PragueBlue
Well-Known Member
Bob Dylan - Live at Budokan
Let me start by admitting that I am not Bob Dylan’s greatest fan and I don’t own any of his albums except for this one. In fact I very much doubt that I would have ever heard of this album if it wasn’t for my dad. He was a big Bob Dylan fan and so I grew up listening to a lot of Dylan without ever really being able to understand what he saw in his music.
One year he got this album for a Christmas present and I remember him being quite shocked by it. ‘This isn’t real Dylan’ he would say and despite his best efforts, he never really grew to love it the way he did with his other Dylan albums. However, I did love it from the first listen. Apparently most Dylan fans don’t really like this album. Perhaps that’s why I like it. I can hear something in it that they can’t, whereas they can hear something that I can’t in most of Dylan’s other work.
Live at Budokan is, as the name suggests, a live, double album recorded in Japan and released in 1978.
It received mainly negative reviews when released - Allmusic scored it 2/5 and Rolling Stone scored it only 1/5. Despite that, I personally feel that it is his most accessible work and I have decided to nominate it despite my misgivings about the length of the album and that it is live, so in effect is a bit like a ‘greatest hits’ album. However, I feel the arrangements are different enough to make it worthwhile to be nominated,
It features many of his most well known songs but with radically different arrangements. It has a much fuller sound and makes much more use of backing singers and the band.
I’m not going to go into individual songs as I guess they will be mostly known already. I will say though that my favourite tracks are Ballad of a Thin Man and All Along the Watchtower but there isn't a bad track on the album. I can honestly say that I enjoy every track and that is rare with a single album let alone a double.
I expect it won’t go down very well with traditional Dylan fans but for those, like me, that never really got Dylan, it could be a way to access the previously inaccessible. Sorry about the length.
Sadly my dad died a few years ago but thanks dad for introducing me to this album (even though you never really loved it the way I do), classical music and Nina Simone.
One of the few albums that I would class as a solid 10.
Let me start by admitting that I am not Bob Dylan’s greatest fan and I don’t own any of his albums except for this one. In fact I very much doubt that I would have ever heard of this album if it wasn’t for my dad. He was a big Bob Dylan fan and so I grew up listening to a lot of Dylan without ever really being able to understand what he saw in his music.
One year he got this album for a Christmas present and I remember him being quite shocked by it. ‘This isn’t real Dylan’ he would say and despite his best efforts, he never really grew to love it the way he did with his other Dylan albums. However, I did love it from the first listen. Apparently most Dylan fans don’t really like this album. Perhaps that’s why I like it. I can hear something in it that they can’t, whereas they can hear something that I can’t in most of Dylan’s other work.
Live at Budokan is, as the name suggests, a live, double album recorded in Japan and released in 1978.
It received mainly negative reviews when released - Allmusic scored it 2/5 and Rolling Stone scored it only 1/5. Despite that, I personally feel that it is his most accessible work and I have decided to nominate it despite my misgivings about the length of the album and that it is live, so in effect is a bit like a ‘greatest hits’ album. However, I feel the arrangements are different enough to make it worthwhile to be nominated,
It features many of his most well known songs but with radically different arrangements. It has a much fuller sound and makes much more use of backing singers and the band.
I’m not going to go into individual songs as I guess they will be mostly known already. I will say though that my favourite tracks are Ballad of a Thin Man and All Along the Watchtower but there isn't a bad track on the album. I can honestly say that I enjoy every track and that is rare with a single album let alone a double.
I expect it won’t go down very well with traditional Dylan fans but for those, like me, that never really got Dylan, it could be a way to access the previously inaccessible. Sorry about the length.
Sadly my dad died a few years ago but thanks dad for introducing me to this album (even though you never really loved it the way I do), classical music and Nina Simone.
One of the few albums that I would class as a solid 10.