I haven't read the Rolling Stone cover story detailing Dylan's greatest songs though I will at some point.
But I am already planning my rebuttal. I own 40 Bob Dylan albums. Impressed? That would be 40 BOOTLEG Dylan albums, as well everything else, the entire canon, purchased in real time since around Desire. I follow Dylan the way I follow Woody Allen: I don't care about the reviews, quality is irrelevant, I get everything. Sometimes I win out big time, I bought the Wonder Boys soundtrack to get my hands on an unreleased song and found myself with "Things Have Changed".
The only album I don't own is the Columbia release Dylan, though I owned it at the time and quite liked his cover of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi". It is out of print, of course.
The RS 70 greatest starts with "Like A Rolling Stone" -a song I can not listen to anymore. And they have Bono reviewing it. I would rather listen to Bono discuss Third World debt than Dylan. Hell, I'd rather hear him sing. At first glance, it is down hill from there and never further down than a preposterous claim that nobody knows what "I'll Keep It With Mine" is about: HOW NOT? It is not that obscure, it isn't "Changing Of The Guard" for fucks sake. How don't they get it? Worse, Sheryl Crow's self-serving "Mississippi" review -a song Dylan gave to her, she destroyed, and he saved on his masterpiece Love And Theft.
The problem is, Dylan is actually a little too good for this list. They should have done 25 songs a decade, decade by decade. I realize it is 70th birthday, but why tie it to the number 70?
By the way, as I get the time I am gonna go maybe 10 or 15 songs reviewed, decade by decade.
And before I wrap rock nyc up, I will try and grade every album (I may have done that before, I don't remember).