Rediscovering a Lost Gem
Street Legal
“Sixteen years…Sixteen years!”
So begins one of the great Dylan albums and also one of the lost gems in his catalogue. Dylan sings the first “sixteen years” and then backing singers repeat the phrase. It’s as if Dylan is amazed his career has lasted so long and the background singers are validating his longevity.
This was 1978. It was the time just before rock hit its mid-life crisis that was the 1980s. Rock’s elite were mostly in their mid to late thirties and back then, it seemed incredible that they were still going – especially considering those who had fallen along the way.
Hindsight shows us that 1978 was a bit of an odd year. The great years of rock and pop had come to an end around 1976, but music was still in some sort of episodic epilogue. Punk had hit and suddenly the rock order had become the old order.
The year produced some great music that got lost in the brave new world of punk and its illegitimate new wave children. Wings’ London Town was a minor classic, now almost forgotten; and Dylan’s Street Legal sold well, but then disappeared from the consciousness faster than a crowd from one of the singer’s later Christian concerts.
The album inherited the large band from the Rolling Thunder Tour and this produced a different sound from the seminal Blood on the Tracks and the following year’s Desire.
Changing of the Guard is a joyous life-affirming opener with Dylan’s voice riding over the background singers like a rusting boat on the Saragossa Sea: slightly incongruous, but wonderful to behold.
New Pony is tight in the way only a touring band can sound. Its blues licks ring out of the speakers with lazy insistence.
No Time to Think probably makes the best use of the extra singers in what is a typically obtuse Dylan tale.
Is Your Love In Vain? is arguably the album’s stand-out track and one that deserves to rank with Dylan’s mature masterpieces. “Do you love me, or are you just extending good will?” Dylan sings, with the confidence of a man who knows he’s just added another classic to his cannon, combined with the vulnerability he introduced on Blood on the Tracks. Lovely, sad and despairing, it’s a high watermark for the album and for Dylan.
Senor is the album’s Joey – you either love these long narratives or you take the opportunity to get another beer from the fridge and check on the cricket scores. For my money, you would be worse off for ignoring its smouldering charms.
The closer, Where Are You Tonight uses railway imagery and signals the lyrical conceits of 1979’s Slow Train Coming – the album that marked Dylan’s conversion to Christianity and a decade-long artistic slump.
Street Legal is an album that is definitely ripe for reappraisal. It would not be until 1997’s Time Out of Mind that Dylan would make a better album. The new SACD version sounds gorgeous and is a worthwhile addition to anyone’s collection.
The album was lost in the aftershock of the Christian trilogy and the truly horrible Empire Burlesque. It’s time it reclaimed its place as one of Dylan’s best – and most enjoyable albums.
