Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. 2 [Remaster] - Dylan, Bob (CD 1999)

Like the man himself, the material on this recording still endures, and still tells us new things about the world and about ourselves. This was the first Dylan album I ever owned, and one of the first records I ever bought with my own money. I am not sure why I popped for this one instead of "Greatest Hits-- Volume 1", which featured the more familiar songs, but I am glad I did.

Of course, these aren't "hits" in any conventional way. I doubt that most were ever singles, and probably most didn't get a great deal of air play, even back then, when FM radio was still a creative medium. In fact, a lot of these songs had never been released commercially, and even some of the ones that might have surfaced on bootleg records appeared here in forms that would have been unfamiliar. Some of these were songs I knew about: "Maggie's Farm", "Lay Lady Lay", "Hard Rain", "All Along the Watchtower". All prime Dylan, to be sure, but the stuff that really grabbed me were some of the others. "Tomorrow Is A Long Time", sung in an intimate, live setting that sounds like you are overhearing something being sung in the next room. "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You"-- one of the sexist things this artist ever sang. There are a lot of great versions of "I Shall Be Released", but this is the one that created the template of this song in my mind.

I think a lot of us forgot about Dylan for a long time-- the '80's and almost all of the '90's were not a time when he was doing much that spoke to me, anyway, but this album reminds us of why he was so important when music mattered, and why he is still so important today. You can't quote these songs-- they have passed into the language, they are part of our cultural DNA. This is not some sort of slapdash pastiche of "hits" the way we understand such albums-- it is, like the best of Dylan's work always is, a carefully thought out journey. Or maybe, better, a journey for the listener, and the reminiscence of a journey for the artist. Robert Christgau has pointed out that the album movers from "Watching The River Flow" to "Down In The Flood" (both great songs, by the way). Believe it, it means something.

Let me put it this way: even if you have every side the man put out up to the time this was released, and "Biograph", and "Bootleg, Vol.1-3" you should still have this set, cause you want to have these songs, in these versions, in this sequence.