Really good music here

Ever since I heard this album on vynil, I realized that musicians don't have to be good singers. Hey, I was raised on guys like the Beatles and Stevie Wonder. While Mr. Dylan's voice is...imperfect, all I really care about is that he writes the best songs I've ever heard. Sure, the Beatles did, but not really until Rubber Soul. And Steely Dan, though creative and the greatest musical group of all time, simply tries harder to be smart-alecs than to write good songs. (But they do. If you've never heard of them, go buy one of their CD's. Great Band)



But Bob Dylan blew me away. "Watching the River Flow", for instance, is an interesting take on the traditional blues song. And "Don't Think Twice..." and "Lay Lady Lay" are both well-crafted songs.



But the "grabber" song, the song that made me truly appreciate Mr. D, was none other than classic "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again", a 7+ minute ballad that stands as one of the crowning achievments of 60's songwriting. To paraphrase Dylan himself, "Visions of being stuck in Mobile shot through my head and made me see stars."



"Mobile" is, undoubtabley, the best song on the album. It's funny, but not overly. It's long, but never gets old--even after me having heard it many times. Most importantly, you can imagine it perfectly. Being an author-in-training, I love descriptive songs.



Second to "Mobile" is "Maggie's Farm", a song that even my anti-Dylan little brother admires. But he's just stuck on those good singers. In case you've never heard it (If that's true, you're beyond any help I can give you), it's about a worker (slave?) on a farm populated by incomptent imbeceles.



The third-best song is "It's a Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall", the most intense song I have ever heard--counting "Idiot Wind". It's a rant against the Vietnam war and society's ills, stretches for seven minutes, and scares the spit outta me.



I've been trying to find this on CD, but it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. It's worse. It's like trying to find a specific piece of hay in a haystack. Either everybody bought one, or the record retaillers have no good taste.



I'd recommend this to anybody--unless you like hip-hop, heavy metal, techno, or the mindlessness that they call rock these days. And if you do, you're beyond all help I can give you.



Oh, by the way, I am really a kid.

Buy this, with volume I.

The Following Are Nineteen Good Reasons to Buy Greatest Hits, Volume II

1. Watching the River Flow

2. Don't Think Twice, It's All Right

3. Lay, Lady, Lay

4. Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again

5. All I Really Wanna Do

6. My Back Pages

7. Maggie's Farm

8. Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You

9. She Belongs to Me

10. All Along the Watch Tower

11. Quinn, the Eskimo (the Mighty Quinn)

12. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues

13. A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall

14. If Not For You

15. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

16. When I Paint My Masterpiece

17. I Shall Be Released

18. You Ain't Goin' Nowhere

19. Down With the Flood

And if you like those other two songs, it makes it an even better buy, doesn't it?

A magnificent compilation

The 21 tracks on this 1971 release are "hits" only in the loosest sense of the word. 1966's "Greatest Hits" was excactly that, Dylan's greatest hits, but this is much more - and in a way even better.



"Greatest Hits, vol. II" compiles genuine hit singles, rarities and album tracks, making this double album one of the strongest releases in the Dylan catalogue and one of the best compilations ever on any artist.

It opens with the non-album track "Watching The River Flow", a tough rocker which has been covered by Joe Cocker and several others, and it's this mixture of singles and non-singles, standards and rarities, that makes this such a fabulous album. It displays the incredible breadth and depth of Dylan's talent much better than a literal hits compilation could have done.



Other highlights include "Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again" (one of the longer titles in popular music!), a live version of another non-LP track, "When I Paint My Masterpiece", the lovely country-rock of "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight", and the classic "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue".

But as I said, they're really all highlights. "My Back Pages", "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere", "I Shall Be Released", "If Not For You", "Lay, Lady, Lay", "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You", "The Mighty Quinn"....you get the picture. And most of these songs are regular band-backed rock songs, which should make them more immediately accessible to a "modern" audience than Dylan's earliest, sometimes rather harsh folk songs.



All in all, this is a tremendous collection of music for fans and casual listeners alike, and it should not be missed. "Greatest Hits, vol. II" features some of the very best songs recorded by popular music's greatest and most versatile talent, and coupled with "Greatest Hits vol. I" it blows the recent "Essential Bob Dylan" out of the water.

Just don't forget to buy "Blood On The Tracks" as well...