Throughout the 1980s, Bob Dylan struggled to find his footing. After finishing his Christian records between the late ’70s and the early ’80s, he got back to more secular sounding songs with the Mark Knopfler produced album Infidels, and capped off the decade with the great Oh Mercy — produced by Daniel Lanois. In between both records, he had some misfires. Empire Burlesque (a record I like a lot), Knocked Out And Loaded, and then Down in the Groove were all uneven productions, but contained some good songs. By 1997, Dylan went back to work with Lanois on his 30th studio album, Time Out of Mind. The record was well received by critics, and it won three Grammys that year. So overall, a success for the mercurial artist known for being difficult to work with, and whose songs don’t always rise to the greatness he’s known for. Meaning, that despite his stature in popular music, Dylan can put out crap every now and then.
Crap is not what comes to mind with Time Out of Mind. Instead, it seems Lanois looked at ways to alter Dylan’s sound to make the songs sound more interesting — a choice that had the effect of making the reaction to this record a little polarizing. Yes, the album went platinum, got tons of praise from critics and fellow artists, and the singles “Not Dark Yet” and “Love Sick” received a good amount of radio play. So, one would think Dylan would be happy with the record. Nope. Seems he didn’t like the kind of effects Lanois applied to the album. So much so, Dylan self-produced all his albums after that — under the name of Jack Frost.
I’m not with Dylan on his impression of the record. Personally, I like the effects Lanois applied to the recording. It gives the album a certain feel that’s kind of otherworldly at times — but always within the familiarity of a standard song structure. You can really hear it on “Love Sick.” The narrator of the song is clearly at the end of his rope with a relationship that’s failed or failing. Walking through “streets that are dead” is a pretty lonely place, which I take to mean that the narrator is going down a memory lane of sorts wondering where it all went wrong. When one thinks of being lovesick, one thinks of someone pining away for another. However, in Dylan’s world, it’s really that he’s just sick of loving the other person. It’s certainly a bitter tune, but as I wrote earlier, there’s a feel to it that makes it very otherworldly, and maybe that’s because we’re in the narrator’s head. Only toward the end of the song do we get a sense that he’s more lovesick in the standard definition of the term:
Could you ever be true?
I think of you and I wonder
I’m sick of love
I wish I’d never met you
I’m sick of love
I’m tryin’ to forget you
Just don’t know what to do
I’d give anything to be with you
I include this performance of the song because it’s a good one, but also because there’s an appearance of a shirtless guy (Michael Portnoy) with the words “Soy Bomb” painted on his chest. He was an extra in the audience who was paid to be in the background. But Portnoy decided he’d do something unpredictable. He told The Hollywood Reporter in 2018 that he was “telling a joke with my body.” Dylan, for his part, never flinched and continued playing as if the whole thing was part of the performance. Overall the stunt worked. After all, people seem to remember it 20-something years after it happened. I guess you can thank the internet for that.
