Planet Waves (1974)

1. On a Night Like This
2. Going, Going, Gone
3. Tough Mama
4. Hazel
5. Something There Is About You
6. Forever Young
7. Dirge
8. You Angel You
9. Never Say Goodbye
10. Wedding Song

Notes and Reviews

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From The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia by Michael Gray:


Planet Waves [1974] For the first ten minutes after it came out, this 14th Dylan album was
hailed—as New Morning had been—as ‘the best thing he’s done since Blonde on Blonde’. Like New
Morning, it then suffered a disappointment backlash from which it never fully recovered. Put in
the long back-projection of Dylan’s recording career it now seems a potent, open album. Warm,
musically sumptuous yet tense, and emotionally rich, it points down no new road; asserting the
artist’s right to prefer minor work on old canvasses to doing no work at all, it is drawn from the
inner resources of memory and a determination to record faithfully the artist’s current state of
mind in spite of tiredness, an unpopular grownupness and some lack of self-confidence.
It is demonstrably a Dylan album of the 1970s in managing to bind together elements of the citysurreal-
intellectual world from which Blonde on Blonde’s language derived, with a new willingness
to re-embrace older, folksier, rural strengths. ‘Going,Going, Gone’ shows this binding together admirably.
Here is the city language: ‘I bin livin’ on the edge . . .’ and here is the urging of an older, simpler
wisdom: ‘Grandma said ‘‘Boy, go follow your heart / I know you’ll be fine at the end of the line /
All that’s gold doesn’t shine / Don’t you and your one true love ever part.’’’ Back on ‘Memphis Blues
Again’ (on Blonde on Blonde), grandpa was just a joke; in ‘Going, Going, Gone’, grandma has insights
to offer. She represents something stable, reliable and, by the implication of her age, something
resilient. Through the rest of the song, Dylan presses this alliance of the two different worlds
he’d previously walked through separately. He brings in an echo of his old folksinger days with a
near-quote from ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’— ‘I bin walkin’ the road’—and he binds a rural
image with vaguer, mid-60s-Dylan language in the opening verse: ‘I’ve just reached a place / Where
the willow don’t bend . . . / It’s the top of the end / I’m going, I’m going, I’m gone.’
The whole album devotes itself to revisiting, as the adult with the mid-60s surreal achievement
behind him, the Minnesota landscapes and feelings from which he had emerged in the first place—
and recalls these Minnesota years largely for the first time (except for ‘Winterlude’ and ‘Went to
See the Gypsy’ on New Morning). There is a strange tension created by the contrast between recollected
childhood and adolescence and current father-figure weariness. The result is nostalgiasoaked
but genuinely beautiful, with an eerie, compelling quality that marks this album as
unique in Dylan’s output. ‘Hazel’ deals with a girlfriend he’d had long before
he first set out for New York City; and in ‘Something There Is About You’ he says it carefully
and clearly: ‘Thought I’d shaken the wonder / And the phantoms of my youth / Rainy days on the
Great Lakes / Walkin’ the hills of old Duluth . . . / Somethin’ there is about you / That brings back a
long-forgotten truth . . . / I was in a whirlwind / Now I’m in some better place.’
This same theme, of the inexorable tug of the past and the struggle to wed it to the present, runs
throughout. It is there in ‘Wedding Song’, and, coming at the end of the album, these lines, with
their chilling full-stop, emphasize the desperation the whole song examines: ‘I love you more than
ever / Now that the past is gone.’ An earlier image in the same song echoes across
the years from 1965’s ‘Farewell Angelina’: ‘I’ve said goodbye to haunted rooms / And faces in the
street / To the courtyard of the jester / Which is hidden from the sun . . .’, and ‘Dirge’ similarly says
goodbye to old haunts—to the old folk days of Greenwich Village, such that the song acts as a rewrite of
‘Positively 4th Street’: ‘Heard your songs of freedom / And man forever stripped / Acting out
his folly / While his back is being whipped . . . / I can’t recall a useful thing / You ever did for me /"

Best Song: "Hazel"
According to Alias

Favorite Lyric:
"I hate myself for lovin' you and the weakness that it showed"
According to Alias