Album Reviews

Talk about bad luck: Love And Theft Bob Dylan’s first album in four years, his 43rd (at the time, including live and studio) and the follow up to the million-selling, triple-Grammy Award winning (including “Album of the Year”) Time Out of Mind had a September 11th, 2001 drop date. Buildings dropped instead.

The attack didn’t prevent the album, which sounds like a wild “roots” re-imagining of the stuff Dylan probably heard as a kid on the radio, from becoming another best seller and Grammy Award winner (for Best Contemporary Folk Album).

Backed by his touring band that then and now included guitarist Charlie Sexton and bassist Tony Garnier, Dylan tears furiously through a set of 12 bars blues, swing, rock-a-billy and folk beginning with the opener “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum” that musically could have appeared on Highway 61 Revisited, though when he’s pushing it as on the opener Dylan’s now diminished voice here kind of sounds like Mickey Katz’s tbh with you, though Mickey too was a great singer!

Dylan opens the epic “Mississippi” with “Every step of the way, we walk the line/Your days are numbered, so are mine” and later prophetically sings “Sky full of fire, came pouring down…”.

It’s a heavy song of entrapment, suffocation and regret yet it’s somehow optimistic too. It’s followed by “Summer Days”— a raucous, humorous Lindy-hop jump sung by a Cadillac driving guy “with a house on the hill” and that’s followed by an old school shuffle that glides easily along with a Les Paul style guitar fill and a Leon Redbone feel, though the lyrics are downright creepy.

Same with the hilariously bizarre and cartoony “Floater (Too Much to Ask)” with lines like “I’m in love with my second cousin/I tell myself I could be happy forever with her.” Okay….

When you’re finished listening to this Southern romp filled with dark humor—sometimes vicious— you’ll have traveled through time and place and sit in wonderment at Dylan’s still rumbling imagination, even if some of it is borrowed. Who doesn’t borrow? You float through “Moonlight” thinking the edge is off, and you’re hit with the barbed wire “Honest With Me.” The record covers a lot of territory musically and lyrically. It’s been picked apart mercilessly by the Dylan-obsessives, but it’s more fun to just listen and pick up passing references than it is to academically analyze.

The original vinyl double LP (Columbia C2 85975) was cut by Ray Janos at Sterling Sound, with mastering credit going to the late George Marino. That tells you it was cut from a digital source. My ears tell me it was cut from the CD master. Because the original vinyl was rare, it goes for big bucks despite the just okay sound.

It’s a fine Chris Shaw recording (the same engineer responsible for Rough and Rowdy Ways. Unlike Oh Mercy, which was originally mixed to DAT (and which Mobile Fidelity has also reissued without the “Original Master Recording” band across the jacket top), Love And Theft was recorded to tape. I write that because the hybrid SACD edition (Columbia CH90340—part of a box set) also includes a Chris Shaw surround sound mix produced at Sony Studios, N.Y. and there’s a “tape research” credit. But again, it could be that the tracks were recorded and mixed to tape but never assembled into a cutting master.

Maybe this was cut from the DSD master produced from the individual analog tape reels, which would qualify for the “Original Master Recording”? I don’t know. Mobile Fidelity says its still in print SACD was “mastered from the original master tapes” and is superior to the original out of print SACD to which I refer.

However, the source really doesn’t matter for three reasons: first because this double 45rpm limited to 3000 edition sounds far superior to the original double LP and second because it sounds better than the already fine sounding original SACD and third, it appears that this double 45rpm version is already sold out. Sorry it took so long to review. That said, if a used copy becomes available, if the price isn’t too stiff, it’s definitely worth obtaining. Love and Theft is one of Dylan’s finest later releases, and one of his best, period: dark, but so much fun, lyrically and sonically.