Bob Dylan’s eccentric opacity is nearly as famous as his genre-defining songwriting. So, it only makes sense that, upon discovering the glow of the public spotlight was becoming uncomfortably warm, Dylan decided to do what any regretful superstar would do: make something so bad that his fans had no choice but to abandon him. A sort of professional self-destruct button, so to speak.
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Such was the project Dylan embarked on in 1970. He had just finished shaping the sound of the 1960s with his pioneering sociopolitical folk rock, and the masses had crowned him their de facto cultural leader. Meanwhile, Dylan was trying to recover from a harrowing motorcycle accident, raise his family, and redistribute the massive weight of his celebrity following hit albums like Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, and Nashville Skyline. Dylan’s follow-up to these major wins was Self-Portrait, a double album that many fans and critics deemed his worst.
Which is good, technically, considering that’s what Dylan was going for.
Why Bob Dylan Made a Purposefully Bad Album With ‘Self Portrait’
From his earliest days as a sullen Greenwich Village folk scene regular, Bob Dylan made it clear that he had no intention of taking the press seriously—or allowing them to do the same. He often pushed back on reporters’ questions with purposefully obtuse answers, made up zany stories about his life that weren’t true, and told other white lies and fibs to keep distance between his true self and the prying public eye. By the time 1969 rolled around, the harassment Dylan and his young family faced made him resent his celebrity. So, he decided to try to push himself off his own pedestal.
“I said, ‘Well, f*** it,’” Dylan told Rolling Stone in 1984. “I wish these people would just forget about me; I wanna do something they can’t possibly like, they can’t relate to. They’ll see it, and they’ll listen, and they’ll say, ‘Well, let’s go on to the next person. He ain’t sayin’ it no more. He ain’t givin’ us what we want, you know?’ They’ll go on to somebody else. But the whole idea backfired because the album went out there, and the people said, ‘This ain’t what we want,’ and they got more resentful.”
As Controversial As It Was, the Album Did Little to Slow His Career
It’s no wonder that some people were upset over Bob Dylan’s flippant disregard for the position in which they had placed him. In many ways, it wasn’t much unlike the backlash to his decision to go electric at the Newport Folk Festival several years earlier. People idolized Dylan in such a way that when he strayed from the figure they painted him to be in their minds, they reacted in anger. How could someone who defined an entire generation with “Like a Rolling Stone” be the same person to release a double album full of live recordings and scrap material he described as a “joke?”
But such is his way. The second you start to figure him out, he makes sure you don’t. When explaining why he chose to make his purposefully bad release a double album, Dylan said, “It wouldn’t have held up as a single album. Then it really would’ve been bad. I mean, if you’re gonna put a lot of crap on it, you might as well load it up.”
In the grand scheme of Dylan’s career, Self Portrait was more of a blip than a true blunder. The album still peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard 200, no doubt bolstered by the name recognition and starpower that Dylan had begun to resent so deeply. And while fans might lovingly hate the album today, it certainly didn’t mark the end of his career. Five years later, he would score a chart-topping success with Blood on the Tracks, pushing him further into the spotlight, no matter how Dylan felt about it.
Photos by Brad Elterman/FilmMagic
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