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by Jochen Markhorst (Author)
"I don't know if I could name all twenty-nine of my records, but I could name some of them. I liked a bunch of albums I did in the eighties. I liked Street Legal a whole lot. I did that in the seventies."That's what Bob Dylan says to interviewer Denise Worrell in November 1985, at home in Malibu. Partly posed, no doubt. Dylan can probably list more than "some of" his own albums. But it's telling that Street Legal is the only one he mentions. At the time, in 1978, Street Legal was burned to the ground in his own country. It bothers him. From September through December '78, Dylan tours the United States. He performs songs from the new album, but not that much and not wholeheartedly. And when he does, he remarkably often announces them with a somewhat sour introduction, even when announcing the album's highlight, on December 9, 1978 in Columbia, the last time Dylan will perform the song: "Thank you. We'd like to do a song from the new album called Street Legal. This was a single. I know it sold about 100 copies. Anyway, I think it just sold 25, but I guess that we can play it anyway."That's not true. "Where Are You Tonight?" did not sell a hundred copies. Not even twenty-five. The song, one of the Very Great Songs in Dylan's oeuvre, has never been released as a single at all. Anyway, after December 9, 1978, Dylan will never look back at this monumental song, the song that belongs in the lineup "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall", "Desolation Row", "Visions Of Johanna", "Tangled Up In Blue", "Blind Willie McTell", "Not Dark Yet" and "Murder Most Foul", the songs that justify Dylan's Nobel Prize for Literature. In his eighth Dylan book, Jochen Markhorst demonstrates the power and richness of this disregarded and forgotten masterpiece - and why the song deserves a place in the canon.
