gblueowl

In article <mikeg22789-BDE04D.01035112122003@news03.west.earthlink.net>, "Mike
G." <mikeg22789@aol.com> writes:

Maybe it's because I was too young to be really listening in 1970, when people
had whatever specific set of expectations they had of what a Dylan album should
be, or what sort of material would serve whatever "purpose" they thought there
should be, but this album has never really seemed like any big mystery to me.
It's Dylan slumming in the studio, mostly just trying to amuse himself. I've
always thought of it as Dylan just showing up in the studio each day and
recording whatever song he'd found himself idly humming to himself in the
shower that morning. There's certainly a casualness about it that could at
times be called halfhearted, or at least doesn't show Dylan particularly
interested in breaking a sweat over any of this, but if you're in the right
frame of mind that in itself can be sort of appealing.

But Dylan's first album was pretty much exactly what was expected of a young
Greenwich Village Folkie's debut in 1961, some accounts even suggest John
Hammond deliberately avoided putting more original material on the record
because it wasn't deemed "acceptable" by the militantly traditionalist Village
Folk Scene of the day to do so. And of course, by the time of World Gone Wrong
it was a well established tradition for Rock Artists to at some point put out a
"covers" album, whose choice of material might range from a predictable rundown
of an artist's early influences, to a more esoteric, unlikely list of songs
designed let the artist "stretch out" and showcase a more diverse range of
musical interests than they generally get to do on their major, high-profile
releasees, and everything in between. But Self-Portriat seems to be about the
first album of largely covers since most Rock Artists were suddenly expected to
write all their own material in the late 60s'

Brian

mike g.

But, coming in an era when -- far more today -- the racks were *stuffed*
with pop/soul singers whose albums were dominated by numbly recycled
versions of other people's hits...?

As for rock, those British R&B acts of the '60s sure had no shortage of
cover songs on their albums. Even the Stones' first four albums were
dominated by covers -- and the debut has only *one* original?