Self Portrait is the tenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on June 8, 1970, by Columbia Records. Self Portrait was Dylan’s second double album (after Blonde on Blonde), and features many cover versions of well-known pop and folk songs. Also included are a handful of instrumentals and original compositions. Most of the album is sung in the affected country crooning voice that Dylan had introduced a year earlier on Nashville Skyline. Seen by some as intentionally surreal and even satirical at times, Self Portrait received extremely poor reviews upon release. Dylan has claimed in interviews that Self Portrait was something of a joke, far below the standards he set in the 1960s, and was made to get people off his back and end the “spokesman of a generation” tags. The album has since built a cult following and saw a retrospective positive re-evaluation with the release of The Bootleg Series Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait (1969–1971) in 2013. (More from Wikipedia)
To put these ratings in context, Self Portrait (1970) is the only Bob Dylan album to get just ** before Saved, other than some live albums (Allmusic shows low ratings for most of the Rolling Stones live albums also). To this day, no one seems to understand Self Portrait – I certainly don’t. The music seems as off-putting as the splashes of color in the cover art. The first few times I played it, I really only enjoyed the live version of “Like a Rolling Stone”; I have heard several others since that I enjoy more. Some years later, the opening track “All the Tired Horses” stood out, but probably only because I couldn’t discern a hint of Bob Dylan anywhere in the song.
There is a Bob Dylan album that scores even lower in Allmusic than his Christian albums, and here I need to put on my “Under Appreciated” hat – the 1973 release Dylan yields just *. The album is described in both Rolling Stone Record Guide and Allmusic as a collection of outtakes from Self Portrait – i.e., songs that didn’t make the cut for that head-scratcher – and that just sent chills up my spine.
Dylan is a recent rescue from Katrina, however, and I found it surprisingly easy to listen to. The album is entirely cover songs, many of them quite familiar; and if Dylan’s performance of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” leaves no impression at all, that is not true of the lesser known songs.
The opening track, a traditional folk song called “Lily of the West” is beautifully performed; and the album is well worth owning for that song alone. Personally I am at least as big a fan of Bob Dylan as a folksinger as I am of Bob Dylan as a rocker, and this song was a welcome return to the performances that I remember so well from his early albums.
(August 2014)
