Most of the stuff here [on Street-Legal] is dead air, or close to it. (p. 51)

The most interesting—if that's the word—aspect of Street-Legal is its lyrics, which often pretend to the supposed impenetrability of Dylan's mid-Sixties albums, the albums on which his reputation still rests. But the return is false; you may not have known why Dylan was singing about a "Panamanian moon" in "Memphis Blues Again" (or, for that matter, have had any idea why the blues were Memphian rather than Bostonian), but you knew what "Your debutante just knows what you need / But I know what you want" meant, and it meant a lot. In Street-Legal's "Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)"—the parenthetical part of the title is the most inspired thing on the record—the lines, "Well, the last thing I remember before I stripped and kneeled / Was that trainload of...