Confessions of a Fanboy

Blonde on Blonde and Pet Sounds turn 41-years old today! How great is that?

Elliott Smith last week, Wilco this week… I was feeling pretty good about the releases for the month of May. In 1966, Blonde on Blonde and Pet Sounds were released. The same day. That is amazing. Blonde being a 2-LP set makes buying both of those albums on the same day an expensive proposition. I absolutely would have done it.

In fact, it would please me to go to the store today and buy them both. It would only be the third copy of Blonde I’ve bought. I bought the original CD pressing and then I bought the SACD hybird remaster because I am one of five people in America with a Super Audio CD player.

I pause this discussion of the amazing day in rock and roll history to bitch about the failure of SACD to take hold. I love SACD. I love the hybrid discs the most. That was the coolest thing ever, and of course it didn’t take.

It’s funny, getting back to the subjects at hand, because I was taking a peek at upcoming releases and trying to figure out how I was going to have enough money to get all the albums set to be released over the next month. In short, unless each of you would like to shower me with generous monetary gifts I am going to have to display frugality and discipline — and I’m just so good at that. Damnation!

It’s not possible for me to decide where Blonde rates among Dylan’s work. On any given day, Blonde, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blood on the Tracks come out on top for me. Freewheelin’ and “Love & Theft” are also brilliant. I suppose it’s enough to say Blonde is a classic album of both its time and of all time.

Pet Sounds is a defining record. So much has been written and said about it (and Blonde, for that matter) that I don’t know what to say. In terms of influence, Pet Sounds is one of the titans. There are a lot of great records but there aren’t many that change the way people record and listen to music. Pet Sounds seems to have done that.

Since I’m not going to be able to buy any more CDs this month in order to be able to afford the ones coming out next week, I’m going to go get myself “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again.” Hell, I live in Huntsville. That’s between Mobile and Memphis. Bob’s talking about me! Or not.

Happy Birthday, Pet Sounds. Happy Birthday, Blonde on Blonde. The best tribute I can make to either of these records is that 41 years from now, these two albums will still be the most famous and important records ever released on May 16.

Filed under: Tags: Bob Dylan, Elliott Smith, Musical Musings and Random Ramblings, Wilco