Under the Red Sky (1990)

1. Wiggle Wiggle
2. Under the Red Sky
3. Unbelievable
4. Born in Time
5. T.V. Talkin' Song
6. 10,000 Men
7. 2 X 2
8. God Knows
9. Handy Dandy
10. Cat's in the Well

Notes and Reviews

This is a much-maligned Dylan masterpiece, a jewel in his creative crown, and a treat waiting to be discovered by the uninitiated. Highlights are too many to mention, but I would pick out the lovely slow ballad "Born in Time", the bravura "Handy Dandy" and the rockabilly doom of "Cats In The Well". Fantastic!!


The musicians:
Al Kooper, Slash, David Lindley, George Harrison, Kenny Aronoff, Randy Jackson, Don Was, Waddy Wachtel, David Crosby, Bruce Hornsby, Robin Ford, Paulinho Da Costa, Elton John, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Jaimie Muhoberac, Sweet Pea Atkinson, Donald Ray Mitchell, Sir Harry Bowens

References:

Trivia:
Reviews:
'Under the Red Sky' came so hard on the heels of 1989's 'Oh Mercy' that it was easy to miss that we had made a transition - out of the religious preoccupations that had dominated Dylan's work during the decade after 'Street-Legal', and into Late Dylan. Taking a cue from Balzac, so fittingly namechecked in 'Chronicles Volume One', we can call Dylan's post-1990 work The Human Comedy.
Feedback? Kingsley Bray 17/05/06

"This is an EXCELLENT album that I only learned about on BobDylanwiki! Take a look at the musician list above! It's a very mellow album and is certainly overlooked." -- Folkrockman

From The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia by Michael Gray:

"Under the Red Sky [1990] The first Dylan album after Oh Mercy
shows Dylan characteristically retreating from that album’s mainstream
production values and safe terrain, and refusing to offer a
follow-up. Nevertheless his penchant for recently modish producers has him turn this time to
DAVID & DON WAS of Was Not Was, who offer a rougher and less unified sound. It’s a pity Dylan
pads out the album with some sub-standard rockism (‘Wiggle Wiggle’ and ‘Unbelievable’) and the
ill-fitting, foggy pop of ‘Born in Time’, because the core of the album is an adventure into the poetic
possibilities of nursery rhyme that is alert, fresh and imaginative, and an achievement that has
gone largely unrecognised. The way Bob Dylan ends the album reflects his
continued interest in challenging dividing lines between the song and the recording. This was in
evidence on Oh Mercy in ‘What was it you wanted? / You can tell me, I’m back’ when his vocal returned
after an instrumental break, followed by the punning ‘let’s get it back on the track’. It is in evidence
here too. A reminder to the listener that it is a recording is built into the whole structuring of
Under the Red Sky. The original vinyl Side 2 begins like a live recording: beginning before the song’s
beginning, by offering on the tape the groundpawing noises musicians make just before they
start to play, but without allowing you to feel certain if you’ve overheard genuine pawing or not. At
the same time this sense of ‘liveness’ is undermined by the way that it begins with the smearing
sound of this pre-song recording actually being switched on: to remind you that your LP, CD or
tape is itself a copy of a tape. As that Side 2 begins, so it ends: like a live recording. For emphasis,
every track on the album fades out except the last one. (The best thing about ‘God Knows’ being the
way the shape of the song mocks the sermonising inside it, perhaps unintentionally, the singer has
to rant more and more to squeeze the lines in as it works itself up like a sermon: and as soon as he
starts to rant, they start fading him out. For the listener, it’s as if you’re slowly but surely closing
the door on a Jehovah’s Witness.) Only the last song on the album comes to a final end.
It’s a challenge, though, a messy business: because while any pointing at form must distance
the listener from content, Dylan’s drawing attention to this form, this recording, stresses that the
track has been done ‘live’: which is to make it, by rock’s conventions, more ‘real’. In turn the irony
of this is that, unlike Dylan’s early records, none of Under the Red Sky was done live: Dylan’s vocals
not only include drop-ins and overdubs but these are made as onto one big basic overdub: Dylan was
still re-writing till the last possible moment, so that his vocals were added at the mixing stage of
the album. Dylan challenges every divide here. All the same, the device of coming to a ‘live’ finish on
the last track of an album on which every other song fades out also dramatises the outrageous lastminute
call across another such divide that is, in the lyric, the album’s final end: ‘Cat’s in the Well’
has been entirely a third-person narrative, yet its last line is ‘Goodnight my love, and may the Lord
have mercy on us all.’ That ‘Goodnight my love’ is so personal it leaps
out at you, cutting not only clean through the recording but jumping right out through the song
itself. It is the most inspired, simple leave-taking on any of the albums of the artist who has always
been incomparable at such leave-takings. Stand-outs: ‘Under the Red Sky’ and ‘Handy
Dandy’ (seeDandy’, separate entries), and ‘Cat’s in the Well’."

Best Song:
"Born in Time"
According to Alias

Favorite Lyric:
"If every bone in his body was broken he would never admit it!"