Bob Dylan - "Self Portrait" (single disc version)

To commemorate Bob Dylan's recent 80th birthday, this time around I look at Self Portrait, a double album he released in June 1970. It received some of the harshest reviews of Dylan's career at the time. Made up of a few originals, lots of traditional songs, covers and a couple of live tracks, it's very much a mishmash. 

Dylan has said that at the time he was feeling suffocated by the "voice of his generation" tag he'd had attached to him, and wanted no part of being a leader of the hippie / counter-culture movement. He has said that he thought maybe an album like Self Portrait would force people to look for another leader and let him simply be a musician. Instead, he attracted a lot of hate from critics and fans who felt he'd let them down. 

 

If we strip away the cover tunes and live tracks, we're left with four originals and six traditional songs, which I thought might make a decent one-disc album. 

 SIDE A 

1. All the Tired Horses 

2. Alberta

3. Days of '49

4. House Carpenter

5. It Hurts Me Too

6. Pretty Saro

7. In Search of Little Sadie 

SIDE B 

1. Living the Blues

2. This Evening So Soon  

3. Woogie Boogie

4. Tattle O'Day

5. Belle Isle

6. Railroad Bill

7. Wigwam

One of the reasons Self Portrait was a double album was Dylan decided to release most all that had been recorded during the sessions in an attempt to avoid anything unused being issued on a bootleg album. Somewhat ironically, in 2013, Dylan released The Bootleg Series Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait (1969–1971), with outtakes and alternate takes from Self Portrait and other sessions. 

 

On Another Self Portrait, four previously unreleased recordings of traditional songs can be added to our track list, giving us a total of 14 tracks. 

I kept the general order of songs from Self Portrait, divided it into two sides (since it would have originally been issued as a vinyl LP), and inserted previously unreleased songs from Another Self Portrait. So the album still begins with the Dylan-penned "All the Tired Horses," which features no vocal by him, but instead a chorus by female singers. 

"Living the Blues" is the best of the four Dylan originals so I used it to open the second side. He performed the song on Johnny Cash's TV show the previous year, and it's similar to "Singing the Blues," which had been a hit for Marty Robbins in the 1950s. 

I've no idea why Dylan decided to include cover versions of "Early Morning Rain" by Gordon Lightfoot and "The Boxer" by Simon and Garfunkel, as well as songs that had been hits for others such as "Blue Moon" and "Let It Be Me." But their inclusion on the album might have added to the hostility of fans and critics -- Dylan is one of the greatest songwriters of all time so why is he doing covers of contemporaries? Removing these and other covers, plus live versions of his songs "The Mighty Quinn," "Like a Rolling Stone" and "She Belongs to Me," allows this album to be sort of a back-to-basics effort. I think it gives Self Portrait a purpose rather than the grab bag that was actually released. 

I also excluded "Little Sadie" and "Alberta #2" and replaced them with previously unreleased tracks to eliminate repetition. 

I used only tracks from Another Self Portrait except for "Singing the Blues" and "Alberta #1" (which I title simply "Alberta" since we're not including #2 or #3) which are from the original album. The versions of "All the Tired Horses," "In Search of Little Sadie," "Days of '49," "Wigwam" and "Belle Isle" are without overdubs.

The result is not an album that I think critics and fans would have loved, but I believe they may have liked it a lot more than the double album and possibly been a lot less harsh than they were.