In honor of Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday, Media Stu selects his top classics

Below I give you my Favorite Dylan tunes. I choose not to focus on the given classics “Like a Rolling Stone”, “Tambourine Man”and “Blowing in the Wind” instead I selected Classics which are well known but just a bit off of the radar for this blog post:

1.Girl from the North Country – 1963 “Free Wheeling Bob Dylan”
I love this tune because it’s just vocals and guitar and it illustrates how powerful Dylan could be before he “went electric”. It is one of the first times that we see Dylan tell an epic tale based around a woman and this is a theme he will repeat throughout his song writing career.

2. I Want You – 1966 “Blonde on Blonde”
This comes from Dylan’s first all-electric album and the electric guitar is the star of this song. It just has a really cool esthetic and sound. It’s a departure from the political rhetoric that dominated Dylan songs during this time period and instead is a song about basic human desire and wanting something so bad it hurts. Who can’t relate to that?

3. All Along the Watch Tower- 1967 “John Wesley Harding”
This song is often thought of showing two of Dylan’s most predominate sides the Joker and the Thief. This haunting tune is a good representation of the apocalyptic theme that Dylan uses throughout his songs such as “Hard Rains Gonna Fall” or “Masters of War”. While this song has been covered and used in movies at nausea, there is good reason for that, its’ haunting lyrics coupled with its cryptic tone conger up images and memories that few other songs can. Battalstar Galatica fans to name a few will never hear this song without remembering the first four of the final five being revealed.

More of Media Stu's List After The Jump