While most of Bob’s big band sound is in tact from Desire, trading the violin for the saxophone and Emmy Lou’s lone back-up vocals for a trio of female gospel singers suddenly turns the ragged gypsy caravan into a slick Vegas production. I’ve always been really conflicted about Street Legal. On one hand you’ve got this brave new experimental band giving the songs a wide variety of possible sounds. On the other, the LP was recorded almost as muddily and murkily as The Basement Tapes leaving most of the subtle nuances buried in the mix (subsequent attempts to re-mix the album have produced no effect audible to my ears). On the plus side you’ve got three of my all-time favorite Dylan tunes: “Senor (Tales Of Yankee Power)”, “New Pony”, and “Changing Of The Guards”. “New Pony” even shows a return of Bob writing an entire song around one simple magnetic riff, something we haven’t heard since “The Wicked Messenger” on John Wesley Harding. However, the other two-thirds of the songs on there are as unremarkable and forgettable as Planet Waves. The band on this album is great. I don’t know why it gets knocked as too show-biz-y. I even liked their live At Budokan album. I generally don’t pay much attention to live albums (If the songs are too close to the original arrangements, then why not just listen to the original. If the songs are too far off of the arrangements, then they just seem sacrilegious). But the constant way that Bob and his quote-unquote Vegas band deconstruct and rearrange the most notable songs from Bob’s catalog is both fascinated and brave, if not always successful (“Going, Going, Gone”). I find myself listening to Street Legal a lot – if just out of curiosity, though not usually enjoying it as much as I think I should.