Bob Dylan - Desire: The Album Review

A portal into explorers’ wildest fantasies.

Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica, some piano, co-writer with Jacques Levy

Scarlet Rivera: fiddle

Rob Stoner: bass

Howie Wyeth: piano, drums

Sheena Seidenberg: various percussion (finger cymbals, tambourine)

Emmylou Harris: backing vocals

Ronee Blakely and Steve Soles: chorus on “Hurricane”

Luther Rix: congas

Dominic Cortese: accordion, mandolin

Vinnie Bell: bouzouki

Mike Lawrence: trumpet on “Romance in Durango”

Eric Clapton: guitar on “Romance in Durango”

Produced by Don Devito

Author’s Note: This post corresponds to the Desire/Rolling Thunder Revue episode of Vinyl Monday, originally posted 9/23/2024. Save for audio/editing jokes that cannot be included in a text format, this is a faithful adaptation of the review chapter. To watch the full episode, scroll to the bottom of this post or visit my YouTube channel here.

In keeping with the album at hand, I’ll start this one off by telling a little story.

Once upon a time in a wonderland called New York, Bob Dylan is boozing it up at the Bitter End hours after closing. He’s found himself here amidst equal highs and lows in his life. His stadium tour with The Band last year was a smash success, and he’s enjoying his first commercial success in years with Blood On The Tracks; rubbing shoulders with the likes of the Eagles and Elton John at the top of the charts. But he’s wound up back in Greenwich because his sad-eyed lady, Sara Dylan, was not about the rock-and-roll life. She never was. She was cursed with the simple desire to be a wife and mother. So they separated for a time; she moved to Malibu while Dylan fled first to the south of France, then his old stomping ground. He’d spent a decade in self-imposed isolation at Woodstock. He’d probably say something like he was “trying to find the Grail” or something.

Anyway, the cops show up at the Bitter End to kick everyone out.

Dylan, plus Ian Hunter, 19-year-old violinist David Mansfield, and manager Faris Bouhafa continue to Rocky’s Venus Club.

Now picture this. It’s 6:00 in the goddamn morning, poor Faris just wants to go home. But skinny little Dylan, drunk as a skunk, grabs Faris and starts ranting about a bus tour around the Northeast, with no promotion at all, and he doesn’t want any agents involved. “Nobody’s gonna make money off this thing or have any control over us. I want you and Don (Devito) to handle everything.”

“Somewhere during the last couple shots of tequila, Bob Dylan had gone off the deep end.”

(Bob Spitz, Dylan: A Biography [1989])

Faris writes it off as classic Drunk Dylan Behavior. But to his horror, Bob turns up the next day stone-cold sober, asking about this tour. He wants Joan Baez, Ramblin Jack Elliott, Scarlet Rivera, Roger McGuinn, and Patti Smith on the bill. But Patti says no, as does...The Boss?? The prince of New Jersey said no for the same reason the godmother of punk did; one of the rules of the would-be Rolling Thunder Revue was that everyone used the same band. Patti and Bruce were very loyal to their respective groups.

Bob also wanted it to be a traveling carnival with a circus tent? This is sounding like nobody knowing what Get Back was supposed to be until the week before!

Faris is having a hell of a time trying to put this thing together. He just can’t convince execs that yes, Bob is serious about this. But then, as if by divine timing, Faris bumps into an old friend of Dylan’s: Bob Neuwirth.He’s added to the bill, as is young singer Ronnee Blakely after bassist Rob Stoner sees her at the Bitter End. It’s unclear if Phil Ochs was seriously considered or if he deluded himself into thinking he was. Phil went off the deep end in 1975, it’s quite sad really.

The final band lineup consisted of Scarlet Rivera (Dylan found her by, I shit you not, pulling over to hit on her as she walked to rehearsal,) Rob, and drummer Howie Wyeth, plus Steven Soles, David Mansfield, Luther Rix, and...MICK RONSON OF THE SPIDERS FROM MARS? Yeah! He agreed to go because he was on a bit of a career slump at the time. Not even sky-high billboards in Times Square could launch his solo career.

Joni Mitchell loved her guest spot in Connecticut so much she joined the rest of tour and wrote “Coyote” about it. Dylan donned clown makeup and sang with Joan for the first time in 11 years. Allen Ginsberg was reduced to luggage boy after tour manager Barry Imhoff severely underestimated the show’s run time and cut his set altogether. The whole time, Dylan’s trying to make this movie? I don’t know man. It was the Rolling Thunder Revue, and it was the stuff of rock-and-roll legend.

But before there was Rolling Thunder, there was its mother-twin, Desire.

Going in: I rank Desire higher than most Dylan fans. I know I do. My first exposure to Desire was through Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder film. I was in the height of my Dylan phase when it came out, so it was easy to get wrapped up in the magic and mystery of it all. Though RT was long gone by the time I saw Dylan that November, the magic remained.

There’s an inherent magic in Desire; a certain mysticism that came with the communal atmosphere. This is themost collaborative Dylan record. It’s spontaneous to the bone, flubs and all. Note Ronnee Blakeleyaccidentally singing “remember you saw you saw the getaway car” when the line is “remember you said you saw the getaway car?” On Hurricane. And Emmylou mixing up the first “one more cup of coffee for the road” with “one more cup of coffee fore I go.” Dylan hadn’t opened up his creative process like this before, and he hasn’t done so since. This alone makes Desire a singular, ethereal experience.

What is desire?

Desire is a strong wanting you feel in your soul. A wanting or wishing that can drive you to do some truly insane things. See Eric Clapton’s desire for his best friend’s wife, that which drove him to making an entire album for her.

What did Bob Dylan desire in 1975? Adventure. Like Odysseus, Treasure Island’s Captain, and Robinson Crusoe embarked on. The adventure of myth. Exoticism permeates Desire: the congas on Hurricane, finger cymbals on “One More Cup of Coffee,” Dylan’s best attempts at Spanish and French. And of course, Scarlet Rivera’s fiddle. She was the sorceress of RT; the tarot-card-reading, fortune-telling, dark-haired, racially-ambiguous lady we see over and over again in 19th century paintings by Jean-Leon Gerome, Eugene Delacroix, and Ingres. A man’s fantasy vision of the Other.

Pictured: Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, La Grande Odalisque (oil on canvas, 1814)

Pictured: John Singer Sargent, Fumee d'Ambregris (oil on canvas, 1880)

In a lot of ways, Scarlet IS Desire. Her contributions are so much of what sets this record apart from others in Dylan’s classic period.

Rock stars were the American pop culture outlaws when Dylan was growing up. See Elvis the Pelvis wiggling himself into the fabric of our nation with “Jailhouse Rock,” or Dylan’s hero Little Richard whooping it up on “Tutti Frutti” awwwwrrrrrudy. Desire romanticizes the outlaw figure, from the Bonnie and Clyde characters of “Romance In Durango,” the “good mobster” trope seen in “Joey,” and, of course, “Hurricane”: Dylan’s crusade to vindicate middleweight boxer Rubin Carter after he was wrongfully convicted of a triple-murder in a New Jersey restaurant.

Hurricane is regarded among Dylan’s finest storytelling. This is because he frames the Hurricane’s story like a scripted drama playing out before the listener’s eyes; where Rubin is the only man among actors. Everyone in Dylan’s story is already aware of Rubin’s fate but him. It even reads like a movie script: “Pistol shots ring out in the barroom night. Enter Patty Valentine from the upper hall. She sees the bartender in a pool of blood, cries out ‘my god, they’ve killed them all!’”

Then the Greek chorus title card: “here comes the story of the Hurricane” Movie imagery makes sense, given Dylan’s futile efforts to make Renaldo and Clara. Dylan introduces every character with intent: Patty Valentine as his ingenue, shady Alfred Bello “moving around mysteriously.” Dylan paints his hero Rubin out to be the meek, unassuming David in this Goliath story. “He could take a man out with just one punch, but he didn’t like talking about it all that much.”

I’ll be honest. Given all the inconsistencies from the original investigation, trial, and retrial, I’m not sure whether or not Rubin Carter did it. I don’t think we’ll ever know who did. There’s just as much evidence pointing to Rubin as there is evidence exonerating him, and whatever truth has been clouded byinconsistency and the apparent plot to frame Rubin. Dylan mentions the Hough riots in “Hurricane;” inferring Paterson police wanted to make an example out of a prominent Black man in the community. Dylanstraight-up accuses the cops of pressuring Alfred Bello and Arthur Dexter Bradley into changing their stories, and accuses both of perjury to save themselves from prosecution from the robbery they carried out at the time of the shooting.

What makes “Hurricane” such a powerful song isn’t the Hurricane story specifically. It’s the fact that there are Rubin Carters all over America right now, spending life in prison for crimes they didn’t commit; because ofeither corrupt police departments, botched investigations, or racial profiling. The one thing Dylan was best at in his prime was calling out the system. He does this through storytelling and delivery. Hear how he cries “they took him to the jailhouse where they tried to turn a man into a mouse!” The band plays with more and more fervor, speeding up the tempo. You get just as feverishly wrapped up in the story as they do.

So wrapped up we’re just barely spitting out these lines: “To the white folks who watched he was just a revolutionary bum, and to the black folks he was just a crazy…”

Okay. So about THAT line.

I understand why it’s here. It illustrates Paterson’s Black community distancing themselves from Rubin to protect themselves from false persecution. But if I were Jacques Levy, producer Don Devito, or manager Faris Bouhafa? I’d advise Dylan STRONGLY against this.

Dylan recounts Rubins’ pig-circus trial and finally, he drops the axe: “Though they could not produce the gun, the DA said he was the one who did the deed” By the time you hear “they could not produce the gun,” you just go,“WHAT?? YOU MEAN TO TELL ME they went through all this trouble? AND THEY DIDN’T FIND THE WEAPON?” As if he’s rubbing it in, Dylan sneers, “and the all-white jury agreeeeeed!”

The last verse is unnecessary. We don’t need to hear the real criminals are in their coats and ties, Dylan already showed us as much for 7 minutes. Takes the punch out of “Couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land where justice is a game.” Otherwise, “Hurricane” is brilliant.

Now how the hell do you follow that up? By changing gears completely; diving headfirst into mythology. Arunning theme of Desire is truth versus deception. It’s perhaps the only thing that links “Hurricane” to its follow-up: “Isis.”

On the back cover of Desire, we see the Empress card from the Rider-Waite tarot.

Verso: the back cover of Desire (photographed by Ruth Bernal and designed by John Berg, 1976)

Pictured: Pamela Coleman Smith, "The Empress" card, as seen in the Rider-Waite tarot deck (1909)

What does the Empress represent? At risk of sounding like a scammy Tiktok tarot reader, it represents the divine feminine. Fertility, nurturing, motherhood. Think mother Mary, Greek god of motherhood Hera, or ancient Egyptian mother god Isis.

Isis is a quintessentially Dylan tale of surrealist anecdotes: pyramids embedded in ice and chopping through a forest to get to an empty tomb. There’s resurrection and re-death; our narrator comes upon an empty tomb, that which his mystery travel companion might have come from. It’s half-Odysseus venturing back to Penelope, half-Robert Johnson encountering the devil at the crossroads. The poor boy fantasizes of greatness. Turquoise, gold, the world’s biggest necklace. He’s called to the hero’s adventure, challenged by darkness and trickster gods. The band seems to waltz around each other, making an endless circle around wild storyteller Dylan in the center. Steady piano chords, sparse bass for Scarlet and manic Dylan to frolic in. And I mean manic: he's so hopped up (cough cough, winter sports) in the performance featured in Scorsese's Rolling Thunder film that he wanders away from the mic more than once. His eyes bulge out of his head as he babbles:

“Isis, oh Isis, you mystical child. What drives me to you is what drives me insane.” That’s desire.

Mozambique: our first appearance of Dylan’s travel companion, Emmylou Harris. “Mozambique” is my least favorite vocal performance of hers, I find it a bit grating. But I love her ad-libbing freely behind country-tinged fiddle. Desire is quite a romantic album; wistful longing for paradise, couples dancing cheek-to-cheek, and faraway lovers. (Fun fact: this song is only called “Mozambique” because Dylan liked how the word sounded. He actually wrote this song about his time in the south of France!)

Dylan and Emmy’s chemistry is much-improved for One More Cup of Coffee. In atmosphere and music, this song transports the listener to another world. Rob Stoner’s accidental bass solo (Scarlet Rivera wasn’t ready yet, she got caught off-guard) is the quiet, contemplative, mysterious introduction into the smoky night Dylan sings of.

This song romanticizes the east so hard. There’s talk of feasts, sword-throwing, nomadic people, fortune-tellers, and of course Arabian coffee. You could practically fill out a bingo card. Dylan wrote this song about stumbling into a Romani holy holiday on his birthday in the south of France – he fled there amidst his split from wife Sara. Our narrator falls for a mysterious young woman, in tune with to whatever is beyond us. The women in her family see the future, there’s a heaviness as she knows something we don’t. Her “heart is like the ocean, mysterious and dark”; one of the most bewitching lines of all of Desire.

Speaking of bewitching, “One More Cup” has Scarlet’s finest and most tragic fiddle playing; particularly through the last verse. The finger cymbals, probably by Sheena Seidenberg, twinkle like stars in the bluenight. You can practically smell the incense off this song! Emmylou’s soft and sensual “aah”s cut through the smoke; she plays Dylan’s ethereal dark-haired princess. Dylan throws these almost Arabic-sounding runs in with every verse: “Your daddy, he’s an outLAAAaaAAaw and a wanderer by trade.”

Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. Such is Dylan.

The women of Desire exist just beyond the tangible. Isis isn’t about Isis, but the journey to her. The princess in “One More Cup” isn’t loyal to her lover, but to the stars above. The subject of Oh Sister is equallywithholding.

I’ve heard this is a possible response song to Joan Baez’s “Diamonds and Rust.” () This would make sense, as the line between lovers and friends is quite blurred. “Oh sister, when I come to lie in your arms, you should not treat me like a stranger” vs. “Oh sister, am I not a brother to you?” Not even the narrator knows what to make of this situationship! This duet between Dylan’s harmonica and Scarlet’s fiddle is stunning. The two are an earthy, old-timey American combination. You can’t really tell where one ends and the other begins. They sway hand-in-hand, heads upon each other’s shoulders. This is also a standout Emmylou performance. Her harmony is perfectly-suited, her delivery cautious yet impassioned.

I’m gonna be real, “Joey” is the dud of Desire.

It’s the 3rd slow song in a row, it’s unnecessarily long. It’s such a downer to open side 2 on. I get what Dylan was trying to do with the whole “virtuous mobster” thing and how it’s a foil to “Hurricane.” But Dylan chose the wrong mobster to make a martyr of. Lester Bangs tore Dylan to shreds for writing a sappy ballad about Crazy Joe. I concede. Moving on.

We venture from Little Italy to Mexico with Romance in Durango. Before I get into my thoughts on this song, I simply have to tell you the story of the session from which it came. Simply put, it was a shitshow.

After Desire sessions began on 7/14/1975 with a pretty big crew in tow, Dylan wants even MORE musicians for day two on 7/28. The only song they could manage was “Romance in Durango.” The following account might explain why:

“By 7:00, Studio B was crawling with the most bizarre collection of musicians ever assembled under one roof: Eric Clapton, Dave Mason and his entire band, Yvonne Elliman, an 8-piece English R&B group named Kokomo whose first album on CBS was going nowhere, Village folkie guitarist Eric Frandsen, Scarlet Rivera, Emmylou Harris and her husband-producer Brian Aherne, musician Sugar Blue who played the mouth harp for spare change on the street, Bob’s pal Sheena who danced around playing finger cymbals and Hare Krishna-type percussion, New York session men Hugh McCracken and Vinnie Bell, Rob Stoner...and a dozen other(s)...who managed to crash the chaotic session.”

(Bob Spitz, Dylan: A Biography [1989])

Dylan’s getting distracted, messing up the words, band is getting frustrated. Leevy is silently freaking outbecause “This album was going to be his meal ticket, and...if the project deteriorated much further there was a good chance Bob would say ‘Fuck it!’ and do an album of rhythm and blues favorites instead of the songs they cowrote.” (Sptiz) By 11:00, co-writer and de-facto session manager Jacques Levy was done. He kicked the hangers-on out, asked Kokomo to go home. Dave Mason and his guys had to fly back to England; leavingClapton, Scarlet, Emmylou, Rob, Eric Frandsen, “a bebop trumpet player named Mike,” and Steve Faroun of the Average White Band.

Anyway, “Durango” is the romance of Desire cranked up as high as it can go: accordion, booming drums, swaying bass, classical guitar. Some Byrds-y electric guitar shoulders its way in when our narrator is shot down, telling his lover Magdalena to take his gun and run. “Durango” was no doubt inspired by Bob’s experience filming Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. It’s basically Pat Garrett in song form. It was filmed in Durango and everything!

This is the most convincing Dylan and Emmy duet of the album. You can hear the chemistry. They look deepinto each other’s eyes as they sing, like they’ve been on the run together...passing a bottle of tequila back and forth. You just want them to lean in and KISS by the time they fall all over the chorus: “No llores, mi querida, dios nos vigila, soon the horse will take us to Durango.” Dylan’s completely wrapped up in the atmosphere, throwing in mariachi-style accents. That’s how you know he’s truly comfortable. He gets playful.

Then something bizarre happens. Something I’ve never heard on a Dylan record: a crossfade between “Durango” and Black Diamond Bay.

I know this was probably done to save room on the disc. But it implores the listener to connect the two listening experiences. This accidentally connected the narratives of “Durango” and “Black Diamond” in my head; after her lover’s untimely demise, I imagine Magdalena fled to a French Caribbean resort, sunk in anearthquake. This narrative is so clouded in deception and surrealism that I can’t exactly make out what it’s about. Dylan might not have known either. He only ever played this song once, at the end of the Rolling Thunder Revue’s second leg.

Emmy exits the world of Desire after “Black Diamond.” At the conclusion of the album, we discover what our wanderer has been looking for; or perhaps what he’s running from.

Sara is unlike any other song in Dylan’s catalog. It’s his very direct plea for his wife not to leave. No characters, no nothing. It’s just a man acknowledging his faults and begging his divine mother for one last chance. “Scorpio sphinx in a calico dress,” “so easy to look at, so hard to define,” “glamorous nymph with an arrow and bow.” She’s mysterious and dark just as much as she is a partner and trusted confidant.

Dylan passionately recounts the good times; “I can still hear the sounds of those Methodist bells”: their wedding. How they went camping, took a vacation to Portugal, the beach trips they went on with the kids. He tries to woo her again by reminding her of his wedding present to her: “Staying up for days in the Chelsea hotel writing ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ for you” But the whole time, it feels futile. It’s in the music: the dainty cymbals like waves battering against wreckage, the lonesome harmonica solos, the mournful violin. The reverb on Bob’s voice sounds like he sings in an empty house once full of love. It’s like he knows in his heart this song won’t work, but he’s doing it anyway.

Desire drives people to madness, and madness is doing the same thing twice expecting a different result.

I much prefer the lyrics Dylan came up with for the recording on Bootlegs Vol. 5. They paint Sara as his valiant savior as opposed to the supine little wife. “I was too young to know you were doing it right, you did it with strength that belonged to the gods” is an expression of deep, deep love; deep enough for a man to admit he was weak. This was the only way theodyssey could end. Something built on such a wild dream could never last.

The modern mythical outlaw adventure is rock-and-roll. Dylan spent nearly a decade in self-imposed exile, and once he got a taste of the outside world he’d deprived himself of, he craved more. So he spun up his own odyssey in the form of the Rolling Thunder Revue: a rotating cast of circus characters, existing outside the confines of time and space. It was as eclectic, muddled, and dreaming as the album Rolling Thunder came from.

Desire is unlike anything else in Dylan’s catalog. Communal and swirling, open yet withdrawn. Virtuosity and deceit, dreams vs. reality. Making men into mice and martyrs, women into exotic jewels to collect, and a whole lot of romance. Though the Empress shows up over and over again, and High Priestess Scarlet Rivera rules over the land, I see Desire more as the Fool card. Both the beginning and the end of the innocent’s journey.

Pictured: Pamela Coleman Smith, "The Fool" card, as seen in the Rider-Waite tarot deck (1909)

High dreaming, high scheming, folly leading you astray. Questions without a care to answer. Who was that man buried in the icy tomb? Are you not a brother to your sister? Was it me who shot him in the cantina? What does all this adventuring get me? What am I running from, the past or the future? Who am I? What do I want? In my heart of hearts, what do I desire? The Fool card is the beginning of the hero’s journey. It desires adventure. And Desire is a portal into explorers’ wildest fantasies. But beware: exactly what you run from is what you end up chasing.

Personal favorites: “Hurricane,” “Isis,” “One More Cup of Coffee,” “Oh Sister,” “Romance in Durango,” “Sara”

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