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. . . pre-rubberizing.

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Sway me smooth, sway me now — you know how . . .

I have no memory of buying this four-LP set of Elvis’s gold-record singles, which was released in 1970. I’m really glad I did, though — it’s in excellent condition and totally wonderful.

Now his wars on God begin,
At stroke of midnight God shall win.

Discounting the unaccountable misdirection of “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”, this is an album of songs about love, romance, sex — mostly sex. You could think of it as Dylan’s Smiles Of A Summer Night — a roundelay of amorous interludes recounting a young man’s erotic adventures in the downtown world of New York in the 1960s.

Before Blonde On Blonde Dylan’s love songs had been either songs of worship or songs of rueful farewell. Things get more complicated here — worship and rue get subsumed in bewilderment and awe. The album ends, as Smiles Of A Summer Night ends, with a lyrical paean — in this case to the woman Dylan would soon marry.

Sad Eyed Lady Of the Lowlands was, however, only a first-act ending — the third act would play out in excruciating pain on a later album, Blood On the Tracks. But this album captured forever the feckless romance of youth in Manhattan before Manhattan became a posthumous realm, a yuppie feedlot.

. . . long ago.

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This album is so masterful, so unique, that it makes everything Dylan did before it seem like practice. Gone is the über-folksinger, the political gadfly — in their place is Dylan the teller of fractured stories, Dylan the dramatist, Dylan the chronicler of the interior soul of his time.

It’s a work that, like Moby Dick or Leaves Of Grass, hasn’t dated a minute since it first appeared, and never will.

This is a great album, but part of its greatness is its foreshadowing of the two albums that would soon follow it.