Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid

Album: Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid

Recorded: Jan-Feb 1973

Released: July 1973

Songs / length: 10 / 35:23

Dylan was on hiatus for much of 1971 and 1972, only recording and releasing a few songs of note – including Watching The River Flow and When I Paint My Masterpiece – both of which appeared on a Greatest Hits Vol. II album released by Columbia in late 1971. Around the same time, he also released a single, George Jackson, in tribute to the Black Panther leader who was killed by guards at San Quentin prison that summer. The events of Jackson's death were enough to inspire creativity in what was an otherwise unusually fallow period in Dylan's songwriting career. As attested by the opening lines of Watching The River Flow, Dylan felt like the muse had left him in the early 70s:

What's the matter with me

I don't have much to say

In 1972, Dylan's scriptwriter friend asked him to write a few songs for Sam Peckinpah's new western movie, Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid. When Dylan auditioned with the song Billy, Peckinpah was so taken by Dylan's charisma that he offered him a role in the film, as Alias, which meant the whole Dylan family was relocated to Durango, Mexico for the winter of 1972-3. After shooting the film, Dylan recorded the soundtrack over two sessions in Jan-Feb 1973 in Mexico and then California. Half of the record is made up of "theme" songs, while there are three Billy songs and just two standalone tracks, Turkey Chase and Knockin' On Heaven's Door.

All three Billy songs capture something of the spirit of Dylan's earlier record, John Wesley Harding, mixing that outlaw ballad perspective with a more musically expansive atmosphere, befitting a film soundtrack. Of the three Billy tracks, Billy 7 is my favourite, for the way it best stands alone as a song and arguably has more intensity than Billy 1 and Billy 4, though all three work perfectly in the context of the film. Note that, in the originally released version of the film that was heavily re-edited by MGM, the scenes and soundtrack do not sync so well. I bought a Peckinpah 6-DVD collection, which includes a newly-edited 2005 version of Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, and that film and The Wild Bunch were the two standouts for me. You can check out the scenes involving Dylan below – he has many talents, but I'm not sure that acting is one.

Thanks to being restored to match the director's original vision, the film is now often ranked among the best westerns of all time, so it's worth checking out. Though the soundtrack is only a minor entry in the Dylan's canon of studio albums, the project gave him the jolt to start writing songs again, and in Knockin' On Heaven's Door he had a Top 10 single, which would go on to find a new life in the hands of Eric Clapton and Guns N' Roses and become a rock classic.

Album rating: C