Buoyed by divorce proceedings, the death of Elvis Presley and custody battles, Bob Dylan took himself to new places and different moods on his 1978 album, Street-Legal. In a long series of reinventions, a constant, shifting ideal that the 81-year-old would employ time and time again throughout his career, Dylan pairs himself with pop power and big groups. A bounty of female backing vocalists accompanies Dylan on his first album after the strong work found on Desire. A shame then, that the recordings proved problematic, the album a critical dud at the time. Despite that, a commercial success. Built, perhaps, on the desire people had to still hear Dylan. One of the many albums he would release that would prove itself over time, rather than immediately.
His pop-rock gospel-like style comes almost immediately. Changing of the Guards sounds like something Leonard Cohen would do. Alan Pasqua’s keyboard and the effects layered over them mark a Cohen hit rather than a Dylan intricacy. It’s interesting, though. Fascinating choices continue to mark Street-Legal as an album offering its heart. Storytelling fixations are back on the cards for Dylan, whose lyrical witticisms are strengthened by the repetition found in those backing vocals and surprise saxophone injections. Like inspiration Gordon Lightfoot, certain tracks here only work for certain moments or moods. No Time to Think is a great example of that, a slower ballad that relies more on the crooning of repetition than on lengthy wordplay. A surprise considering it is the longest track on the album.
But what Street-Legal presents is consistency. There are no dips or falls. It strums and hums on as a delicate and enjoyable piece. No Time to Think is an impressive ballad through the sheer length and variety alone, while the spotty saxophones additions to Baby, Stop Crying mark a new sound for Dylan that turns out a very fun song and a real highlight before heading into the B-Side, where Is Your Love in Vain? has a saxophone closer to gospel music than jazz. Street-Legal provides streaks of innovation that did appear earlier and later, but never as intimate and consistent as it does on here. Señor (Tales of Yankee Power) is a touching understanding of taking the chance before it disperses, a piece shrouded in mystery and misery in that fascinatingly unique Dylan charm. End track Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat) has a charming similarity to Like a Rolling Stone to it. A lovely cap to a strong B-Side.
Certainly an underrated time for Dylan, but not one worth championing as the best of the best. Very good fun, a Planet Waves situation of enjoyable riffs and good wordplay, but far from Dylan’s best work. Still, Dylan’s rockier moments are far better than most of the releases from that year. Street-Legal proved that despite the change in mainstream momentum, Dylan could still capture and understand not just his own life and period of change but the movement that came around it. Lengthy tracks are a frequent feature of this intense and interesting piece. An interesting era for Dylan is capped off by Street-Legal, an album that does muse on the fundamental themes of religion with tracks like We Better Talk This Over and True Love Tends to Forget, but not as much as his follow-up album, Slow Train Coming, does.
Great review. I still have my original LP, and played it day after day…loved it. The whole album had a great theme, and the story for each song was a ride of a journey I could never understand why it was panned at the time. Once again, Bob was beyond the critics.