anything. In
any case, they both get 10.
Owning Royal Albert Hall (ninth-generation copy? I bought it in '79 or '80 from the
Record Peddler, which always racked a few dozen bootlegs before they vacated the
Queen St. address) and the two White Wonder albums doesn't seem like as big a deal
as it used to be, before CBS released all that stuff legitimately. My version of
"I'll Keep It With Mine," which to me is Dylan's most stunningly beautiful ballad
ever, is missing the insane banter with Tom Wilson that prefaces the sanctioned CBS
version: "This one's called, uh, 'Bank Account Blues'!"...I just finished Memoirs
this past weekend, having gotten about two-thirds of the way through many months ago
before putting it aside. It's such a weird book--whatever version of Dylan you carry
around in your head, there are enough anomalous juxtapositions and almost surrealis-
tically mundane bits of description scattered throughout to stop anyone short:
"Whether he really said it or not, it didn't matter. It's what I thought I
heard him say that mattered, and I never forgot it. It was all the recog-
nition and encouragement I would need for years to come. Sometimes that's
all it takes, the kind of recognition that comes when you're doing the
thing for the thing's sake and you're on to something--it's just that no-
body recognizes it yet. Gorgeous George. A mighty spirit."
From anyone else, a passage you wouldn't even notice. From the guy who imagined a
world where Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot trade barbs while Cinderella does Bette Davis
impressions and down-on-their-luck monks recite the alphabet, kind of disorienting--
in a good way, I think...Even if albums were still the format of choice, I bet my
Dylan collection would stop mid-70s nonetheless. I'm just not that interested in his
acclaimed work of the past 10+ years. I haven't heard nearly enough of it to make a
convincing case as to why I feel that way, but I do. (I listened to Love and Theft
in its entirety and got very little out of it. I have a feeling I'd like Time Out of
Mind better.) The short version: he's not a very good singer anymore, and by "good,"
obviously I don't mean in a technical sense. The irony is, I'm sometimes acutely
aware of situations where an artist continues to do great work beyond a point where
people have decided that he or she isn't vital enough to warrant close attention
anymore. The Pet Shop Boys immediately come to mind. With Dylan, though, those mid-
60s albums that had such a profound effect on me in high school were enough. Even
if the story has indeed broadened and deepened these past few years, the first tell-
ing was rich enough for me that nothing more ever needed to be said.
________________________________________________________________________________
793. The Dynamic Superiors
794. Dynamic Superiors: Pure Pleasure
795. Dynamic Superiors: You Name It
796. Earth, Wind & Fire: Gratitude
797. The Best of Earth, Wind & Fire Vol. 1
798. Earth, Wind & Fire: Touch the World
799. The Best of Earth, Wind & Fire Vol. 1I
800. Earth Quake: Rocking the World
801. Sheena Easton: The Lover in Me
802. Eater
803. Echo and the Bunnymen: Crocodiles
804. EBN-ÔZN: "AEIOU Sometimes Y" 12-inch
805. Eddie and the Hot Rods: Teenage Depression
806. Duane Eddy: Pure Gold
807. Dave Edmunds: Repeat When Necessary
808. Jonathan Edwards
Mixworthy: "Shoe Shoe Shine," #793; "Girls Talk," #807. I listed Elvis Costello's
version of "Girls Talk" earlier; excellent song but nothing I'd need twice, so I'll
drop one or the other at some point.
I've had Gratitude for a long, long time. Surprisingly vivid memory: I bought it
specifically to play at one of our weekly poker games in grade 10 or 11, and as I
was biking down Raylawn Crescent on my way home from the record store, I went for a
spill just before coming out onto Weber Drive. That's the kind of mad recklessness
that EWF inspired among small-town Canadian teenagers in those days; we will never
see anything like it again...Who were EBN-ÔZN, and why do I have a 12-inch of theirs?
I was completely baffled by this at first, but there's a previous owner's sticker on
the back ("Lucy Montgomery, 4 Blackwell Place, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19147")
that gives me an idea as to when and where I bought it, and also who it was that
coerced me into doing so. This record needs to find its way back home...Jonathan
Edwards was one of the oft-cited Antichrists among rock critics circa 1971, situ-
ated somewhere between the Osmonds and Richard Nixon as an object of scorn. I'll
say this as quietly as possible: I loved "Sunshine" at the time, and it still
sounds pretty good to me.
________________________________________________________________________________
809. E•I•E•I•O: Land of Opportunity
810. E•I•E•I•O: That Love Thang
811. El Dorados: Bim Bam Boom
812. Electric Prunes: Underground
813. Roy Eldridge: Dale's Wail
814. Electric Light Orchestra: Olé ELO
815. Electric Light Orchestra: A New World Record
816. Electronic: "Getting Away With It" 12-inch
817. Duke Ellington: Flaming Youth
818. Duke Ellington: The Duke Plays Ellington
819. Duke Ellington: Masterpieces By Ellington
820. Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: Ellington Indigos
821. Duke Ellington's Greatest Hits
822. The World of Duke Ellington
823. Duke Ellington's Greatest Hits
824. Duke Ellington & John Coltrane
825. Duke Ellington with the Ron Collier Orchestra: Collages
Mixworthy: "Lights Are Low," #811; "10538 Overture" and "Can't Get It Out of My
Head," #814; "Rockaria!" #815; "Getting Away With It," #816; "My Little Brown Book,"
#824. I'll save "Do Ya" (#815) for the Move.
A lot of Duke Ellington--I've got a couple of box sets, too; I file boxes either at
the front of a row or altogether separately, so I'll list them once I finish the
main alphabetical section--and I like it all, but "My Little Brown Book" is the only
single song that jumps out without taking the time to start checking and comparing.
The two albums that I've played most often would be The Duke Plays Ellington (solo
piano and pleasingly old--1954, turquoise Capitol label, fantastic shape) and Master-
pieces By Ellington, which, although not solo, is quiet enough that I hear it in my
mind that way. "A lot" is relative--in terms of what's out there, nine albums doesn't
even qualify as a blip...There aren't too many cases like E•I•E•I•O's, where I have
two full-length import albums and I haven't even the slightest recollection of what
they sound like...I like to pay homage to the earliest records in my collection, and
both ELOs predate Gratitude above. I'm strictly hardcore when it comes to the Orch-
estra: by the time they had their big run of late-70s Ronco-era hits--you can see how
A New World Record bridges their earlier and later incarnations--I had moved on. I'm
not sure whether it makes more sense to call them the artiest bubblegum group ever or
just the liveliest art-rock group, but either way they were as uniquely '70s as Cheap
Trick or Steely Dan or anybody else, and their best stuff holds up amazingly well.
________________________________________________________________________________
826. Joe Ely Band: Live Shots
827. Joe Ely: Musta Notta Gotta Lotta
828. Elektrics: Current Events
829. Emerson, Lake & Palmer: Brain Salad Surgery
830. Emotions: Rejoice
831. Emotions: Flowers
832. Emotions: Sunbeam
833. End Result: Ward
834. English Beat: I Just Can't Stop It
835. English Beat: Wha'ppen?
836. English Beat: Special Beat Service
837. Eno: Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy
838. Eno: Another Green World
839. EPMD: Strictly Business
840. EPMD: Unfinished Business
Mixworthy: "Best of My Love," #830; "I Confess" and "Save It for Later," #836; "The
True Wheel," #837; "Another Green World," #838. "Best of My Love" didn't mean anything
to me when it was on the radio, so I'll credit that one to Boogie Nights. Um, can you
spot the new wave album in this group?
I think EPMD went on to make another half-dozen albums, every title a variation on
their debut: Business, Not Personal, Going Out of Business, Mind Your Own Business,
No Business Like EPMD Business, etc., etc. I almost listed "Get Off the Bandwagon,"
but I gave it another listen and just wasn't feeling the flow...I played "The True
Wheel" for my three math classes this year as an introduction to our unit on Percent,
Fractions, and Ratio. They absolutely loved it! For the next three weeks, once they
got down to work on that day's assignment, we'd put it on and half the class would
be going "Uh-oh, nothing there this time!" in unison. Towards the end of the unit,
I passed around Roxy Music's For Your Pleasure cover so they could get an idea of
who they'd been listening to--Eno's wearing that insane get-up on the inside gate-
fold--and they clearly didn't know what to make of that.