MAXIMUM BOB! Bob Dylan
Aug 13, 2010
A pair of fresh bios, one about the Rolling Thunder era, one covering The Bard's songs, aim to add weight to the discriminating Zimmerologist's already stuffed bookshelf.
BY STEVE PICK
It seems there's no end of things to say about Bob Dylan. We're just a few months away from the 50th anniversary of young Robert Zimmerman's first appearance in New York, and not all that much farther away from the 50th anniversary of the cottage industry called Dylanology. From the beginning, Dylan's music has led to people musing about what it all means and how did it all get that way.
Two brand new books tackle the subject from different viewpoints, though each starts in the middle of the ‘70s with the release of the last Dylan album that everybody agrees was great, Blood on the Tracks. Sid Griffin, who used to play in the Long Ryders (still doing occasional reunion gigs) and now leads the Coal Porters, takes a close look at the next steps of Dylan's long meanderings down the performance road in Shelter From the Storm: Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Years (Jawbone Press; 8 out of 10 stars). Clinton Heylin, who wrote about Shakespeare before a long assortment of books on music, including six previous works on Dylan alone, comes up with something to say about every single documented song Bob Dylan wrote between 1974 and 2006 in Still On the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1974-2006 (Chicago Review Press, 10 stars).
Shelter From the Storm is hardly the first book to shed light on the 1975-76 tours, but Griffin has some fresh thoughts and some previously unavailable source materials. Rolling Thunder neophytes will find the basic story of Dylan's attempt at a rock'n'roll carnival tour, with a wide variety of guest performers and, at least at first, as little advance planning as he could get away with. There's also detailed rundown on the writing and recording process of Desire - Griffin doesn't let Dylan or collaborator Jacques Levy off the hook for their romantic takes on criminal behavior in "Hurricane" or "Joey" - and a pretty thorough run-down of what paying customers experienced at Rolling Thunder shows early and late.
Griffin acquired access to Roger McGuinn's collection of audio verite tapes recorded on the bus as the musicians traveled from town to town. Depending on your tolerance for drunken and/or stoned rambling and cross-conversations between the likes of McGuinn, Rambling Jack Elliott (whose nickname is herein revealed, quite accurately, to have much more to do with his story-telling prowess than with his desire to move on to places unknown), Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, David Mansfield, and T Bone Burnett, you may find it excruciating to read the chapter of transcription from just one of these tapes. On the other hand, when Mick Ronson explains to McGuinn that he can actually name the chords Joni Mitchell uses in her songs - remember that Mitchell basically invented her own tuning and fingering methods years before Sonic Youth tried that sort of thing - you just might find yourself getting goosebumps. This is an amazing fly-on-the-wall opportunity to hear musicians discussing their art.
Dylan filmed parts of the tour for use in TV specials both aired and unaired, and in the four-hour long surrealistic film "Renaldo and Clara." Because Griffin is a musician, he comes up with endless amounts of insight into tiny decisions good and bad which make Dylan's performances come off the way they do. (Just for one example, Griffin's discussion is breathtaking on page 22 of the way Scarlet Rivera's near-constant fiddle fills work in ways a guitarist could never achieve). And he helpfully edits Renaldo and Clara down into a much shorter film, with all the necessary hints as to which clips you'll want to seek out on YouTube.
Heylin's book is the second of a two-volume set which looks at the first 600 songs Bob Dylan has written for mostly public consumption. The first volume, Revolution in the Air, had the advantage of containing explications of the 200 songs Dylan had written and mostly performed before 1967; the first 9 years of his writing were considerably more prolific than the next 53. Still on the Road, however, covers a breadth of material no less intriguing, if artistically more sporadic. There is the aforementioned acknowledged masterpiece Blood on the Tracks, and a range of one to six or seven terrific songs on each album of original music Dylan has released since.
It should be said that Heylin, while acknowledging the ability of songs to come alive via the recording process or even more often, onstage, is primarily interested in the words Dylan writes. As Dylan seems to be almost never satisfied with the entirety of his songs, and as Heylin has heard every single live Dylan performance ever recorded by the most obscure bootlegger in the world, there is much breakdown of alternative approaches to these words. For every improvement Dylan has made in this process, he's thrown away some gems. "Wiggle Wiggle," for instance, from 1989's Under the Red Sky, was an apocalyptic rant before it became the lightest weight celebration of sexual pleasures ever.
Heylin loves Street Legal more than most critics, and he is troubled by laziness and sonic excess on Time Out of Mind more than is generally done. He offers rigorous scholarship on not only the Biblically-inspired songs of Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love, but on the dozens of further explorations of Christian principles Dylan has offered since the so-called end of the Christian period. And, considering the wealth of information Heylin unearths on folk music sources, pop music templates, and other assorted influences on Dylan's mind, the recent trend towards accusations of out and out plagiarism gets an interesting take from Heylin. It all boils down to the belief that Dylan can take any source and make it into something uniquely his own, but that when he doesn't do anything aside from quote, the result is flat and easily dismissed.
For all Heylin's elucidation, he's also just plain a hoot to read. You won't believe how many ways he can insult the musicianship of the Grateful Dead in a book wherein they really shouldn't be overly involved (though, apparently, the brief tour Dylan and the Dead did together was instrumental in getting him to dig through his back catalogue for songs he hadn't performed in years). And Heylin never misses a chance to make a punning reference to Dylan song titles and lyrics (though admittedly, these are easier found in the first volume of the set).
Both Griffin and Heylin convey their love of Dylan's music, their occasional exasperation at his choices, and their ability to find different ways into songs which may have seemed either frustratingly opaque or overly obvious. Both books send one back out to the source material with fresh ears. Listening to Bob Dylan just became even more pleasurable.
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