Bob Dylan is not one of my favourites. I remember seeing him in the 80's at a Hamilton concert. It was a short, perfunctory, noisy and unintelligible wash of indiscernible nonsense. Not even the "hits" were recognizable. I wondered at the time why he bothered; whether he even cared anymore. Still, the guy has a heart and head for recorded sound that is legendary. Dylan moved musical styles and changed tastes. While the Dylan I saw live was abysmal, another Dylan thought about the construction of his records. He has and continues to work on the complete package -- music with words, words and sound.

Dylan on sound from a recent Rolling Stone interview:
"You do the best you can, you fight that technology in all kinds of ways, but I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past twenty years, really. You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like -- static."

I have been thinking, feeling and talking about this for the past couple of years. Current recorded music is really awful. People under 30 look at me like I'm insane. In some small way I wonder if this is one of the motivations behind "Big" music being so aggressive with their back catalogs; the current stuff is just so badly recorded it has a shelf life measured in months.

Recently JFB sent me a David Gray CD for my birthday. Gray's songs are interesting, his voice is curious and the music may be moving. The problem? The sound on the record -- the production, the editing, the mix, the tonal balance -- is positively chainsaw-like.

The last great pop/rock record that was made was U2's Achtung Baby. Ironically that record was made with the intent of deliberately using "bad" sound. Lanois and Eno played with the concept of making harsh sounds work. Initially the group thought they could capture the big sound of the Berlin Hansa studio in the record but the only thing that came out of that session was "One"; their greatest song. Back in Ireland it was all electronics and distortion. The real secret of why that record works is how they used electronics. Lanois loves analog reverb (check out what he's done with Emmylou Harris) and he understands analog recording from his days working with Doidge; first in the basement in Ancaster and then later at Grant Avenue. Eno worked with analog tape loops on some of his strangest sessions with Lanois at Grant Avenue. Achtung Baby is avant garde experimental sound married to pop band power. It was the high watermark for pop recording and all these years laters stands as a marker for the end of great production in popular music. The concept was so effusive that it lent itself to visual art and effects that became the greatest concert spectacle of its era, the ZooTV tour.

What Dylan so plaintively expresses is nothing short of the end of an era. Not only is "good" sound dead; but so too is rock and roll. We are on the other side of the "Rock Era" and we have no sonic landscape to replace it with.

More to come...