Self Portrait (1970)

1. All the Tired Horses
2. Alberta #4
3. I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know
4. Days of 49
5. Early Mornin' Rain
6. In Search of Little Sadie
7. Let It Be Me
8. Little Sadie
9. Woogie Boogie
10. Belle Isle
11. Living the Blues
12. Like a Rolling Stone
13. Copper Kettle (The Pale Moonlight)
14. Gotta Travel On
15. Blue Moon
16. The Boxer
17. The Mighty Quinn (Quinn the Eskimo)
18. Take Me as I Am
19. Take a Message to Mary
20. It Hurts Me Too
21. Minstrel Boy
22. She Belongs to Me
23. Wigwam
24. Alberta #2

Notes and Reviews

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From the The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia by Michael Gray:

"Self Portrait [1970] The tenth album, and misjudged on Dylan’s part. You could have made a
good minor album out of it if you’d cut it down from the overblown double-LP set that it was.
There was no reason why Dylan shouldn’t have made this new departure—largely into pop songs
and Tin Pan Alley country material written by other people—but it just wasn’t that good. It was
the cue for large numbers of Dylan’s followers to give up on him. In Chronicles Dylan claims that
this was what he’d set out to do: that the album’s vapidness was deliberate. That’s rather an insult
to the musicians who worked on it with him, and to whom he was perfectly respectful at the time.
Either way, he had deconstructed himself. Now, seen in the long back-projection of his
work, it isn’t gruellingly important that the album was so second-rate—but when it was new, in 1970,
the adjustments necessary to come to terms with Self Portrait seemed enormous. Dylan was demanding
more and giving less with this album. At first hearing, much of the work was trite, rutted and
simplistic: and that, in itself, had huge and perplexing impact. Here was an apparently mediocre
collection of work from a man who, rightly or wrongly, had become accepted as the genius of
our generation.

There were, of course, people who didn’t face these difficulties—those who simply listened and
enjoyed; and Dylan has always been on their side, against classification, with those who, in his view,
know ‘too much to argue or to judge’. All the same, the question ‘How should we respond to
this album?’ was a common one among those whose concern isn’t disproportionately with Dylan’s
music at the expense of a concern with the words. First, there is a blandness of defeat about it,
which comes across most clearly through Dylan’s voice. It conveys, especially in the ‘happy’ songs, a
sort of choking caution (listen, for instance, to ‘I Forgot More’)—an impression that Dylan has
walked, Godlessly, close to the valley of the shadow of death and dare not now explore beyond the simplistic
verities adhered to by Nashville, Tennessee. It is not so much mental plumpness as an exhaustion
of courage—as if the Dylan of Self Portrait has placed himself under house-arrest because the old
Insanity Factory is too close to his gates. And while this kind of rest/retreat is understandable enough
in the man, it doesn’t do much for his art. The parallel with the Born Again Christian albums
Slow Train Coming and especially Saved is very strong: on these, Dylan s panic at Godlessness
has him clinging not to Nashville’s country verities and simplicities but to the gospel ones of the
Bible Belt. The main virtue of ‘Saving Grace’ is that it confesses this need-to-cling, just as ‘Watching
the River Flow’ was to do not long after Self Portrait. Yet just as Slow Train Coming and Saved are
good enough to repay countless plays, so too Self Portrait, albeit a very minor Dylan work, has its
own riches; and now that the album is well into the past, it is easier to enjoy them.
First, the album does not lack warmth; and second, its self-deprecation can be seen as showing
an egolessness which is, now and then, a welcome ingredient in Dylan’s largely ego-emphatic output.
As Bill Damon put it (Rolling Stone, September 3, 1970): ‘With all of its unity and inclusiveness, Self
Portrait is too complex to have a point of view. . . . It is Eastern in its egolessness. . . . Dylan does remind
us on this album of all the ways we have known him . . . but Dylan’s image serves only his
music.’ Even the cover painting has its virtues: its childlike technique and colouring are a relief from
image-building ad-man photography, and interesting also because, like the painting Dylan did for THE BAND’s
Music from Big Pink album, it owes a lot to the pen-and-ink sketches of WOODY GUTHRIE."

Best Song: "Days of 49" is one of Dylan's most underrated songs. -- Folkrockman

Favorite Lyric: "All the tired horses in the sun
How'm I supposed to get any ridin' done? Hmm."
According to Alias