When you do it once, they expect you do it again. In Bob Dylan‘s case, he had done it—as in releasing incendiary albums and singles that seemed to capture the tenor of the times—on several occasions throughout the 1960s. His 1970 album Self Portrait didn’t do it for a lot of people, include Rolling Stone magazine.
Here is the story of Dylan’s most inscrutable album, and the record review that called the artist to task for failing to live up to others’ expectations of him (as if that’s any way to make great music).
Portrait Poses
As the ’60s waned, Bob Dylan willfully backed away from his unofficial duties as the spokesman for an entire generation, a title he never wanted to assume in the first place. After a 1966 motorcycle accident, he slowed his pace considerably, releasing two low-key albums (John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline), made publishing demos with The Band that became widely bootlegged, and ceased touring except for the occasional one-off show.
He concentrated instead on his wife Sara and their growing family. In 1969, he relocated them to New York City after the tranquility of his time living in Woodstock was shattered by scenesters and nosy fans. Working in Columbia Studios, he began cobbling together the material for the album he would call Self Portrait. Occasionally, he recorded with session musicians. Other times, he did acoustic guitar-and-vocal takes he then had sent to Nashville for string overdubs. Many of the songs were covers, and the originals often had little to no words.
Adding some tracks that were recorded with The Band at the Isle of Wight Festival in August 1969, Dylan ended up with a double-album’s worth of material. He painted the abstract self-image for the cover to play into the Self Portrait theme. The album came out on June 8, 1970. And, boy oh boy, were people ever confused, including a Rolling Stone record reviewer.
An Opening Line for the Ages
“What is this s–t?”
So began Greil Marcus’ Rolling Stone review of Self Portrait. At the time, Marcus was one of the first wave of critics who understood there was depth and import to rock music. Many of those critics gravitated to Rolling Stone, which, almost immediately upon its publication, became the premier rock magazine.
That line has been quoted so often that many people assume Marcus’ review was an unrelenting putdown of the album. In truth, it’s much more nuanced than that. Marcus didn’t write the usual record review essay, instead dividing it up into a couple dozen individual observations, a few of which go off on tangents about auteurism or the poet Rimbaud. (It helps to understand that rock reviews ran about 8 billion words back in the day.)
But Marcus’ overriding point seemed to be that Dylan had essentially given up the fight, failing to rise to the level of the music he released in the mid-’60s. He praised some songs on the record, but a general sense of disappointment wafts through the review. It turns out Marcus wasn’t that far off-base, and Dylan might have been paying attention to his notice more than you might expect.
Dylan Reacts
Based on interviews done over the years with Dylan and others, it seems safe to say Dylan was stung by the Rolling Stone review and the overall reaction to the album. It turns out his purpose for making Self Portrait had essentially been defeated.
Dylan claimed he was getting increasingly fed up with the view of him as some sort of savior, and he no longer wanted fans to look to him for answers he didn’t feel qualified to give them. He purposely made Self Portrait as a way to unburden both himself and his fans of these expectations. The reasoning: If I don’t give them what they want, they’ll stop looking for it.
But the review just proved his miscalculation. If anything, critics pounced even harder and threw the mid-’60s records in his face as a kind of taunt. Self Portrait hadn’t thrown them off the scent. It only seemed to make them hungrier for blood.
As a way of reacting, Dylan hustled back into the studio to finish off a batch of all originals he had begun during the Self Portrait sessions. Those songs became the album New Morning, which arrived on shelves just five months after Self Portrait‘s release. While the new record still didn’t satiate all the critics, it at least was a more traditional Dylan album for everyone to analyze.
All Is Forgiven … or at Least We Think It Is
In 2013, the collection Another Self Portrait was released as part of Dylan’s ongoing Bootleg Series of reissues. The release was reviewed quite favorably (including by this writer). And, in a clever but of symmetry, none other than Greil Marcus did the fawning liner notes. Which either proves that Bob Dylan believes in forgive and forget, or he adheres to the adage about keeping your enemies close.
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