What Makes Bob Dylan’s Weirdest Album ‘Self Portrait’ Great
In the spring of 1970, anticipation for Bob Dylan‘s next album was through the roof. He hadn’t released a note of new music since Nashville Skyline 14 months earlier. His upcoming album was going to be his first double LP since Blonde on Blonde, and it came with a title – Self Portrait – that seemed to promise the kind of personal statement fans craved.
What they got was something totally different. “A radio station played the entire record when it first came out,” says author and critic Greil Marcus. “Maybe a quarter of the way through, I recall the DJ saying, ‘Gee, I don’t know if I should keep playing this. I’ve been getting a lot of phone calls saying, in essence, ‘What is this shit?'”
Those four words – What is this shit? – kicked off Marcus’ infamous review of Self Portrait in Rolling Stone. He wasn’t the only listener to be completely baffled by the album. It’s a bizarre mishmash of pop covers (Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer”), pre-rock hits (“Blue Moon”) and poorly recorded live cuts from Dylan’s 1969 set at the Isle of Wight Festival. Nearly every tune is overloaded with backup choirs, strings and horns. “I knew that opening [to the album review] was provocative,” Marcus says. “But that’s what everybody in the country was saying, and I had to reflect that.”
Dylan’s journey to the first critical flop of his career started at Nashville’s Studio A in April 1969. Working with a band that included guitarist Charlie Daniels, bassist Charlie McCoy and drummer Kenny Buttrey, he cut standards like “A Fool Such as I” and “I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know.” Dylan didn’t explain the thought process behind all the covers (and still hasn’t), though his decision to record “Ring of Fire” and “Folsom Prison Blues” was clearly inspired by an appearance on The Johnny Cash Show that week.
The Self Portrait sessions were extremely loose. “There was nothing regimented,” says Daniels. “I remember one time he wanted me to do a solo. Someone said, ‘How many bars? What chords?’ Dylan then made a very Dylanesque statement: ‘What do you want Daniels to play?’ ‘Well, all he can.’ That was it. You just added what you thought was best and what you thought Bob wanted.”
After cutting just 11 songs, Dylan suspended the sessions until the following March. When they resumed in New York, his band included Al Kooper on the organ and David Bromberg on guitar, Dobro and bass. “I hadn’t played with him since Blonde on Blonde, so I was glad to get the call,” says Kooper. “When I got to the studio, it got really weird, just the strangest situation. He had a pile of issues of [folk-music journal] Sing Out! and was going through them, picking out songs and just recording them. They ran the gamut from traditional folk songs to ‘Mr. Bojangles’ and ‘Come a Little Bit Closer,’ by Jay and the Americans, and Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘The Boxer.’ I didn’t comprehend what he was doing, and I wasn’t really in charge, so I just sat in my seat and did what I was told.”