Ah, well they have funked the job of integrating or just adding in an
appendix the 40+ later Dreamsongs I mentioned - pity. Personally, I
think one should read them in sequence first, but your way may well be
best for you. I do think the wow-factor of Dylan has definitely
fluctuated, rather than simply declined, reaching for me a high level in
his last 3 albums (if I may use this archaic term), but from the mid-70s
the songs started getting worse on the whole & this had nothing to do
with any law of diminishing returns: they had in fact been getting
better (and madly different too) from the 1st album till at least *John
Wesley Harding*, perhaps best of all in *Blood on the Tracks*, and
individual songs even on catastrophic LPs like *Knocked Out
Loaded*(1986) contained amazing humdingers like "Brownsville Girl",
which makes me think that he lost the sense of what was good for some
time. I think if people had started with the inferior stuff on *Saved*
etc they would have stopped there too. And to return to Berryman, some
of the later Dreamsongs are magnificent. I think it was B's alcoholism
that exacerbated the quality problem. Perhaps being a kind of teacher
guru was bad for him too. He did turn quite human in *Love & Fame*, but
the flash & crazy afflatus had gone. " 'It always happens', said the Gnat".
mj
Dominic Fox wrote:
> There are 385 Dream Songs in the book, of which the first 77 are those
> that were first published together. I have not read them in order, but
> am skipping backwards and forwards, so that the later and earlier ones
> happen for me side-by-side. You can't sustain the wow-factor of the
> first encounter - for both reader and author - of a new poetry
> indefinitely; there just isn't a career's worth to be had of what made
> early Dylan so hugely impressive. But people disappointed with later
> Dylan might in some cases have been less disappointed if they'd been
> able to start with later Dylan and work backwards - even to the point
> of finding some of the earliest material (e.g. "Mr Tambourine Man") a
> bit gauche and wishy-washy, even given the steely charisma of the
> person singing it...
>
> Dominic
>
--
Il ne faut pas toujours conter,
Citer,
Dater,
Mais écouter.
Il faut éviter l'emploi
Du moi, du moi,
Voici pourquoi:
Il est tyrannique,
Trop académique;
L'ennui, l'ennui
Marche avec lui.
Marie-Françoise-Catherine de Beauveau, Marquise de Boufflets
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