Street Legal [Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered]

Bob Dylan | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (June 1, 1999)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered
• Label: Sony
• ASIN: B00000J7SO
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Audio Cassette  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (72 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #312,489 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. Changing of the Guards

2. New Pony

3. No Time to Think

4. Baby Stop Crying

5. Is Your Love in Vain?

6. Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)

7. True Love Tends to Forget

8. We Better Talk This Over

9. Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Forget what you've heard about this album, May 21, 2001

By 

James J. Lundy Jr. (Charleston, SC United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Street Legal (Audio CD)

I've been avoiding buying "Street Legal" for years because everything I have ever read about it focuses on its terribly muddy sound. That may well have been true (I never heard the original release) but I recently purchased this remastered version and the sound is great! Beyond that, the songs are truly among Dylan's most melodic best and sung with incredible fervor. If you are a Dylan fan you've heard this from countless people: "I'm sure Dylan is a good song writer but he just can't sing!" Ok, we Dylan fans know that's not true but next time it happens just pull out "Street Legal" to prove that he can too sing by anyone's standards. Many of these songs are a tour-de-force of Dylan's absolutely unique and ingenious way of phrasing. He rhymes lines with the middle of some words, cramming the rest of the line into a space only he could find within the beat. The backing on this album is also exceptional. It's a big band with horns and backup singers in the tradition of Joe Cocker tunes like "Feeling Alright." They play with incredible intensity. The lyrics are sometimes bewildering. The songs are seldom linear stories but more like collections of imagery. This works for me because you always hear something new depending on the mood you're in. There's also a lot of psydo-religious imagery packed in there. I wonder why this isn't considered the first of his "born again" phase after hearing it. It doesn't get preachy, though, more like a level of mysticism, and unfocused at that. To summarize, I love this CD and it's been living in my CD player for weeks now.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Underrated, November 29, 2001

By 

Bill R. Moore (New York, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Street Legal (Audio CD)

Far from being Bob Dylan's best album, but it is interesting for several reasons, and sort of a rarity in his catalog. A transition album in one sense, Street Legal came on the heels of Desire and the Rolling Thunder Revue, this is the one and only studio album on which Dylan employs a big, slick backing band (complete with Steve Douglas's saxophone and several female backing vocalists.) It is also, in respect, a sort of pre-requisite to his subsequent "born again" phase and his "Christian trilogy" of albums, from the subject matter on certain songs to individual quotes ("I'm exiled, but you can't convert me"), to song titles (Changing of The Guards), right down to the name of the album itself. And also, while Blood On The Tracks is commonly known as Dylan's "divorce album" (along with the closing track, Sara, on Desire), Street Legal, in a way, deals more with it in actuality; as, in fact, the majority of the songs (titles and all) deal with a "coming down to earth" view of love and romantic disillusionment. Standout tracks include the ackwnoledged master tracks, Changing of The Guards and Senor (Tales of Yankee Power), and another major track in my mind is the vastly underrated No Time To Think. This is one of Dylan's most amazingly constructed songs - chock full of highly dense verses with blistering internal rhyme schemes - as well as having a fantastic backing. Is Your Love In Vain?, True Love Tends To Forget, and the frenetic closing song, Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat) are notable songs as well. Some people complain that this album's musical backing, atmosphere, and production are too suffocating and glossy (especially when compared, of course, to earlier Dylan material), but I find it has its own charms. No other album in the Dylan catalog sounds this way - it builds on the already big sound of the Desire album - and, while such overbearing theatrics make it hard to focus on the lyrics at times, it also puts them in a special context. The female backing vocalists manage to avoid sounding corny most of the time and actually sweeten some of the songs with excellent vocal harmonies; whereas Dylan himself turns in some great vocal performances himself (I'd actually say this is one of his best albums singing wise; Love In Vain and True Love are both very well done), and the horns lend a nice air to several tracks. As for the lyrics, they are some of the most dense that Dylan has ever written (one chorus begins, "I was down in the reeds without any oxygen..."); featuring unprecedented amounts of internal rhyming and truly innovative and clever rhyme schemes on such songs as Senor. These techniques may seem more showy than emotionally true at times, but they just add to the tone of excess that already runs through the album. While I certainly don't reccommend this as one of your first Dylan albums, I think you should definately get it if you are a fan - it has several classics and he's not done anything like it since.

24 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Forgotten Classic, May 14, 2000

By 

Gianmarco Manzione (Tampa, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Street Legal (Audio CD)

Recorded at the tail end of his second creative wind (the mid 70's), "Street Legal" is one of those great albums obscured under the ruble of a forty year career. The epic "Changing of the Guards" launches Dylan into a new musical direction with background singers and sprightly horns, not to mention that it is truly one of Dylan's greatest songs. As if to counterbalance his new form with a reminder of his mid 60's rock albums, "New pony" offers a shamelessly raw rock 'N roll sound that hadn't appeared on any Dylan record in the 70's and requires that listeners play it as loud as possible.

However, three consecutive dull tracks ensue, and the album's momentum is slowed considerably. "Baby Stop Crying," includes a very good vocal performance by Dylan and a good chorus, but it takes the new sound of "Changing of the Guards" to an extreme, and the result is a less accessible sound, particularly for Bob Dylan. "Is Your Love in Vain" and "No Time to Think" follow the bland model of "Stop Crying."

Fortunately, the album makes a triumphant come back with yet another of Bob Dylan's most legendary songs, "Senor." With its "Highway 61 revisited" style guitar licks, haunting atmosphere and Dylan's brooding voice, "Senor" is as dark as anything on "Time out of Mind." The remastering job really shines on this track, as well. The drums beg for attention and the entire band sounds very crisp.

The brilliant performances do not end there, as the rollicking "We Better Talk This Over" again offers mid 60's style guitar rhythms and is one of those rare Dylan performances that is bound to get your body moving.

"Street Legal" joins classic albums like "Oh Mercy" or "Shot of Love" as the album to get if you're sick and tired of the over-played hits of Dylan's career. Some of the songs on "Street legal" are so brilliant that Dylan fans who ignore the album are doing themselves an egregious injustice. There is no way that this album could entirely disappoint any Dylan fan.