vgonis, I should start by saying that Under The Red Sky is not one of my favourite Dylan albums. I am prepared to accept that there is nothing wrong with reworking the themes, phrases and thrust of nursery rhymes and I am prepared to accept that Dylan is doing so in an allegorical way rather than a literal way. Not my thing but all well and good. That doesn't mean I have to like the songs, though. "Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee", for example, has never resonated with me and "Wiggle Wiggle" may be fun in concert but that's just about all. The album is dedicated to "Gabby Goo Goo", who is Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan, a daughter born in 1986. This, perhaps, explains alll the nursery rhyme elements to the album.
Some of the songs do lift somewhat above those ("Unbelievable", Handy Dandy" and even "Cat's In The Well" came across well to me) but it is an unsettling album (which is not bad in itself) but one that, overall, I've never really warmed to. Take a line like "None of them doing nothing that your mama wouldn't disapprove" (from "10,000 Men"); all those negatives (double, triple and quadruple negatives) seem to amount to: "All of them doing something of which your mother would approve". Even now, I'm not sure about that. Maybe I will come to like, and even enjoy, the album some day.
After "Oh Mercy", I found it a disappointment. I don't think that the "star" musicians on the album actually help very much. There's a whole bunch of them: Slash, Waddy Wachtel, David Crosby, Bruce Hornsby, Robben Ford, Stevie Ray Vaughan, his brother, Elton John, David Lindley and George Harrison to name some. I'm not saying they played badly but it was more like, "Let's pile a lot of well-known musicians into the mix and surely we'll get something good out of it". It is interesting to compare the "Oh Mercy" out-take version of "Born In Time" with the version on "Under The Red Sky". I prefer the earlier version, though "God Knows" on "Under The Red Sky", also a left-over from "Oh Mercy", is pretty strong in the later version.
All of that is to indicate that, star producer or not, Don Was didn't add much to the album, in my opinion, other than a few star names. But, to be clear about my position, I have no quibble about Dylan recording it or releasing it. I do wonder what the early demos of the songs might have been like (assuming there were early demos). Whatever Dylan felt about the album and whether or not he lost his song-writing mojo, he didn't release an album of new songs for another seven years.
In terms of breaking new ground, I wasn't really suggesting something "avant-garde" each time, merely that a writer and perfomer has to move forward and cannot allow himself or herself to be bogged down in the past or to be trapped by the past. There will usually be something of the past in whatever is produced currently ("nothing comes of nothing", they say) but, when the past becomes a trap from which one cannot escape, then artistic development is stifled. Dylan, in recent years, has to some extent returned to a past that predates his own appearance on the scene. In that sense, it is new for him. It doesn't have to be "avant garde", as I say. And, in a similar way, Mark has returned to his own roots and then embellished and developed them in his own way (and in, what one might describe as, a contemporary manner). That's all.
