Desire (1976)

1. Hurricane
2. Isis
3. Mozambique
4. One More Cup of Coffee
5. Oh, Sister
6. Joey
7. Romance in Durango
8. Black Diamond Bay
9. Sara

Notes and Reviews

The musicians:




Reviews:

From The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia by Michael Gray:

"Desire [1976] Dylan’s 18th album and the next newly recorded studio work after Blood on the
Tracks, it proved to be Dylan’s biggest seller, finding him a new following among teenagers
who would hardly have been toddlers when the mid- 60s Dylan was so much in vogue. After such a predecessor
it was bound to be a disappointment but it is an important album nonetheless—a work with
its own distinctive unity yet with most of Dylan’s traditional strengths: not least wit, warmth, energy
and a beautiful disregard for finishing things off with professional songwriterly polish.
The downside is, in part, that the featherweight pop song is back in Dylan’s repertoire with ‘Mozambique’
and the protest song is back in ‘Hurricane’, the weakness of which is shown by how
much better the music is than the ideas behind the words; the hollowness of ‘He could have bin
the champion of the world’ having been assured, years and years earlier, by Dylan’s own youthful,
sharper ‘Davey Moore’. Even on the more substantial songs on Desire
there is a distinct falling-away from the incisiveness of the Blood on the Tracks collection, by virtue
of Dylan’s shift of preoccupation, away from an engaged concentration on the corrosions of time
and failures of love, and towards a more mystical, religious focus. ‘Oh Sister’ thrusts this new
emphasis at us, yet also suggests, with a plainness it’s hard to understand
how we could have ignored at the time, that part of Dylan’s religious focus is on its way to the
conventionally Christian: ‘We grew up together from the cradle to the grave / We died and were
reborn and then mysteriously saved.’ (It also seemed to stand, back then, as a hopelessly clumsy
attempt at dialogue with the new 1970s generation of liberated woman—clumsy not least in making
bluntly clear, from lines like ‘And is our purpose not the same on this earth / To love and
follow His direction?’ that he had not been listening to a word of the new politics of gender. It
seemed important at the time.) All of this sternness underrates the album, in some ways caused
more by the fact of its coming after Blood on the Tracks than because of its own
weaknesses—which are, after all, largely the result of its limitations of scope and intention. More importantly,
Desire revealed a Dylan still wanting to experiment, still refusing to stand in one place.
One experiment was the songwriting collaboration with JACQUES LEVY, who co-wrote every song
on the album except for ‘One More Cup of Coffee’ and ‘Sara’. (For more on ‘Sara’ see Poe, Edgar Allan.)
The resulting album has exploratory strengths of its own that were easy to overlook when it was
new and remain difficult to write about even now. Never before had Dylan so utterly made his word
content the servant of his music. The precise, almost mathematical interlocking of the two is primarily
what concerns him on this album. He is serving an apprenticeship here, at something new.
Who else would have done that, after scoring so total a success as Blood on the Tracks?
The nature of this apprenticeship—of honed communication of feeling, emotion sparked off at
the innate mystery of things and places and sounds—is well suggested in ALLEN GINSBERG’s
short sleevenotes to the album. They merit much re-reading and make a lot of unpindownable
sense—in exactly the same way as the album itself. Recorded in the summer lull before the first
Rolling Thunder tour and released soon after it, the stand-out tracks are ‘Isis’, ‘Romance in Durango’
and ‘Black Diamond Bay’, but ‘Hurricane’, 'One More Cup of Coffee’ and ‘Oh Sister’ are
breathing down their necks."

Rolling Stone review ...

Best Song:
"Hurricane"
According to Alias

While "Hurricane" is an awesome song, it's "One More Cup of Coffee" for me! I sing and play this song and the melody has really gotten under my skin. It's a phenominal tune! -- Folkrockman

Favorite Lyric:
"Pistol shots ring out in the barroom night
Enter Patty Valentine from the upper hall.
She sees the bartender in a pool of blood,
Cries out, "My God, they killed them all""
Perfect musical journalism
According to Alias