It is automatically assumed that every Bob Dylan album is an event, and Desire is certainly no exception. It is not, however, the event that it might appear to be. It is not an event because of the inclusion of several drearily rambling Marty Robbins cum Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid sagas of outlaw's progress from cantina to cantina. This album is a landmark neither because of the back-cover slice of imitation Patti Smith poesy by (presumably) Dylan, nor because of the offensively portentous liner puffery provided by a senile Allen Ginsberg, who ironically was one of Dylan's major influences back when Ginsberg was perhaps the premiere American poet and Bob on his way to being declared that by people who didn't know any better (like me, for instance) .

We can't even assign historic import to Desire on the basis of "Hurricane," the undeniably powerful single which, in a controlled spasm of good old rabble-rousing, spits an inflammatory account of the railroading of Rubin Carter, onetime contender for the Middleweight Boxing Championship of the World, on a mid-sixties murder rap.