[driftless2]

Dylan never had a great voice, but for a while he had a decent voice. "Nashville Skyline" for example was an album where his voice actually sounded mellow on a number of tracks. But certainly starting out Dylan was unconcerned about his voice and the music to his songs. He was quoted as saying only lyrics count. So he "borrowed" a lot of melodies and sang his songs with a rough voice.

And he didn't care much for production techniques. He was known as One-take Zimmy by some of his musician friends for his refusal to do more than one take on his recorded songs.

So while Dylan put out a lot of good songs, he put out a lot of crap as well. Poorly sung, indifferently played crap. Even in concert on his best songs he breezed through many of them in a haphazard, musical way.

I don't know if many people remember in 1976 NBC put on a live Dylan primetime special called "Hard Rain." It was awful. Again Dylan just sped through his songs as if merely playing by the numbers made a good concert. Dylan simply didn't care what people (or his audience) thought about the way he did things. Probably still doesn't.

[nikos1121]

The sheer magic and brilliance of Dylan’s work has always been from the interpretation of others...many others from Peter, Paul and Mary to JOan Baez, Ian & Sylvia Jimi Hendrix and countless many others. I think the fun is watching his early performances, not his recordings...