I haven’t heard anything from Planet Waves but I’ll be getting to it soon. I do plan on listening to the deliberately bad album Dylan as well.

This wasn’t a best selling book at the time, but Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street was released in 1973 during Dylan’s where-the-hell-is-he period and is about a folk-rock superstar going recluse. It’s probably the best of DeLillo’s early works, even if it is no Libra. Plus it had a cool 70s cover and looks great on your bookshelf.

I think it would be hilarious if it turned out that Dylan’s motorcycle accident really never happened. So Dylan has something in common with Paula Abdul (who has likely been lying for ages about being in a plane crash in the Midwest around 1992.)

The 1974-75 Dylan being regarded as a “comeback” anyway has me thinking about how long you have to be “gone” before what you do is a “comeback.” U2’s “comeback” was in 2000 with All That You Can’t Leave Behind but that was because Pop wasn’t a very well-received album (it still sold well.) Weezer’s “comeback” with the Green album and “Hash Pipe” and “Island In The Sun” was in 2001 and they’d been “gone” only five years, after Pinkerton “bombed.” Here we have Dylan doing a “comeback” after…what, seven years? I guess trends in popular music used to change a lot faster, if somebody who’d last been a big deal in 2018 (who would that even be?) turned up again with a big hit this year would that still be a “comeback” or is pop music not different enough in 2025 than in 2018 for anyone to care? “Nevermind may have changed the world but look how quickly the world changed right back”…