Books
Tryin’ to read his portrait
by David Cohen
Looking for a book about Bob Dylan? Start here.
Bob Dylan had this to say about an admirer in a 1986 song: “It’s been nice seeing you, you read me like a book.” She would not have wanted for available titles. Even at that point in the mercurial star’s 45-year recording career, more books had been published about Dylan’s elliptical life and times than any major popular artist this side of Elvis Presley.
The tally has multiplied faster than loaves and fishes. A random computer search throws up scores of available titles, and those do not include minor and self-published efforts or books published in the 23 languages other than English in which original works on the artist formerly known as Robert Allen Zimmerman are known to exist.
Enough works on the shelf, surely, for we admirers – assuming it will indeed be nice to see Dylan when he returns to New Zealand for a three-stop tour this week – to reread him like a book in the run-up to the antipodean shows.
The 66-year-old star has not, of course, spent much of his life only performing in front of stage microphones; there have been the journalists’ microphones, too. Among the sturdier anthologies of those frequently cryptic encounters are the genial Younger Than That Now (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004), the awfully brainy Studio A (W W Norton, 2004) and the obscure but definitely worth seeking out (at least for its Australasian connection) Bob Dylan: A Retrospective (Morrow, 1972), edited by Melbournite Craig McGregor, whose introductory piece on Dylan’s first Australian appearance, in 1966, alone is worth the search for its hilarious one-on-one interview conducted by Dylan with himself at Sydney International Airport.
Those of a less secular disposition might want to check out Stephen Webb’s Dylan Redeemed: From Highway 61 to Saved (Continuum International, 2007), which charts – not always convincingly – the singer’s spiritual evolution from Orthodox Jew to St Bob of the Cross.
Anthony Scaduto’s Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography (Signet, 1971), the first standard biographical title to appear on the never-ending bookshelf, is considered a dependable place to start in the heavyweight stakes. And, to be sure, at the time of its publication Scaduto’s appraisal received the heartiest of endorsements from an unexpected quarter: “I like your book,” Dylan told the author, “that’s the weird thing about it.”
Well, sure. But Scaduto’s rattle and ho-hum of a thesis explaining Dylan in messianic terms was never all that weird to start with and it has not dated so well, either.
Scaduto goes big on the full-blooming sound of Dylan’s folk recordings while lacking much feeling for his subject’s more important rock period. For what it was, and remains, though, An Intimate Biography comes across as neat, well-reasoned and boasting a trove of quotes from a retinue of fellow Greenwich Village denizens now largely unobtainable or dead.
The dead make for better biographical studies, too, as a general rule, since the living, by definition, are yet to experience their own final chapter. Imagine, let’s say, the historical value of a Kurt Cobain bio completed in March 1994. Worse, and especially apposite in Dylan’s case, the living remain in a position to manipulate the proceedings. Another problem with the biographies of musicians in the popular realm is the authors’ tendency to stress artistic appraisal – criticism, really – rather than the kind of psychological investigation that marks the genre at its best.
Still, Bob Spitz’s demythifying Dylan (Penguin, 1989) comes close. Spitz, who learnt the academic craft at Columbia University studying under the corrosively brilliant Albert Goldman, and more recently the author of a well-received study of the Beatles, largely ignores Dylan as a song-and-dance man, opting instead to unriddle a persona based on “paradox and mystery, illusion and misdirection, fantasy and exaggeration”. American journalist Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (Da Capo Press, 1986) marks another solid psychological effort.
Among the other standard Dylan studies is one that stands as an object lesson in why the biographically young and restless ought to be kept away from cultural icons. In his Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan (Grove Press, 2001), author Howard Sounes, writing at the still-tender age of 36, carves out a virtually insight-free zone for readers by revealing, for instance, that Bob Dylan is something of a rambling loner, an aloof personality who yet remains a loving father to his six children, and is prone to feeling a touch blue on occasion. Sounes unearths startling new information suggesting that the internationally travelled rock star has been known to over-refresh himself with alcohol – and cigarettes! – along with the romantic attentions of snake-hipped women. Fancy that.
These days one can hardly zing a stone through the window of any self-respecting university’s cultural studies department (now why would anyone wish to do that?) without hitting a published Dylanologist or someone with a doctoral work in process on the great man. Take the British musicologist Wilfrid Mellers, whose first-of-a-kind thesis, A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan (Oxford University Press, 1985), renders Dylan’s greatest achievement – knitting the backbeat of Chuck Berry to the lyricism of T S Eliot – thus: “It at once affirms and transcends the physical, inducing a state of trance, even ecstatis, when the women begin to yell a magical ‘music of the vowels’ which is beyond literate sequence and consequence.”
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