The Bob Dylan CD Review

The Essential Bob Dylan (2000)

 
Disc One
  1. Blowin' in the Wind
  2. Don't Think Twice, It's All Right
  3. The Times They Are A-Changin'
  4. It Ain't Me Babe
  5. Maggie's Farm
  6. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
  7. Mr. Tambourine Man
  8. Subterranean Homesick Blues
  9. Like a Rolling Stone
  10.Positively 4th Street
  11.Just Like A Woman
  12.Rainy Day Women #12 & 35
  13.All Along the Watchtower
  14.Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)
  15.I'll Be Your Baby Tonight
  
Disc Two
  1. Lay Lady Lay
  2. If Not For You
  3. I Shall Be Released
  4. You Ain't Goin' Nowhere
  5. Knockin' on Heaven's Door
  6. Forever Young
  7. Tangled Up in Blue
  8. Shelter From the Storm
  9. Hurricane
  10.Gotta Serve Somebody
  11.Jokerman
  12.Silvio
  13.Everything is Broken
  14.Not Dark Yet
  15.Things Have Changed

There are compilations that serve as career summaries, and then there are those that attempt to act as definitive distillations—grand gestures in curation, designed for the age of the CD changer and the casual convert. The Essential Bob Dylan, released in 2000, clearly aimed for the latter. Two discs, spanning four decades, with an eye toward balance, accessibility, and, one suspects, shelf appeal. And while it succeeds in offering a respectable cross-section of Dylan’s sprawling catalogue, it inevitably buckles under the weight of what it omits.

The problem isn’t what’s here—it’s what isn’t. The first disc is a triumph of selection, tracing Dylan’s evolution from folk provocateur to electric alchemist with a confident sense of momentum. The canonical touchstones are all present: Blowin’ in the Wind, The Times They Are A-Changin’, Like a Rolling Stone, and Tangled Up in Blue—each song serving as both historical artifact and enduring statement. The sequencing flows as if it were an original album in its own right, a rare feat for any retrospective.

The second disc, however, tells a different story—less of continuity than of collapse and compromise. By the halfway mark, we are already past Dylan’s mid-’70s peak, and faced with the challenge every Dylan compilation must wrestle with: how to represent the long, uneven terrain of the late years. Here, the selections thin out. The 1980s and 1990s, while occasionally punctuated by moments of brilliance, are largely passed over, save for a few token entries. There is a sense that the compilers simply ran out of time, space, or perhaps conviction.

The inclusion of Things Have Changed, a then-recent addition to Dylan’s canon (written for the film Wonder Boys), is a curious but not unwelcome gesture. The song, all weary menace and sardonic wisdom, stands as one of his better latter-day efforts. Whether it sits comfortably among the towering early works is another matter—but it does hint at the defiant creative energy Dylan would carry into the new millennium, long after many of his peers had faded into pastiche.

In the end, The Essential Bob Dylan is exactly what it claims to be—essential, but incomplete. It offers a superb primer for the uninitiated, a reminder for the lapsed, and a pleasant listen for the devoted. But for a figure as restless, as prolific, and as maddeningly inconsistent as Dylan, two discs simply can’t carry the full weight. The deeper cuts, the outliers, the songs that didn’t chart but changed lives—those lie beyond this scope.

This is Dylan’s reflection in the glass. To hear his voice, you’ll still need to go further.

Go back to the main page
Go To Next Review