Concerning the life of the deceased gangster Joey Gallo, critics lambasted Dylan for a one-sided portrait of the man that was apparently written in one night (almost entirely by writing partner Jacques Levy, according to Dylan) and omitted the (many) negative aspects of Gallo’s character. The other character-based track, the 11-minute ‘Joey’, is rather more cumbersome, and split opinion at the time. The scraped strings blow like the proverbial storm throughout the track, reflecting Dylan’s righteous ire at all-white juries and biased police investigations, making for one of his most memorable songs ever. Opener ‘Hurricane’, a 9-minute electrified protest song about Rubin Carter, the black middleweight boxer wrongfully convicted of a triple homicide in 1967 and only released from prison in 1985. Coupled with Scarlet Rivera’s violin that pierces through the mix, no other LP in Dylan’s vast and varied back catalogue sounds like Desire. As such, it’s a divided work, half personal and half cryptic, but that duality nevertheless gives it a distinctive character. Although it’s a return to the topic-based songwriting that had defined most of his ‘70s work, based around the twin epics ‘Hurricane’ and ‘Joey’, the figure of his estranged wife Sara undoubtedly looms large, meaning that it serves as a kind of thematic coda to Blood On The Tracks. Recorded with the Rolling Thunder Revue, the live band that Dylan had performed with on the road to promote his previous record throughout 1975, Desire is most definitely an odd beast. While neither as special nor as iconic as …Tracks, Desire is as distinctive and musically varied as anything else he’s made in his career, even during his golden age, and one of the few occasions he dropped his protective shield of cryptic songwriting and, to the extent that Dylan ever did so, bared his soul. 1975’s Blood On The Tracksis regarded by more than a few Dylan fans as his very best album, but that record’s reputation often overshadows that of its successor.

Though Bob Dylan’s reputation and power is inextricably bound up with the 1960s, the middle of the next decade saw him briefly recapture his peak form with back-to-back classics.

Bob dylan desire