Books |
Bob Dylan
By
Published: Jan 01, 2005
Category:
Biography
Two hundred and twenty reviews into this venture, and not one about Bob Dylan.
What does that tell you?
It might suggest that the proprietor of HeadButler.com either needs a lot of warm-up exercises or is a little scared of writing about Dylan.
Vote for #2.
Lord knows, it’s true that I have pretty much memorized 40 years of Dylan’s music and never really wavered in my conviction that Dylan is America’s Picasso, the nation’s greatest 20th century artist. But how do you write about an artist who’s been the single biggest influence on your life? Where do you start?
Well, now my hand is forced. No Direction Home — a Martin Scorsese documentary about Dylan — is about to air on PBS. (It’s also for sale .) Starbucks is selling a CD of early Dylan bootlegs. And then there’s the two-CD soundtrack of the Scorsese movie, which tracks Dylan from Minnesota to superstardom in just seven short years. And finally, there’s the Bob Dylan Scrapbook, 1959-1966, an artfully designed collection of memorabilia that has cool inserts like ticket stubs and scribbled sheets of lyrics.
But let’s start at the beginning. Skipping his music, what do you know about Bob Dylan?
If you’re like most interested but not obsessed music lovers, you have a copy of Chronicles, Dylan’s recently published memoirs. Many otherwise sophisticated and skeptical friends of mine have been fooled by Dylan’s assertion in these pages that, at the height of his fame, all he wanted was to spend time with his wife and kids in a cute house with a picket fence. Other parts of the book are credible, well-written, even moving — this stuff is utterly bogus. Hey, people, he was the biggest, hippest star in the world. And young. And drugged. Do you seriously think, when confronted by a willing and nubile girl (or two), he sent her off to Mom and Dad and then rushed home to Sara and the kids?
“Minor poets imitate, great poets steal,” T.S. Eliot said. You see the young Dylan becoming a genius by going to school on other singer-songwriters in Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina, by David Hajdu. It is a measure of this biographer’s craft that Dylan doesn’t enter the book until page 66 — long enough for Hajdu to show us how impressive are the book’s other characters. He goes on, of course, to show us how they soon ate Dylan’s dust. And how surprisingly submissive Baez could be around him. It’s a complex story: “I think we both felt spurned, and we were both right,” Baez says.
‘Positively Fourth Street’ ends in the mid-60s. Down the Highway is a far more complete biography. In fact, it’s probably the most complete we’ll ever see. Howard Sounes seems to have enlisted the cooperation of even the most recalcitrant sources, and they deliver the goods: the secret marriages, the epic cruelties to friends, the sexual hookups, the religious conversions, the surprising fascination with money — it doesn’t get more ‘warts and all’ than this. Don’t pick ‘Down the Highway’ up for bedtime reading; it will keep you awake long after midnight, eyes wide open, jaw slack.
I’ve said nothing about Dylan’s music here. That’s for another time. And it should be for another time — we judge artists on their work, not on their personalities. Because if we were to judge Dylan on that score….well, we probably wouldn’t be having this national celebration of his early years, would we?
To buy ‘Chronicles’ from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy the audio CD of ‘Chronicles’ read by Sean Penn from Amazon.com, click here .
To buy the audio cassette of ‘Chronicles’ read by Sean Penn from Amazon.con, click here.
To buy the ‘Bob Dylan Scrapbook’ from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy the DVD of ‘No Direction Home’ from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy the soundtrack of ‘No Direction Home’ from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “Positively Fourth Street” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy ‘Down the Highway’ from Amazon.com, click here.
