Artist	Song
Bob Dylan & The Heartbreakers [Knocked Out Loaded, 1986]	Got My Mind Made Up (Bob Dylan, Tom Petty) 2:56
Bob Dylan [Down in the Groove, 1988]	Silvio (Bob Dylan, Robert Hunter) 3:06
Bob Dylan [Hard To Find bootleg = vinyl single, 1986 = Hearts Of Fire soundtrack, 1987]	The Usual (John Hiatt) 3:34
Bob Dylan [Knocked Out Loaded, 1986]	Brownsville Girl (Bob Dylan, Sam Shepard) 11:03
Bob Dylan & The Grateful Dead [Grateful Dead: Postcards of the Hanging compilation, 2002, recorded 1987]	Man Of Peace (Bob Dylan) 4:05
Bob Dylan [Down in the Groove, 1988]	Ugliest Girl In The World (Bob Dylan, Robert Hunter) 3:33
Bob Dylan [Knocked Out Loaded, 1986]	They Killed Him (Kris Kristofferson) 4:04
Bob Dylan [Down in the Groove, 1988]	Ninety Miles An Hour (Down a Dead End Street) (Don Robertson, Hal Blair) 2:56
Bob Dylan [Down in the Groove, 1988]	Had A Dream About You, Baby (Bob Dylan) 2:54
Bob Dylan & The Heartbreakers [Hard To Find bootleg = vinyl single, 1986]	Band Of The Hand (Bob Dylan, Tom Petty) 4:34

Comment:

The period 1986-1988 was Dylan's Hell Time. Two studio albums, 1986's Knocked Out Loaded and 1988's Down in the Groove, plus the 1987 tour that gave us the live Dylan and the Dead: three albums that are known mainly for being the most awful albums in the man's otherwise glorious career. As much as I'm in favor of depressed-era Dylan reclamation, I can't really myself find much to recommend about tracks like Loaded's "You Wanna Ramble" or Groove's "When Did You Leave Heaven?". The two studio albums were scattershot affairs collected from years of recording sessions, mostly of cowrites and covers (just look at the author list above!). Ultimately, it barely seemed to matter what made it to the albums, and what didn't.Well, when I finally bought Knocked Out Loaded and Down in the Groove last week, after four years of holding out, they seemed like two sides of the same coin: the tricksy, ambitious Loaded and the casual, rootsy Groove. So I decided to take a page from all those White Album and Beatles breakup distillations out there on AOTM, and combine them into this: my version of what Dylan's successor to 1985's Empire Burlesque, maybe, should have been.(Here's the joke: I even structured it like a vinyl record: side 1 is tracks 1-4, side 2 is tracks 5-10. The overall effect reminds me somewhat of Fairport Convention's Unhalfbricking, three of whose eight songs were, of course, Dylan covers).There are actually a couple other worthy songs on the two albums that I considered including (like "Under Your Spell" and "Let's Stick Together"), but what I decided to go for here was to make the strongest statement possible out of Dylan's three-year ramblings in the wilderness, slimming the resultant length down to a trim-though-nowise-lean 42:43. To that end, I added a couple of non-album singles, "Band Of The Hand" and "The Usual" (which was actually slated for inclusion on Down in the Groove at one point) and a Dead-juiced version of a song from 1983's masterwork Infidels, which should fit in with these other songs, I'd say, better than anything from the actual Dylan and the Dead album (none of whose songs' original versions postdate 1979, another Bob epoch entirely).The thing is, also, Dylan still had plenty of juice to turn on in 1986-88. "Got My Mind Made Up", with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, is raucous and tight with that real band sound Dylan barely ever gets; "They Killed Him" combines folksy wisdom with utterly complicated production and comes out a winner; and "Silvio" turns existential longing groovy and catchy as hell-get-out. The two major statements here, though, are the songs I've used as side-closers: "Brownsville Girl", the eleven-minute cowrite with playwright Sam Shepard, has, with its inclusion on the recent, fan-selected Dylan boxset (along with "Silvio"), finally, I'd say, argued its way into its deserved standing as a classic, but there are probably plenty of Dylan fanatics who've never even heard "Band Of The Hand".Actually, the first time I heard "Band Of The Hand", I must admit I suffered a complex of feelings basically tantamount to "Wait... am I allowed to like this?" Certainly, lines like "the system's just too damn corrupt" and "rich dope dealers who should be put in their graves", not to mention a mass vocal attack of "It's hell time, man!" coming in at every chorus, seem more than a little disingenuous coming from the former king of sly guffaws and understated protest songs; but though that's probably enough to prevent "Band Of The Hand" from cracking any of the next ten Best of Bob compilations the man puts out, it can't hide the fact that it's actually a fantastic song. And it even features a line that plenty of the power-players of today would surely be wise to take to heart: "Wealth is a filthy rag / So erotic, so unpatriotic / So wrapped up in the American flag!"

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