"Knocked Out Loaded" Song-By-Song Discussion Thread

Who is the woman pictured inside the booklet?

 

You don't

Indeed, we agree that it is his creative low point. I never wanted to listen to it again, but now I decided to take the plunge and see if anything has changed. So far, nothing has. Pleasure is not something I associate with this album.

 

Have to say I absolutely love this track and find it utterly joyous. I think it gets bogged down by the production somewhat, but it's still wonderful.

 

No hiding under chairs allowed in this thread.

Never turn away joy.

 

Thanks. When I make compilations of Bob's 1980s music, 'Precious Memories' always makes it. In fact, it's possible that it works better outside of the context of KOL.

 

Bob's take on "Precious Memories" has never grabbed my attention. Down near the bottom on my list of Dylan's album tracks for sure.

 

I didn't realize so many people have covered Precious Memories. I listened to a few too many this afternoon! I enjoyed Jerry Lee Lewis's version because it is a rambling dialogue about Jerry Lee Lewis. It starts:

"You know, there are many precious memories Jerry Lee would love to recall, and there are some things I'd like to forget..."

 

This is worse than Johnny Cash doing a recitation about "Mama".

This must have been shortly after what Lou Reed called "The Sins of Swaggart, Parts 7, 8 and 9".

 

The Anton Fig account explains a lot. The drumming on this and Maybe Someday is abysmal. The snare is always lagging behind.

 

I link Precious Memories to Cash again... he even had an album named after it. Regardless, it is an interesting choice for Dylan. All of the above performers grew up in that southern gospel environment and would have a direct connection to the sentimentality of this hymn.

Any Christianity Dylan would have been exposed to in Duluth would have been of a more intellectual Lutheran or Calvinist variety I would guess. And, of course, "gospel Dylan" of a few years earlier was rooted in the apocalyptic, post-hippie Vineyard movement in the Hollywood Hills. So what drew Dylan to this one?

Apart from not knowing why he chose such a left-field tune, and a quite brilliant vocal delivery, the Jimmy Buffet style arrangement makes this one unlistenable for me.

 

Day 5 - Song 5

"Maybe Someday"

I couldn't find a good clip to go here. Dylan's folks have made sure the album track isn't on YouTube, there were no live performances, and it appears that no major artist has chosen to ever cover this song.

So you'll have to use your own vinyl, CD, Ipod, Spotify ... etc.

Similar to other Empire Burlesque/Knocked Out Loaded originals, Dylan seems to be trying to write in the crackling style of film noir dialog. As in numerous other cases, he quotes a classic film (in this case, "Out of the Past", one of the lynchpins of the genre). He also quotes some T.S. Eliot.

The production is once again (IMO) a barrier the listener must overcome. The released version seems to come in mid-take - is this some cute editing, or are we listening to something that was still halfway between rehearsal and take? The drum track, a la "Driftin' Too Far From Shore" is harsh (as one reviewer said about Pete Townshend's "Face The Face", also released around this time, "Drum track sponsored by Anacin'"). The Queens of Rhythm, who I often enjoy hearing, are mixed right up in the listeners face here ("Uh huh"!)

So is there a song worth hearing buried under the 80s production/mix? I would say moreso than in the case of "Driftin'". There are some good lines sprinkled through the song, although to the negative, many lines seem to contradict each other. At its worst, this song sometimes sounds like a William Burroughs "cut up" exercise. Write all the noiresque lines about a romance gone bad you can think of, throw them in the air, and make them a song. On the flip side, the apparent contradictions may lend the song some color and depth (if one chooses to try to derive a cohesive narrative).

Thoughts?

 

I think you're spot on in your assessment of the production. Again the background (or perhaps foreground) vocals and off kilter electronic snare drum make this one really hard to listen to.

There might be a half-decent tune buried in there somewhere.

 

Ray, you took my "uh huh" line!

The song starts off in an odd manner. Like it's already in mid stride. Then it gets it together, I suppose, but those "uh huh"s get to the point where I just want them to shut up.

 

Bob Dylan - vocals, guitar
Mike Campbell - guitar
Steve Douglas - saxophone
Steve Madaio - trumpet
Howie Epstein - bass
Don Heffington - drums
Carolyn Dennis, Madelyn Quebec, Annette May Thomas, Elisecia Wright, Queen Esther Marrow, and Peggi Blu - backup vocals

Seems like this song could have been so much more. When it was recorded in 1984, it was known as Prince of Plunder, but was completely reworked in 1986. I'm not too familiar with Bob boots or grey market releases, does any recording of Prince of Plunder circulate? Anyone know how close it was to what became Maybe Someday?

 

According to Clinton Heylin ( in his book Still on the Road) Prince of Plunder was never copywrighted and most likely not finished. According to Heylin : " It is not clear at what point he changed tack and scribbled out the words that came out as Maybe Sunday but it would appear to have been late on in the KOL process. It was not until May 14 1986 that the song was added to the album that Dylan was now describing as compiled from ' all sorts of stuff...not really hav[ing] a theme or purpose.' Heylin described the Maybe Someday record: " Over the next ten days any available kitchen sink was added to an overbearing backing track."

 

Also from that Heylin book: “Prince of Plunder” was a song Dylan recorded alongside early versions of “I’ll Remember You” and “Seeing the Real You at Last.” This time, Dylan relied on the Heartbreaker combination of Mike Campbell and Howie Epstein. Lone Justice drummer Don Heffington also continued to enjoy Dylan’s largesse. Unlike those other two songs, it was not worked on further in New York. However, it was not entirely forgotten, reappearing as “Maybe Someday” at the May 1986 Skyline sessions, having acquired an entirely new lyric for the Knocked Out Loaded sessions.

 

Another similar quote from Ron Wood...

Wood later described his surprise at Dylan's lack of authority during the mixing process. "[The engineers would] say, 'Hey Bob, we don't need this,' and he'd say, 'Oh, okay.' And they'd make a mix to their ears, and he'd just stand outside and let them do it. And I'd be saying, 'Hey! You can't let these guys...Look!! They've left off the background vocals!' or 'What about the drums?!' But there would be something going on in the back of his head which didn't allow him to interfere. And yet if he'd have gone into the control room with the dominance that he had while we were cutting the stuff, it could have been mind-bending."

https://en.wiki2.org/wiki/Empire_Burlesque

 

So far I don't think anyone needs to worry about the background vocals being left off!

 

Off the top of my head, I'm trying to think of any original Dylan compositions from the 80's that are worse than this and I am struggling to think of one.

 

When the Wheels Came Off: The History of Bob Dylan in the '80s »

The following year, as he started thinking about putting together a follow-up to Empire, he continued to defend his recent output. “There’s a certain area of songs, a certain period that I don’t feel that close to. Like the songs on the Desire album, that’s kind of a fog to me,” Dylan told Spin in 1985. “But since ’78 the characters have all been extremely real and are still there. The ones I choose to talk about and relate to are the ones I find some kind of greatness in.”

As Dylan started working on what would become 1986’s Knocked Out Loaded, he seemed to be searching for a way to recreate the jam-sparked sessions he’d had with the Band, with recent tourmates Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers initially serving as a sort of house band that could be augmented with session guests as Dylan saw fit. But that old spirit seemed to elude him on a more and more frequent basis; for instance, when Waterboys frontman Mike Scott peeked in on the process, he came away somewhat less than impressed.

“It was basically a free-for-all,” Scott recalled. “Dylan turns around and says, ‘Listen, you can play your heart out, just keep playing. It doesn’t matter if you overplay, it doesn’t matter what you do, just keep playing and we’ll keep the best bits and we’ll dump the other bits.” As for what they were playing? “He had a verse, a chorus, a middle eight, and that was the structure,” observed Scott. “Maybe he’d be humming along to himself, but he didn’t actually stand at the mic and sing.”

What proved most frustrating for fans and observers during this period was the perception that Dylan was still capable of periodic flashes of brilliance — it was just that, as often as not, he’d toss out his best material before anyone else could hear it. Journalist Mikal Gilmore recalled sitting in on several days of sessions for Knocked Out Loaded, and he described some of what he heard as “pretty wondrous,” adding, “Sitting there in a studio, it didn’t sound to me like he was somebody with a studio problem — he was working very fast, moving from track to track, and really directing the sound.”

“There was enough stuff cut on Knocked Out Loaded to have put out a great album,” agreed session player (and rock legend) Al Kooper. “There was some really wonderful things cut at those sessions, but I don’t think we’ll ever hear ’em.”

Those cuts were certainly out of the picture later in the year, when Gilmore met up with Dylan for another look at the progress on the new album. Describing Dylan as “not in a good mood,” he recounted, “He told me he’d thrown out all that other stuff, and now it was just gonna be an album of bits and pieces…I think it was a bad period for him.”

The end result, released on July 14, 1986, was shrugged off by Dylan as “all sorts of stuff” that “doesn’t really have a theme or a purpose.” True enough, as the eight cuts on the record were cobbled together from disparate sessions, covers, and Empire Burlesque outtakes — one of which, “Brownsville Girl,” served as the new album’s acknowledged highlight.

This time around, critics weren’t as forgiving as they’d been with Empire Burlesque, and it isn’t hard to understand why; Loaded is only eight songs long, two of which are covers; another is a rearranged version of the hymn “Precious Memories.” Plenty of studio hours and musical talent had gone into the record, as the long list of credits in the liner notes could attest, but it didn’t add up to anything that could conceivably be called a compelling statement from one of rock’s greatest living artists.

 

Still no sign of Al Kooper on guitar.

 

Fine analysis, really. I agree about the (again!) horrible production, the (again!) misguided background vocals, the (again!) horrible drumming and the sense that this is a song that is sung by someone who is treading water. That being said: the performance is animated. He is failing, but he is trying on this one.

 

[QUOTE="J
“There was enough stuff cut on Knocked Out Loaded to have put out a great album,” agreed session player (and rock legend) Al Kooper. “There was some really wonderful things cut at those sessions, but I don’t think we’ll ever hear ’em.”.[/QUOTE]
*Sigh*
Id like to contribute more to tbis thread but I dont know what to add other than saying that all songs since the opener afe poorly produced and certainly among the weakest on his catalogue but not lacking good ideas and elements and yes I do enjoy them all very much

 

It doesn't sound to me like a lot of loving care went into "Maybe Someday." That said, it least it's got some mildly humorous lines:

"You’ll look back sometime when the lights grow dim
And you’ll see you look much better with me than you do with him."

 

As an aside...

There are more than 100 people who receive "SPECIAL THANKS" on the album's inner sleeve--so what's the biggest surprise:

Steve Howe?
Iron Mike?
Baby Boo Boo?