That's amazing.So this time, I got a little Teac four-track cassette machine, and I said, I'm gonna record these songs, and if they sound good with just me doin' 'em, then I'll teach 'em to the band. I could sing and play the guitar, and then I had two tracks to do somethin' else, like overdub a guitar or add a harmony. It was just gonna be a demo. Then I had a little Echoplex that I mixed through, and that was it. And that was the tape that became the record. It's amazing that it got there, 'cause I was carryin' that cassette around with me in my pocket without a case for a couple of weeks, just draggin' it around. Finally, we realized, 'Uh-oh, that's the album.'
I lost a Twitter debate about this article because I approached it from the wrong direction. A bunch of Swifties who couldn't name three Springsteen songs thought they got the better of me after I was unclear about the number of horny boys in his oeuvre. I don't hate Taylor Swift but I hate this article https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/7/31/21340926/taylor-swift-folklore-millennial-bruce-springsteen
There's a scene in Walk Hard (an underappreciated comedy) where John C Reilly's character just decides he's going to start putting nonsense words together as lyrics. They accuse him of trying to be like Dylan, and he's retorts that maybe Dylan is trying to be like him. I discovered Dylan as a kid, so I'll always love him in the way you can only love things you discovered as a kid, but the older I get the less I respect him in a lot of ways.
That makes sense. I doubt I would have liked Dylan had I not started listening to him very young. My dad played a lot of Dylan and Cohen when I was a kid. I still love both, but I appreciate Cohen more and more the older I get. Can't say the same about Bob.