Expecting Rain

After avoiding the MTV Unplugged album for many years due to its bad reviews I finally decided to give it a listen last week. And what a great recording it is!! For anybody familiar with Bob’s live performances and the way that he rearranges his songs, this is really an excellent concert. The way that he breathes life into old and familiar songs is amazing and shows what a supremely talented artist he really is.

One of the negative reviews that I recall is a quote from the author Michael Gray that the album is ‘the dreariest, most contemptible, phoney, tawdry piece of product ever issued by a great artist’. This I find astonishing. Michael Gray is an author that makes a lot of money writing about Bob Dylan – and with his Encyclopaedia (which I haven’t read) has probably written more words on Dylan than anyone else. His opinion stinks of conceit and self-righteousness, and on his MTV Unplugged opinion alone I doubt that I will ever waste my time reading any of his books.

Notwithstanding the argument that ‘everyone is entitled to their own opinion’, I still suspect that Gray is nothing but a parasite, making money from someone else’s talent. If he was a real fan he would have a more considered and intelligent opinion of his works.

If anyone has read Michael Gray and has a different viewpoint I would be interested to hear it.

Michael Gray is a prick.

This is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

p.s. Unplugged has some good performances. 'Love Minus Zero', 'Desolation Row', 'Dignity' & 'With God On Our Side' would be my cherry picks.

gee benny, does that mean your "mission" to rag about bob's voice is over... hallelujah- there is a god

Always loved that show. x Michael Gray.

Hey, you did another post!

I didn't get THAT as the implication of Bennyboy's remark .......

Michael Gray puts a lot of people off by the length of his books. Despite that fact, there is a lot of amazing scholarship in Song and Dance Man 3, and it would be a pity to dismiss it out of hand, though summoning the time to read it might be beyond many. On the subject of modBob, he takes a point of view not dissimilar to Bennyboy's, and has, as far as I am aware, given up attending concerts because he thinks Bob is past his sell-by date as an artist. He also thinks that he only tries occasionally, and that that is not good enough. Despite that he continues to offer fragrant soirees at his French residence where he deals largely with 'oldBob'.

He speaks a lot more politely than Bennyboy, but each to his own ........

This.

yeah, but i'm still not a titanium member like you... impressive

Don't give up! Follow your heart! etc.

There's a lot of worthwhile research in Michael Gray's books and some thoughtful opinions, but there's also a great deal of hubris - that particular kind of hubris that seems to convince itself that as great an artist as Bob Dylan is, he would be so much greater if he would stop trusting his own instincts and follow the writers' instead. Clinton Heylin is the biggest culprit in this regard but Gray - though a much better writer - is not far behind.

In his defense, though, he does not share Heylin's other glaring fault of refusing to allow that there might be something he doesn't know and attempting to pass his own suppositions off as fact.

If you can get into it, you could be reading much worse stuff. I've read the whole of Song & Dance Man III, the BD Encyclopedia (both versions) as well as his book on Blind Willie McTell (the most entertaining of the three), there are lots of interesting things in there.

Does your team of therapists work shifts?

Agreed. The man himself can be a little less interesting at times .......

^^^^
I wouldn't want to pay for a weekend of talks at his house, no.
But hey, I'll read anything on Bob.

Good to know that it can still change for the worse?

This sounds about right. The parasite charge is hard for any biographer to avoid if he dares to criticize, but Gray giving lectures and charging people to come to his house and talk Dylan surely helps it to stick.

But was Unplugged "product"? Comparing it to the Supper club shows I would conclude that it was. Dylan even said flat out that when he was younger he would have fought the record company to put some more adventurous stuff on there, but "not anymore". Mostly Greatest Hits and not really representing Dylan's show or style at the time, it did contain some nice performances and probably convinced more than one person who'd seen him in 1991-92 that he hadn't lost his mind or sobriety altogether, which I think was part of the point, and I think the album played it's small part in reviving his career.

If anyone wants to know what Michael Gray is worth, let him/her read this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=69328&p=1133145&hilit=michael+gray+paul+williams+bristol#p1133145

Given that the Supper Club shows contain some of Dylan's most helium-squawk wailing, I'll take Unplugged any day of the week.

Unplugged is great... but Completely Unplugged is essential.
http://www.bobsboots.com/CDs/cd-c22.html

It sounds like Michael Gray never really heard Unplugged and just dismisses it because Clapton (and Nirvana) did one first and made a killing off of it. I don't think Dylan's was as successful commercially, but I'm sure Gray relishes this.

And here I thought Gray was of higher intelligence than someone like Clinton Heylin, but I can see I was/am wrong.

Fraid you were... Heylin for me every time.... Even Willentz is worth ten of him.

Song & Dance Man 1 was pretty essential, when it came out in 1971. To that point there was only Scaduto's bio and Toby Thompson's pilgrimage to Hibbing, and Gray was yet to take on his poncy, self-regarding airs and graces.

It's easy to forget how huge Dylan's scarcity/ rarity/ mystery value was back then. Apart from IOW, he'd disappeared. If you were a fan when Song & Dance Man came out, you seized on it. Today, he's pretty much a small industry.

I don't think any of the "professional" Dylan writers come close to Heylin when it comes to sweeping, uninformed opinions dressed up as fact, but Gray does come perilously close at times. He passes off My Fair Lady as "music for teenybop senility", Ray Charles as being balanced nicely between "soul and a bowl of slop" (and he was discussing the Ray Charles of the late 50s/early 60s mind you!) and in a talk I attended made very belittling remarks about Matt Monro, who was as good a ballad singer in the Sinatra model as the UK ever produced (as Sinatra himself concurred). Of course, Gray's not "wrong" in any of these opinions, but that's what they are - opinions - and in none of these cases did he offer anything to back them up. (Gray took me to task once for criticizing these fannish tendencies, but they have got worse over time, not better.) Opinions are only worthwhile when they enlighten, not when they're used as brickbats.

gray is simply splendid

He probably is. Though for some reason back in the 90s he sent me a unreleased demo tape.