Entries by

,

Review of Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God

Go Back

Other Issues

Jeffrey Edward Green. Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2024. 368 pp. 

Reviewed by Barry J. Faulk, Florida State University.

 

Jeffrey Edward Green’s new book, Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God, is a learned, carefully reasoned, and extensively researched study of Dylan’s relationship to the figure of the prophet; it is sure to interest readers who already regard the singer to be something more than an entertainer. However, Green, a political philosopher, also wants to persuade readers (and listeners) unmoved by Dylan’s songs, and skeptical of the claims that enthusiastic fans often make about the singer, that his life and work have had a transformative impact on contemporary thought as well as on contemporary life.

Green points to the “brilliance, poignancy, fecundity, uncanniness, arrestingness, and beauty” of Dylan’s “transmission through words” as perhaps the most compelling reason to bestow the “prophet” label on the singer (3). He takes great care to place the singer’s life and work in the context of earlier prophetic traditions, most notably the Hebrew prophets, who claimed to relay a divine message about redemption and justice to an errant people, and the principled civil disobedience advocated by Mahatmas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. That said, Green’s book is built on the premise that Dylan represents a crucial difference in kind from these earlier prophetic leaders. Green’s Dylan is a prophet of “diremption” and thus metaphorically a “prophet without God,” as the subtitle claims. Unlike earlier prophets who claimed direct access to higher truths and who were identified by the singular message they proclaimed, Bob Dylan is a postmodern prophet who inspires us to reflect on the structures of meaning-making. Dylan’s prophetic power lies in the unique ability of his words to illuminate the gaps between the various ideals–of faith, social justice, personal liberation – that we aspire to actualize. A prophet of diremption may speak on behalf of freedom and justice, but, as Green remarks, will “continually [insist], tragically, on the divergences and conflicts between these ideals”; such a prophet testifies to the absence of any court of appeals that might help us adjudicate the contest between incommensurate values (vii). Prophets of diremption speak for a hidden God, not a revealed one, and testify to God’s absence in the world, even as they urge us to recognize the true and enact the good. As Green puts it, “Dylan makes the very conflicts between the grounds of normative authority ethically meaningful. He discloses the conflicts between incommensurate values of normative authority so that normative authority is no longer a stable unity or a foundation without cracks or fissures” (34). To recall the words of another prophet, Green’s Dylan comes not to bring peace, but a sword. And as Green also reminds us, the singer’s vehement rejection of the prophet’s role at crucial points in his career keeps faith with the venerable precedent set by the Hebrew prophets themselves, such as Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Amos (12-13). 

Green approaches the subject of Dylan and prophecy from the perspective of a political philosopher: besides situating the artist’s life and work within the broader history of Western theological and philosophical thought, he wishes to examine what Dylan’s popular audience might reveal to us about the persistence of belief in ideas about the good, the true, and the beautiful in modern secular democracies. Given their divergent starting points, there is an interesting convergence between Green’s thesis and music writer Ian MacDonald’s account of Bob Dylan’s post-Newport transformation into a distinctly modern prophet, committed to “inoculate the world with disillusionment” by means of amplified sound: a role that, as MacDonald notes, Dylan “applied himself to … with perverse relish and, as audience resistance persisted, an increasing militance” (The People’s Music 32). In this view, Dylan remains a man with a mission even as he rejected a leadership role in the folk music revival of the early 1960s. The message may have changed, the volume had gotten louder, but behind it all the prophetic stance and the presumption on the part of both the artist and audience that the singer’s words reflected a higher wisdom and a more penetrating view of the nature of reality persists. That MacDonald builds his observation on a phase by bohemian writer Henry Miller suggests that what Green describes as Dylan’s “prophetic” stance may be grounded in the history of art as much as theology, specifically in the notion of the artist-as-outsider that the singer might have learned from modernist literature.    

In three chapters that demonstrate a thorough knowledge of the by-now voluminous scholarly literature analyzing and explicating Bob Dylan’s life and music, and referencing a wide range of political philosophers from Niccolò Machiavelli to Hans Morgenthau – with insightful readings of the key concepts of Max Weber, William James, Charles Taylor, and Jurgen Habermas offered along the way – Green draws our attention to the rich commentary that Dylan has provided on his own ethical struggles at different stages of his career. For Green, the singer’s extensive discourse on these internal conflicts constitutes his prophetic message. In Part I, “A Rebel Rebelling against the Rebellion,” Green traces the history of Dylan’s participation in the 1960s folk music revival and the shock waves created by the artist’s very public disavowal of his popular audience. Dylan’s music as well as his fateful career choices during these years challenged a cherished myth of political democracy, especially prominent in the Cold War era, that the ideals of individual liberty and communal belonging are easily reconciled. Dramatized in songs like “My Back Pages” and enacted on stage during his 1966 concert tours with the Band, Dylan both articulated and embodied the conflict experienced by a generation that sought to simultaneously achieve personal fulfillment and enact revolutionary change. Greil Marcus’s description of Dylan’s Basement Tape recordings as “deserter’s songs” could reasonably be applied to the whole of the singer’s musical output after 1963, until the release of the Christian-inspired Slow Train Coming recording in 1979. Although the music styles may vary, most of the songs Dylan writes during this period locate happiness and self-fulfillment in moments of profound introspection or in personal relationships. As Green eloquently observes, the Prophetic Dylan of the 1960s bears witness “not to the resolution of competing ethical duties in a better-organized future world, but to the permanent moral chaos of the present, in which individuals such as himself will routinely turn their backs on causes they otherwise recognize as just out of a competing commitment to their own freedom” (39). 

Dylan’s conversion in the late 1970s initiated another ethical struggle, this time with the “self-reliant individuality” that was previously the hallmark of the singer’s work and career (37). In Part II, “Never Could Learn to Drink that Blood, and Call It Wine,” Green persuasively argues that Dylan’s prophetic status represents a point of continuity amid change, and he challenges us to take a broader view of this dramatic turning point in Dylan’s life and career. Green’s analysis of Dylan’s prophetic stance on religion provocatively includes not only the uncompromising declarations of faith in songs from the Slow Train Coming and Saved recordings, but the more muted, delicate Christian testimony of “Every Grain of Sand” from 1981’s Shot of Love, as well as Infidels (1983) and Empire Burlesque (1985), recordings from the singer’s putative “post-conversion” period, once again writing songs on non-religious topics. For Green, all these recordings represent different steps taken on the same path in a longer, more enduring faith journey.  

Viewed as a totality, Green claims that Dylan’s different modalities of faith represent a new manner of being religious in a secular age, more appropriate to a prophet of diremption.  Green draws on the theories of postsecular democracy advanced by the social philosophers Charles Taylor and Jurgen Habermas to interpret the significance of Dylan’s prophetic message on religion. The postsecular theory advanced by Taylor and Habermas asserts that, since the Fall of the Berlin Wall, governance in modern liberal democracies has evolved beyond hostility to religious belief to a more comprehensive view that treats, as Green puts it, “both religion and non-religion as standpoints of equal integrity, which each of us might adopt at any time” (xvi). While Taylor and Habermas advocate the postsecular ideal, Green regards Dylan to be “perhaps the greatest representative of a postsecular mentality”: its prophetic embodiment, in other words. As Green demonstrates in a detailed survey of Dylan’s post-conversion interviews and in thoughtful close readings of song lyrics from the era, the singer clearly aimed his late 70s/early 80s musical ministry at a popular audience that he presumed was non- or anti-religious. Yet at the same time, Dylan’s new gospel songs were rarely explicit declarations of faith. As Green establishes in his readings of “Covenant Woman” and “Precious Angel,” Dylan’s preferred mode of gospel song paid homage to his mentors, to those who inspired him by possessing a faith that he regarded to be far stronger than his own. Other Dylan songs from this period (“Property of Jesus,” “Watered Down Love,” “Slow Train Coming”) are preoccupied with defending believers against the taunts of non-believers rather than with advancing religious doctrine, or indeed any specific claim about religion. Green interprets Dylan’s post-1980s recordings as an effort to build a musical bridge among believers and non-believers, and he makes a bold assertion about the singer’s success in this regard: “Dylan, almost uniquely in popular culture, has demonstrated for non-religious people the integrity, dignity, and plausibility of religiosity” (ix).

In Part III of Prophet Without God, “Strengthen the Things that Remain,” Green analyzes Dylan’s “prophetic pessimism,” his belief that “the political world will never become the site of secular salvation,” which, as Green documents, seems as informed by the singer’s careful reading of Thucydides, Carl von Clausewitz, and various historical accounts of the American Civil War, as by the singer’s religious convictions (253). Here, Green traces a by now familiar pattern, where the artist first inhabits an intellectual tradition and then rubs it against the grain. As Green demonstrates with copious textual examples, modern political realists such as Hobbes, Machiavelli, and more recently Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger often place great faith in a fantasy image of the Strong Leader, unafraid to commit any crime to maintain order and stability, and unconsciously bring to the fore the idealism they sought to eliminate from their positivist political science. Green first situates Dylan within a long-standing tradition of political realists who take it for granted that human institutions are imperfect, since they are built and operated by flawed humans. Then, referencing song lyrics from throughout Dylan’s writing career, as well as an extensive range of contemporary interviews where Dylan has been uncharacteristically effusive about American politics and his reading of classic history texts, Green makes a compelling case that Dylan significantly alters the discourse of political realism by addressing his message not to “the Prince,” or an elite, but “to a real constituency–ordinary, non-specially empowered individuals – [who are] typically overlooked by canonical political realists with their focus on leadership” (254). As Green details in an extended close reading of “Man of Peace,” Dylan’s prophetic stance on politics focuses on practical matters of conduct: on how ordinary people can attain a clear-eyed view of political realities and still work to “strengthen the things that remain” (“When You Going to Wake Up”). 

One of Green’s stated aims in writing the book is to illuminate the character of a people who would regard Bob Dylan to be a prophet: yet one can’t help but notice a disconnect between Dylan’s prophetic messaging as described by Green and the lived experience of the singer’s popular audience, and doubtless of Dylan himself. The hope that a mutual respect and tolerance can still bind together those who hold opposing opinions in matters of faith or politics seems a very weak revenant in “Trump 2.0” America. The polarized discourse of social media seems light years away from the ideals of mutual respect between believers and nonbelievers that Green claims are at the heart of Dylan’s prophetic message on religion. Digital algorithms leave little room for the idealized notions of dialogue and mutuality articulated by theorists of the public sphere. Social media is about profits, not prophets; its algorithms are meant to keep us engaged online, regardless of the content of our messaging. Trolling is not a “bug” of online life, it’s a deliberate part of its functionality.  

Still, as Green memorably puts it, prophetic testimony always presumes “the permanent moral chaos of the present moment”: it presupposes this chaos (or diremption), even as the prophet exhorts us to act differently, and deliberately. In that sense, Dylan’s exhortation to strengthen the things that remain may prove to be the artist’s timeliest message, and Green has done us a considerable service in elucidating and contextualizing the nature of Dylan’s prophetic communications.

March 2, 2025 by
,

Review of Teaching Bob Dylan

Go Back

Other Issues

Barry J. Faulk and Brady Harrison, editors.  Teaching Bob Dylan.  NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, xiii + 268 pp.

Reviewed by D. Quentin Miller, Suffolk University

 

I’m writing this review just after seeing A Complete Unknown, the biopic starring Timothée Chalamet about Dylan’s formative years in the Greenwich Village folk scene. I’m wary of reading reviews prior to seeing films, partly because of spoilers and partly because I want to reduce the chance of external bias as I sit down with my popcorn, but in this case I had surveyed some critics because the movie was so hyped. The ones I read ran the gamut, from pans to raves. Now that I’ve seen it, I’ll go back to them to deepen and sharpen my own responses, and maybe to see something I didn’t fully grasp in the moment: in other words, to learn something.

I’ll keep my movie review to myself because my job here is to review an important new book, Teaching Bob Dylan[1], but the film provides useful context for thinking about the topic of teaching Dylan as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, more than fifty years after young Bobby’s debut. I saw the movie with my elder son, a twenty-something who likes Dylan and who loves movies. We talked through our first impressions on the ride home, and he had some questions that I could answer (which album was “It Ain’t Me, Babe” on?) and others that I couldn’t (who was his Black lover with the British accent in that one brief scene…or was she invented for the film)? I had questions that he could answer, too, like where have I seen the actresses who played Suze (called Sylvie in the film upon Dylan’s insistence) and Joan? Facts are checkable, but the discussion became truly interesting when we talked about the film’s artistic choices and how they affected us as two representatives of the multigenerational audience. We agreed that the title A Complete Unknown was appropriate because you don’t feel like you know Dylan any better by the end of the film than you did at the beginning. It’s a matter of debate whether that’s because he’s unknowable even to himself or because he deliberately cultivated mystique as a shield against the fame he both courted and rejected. Whether we’re looking at Dylan’s performances, his lyrics, or his life, he can be regarded as a fascinating and complex classroom text.

The never-ending tension between what can be known and what must be interpreted is part of what makes higher education a joyous pursuit. Once my son and I dealt with the movie’s factual inaccuracies – (son, the infamous Judas exchange didn’t happen at Newport) – we were able to get to the topics that really engage the mind. This, too, is the tension that consumes anyone who has designed a course or course unit on Dylan, and who would thus benefit from a book like Teaching Bob Dylan.

Part of what explains the existence of the journal you’re currently reading is that Dylan has produced so much art for so long that those who think they know him well will always have new contextual directions to take, or connections to make. And those who are just discovering him have a lot of catching up to do. The editors of Teaching Bob Dylan acknowledge this fact in a single-word subtitle: “Multitudes.” This word rightly signals that the book cannot hope to contain Dylan’s multitudes, but we should always be aware that they exist. There are many ways we can approach Dylan in the classroom, the word acknowledges, but no book nor any fourteen-week course of study will ever cover them all. Parallel to what we do with our students in any semester, the book merely introduces the multitudinous Dylan as a classroom subject and invites us to continue the pursuit as we are able. To return once more to the film’s title, “unknown” is a given, but “complete” is impossible.  Dylan’s multitudes are fragments.

I asked a few questions as I started to read Teaching Bob Dylan, questions that I think would be useful for you, dear reader, as you decide if it’s a book you want to add to your library. You’ve got an ever-increasing number of books about Bob to choose from, as well as the substantial content of this journal and, of course, articles in the popular press.  My questions are: how useful is the book to instructors or would-be instructors? Are the contributors dedicated and innovative teachers? Could the book also be useful to Dylan scholars who are not necessarily interested in teaching a new course or changing the way they teach a current course? Is the volume well written and carefully edited? And finally, and most crucially, does the volume inspire?

Specialized books about pedagogy have a limited audience. That’s a neutral observation, but I want to acknowledge from the get-go that this book is not designed for everyone. I would even argue that it’s not a book for all teachers as I saw very little in these pages that would appeal to our valued colleagues who teach high school. The orientation is toward higher education, even specifically toward undergraduate education. Again, that’s a neutral statement for the benefit of Dylan Review readers who teach secondary school or graduate courses and who might come looking for tips and tricks.

Given that set of caveats, for those of us who teach courses or units on Dylan to undergraduates, Teaching Bob Dylan is a valuable resource. For starters, the book features a wide variety of contexts. I teach a course on Dylan and the Beat Generation, and I was gratified to read two separate and superb essays on that same topic as well as other subjects I might have anticipated (i.e. approaches involving the “old, weird America” and the social revolutions of the 1960s). No book of this type would be complete without those contexts, and they’re covered intelligently and thoroughly. What I didn’t expect were other frames of reference that expanded my way of thinking. I never would have considered teaching Dylan’s gospel/Christian phase before I read Lauren Onkey’s “Teaching the Gospel,” but after reading her clear and persuasive essay, I can’t imagine why I would have sidestepped it. Robert Hurd’s “Romances with Durango: Teaching Dylan’s Encounter with Mexican Culture” also blew my mind because it’s not an obvious approach, but it’s a highly relevant one. As soon as I read each of these essays, I wanted to register for my colleagues’ classes. That’s good teaching! I was also drawn to the section on “Dylan Beyond the Songs.” Essays by Graley Herren (“Teaching Chronicles”) and Leigh H. Edwards (“Bob Dylan and Documentary Film”) made me want to include more of that content in my course. Like many instructors, I use excerpts from Chronicles and clips from a handful of documentaries, but Herren and Edwards provide valuable genre-based readings of these sources rather than treating them as mere framing devices for the songs.

In addition to the introduction, twelve essays, and afterword that comprise the volume, there are also two appendices, one consisting of syllabi provided by the contributors and one consisting of course materials. These appendices take up roughly one-fifth of the entire volume. At first, I thought this was a little excessive, but upon reflection I feel it was a wise decision because it keeps the volume’s focus squarely on pedagogy (more on that later), and it is a treasure trove of possible materials for those who are eager for fresh ideas to revitalize our teaching. Plus, it’s always valuable to see what choices other instructors have made, not only in terms of selection and organization, but in their presentation of material to students. In offering these documents, our colleagues are generously inviting us to steal ideas and lessons, and we should thank them.

It’s evident that all the contributors to this volume are innovative, creative, thoughtful, and dedicated instructors. I applaud the editors for finding contributors whose experience covers the full range of the higher education landscape, from community colleges to Ivy League institutions. The variety of viewpoints speaks again to the “multitudes” of the subtitle. Not every approach will work for every set of students or every institutional setting, so the variety is necessary. There is also variety in the levels of engagement or granularity of detail. We encounter some sophisticated theory (such as “the cognitive-science theory of ‘conceptual blending’” [35] in an essay by Michael Booth) as well as some screenshots of group exercises an instructor worked on with students in class (a map of the Texas-Mexico border and a timeline in an essay by Robert Hurd [150]). Finally, there are significant differences in organization. In addition to the chronological approach many of us take when organizing a course, we see examples of instructors who creatively break that approach, such as Gayle Wald’s nimble description of her course “The World of Bob Dylan” which (as the title indicates) moves around quite freely, or Robert Reginio’s willingness to shuttle between early rock and roll and hip-hop as a way of reframing Dylan for a new generation.

I’m compelled to gush a little more here about the innovation I saw in these pages because I don’t think faculty are rewarded enough for this dimension of our work except (occasionally) by our students. The thought we put into organizing and structuring our classes is often invisible labor. Also, a really good syllabus requires creative thinking and risk-taking despite institutional pressures to make all syllabi boring, quasi-legal documents. I was struck by Graley Herren’s description of “vocation” at his institution. He reports that this concept must be introduced in a first-year seminar such as the one he teaches on Dylan, and that his institution conceives of it in a specific way, “as the intersection in each person’s life where three roads meet: (1) what you love; (2) what you’re good at; and (3) what others need from you” (167). Most instructors would not automatically reach for Dylan given that mandate, but Herren – a creative thinker – makes his case in a most convincing way. By the end of the essay, he interrupts his own analysis to say, “I’m only noticing this now, so I’m eager to get back into the classroom and try out this idea with my next group of FYS students” (174). Clearly this love of the subject – love being one of the three roads that intersect at vocation – is at play here, and it’s the beating heart of this volume in general. As Richard F. Thomas puts it in his moving afterword, “Most [authors of the Classics] are interesting and important, but I don’t feel for them the love I feel for Virgil, Horace, Tacitus – or Dylan – so I simply don’t teach them” (193). This is not to say love need not be critical – this book is not hagiography, and the portrait of Dylan that emerges is definitely “warts and all” – but the contributors’ passion for their subject is evident and infectious.

The question of whether this book is only for instructors is a little vexed. In their introduction (I assume co-authored by the editors, but it’s not explicit) Faulk and Harrison play with an inherent pun in the volume’s title: as instructors we teach courses on Dylan, but the title indicates that Dylan is himself a teacher, and he sometimes expresses “a teacherly frustration with unruly, uncaring students” (7) which might include not only pesky interviewers, but, well, us. By opening up this possibility, the editors suggest that academics – even ones who would claim to be Dylanologists – want to learn from Dylan, which leads us down the road to interpretation as opposed to pure pedagogy. At the end of the book’s “Acknowledgments,” the editors admit, “We’re all wondering what Bob Dylan would think of a book about teaching ‘Bob Dylan’” (xiii). That’s natural. But the volume takes as a given, and consistently reminds readers, that we could never get a straight answer from him: that’s his schtick. That means we’re in the realm of interpretation, which means the volume must spend some time trying to figure out its evasive subject rather than just presenting ways to present him in the classroom. The placing of “Bob Dylan” in quotation marks in the above quotation is a coy acknowledgement that the subject is about as easy to hold as a handful of rain. To return to my point about viewing the movie with my son, there are things we can solidly know but many more things we must argue for, based on the mess of contradictions and slippery evidence that has constituted Dylan’s career.

Even seasoned instructors can’t get away from interpretation, in other words, or the critical impulse; as the editors argue, “if Dylan had never existed, it might have been necessary for rock critics to invent him” (8). Note: not college instructors, but critics, but all of us who teach higher ed are both critics and teachers. Moreover, we get to know our subject better when we teach it, and the insights we arrive at in the classroom often supersede the ones we bring to the classroom. (Raise your hand if you ever assigned a book to students because you were hoping to understand it better, then to write about it). The volume is ostensibly about pedagogy, but some of the essays – you’ll know them when you encounter them, which I hope you do – shade more to the scholarly article side with the practical pedagogy largely saved for the appendices. That’s totally fine, except that I’m concerned that scholars might overlook this volume because they assume it is only designed as a teaching resource. It contains many gem-like insights for critics who do not necessarily teach Dylan to undergrads. In that sense, it may have even broader appeal than the title would indicate. Scholars who never teach Dylan will also benefit from it.

Readers might seek out individual essays in this collection based on their approach to the subject, but the collection also holds together as a coherent volume. I’ve edited a few essay collections and it’s a simple fact that the writing within them will never be uniform. We all have different voices and styles and different relationships with our readers. Editors who aim for uniformity face frustration. That said, all the essays in the collection are strong and clearly written, and they hold together nicely. The organization of the volume, including the pages in the appendices, makes sense to me, although I might have suggested fewer subsections representing broader categories. Five sections for twelve essays seems a bit many, and the one called “Love and Theft” is more abstract and less descriptive than the others. I’m picking nits here: the volume reflects a steady editorial hand but not an overly heavy one, and typos and redundancies are minimal.

What I really hoped for when I picked up this volume was to be inspired, and it certainly delivered on that level. I finished the volume not only with new ideas for my Dylan and the Beats course based on the superb essays by S.E. Gontarski and Paul Haney, but also with a ton of inspiration to develop a host of new courses. As Faulk and Harrison say, “Dylan is not having a cultural moment quite like, say, Taylor Swift,” but he is in the midst of “a number of very good years” beginning with the Nobel Prize for Literature (3). When that award was announced in 2016, the whole world (including its recipient) seemed a bit taken aback, if not shocked. Enough time has passed to try to figure out what it means, not only for Dylan, but for cultural production more generally. Under the guidance of a smart book like Teaching Bob Dylan, and with the help of the younger generation who might register for any number of Dylan-themed courses, I think we’ll figure it out.

 

[1] As a contributor to this collection, Dylan Review editor Paul Haney recused himself from any involvement in the procuring and editing of this review.

March 2, 2025 by
,

Review of The 1974 Live Recordings

Go Back

Other Issues

Bob Dylan and The Band. “The 1974 Live Recordings.” Columbia Records, 2024. CD.

Reviewed by Annie Burkhart, University of Northern Colorado

 

“Locating The Band in The 1974 Live Recordings”          

Yeah the ole days are gone forever and the new ones aint far behind, the laughter is fading away…

—Bob Dylan, 1974, Planet Waves back cover

 

On January 3, 1974, 18,500 rock ‘n’ roll converts watched in awe as six men who had betrayed them eight years prior scrambled onto the Chicago Stadium stage. Never has ovation on top of ovation been so bizarrely repaid; without a word or even a gesture of acknowledgement, Bob Dylan and The Band broke into a number that no one recognized. Once Robbie Robertson teased the arena with a twangy false start on guitar, this electric ensemble delivered three-and-a-half minutes of rollicking roots rock, refusing to deliver “Hero Blues” as it was originally recorded. There would be no mistake about it. As in 1966, these behemoths of blues rock still answered to no one. 

What transpired over the next six weeks, especially on a musical level, was aggressive, subversive, and defiant. These genre-defying musical giants would not be denied as they were, insisting on defining themselves not by but against their past selves – while also making no promises about who they’d be next time. Across forty shows in twenty-one cities on a tour that might have easily been dismissed as a nostalgia act, The Band and Bob Dylan played career-defining music at critical junctures for both acts. As of 2024, a compellingly curated collection of Tour ’74 has been made (theoretically) available to the public in the form of Bob Dylan and The Band’s 1974 Live Recordings.

Listening to the boxset, fans will hear loud and clear that The Band were holding themselves to an incredibly high standard in 1974, a year often overlooked completely in discussions of the group’s legacy. When Band and Bob fans heard from me last, I was situating The Band’s attitudes about their own legacy in 1974, and I, in essence, concluded – with the knowledge of how they sounded on both Before the Flood (1974) and a bootleg or two – that this tour marked the beginning of the end – a sentiment echoed by rock columnist Elizabeth Nelson in her 1974 Live Recordings liner notes. After listening to all 29 hours of this boxset, however, it’s clear that there’s more to the story. While The Band might have relished this opportunity to retreat into Bob Dylan’s shadow as backing musicians, the magic they created on this tour extended their tenure as performers, rather than marking its imminent decline. You don’t make fifty cumulative hours of music this good, this consistently masterful, in the space of six weeks if you’ve got one foot out the door. The 1974 Live Recordings, for The Band as well as Bob Dylan, show us that while the “good ole days” are indeed gone forever, the “new ones” are going to be a trip.

It’s for all of these reasons that The 1974 Live Recordings has supplanted Before the Flood as the definitive artifact of Tour ’74. While many fairly regard 1974 as a year of transition for Dylan and a period of uncertainty for The Band, they were making revolutionary music on this tour that allowed them – not critics, and not fans – to define their legacies. Nelson’s liner notes remind us that “[t]he audience had gotten personal on the ’66 tour . . . And this was the receipt.” This boxset chronicles how one of the most cohesive, innovative, and self-aware bands in history cooked up fire and technical precision night after night as one of the most polarizing and influential artist of the prior decade stood center stage figuring out the future of music. As MOJO Magazine observed of Dylan in their October 2024 review of the Recordings, he was “gathering the sheaves of his past and setting them ablaze with old friends” (67). The Tour ’74 bonfire rages in this boxset. 

Their gutsy and impenitent performance of “Hero Blues” (a number that would be axed from the set fewer than two days later) drives home its lyrics in a way that Dylan’s acoustic number had not. These six musicians attack every measure and every beat with a painstaking accuracy that has rather a violence to it. A period of unadulterated joy for fans of The Band hits around the 1:30 mark, and the group starts doing what they do best: breaking it all the way down. Robertson’s wailing lead guitar slowly crescendos at 1:33, rising to the top as Bob yells to no one (yet everyone) “you need a different kind’a man, babe!” after which all but Bob and Levon Helm go quiet for a measure. Helm keeps driving home that backbeat while elegantly hitting a snare-bass flam and Bob announces who’s replacing everyone’s folk hero: “NAY-POH-lee-uhn BOH-nee-parte!” The bridge breakdown sees The Band performing as soundly and tightly as they have at any point in their career. Robertson and Garth Hudson trade and weave together soaring organ and lead guitar solos as Richard Manuel deftly drifts between lead and rhythm keyboard, hitting the backbeats one moment and the off-beats the next with a simple but confident artistry that’s impressive for this point in his career. And when Rick Danko’s bassline ascends to the top of the mix just before the two-minute mark, even my dog starts paying attention. We’d be hard-pressed to find more gutsy bravado in any juke joint in America than we hear in these first three and a half minutes of Tour ’74.

Candidly, I don’t have the encyclopedic knowledge of Dylan’s live performance history to discuss all 431 tracks of this collection. Instead, I’ll briefly touch on the elephant in the room: that The 1974 Live Recordings was, above all else, a Sony copyright collection. As Sony doesn’t own the rights to any of The Band’s music, not a single recording of an original Band number made it into the boxset. That’s an omission to the tune of 400 more tracks and thus approximately twenty-four more hours of music. Whatever Dylan partisans may say, The Band fans do need to hear all twenty-six performances of “The Shape I’m In.” While The Band shone brightest on this tour when they were, perhaps counterintuitively, not caught in the spotlight, their sets are not an insignificant part of any tour stop. As we flesh out our complete portrait of Tour ’74 with bits and pieces from the archives, we need to remember The Band.

Few of the acclaimed music critics who dropped in on Tour ’74 entered the venue with fair, informed assumptions about The Band’s role on what was principally thought of as a Dylan tour. Even Ralph J. Gleason, whose review of the Oakland shows initially celebrates The Band as having “never played better in person or on record” (86), ends up ultimately misrepresenting what this tour meant to Danko, Helm, Hudson, Manuel, and Robertson in what reads like a backhanded compliment. He opines, “The Band itself has done something only truly great musicians, secure in the knowledge of their own strengths, can do. They have sublimated [sic] themselves to their fellow artist” (89). Though I applaud his flattery in a general sense, I think he misses the point: that The Band needed this chance to stand in Dylan’s shadow, this opportunity to make music in a way that complements their sensibilities both professionally and personally.      

The Tour ’74 stop that leaves this Band fan howling at the moon is the January 15th show in Largo, Maryland. The touch of master engineer Rob Frabroni – invited onto Starship One with the rest of the crew by Bob Dylan himself – turned Disc 9 of this boxset to gold. MOJO Magazine’s review admires how Frabroni “helped Dylan and The Band sound pretty mean” by maximizing their mix of the “constantly acerbic voice, the proto-punk wallop, the squealing guitars and psychedelic keyboards.” The best mix of this boxset is, by default, likely to be a Band fan’s favorite.

While it’s hard to find a bad performance on this disc, the first full-group set at the Capital Center is something special. This was only the group’s second test of beginning and ending a set with the same tune. The number they chose was, as Robertson describes it, a “ripping” version of “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)” (Testimony 428). The Band and Dylan effortlessly recapture their Blonde on Blonde-era energy for this performance. Pair this with Bob’s vituperative shout-singing and the rhythm section’s “tenterhooks urgency that verged on rage” (Nelson), and it becomes the anthem of Tour ’74. As Danko plucks out a sometimes frantic staccato on electric bass, Helm drives this “hectic freight train” number along with deceptively intricate ride cymbal work and a snare pop that hits the tiniest fraction ahead of every beat. 

The Band musically manifests the urgency of Dylan’s song about parting ways. On one level, Dylan is singing about parting ways with the audience as they leave the arena after the encore. More deeply, he is singing about the audience parting ways with their idea of who Bob Dylan is. Robertson notes to Fong-Torres in a 1974 interview, “I don’t remember him ever delivering what they believe he delivered, or what they think he’s going to deliver [this time] . . . people have a fictitious past in mind about him” (24). By 1974, Bob and The Band had earned the privilege of revising their respective legacies. With Dylan’s lone troubadour days behind him, The Band were there to set expectations. As British documentary filmmaker Mick Gold notes of The Band just after the conclusion of Tour ’74 that they are “the only group who could warm up the crowd for Abraham Lincoln … [T]hey sang about communities tied together by traditions of loyalty and deference.” While I find that rock writers focus on The Band’s personal humility a bit too enthusiastically in the mid seventies, “loyalty and deference” were certainly chief among their noblest qualities. The Band facilitate Bob’s identity migration, just as they always have – they take a load off Bobby as he decides where to take music next.

If it wasn’t already clear that Tour ’74 was charting new territory for the group, the January 15 performance of “Lay Lady Lay” eliminates any shadow of a doubt. It’s sultry; it’s salacious;  no listener is safe. All eyes and ears are on them before the number even starts, as Dylan gives tens of thousands a jump scare by saying a complete sentence (other than “we’ll be right back”) for the first time in twelve days of touring: “Thank you; it’s great to be back in D.C.” Robbie and Bob create a spicy back-and-forth between vocals and lead guitar. Both are feeling powerful and self-assured. Clearly, anyone who jumped on the recent “Bob Dylan is not sexy” train has never heard this performance. As Garth Hudson and the rhythm section issue standard-yet-tight-as-ever backbeats and flourishes, a good time is clearly had by all, and performers and spectators begin to feel at ease, if a tad overexcited.

If “Lay Lady Lay” is a moment of sexual delight, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is the morning after. The thrill is brief, and now it’s time to blow this border town. The band settles on something unexpected here – they slow down. Coming down from their “Lay Lady Lay” high, they take their time and devote over six minutes to this number alone. Author and Dylan devotee Paul Prescott drew up a to-die-for infographic for Dylan obsessives:

 

Every Tour ’74 performance of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” in ascending order of duration and notes on modifications.

 

Needless to say, If Prescott sees Dr. Annie, she’ll tell him “thanks a lot.” The January 15 tour stop is only the second time the group plays “Tom Thumb” in full and the only time they’d be this measured in tempo. After a barreling 94 bpm at The Spectrum in Philly on January 7 (another disc of unusually good sound quality), this is an interesting development. What’s notable is that every review I’ve read about this tour notes that the group speeds up from show to show, and slowing  this number down to one of the most plodding of its kind to close out the first third of the tour is rather remarkable. It’s as if the wish fulfillment of “Lay Lady Lay” gives them permission to relax. Robertson’s opening lick could be mistaken for rock-reggae, and when Bob sings “howling at the moon,” Robbie howls back on lead guitar without missing a beat. However, this number ultimately belongs to our boys on the keys. In my mind’s eye, I can see Hudson’s spider fingers moving between consoles while Manuel complements his trills and ditties with his signature shoulder shimmy. Behind the colorful organ and piano stands, as always, the tight but funky support of Helm and Danko, driving this carefully timed number home. Dreams realized in the previous song give the musicians a moment to linger in Juarez before high-tailing it home.

Even as Tour ’74 in the mind of most fans serves as a weigh station between more memorable milestones of these artists’ careers, these roots-rock royalty are making sure we know who they are, where they’ve been, and where they’re going. Their updated, straight-ahead interpretation of “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)” clues us into the musicians’ interior lives. Finding a sound reminiscent of “Loving You (Is Sweeter Than Ever),” a highlight of Rock of Ages-era Band sets, helps this number go down easy. “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” and “Like a Rolling Stone” never get old, as we get an ever-energetic Danko at his vocal best – thin, shouty, and unrestrained—in each chorus. To boot, there are few joys more profound than hearing Richard Manuel on drums, and we get that on “Ballad of Hollis Brown” – a real treat for any fan who adores The Band at their funkiest, which is more often than not The Band at their best.

We must bear in mind, however, that these men were playing a minimum of one show (28 songs) per day, most days over the course of six weeks, so anyone looking for career-defining solos from Danko, Manuel, and Helm are bound to be disappointed. After two years of almost no live gigs, Tour ’74 demanded a lot of the group’s co-lead vocalists – a reality (sadly) spotlighted in Before the Flood. However, for the typically unassuming members of The Band, notoriously bashful about their celebrity, it’s easy to mistake the necessity of slowing down with bowing out and giving up. If we take anything from The 1974 Live Recordings, it should be that The Band did neither. Gold notes in the April 1974 edition of Let It Rock that their 

 

lack of new material might seem predictable after the anxiety of unanswered questions in Cahoots, but I don’t feel their performances can be dismissed as a copout or a lack of nerve. Just as their early work contraindicated widely held views about rock being the music of radical dissent and continual innovation, their last two albums have subverted the idea that rock depends on constant production of significant responses to the present … What The Band expressed … was a faith in rock as a living tradition that can be invoked as well as added to. (5)

 

This is one of the most astute observations I’ve seen about The Band in the mid-seventies, but I think we do everyone involved an injustice to say that what The Band did in 1974 wasn’t “significant.” It is significant because it’s a “response to the present” that demonstrates an attention to their personal needs as well as the public’s complicated expectations of Bob Dylan. We can’t say The Band sublimated themselves to Dylan on this tour. None of these six men saw himself as any more or less valuable than the others, and that’s why this experiment worked. But The Band did something much more remarkable. They had the courage to stand still.

And why would they want anything more? They had created something beautiful and enduring. Indeed, by 1970, The Band had successfully reenlivened music addressing fin de siècle America to lionize the working class (laborers of color included). Gold captures their singular charm, noting that The Band’s songs “went further than Dylan’s by going beyond metaphor and actually embodying the experiences they were about … Where Dylan used the form and language of country music to mark out some firm ground after the amoral fragmentation of the electric albums, The Band actually enshrined the people and places they’d traveled through” (5). They didn’t need to take it further; there was nowhere else to go. To say, then, that The Band were unremarkable after 1970 because they were deliberate about touring and measured in their output is to fundamentally misunderstand them; they had been like that since the beginning when they backed Ronnie Hawkins as The Hawks, then retreated to Big Pink. They never craved attention; they never chased acclaim – but they didn’t rest on their laurels, either. In 1974, The Band were, quite simply, exactly where they needed to be.

For what it’s worth, I’m not the only one who feels this way. In some glowing Tour ’74 commentary, American historian Nat Hentoff gives The Band their flowers, as they were by his estimation, “far more stimulating than [Dylan]” (Knockin’ 116). While it needn’t be a competition, and I don’t intend to make it one, every recognition of this still-rockin’ group who made timeless music with Dylan in a Woodstock basement counts for a lot. In fact, the best remark I’ve turned up while writing this review is from someone whose name I may never know, in a thread about The 1974 Live Recordings on the Steve Hoffman Music Forums:

 

Hearing these as just Dylan shows sharpens the focus. It’s funny, because it’s made me appreciate The Band much more for their instrumental ability. Most commentary on this thread has been about Dylan, how the setlist changed, how his vocal delivery developed. What I’m hearing are his call and response bits with Robbie, the timely Danko interjections, Manuel’s bluesy barrelhouse piano, Garth’s arsenal of sounds, and Levon’s backwoods Keith Moon fills.

 

For me, this is what heaven looks like – conversations in which we give The Band their due ad infinitum. This is exactly the reaction I had hoped to read from fans drawn to The Band through The 1974 Live Recording, fearless remarks that locate The Band, steady and enduring, in moments when we’re apt to lose them.

 

In loving memory of Eric Garth Hudson, maestro of mana, 1937–2025.

March 2, 2025 by
,

Review of A Complete Unknown

Go Back

Other Issues

A Complete Unknown. Directed by James Mangold, Searchlight Pictures, 2024.

Reviewed by Jonathan Hodgers, Trinity College Dublin

 

If you’re lucky enough to be around this long, you prolong your career by talking about the past, and you use documentaries and books and films to remind people that you’re here.[1]

Robbie Williams

 

A Complete Unknown is a deft piece of propaganda about Bob Dylan, with some vivid recreations of his songs by diligent craftspeople. It achieves its modest aims of approximating Dylan’s story and conveying it in a competent, accessible fashion, and does so in an entertaining and carefully calibrated way. Would one like something more insightful and creative? Absolutely.

The film traces Dylan’s career from his arrival in New York until the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, with a lot of elisions, contractions, and embellishments along the way. How one responds to these alterations depends on their tolerance for deviations from reality and whether these creative liberties succeed in capturing the story’s essence, revealing deep truths about the performer, or simply delivering an entertaining two-hour experience. On these levels, I feel it was a qualified success in two categories and a failure in one.

 

Entertainment Value

On the level of pure entertainment, the film worked for me – and apparently for the large-ish crowd in attendance on the opening weekend in my local cinema. The laugh lines landed, such as Dylan’s crack about Baez’s songwriting (I won’t spoil it here). I remember feeling momentarily excited to walk in Dylan’s shoes, to see a recreation of that corner of New York at that particular time. The coffee shops and supper clubs, the look of the streets – these were fun and interesting sojourns into historical ethnography. While I can’t vouch for their accuracy, the verisimilitude was impressive. The film’s depiction of the hospital where Woody Guthrie stayed – desolate and purgatorial – stood out, and given how faithfully other elements were recreated, I suspect it was accurate. It’s fun to watch the actors navigate their real-life counterparts’ affectations. Timothée Chalamet is never less than watchable and credible. Certain scenes are poignant; not least of all, those with Scoot McNairy’s Guthrie, where we’re exposed not only to the tragedy of Huntington’s disease but also feel for an  prodigious talent cruelly rendered inert, confined to being a spectator venerated by participants. And the film is moving in other ways. Edward Norton gives the most affecting performance. Seeger’s reaction to his dreams becoming a reality, but not because of him, is sad and sympathetic. The most haunting shot of the film for me was Seeger clearing away chairs after Newport. Whether it’s real or not, it captures the divide between stars and ordinary people who are famous. The menial tasks he voluntarily performs contrast strikingly with Dylan’s actions, who, in this film, is above everyday altruism.

 

Fidelity to Dylan’s Story

The film’s attempts to capture Dylan’s story – or at least one version of it – within a fairly narrow time frame,  just about works. While it dramatizes some public events proficiently, it struggles to move beyond that, or even intimate that it wants to. This is the hardest pill to swallow: it’s a kind of fantasy. It’s not miles away from Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue (2019), albeit it’s not working within the documentary format, and is slyer in its various duplicities because it so accurately and obsessively works to get the accoutrements right.

The film’s fastidiousness in recreating the world its characters inhabit is implicated in the unease I feel about its fictionality. On one hand, the dedication to getting the physics of the film right—the microphones, the jeans, the settings – is admirable. The other side of me distrusts and questions all the meticulousness because the film has overcompensated in this area for deficiencies elsewhere. It obsessively recreates up to a point, such as with the physical space the characters occupy, but is on much less sure footing in recreating other aspects of the characters’ lives and how they interact with one another. The fact is, I don’t believe much of it, whether or not any of us can ever truly know whether certain events happened the way the film suggests (what were Dylan and Suze Rotolo like as a couple behind closed doors? Or for that matter, Baez, beyond what both women shared publicly?). Certain other instances are openly, verifiably counterfactual – the break-up scene with “Sylvie” (Elle Fanning) at Newport, and the argument with Baez (Monica Barbaro) on stage. All these scrupulous recreations of costumes, locations, and props are sleights of hand, aimed at distracting from some (very) fanciful digressions from reality. At its worst (for instance, the breakup at the ferry), it’s hokum: easy, basic, unsubtle, and designed to telegraph narrative developments in the most transparent, unequivocal, unambiguous, and heavy-handed fashion possible.

This unfortunately drags the film into territory well-trodden by other biopics, not just musical ones. Obsessive recreations of physical spaces are used to serve cliched soap opera tropes – shopworn scenes of strife between romantic couples seem to take priority over everything else. These scenes are not only of questionable validity, but often fail to capture complexity even within that narrow focus. Dylan’s personal life, despite the extensive screentime devoted to it, is not depicted with the nuance it actually possessed. This is partly due to Sara’s absence (a shared trait with Rolling Thunder Revue and No Direction Home), likely omitted for privacy reasons or due to divorce settlement terms. Regardless, even this aspect of his life is oversimplified, streamlined into melodrama that obscures the richer, more dramatic reality. Often doubling down on the simplifications, many of the scenes, as written, manage to flatline on account of sheer heavy-handedness. Trusting nothing to chance, the filmmakers serve up blunt dialogue with a large dollop of symbolism (they just had to include the fence in the breakup scene, didn’t they?). It doesn’t matter that such overstatement is cliché enough to be mocked in music biopic parodies (“the ‘60s are an important and exciting time!”).[2] The filmmakers still seem to believe it’s more compelling than the other facets of Dylan’s life that influenced his music. Yet there are no shortage of fascinating influences on Dylan’s development. Blink and you’ll miss Van Ronk. Izzy Young is nowhere to be found (though a stand-in for the Folklore Center appears), nor is Victor Maymudes; Eve and Mac McKenzie are similarly absent … the list goes on. The point isn’t to fact-check the film, but to illustrate that omitting so much weave from the Village tapestry has a way of distorting how Dylan became who he was over the time period covered by the film. The Village in A Complete Unknown is depicted as something to transcend – almost like an adversary, a Devouring Mother. However, that’s an overly simplistic view and undermines the audience’s understanding of the Village music scene and the path to artistic and professional ascension at the time. Never mind how Dylan himself eventually saw it – Rolling Thunder literature poignantly reveals how much Dylan tried to recreate that very Village in the mid-70s. As a result, too many gradations are missing – both regarding the protagonists and the broader Village ecosystem. Even though the film doggedly tries to convey as rich a sense of place as possible, it’s done to shore up rather corny prevarications and a significantly simplified account of events.

Another byproduct of this anal retentiveness is the intimation of hard graft behind the scenes – the sense of studious dedication and reverence, but not joy. The film has done its homework, in the worst sense of the term. Boxes ticked, chores done, t’s crossed, i’s dotted – we feel the labour behind the film, the years of effort, all of which have been hammered into us by the PR. Dylan’s music is joyous, in the moment, and delightfully cavalier at times (who cares if a musician made a mistake or Dylan fluffed a lyric?). That sensibility is not to be found here – just veneration, the same nagging fanboyishness that suffocates many comic book films and resurrections of older IPs. It feels like toil – arduous, painstaking even – all of which comes at the expense of spark.

The problem here is that real life as mediated to us in other media told us something more interesting and nuanced. A telling comparison is Dont Look Back (1967), which portrays Baez’s marginalisation in a subtle, drawn-out manner rather than through a crude onstage confrontation. That documentary shows her sad exit through a hotel door, all but unnoticed except by Pennebaker’s camera. In contrast, A Complete Unknown presents an assertive Joan Baez rejecting Dylan – another fabrication. Films, of course, must condense and dramatize events, but here, it lapses into the flaws of other biopics; it makes up conflicts and distorts the behaviour of real-life individuals in the process, leaving us, ironically, with less effective drama.

And the film does lack real drama in the form of suspense. There’s never a sense of tension that Dylan is being pulled in two directions – no feeling that history might go awry. It feels rote. It presents what happened as if it was inevitable. There’s no flicker of doubt, no pull of the metaverse, nothing that would call into question whether things always had to happen the way they did. In other words, it doesn’t make us feel present in the moment when the future was uncertain. We never forget what happens, and never suspend our knowledge of how the story ends. Compare this with No Direction Home (2005), which, with great skill, managed to introduce a frisson of uncertainty – it’s exciting, in a way this film isn’t. In the scene with Seeger’s teaspoon analogy, did Dylan ever look remotely like he would back out of going electric at Newport? There is conflict in the sense that the two characters have contrasting beliefs, but little inner conflict among either party (although Seeger’s character does evolve more than that of Dylan’s), which has a way of flattening them out as people, but also diluting the suspense we might feel by witnessing 3D individuals having to think about their choices and figure things out in the present. (One recalls several expert scenes in Tarantino’s films, where characters pause to really think about their circumstances and choices.) Uncertainty – the lack of detours, the fact that Guthrie liked his singing more than his writing, that Dylan mocked Cash initially, his trajectory as a songwriter for Leeds and then Witmark – it’s not here; just Dylan’s manifest destiny to be the person James Mangold and Jay Cocks (and, it has to be said, Bob Dylan), portray him as being.

Relatedly, I’m not sure the story-as-told is as strong as Mangold et al. thought. The events are dramatic, but the Dylan of the film (not the real-life Dylan) isn’t an especially easy figure to identify or side with, and as a result, the conflict is robbed of some of its urgency. It’s not always 100 per cent clear what Dylan wants or why, beyond a contrarian desire not to be what others want him to be. It’s a touch negative, as if there was nothing positive to his actions. He seems to not especially enjoy music or its performance. Chalamet’s Dylan is grumpier than what real life suggested, like a mix of the front covers of The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964) and Highway 61 Revisited (1965). The likes of the Halloween concert Dylan (The Bootleg Series Vol. 6) aren’t to be found. The protagonist is a sort of amalgamation of Dylans: a summation of Dylan, assembled from multiple eras, and perhaps a vague cultural memory of how he was at the time. It’s not easy to know what Dylan’s thinking, which is par for the course, but Chalamet’s Dylan is obtuse at times, gnomic and uncommunicative in a way that seems off versus Dont Look Back, which is near this film chronologically. Again though, we’re reminded that we’re witnessing a fantasy. The deep well of empathy that it’s possible to feel for Dylan never quite emerges, and the film’s various conflicts suffer as a result from a lack of a strong point of identification.

The inconsistent fidelity to the real people again conspires to rob the film of dramatic heft. It’s normal and inevitable that critics have critiqued the various participants’ portrayals: Suze/Sylvie, Baez, Grossman, Cash … it hardly matters in some way; they’re reasonable simulacrums, low res and streamlined, like much else in the film. (Grossman, especially, has lost his real-life capacity to illicit discomfort.) Within these confines, however, the actors work hard. Chalamet mimics Dylan well – or at least some instantiations of him: the way he lowers his head and glowers out from underneath his eyebrows when he sings, the way he seems to put his sunglasses on with both hands … it’s a not-insignificant achievement that he’s not inadvertently silly (cf. Ben Whishaw and Christian Bale in 2007’s I’m Not There). I’m not sure I ever fully embraced him, however. It’s an impossible task in some ways, as with all major public figures one knows reasonably well from documentaries and interviews. One always watches and judges how well the impression aligns with their memory of the person. The more familiar we are with the real person’s body language, the harder it is to sink into the performance and see a character rather than an impression. In that way, it might have been helpful to have known Dylan less – the performance itself might have distracted less (Dylan neophytes obviously won’t be bothered by this). However, the first time we hear Chalamet sing in the film with “Song to Woody,” he certainly convinced me that he had done his homework.

 

The Question of Truth

How much should one care about the film’s correspondence to reality? There seems to be an Overton window: complete distortions will be rejected, but some make-believe is tolerated if it serves an “emotional truth.” But does A Complete Unknown get at something deeper about Dylan?

Emotional or spiritual truth is, to some extent, in the eye of the beholder. Praising the film for being emotionally true often just means that it aligns with the viewer’s pre-formed impression of Dylan, or at least doesn’t move the needle too much. By this metric, the filmmakers succeeded – they printed the legend. But much is lost in the process. If the film is “spiritually true,” it has sacrificed an awful lot to get there.

Regardless of one’s tolerance for falsehoods, the key question is whether those falsehoods were worth it. For all the cutting and pasting, I don’t think the filmmakers access the spiritual or emotional truth they are striving for. I don’t think, for instance, that there’s a sequence here as good as the “I Want You” sequence in Haynes’s I’m Not There. Unlike that exciting montage, A Complete Unknown doesn’t seem to be able to tap into the thrill of striking out on one’s own, of the cocktail of sex, poetry, motorbikes, and young love, although all are present, duller and flatter, in A Complete Unknown.

The film does, in places, pull one into a vicarious sense of Dylan’s achievement. I did feel a spark of schadenfreude when Dylan performed “Like a Rolling Stone” at Newport – a giddiness at giving philistines that most thrilling middle finger in music history (albeit transplanted from Manchester), but that feeling was somewhat tempered by the fact that the film’s Newport audience members are simple and somewhat shallow antagonists (or enough of them are anyway – Mangold does show some happy converts). In the aftermath of the film’s festival, they dance to his music like it’s “Louie Louie.” It’s edifying to see people won over by the power of his electric material, as it is to see small-mindedness and holier-than-thou attitudes attacked, but when those attitudes belong to a cartoonish, generalised audience, one feels the spiritual truth is too disconnected from the actual truth. The Judas moment is here, for instance, conflating and blurring two very different crowds in the whole electric saga. In Tulsa’s Dylan archive, the vox pops featuring the audiences reacting to the ‘66 gigs are remarkable for how articulate, varied, and revealing their responses are. It’s easy to remember the freaks and obsessives (“he’s making a pile out of it!”),[3] but there were (are?) a lot of normies out there with rational, understandable reasons for demurring at various facets of Dylan’s evolution. You wouldn’t know that from A Complete Unknown. They are Pavlov’s dogs, vulgar as they come (“it’s Bob fucking Dylan!”). It’s all part and parcel with how the film sets up the conflict between Dylan-as-rebel and the gatekeepers of folk music, as well as narrow-minded acolytes and fans. Again, the simplifications of events and contracted timeline comprise the film’s emotional and spiritual truth.

 

Creative Choices

Part of me is disappointed that this is where Dylan and film has gone. We get a conventional Hollywood narrative, working within a restricted bandwidth, with unobtrusive editing, dialogue, and a loose Oedipal trajectory that aims to work primarily on the emotions. Still, my issue isn’t so much the choice of the classic Hollywood cinema paradigm for the telling of the story; it’s more so that the film seems to lack much creative vision for the subject matter, and ultimately doesn’t have all that much interesting to say about it or persuade the audience of beyond what’s been established in multiple other media about Dylan: that he didn’t like to be fenced in artistically, was something of a lyrical savant, and was not always an especially pleasant or considerate person, especially if he found you trite, prying, or square.

Compare Todd Haynes’ thesis. This is no judgement on the quality of either film – just an observation that one takes a firmer stance than the other. In I’m Not There, the trajectory of a number of the Dylans – one thematic thread that unifies them – is the idea that Dylan fears, for want of a better term, the idea of being found out: specifically, the idea that he be exposed as somehow ordinary, or that his story – specifically, his control over his own story – be somehow taken away from him by either being known too well publicly, by getting too close to others, or by being sniffed out by nosy busybodies looking to dig up dirt on him or otherwise uncover and embarrass him. This affects the Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin), Jude (Cate Blanchett), Robbie (Heath Ledger), and Billy (Richard Gere) versions of the character (Woody is a runaway from a juvenile corrections center, Jude is a middle-class suburbanite, Robbie is boorish beneath the movie star veneer, and Billy is a wanted man). How disconcerting would it be to have one’s self-delusion or self-presentation suddenly punctured, especially when the carefully crafted persona is so compelling? Haynes doesn’t go much further than this riff on the theme of “Like a Rolling Stone,” but it’s a provocative perspective on Dylan that he might actually be hurt, wounded, or embarrassed by being revealed as banal or false, or might consider himself less-than without all the invention and role-playing – i.e., that he would respond as a human being would to being seen as an imposter. Compare how a similar idea plays out in A Complete Unknown. Baez calls Dylan out on his pretence, but he’s utterly unmoved, despite being put on the spot. One might invoke Renaldo and Clara (1978) as a rejoinder, where Baez teases Dylan and he’s visibly on the defensive. It’s a human moment for both of them, but that’s not what A Complete Unknown wants; it wants an inscrutable hero – dickish, but utterly sure of himself and without anything underneath. There’s no fear of being found out or exposed; he seeks to be a sort of freak because plain people don’t hold an audience’s attention. Once again, I’m Not There provides more fallibility. Look at Robbie on the motorbike – more accurate, and more vulnerable. Look now at the pro speeding around the Village in A Complete Unknown.

It’s the kind of film that I imagine satisfies the conservative, profit-oriented, Oscar-hungry impulse in the filmmakers’ hearts: something like Walk the Line (2005) or Elvis (2022), a film that shows up at 9pm on terrestrial TV after a few months that most of the family can watch. It’s a job I’m Not There didn’t attempt, and it’s filling a hole in Dylan’s filmography, that of the conventional biopic aimed at mass consumption and designed to present a palatable, sanded-down version of the artist in question and a commensurate simplification of his role in history, with enough romances and bust-ups to keep sceptical or distracted viewers engaged. Its wheelhouse is an easily digestible cinematographic vernacular, designed to go unnoticed, with no hint of warring forces or transformative impulses within the film itself.

 

Conclusion

Speaking of that recent Robbie Williams biopic, I return to his quotation used as this review’s epigraph: “If you’re lucky enough to be around this long, you prolong your career by talking about the past, and you use documentaries and books and films to remind people that you’re here.” For better or worse, A Complete Unknown ultimately achieved what it aspired to be: a reminder. Underlying Williams’s comment, more importantly, is that need for content, which A Complete Unknown, I’m afraid, feels like to me at times. That it introduced young people to Dylan’s music and drove up his Spotify streams[4] is a positive outcome for anyone who believes his work is valuable and that it should be as widely known as possible. I appreciate why people might praise the film for doing these things, but I wish the film could stand better on its own rather than as a means to an end. A viral TikTok video or strategically placed song in the likes of Stranger Things (2016–) might have achieved something similar. What we got was, again, propaganda, because it’s a form of promotion in the service of an ideology: Dylan-as-enigma, Dylan-as-genius, Dylan-as-lightning rod, Dylan-as-sexy-revolutionary, packaged as part of a simple worldview depicting the individual artist battling against narrower minds and the inequities of a censorial, backwards looking folk world. If it was art, it wouldn’t be so deferential, so eager to please, so in thrall to its central figure. It’s compliant, which is probably the greatest stain on its artistic aspirations. That being said, it’s clear the film worked for some fans and enticed some new ones into the fold. If it succeeds as a gateway drug for the real Dylan, that says something about the film’s quality and its ability to effectively translate and dramatize a world, a series of conflicts, and a group of personalities in a way that resonates with present-day audiences. If it’s somewhat dumbed down and disingenuous, it’s no different than most musical biopics, and perhaps everyone’s sin is no one’s sin. Watch it if you haven’t. I’m going to see it a second time.

 

Works Cited

Dylan, Bob, dir. Eat the Document. 1972.

Dylan, Bob, dir. Renaldo and Clara. Circuit Films, 1978.

Dylan, Bob. Highway 61 Revisited. Columbia – 512351 2, 2003, compact disc. Originally released in 1965.

Dylan, Bob. The Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall. Columbia – 88697732912, 2010, 2 compact discs. Originally released in 2004.

Dylan, Bob. The Times They Are A-Changin’. Columbia – COL 519892 2, 2005, compact disc. Originally released in 1964.

Gracey, Michael, dir. Better Man. Hollywood: Paramount, 2024.

Haynes, Todd, dir. I’m Not There. 2007; Hollywood: Paramount, 2008. DVD.

Kasdan, Jake, dir. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. New York: Sony, 2007. DVD.

Luhrmann, Baz, dir. Elvis. 2022; Burbank, CA: Warner Bros, 2022. Blu-ray Disc,1080p HD.

Mangold, James, dir. A Complete Unknown. Los Angeles: Searchlight, 2024.

Mangold, James, dir. Walk the Line. 2005; Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 2006. DVD.

Pennebaker, D. A., dir. Dont Look Back. 1967; New York: Criterion, 2016. Blu-ray Disc, 1080p HD.

Scorsese, Martin, dir. No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, 2 discs. Hollywood: Paramount, 2005. DVD.

Scorsese, Martin, dir. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. Los Gatos, CA: Netflix. 2019.

Steiner, Robert. ‘Bob Dylan Streaming Boom Highlights Biopic Bump’. Variety, 28 January 2025. https://variety.com/vip/bob-dylan-biopic-streaming-increase-1236287468/.

The Duffer Brothers, creators. Stranger Things. Los Gatos, CA: Netflix, 2016–.

The Graham Norton Show, season 32, New Years Eve show, “Robbie Williams Has a Message for His Critics.” Aired 31 December 2024, on BBC. Video clip. https://youtu.be/WrQsBRU9u3I?si=ictMP_QJ-k4QmMGn.

 

[1] The Graham Norton Show, season 32, New Years Eve show, “Robbie Williams Has a Message for His Critics,” aired 31 December 2024, on BBC, video clip, https://youtu.be/WrQsBRU9u3I?si=ictMP_QJ-k4QmMGn.

[2] As spoken in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007), here: https://youtu.be/ukq-Zc7nGw8?si=Gtxo-Tmj9Gkztxh6.

[3] From Eat the Document (1972), https://youtu.be/MGylr0S-yZ0?si=YYNNMLR6WEG-cwEv&t=1851.

[4] Steiner, ‘Bob Dylan Streaming Boom Highlights Biopic Bump’.

March 2, 2025 by
,

Dylan Review Vol. 6.1, Spring/Summer 2024 – BOB DYLAN LYRICS, COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Go Back

Other Issues

Gates of Eden. Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music. All Rights Reserved.

Talkin’ World War III Blues. Copyright © 1963, 1966 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1994 by Special Rider Music. All Rights Reserved.

What Was It You Wanted? Copyright © 1989 by Special Rider Music. All Rights Reserved.

When the Ship Comes in. Copyright © 1963, 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1992 by Special Rider Music. All Rights Reserved.

 

All songs written by Bob Dylan.

August 6, 2024 by
,

Dylan Review Vol. 6.1, Spring/Summer 2024 – BOOKS RECEIVED

Go Back

Other Issues

Jeffrey Edward Green, Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.

Jonathan Hodgers, Bob Dylan on Film: The Intersection of Music and Visuals (Ashgate Screen Music Series). Oxford: Routledge, 2024.

Thomas Palaima, And The Nobel Prize in Literature Goes to… Bob Dylan?. Virginia Beach: Koehler Books, 2024.

August 6, 2024 by
,

Dylan Review Vol. 6.1, Spring/Summer 2024 – CONTRIBUTORS

Go Back

Other Issues

Nora Bonner is a fiction writer, singer-songwriter, and college writing instructor from Detroit, Michigan. She teaches composition at Georgia State University, where she obtained her PhD in Creative Writing. Her stories have appeared in Third Coast, Redivider, and the Best American Non-Required Reading.

Andrea Cossu is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento, where he obtained his PhD in Sociology. He is the author of It Ain’t Me, Babe: Bob Dylan and the Performance of Authenticity.

Jason Grant is a designer and co founder of Inkahoots Design in Brisbane, Australia. He occasionally writes about design and culture.

Roberta Rakove has a Master’s degree in Public Health from the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health. Roberta developed a class on Bob Dylan for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Northwestern University, and has been interviewed on The Dylantantes, Pod Dylan, and Songs of Experience: A Bob Dylan Podcast.

Bob Russell is a retired IT Manager. He is an admirer of rock, folk, and traditional country and bluegrass music, and a longtime listener to the music of Bob Dylan.

August 6, 2024 by
,

Interview with Erin Callahan and Anne-Marie Mai

Go Back

Other Issues

The Dylan Review spoke to Dylan scholars Erin Callahan and Anne Marie Mai during “Bob Dylan – Questions on Masculinity,” a conference hosted by Callahan and Mai at the University of Southern Denmark. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

 

Dylan Review: How did this conference come about?

Erin Callahan: Anne-Marie [Mai] and I met in 2018 at the Dylan in the 21st Century conference in Arras, France. And then I reached out to her when I was doing interviews for Jim Salvucci’s The Dylantantes. During the interview, we started talking about Dylan and gender, and I don’t know if you [Anne-Marie] said we should host a conference, or if I said it, but you said “We should do that.” And it really was just in the course of that conversation that we decided to do it. And when we got home, she came back here [to Odense, Denmark] and I went back to Houston, we followed up and that’s how it happened.

Anne-Marie Mai: I was lucky to get a research award, some money I could spend on interesting topics of my own choice, so I decided to spend part of it on this conference.

 

DR: The conference is called Bob Dylan: Questions on Masculinity. Why are questions on Bob Dylan and masculinity important?

EC: Gender is interesting in general. Identity studies are interesting. And part of my dissertation was focused on the voices or the different identities Dylan occupies. And so what Sean [Latham in his paper “The Cowboy Angel Rides”] was doing with the cowboy identity was central to my dissertation. But I think looking at the way Dylan shifts his identity performance throughout his career can tell us a lot and open the discussion on Dylan, as we saw throughout the two days. And I think that’s another piece of understanding Dylan and his art.

AM: I agree, but I was also interested in his fans’ and followers’ ideas of him and how they relate to masculinity. What are their images and ideas of him? Because I think it was important to the respondents of my questionnaire, who are elderly men, to be men in another way to their fathers. Of course, we used to talk about the youth rebellion, but perhaps we neglect how much it was a rebellion against a certain modern masculinity. We think of it as a rebellion towards the older generation, but it was definitely a rebellion against a certain modern masculinity, too.

EC: As I said when I was introducing Carsten [Lang-Jensen and his paper “Sitting on a Barbie-Wire Fence”], we have two different fields that converge. There’s the fanbase community in Dylan studies, who understand his masculinity in a very personal way, and I think your presentation [Dylan Review interviewer Paul Haney and his paper, “Queering Bob Dylan Through Creative Nonfiction”] spoke to that and merged the two fields: academic and fan culture. Because you intellectualize that process, almost like a hero’s journey. I think it gave us that real focus from both the fan perspective and the academic perspective to see how masculinity is at play in Dylan’s work throughout the trajectory of sixty-plus years.

AM: And then we also heard some wonderful presentations on Dylan and gender issues in Tulsa.

 

DR: Do any of those stand out? There was the Anne Powers’s keynote [“Bob Dylan’s Body” from World of Bob Dylan 2019]

AM: Yes. That was a great inspiration to me. And also there are essays on Dylan and gender in some of the anthologies on Dylan. But this topic develops slowly, and we decided we should try to go further into that.

 

DR: And so we’re here in Odense, in the Noble Woman’s Monastery.

AM: Perhaps you call it a convent, for noble women who decided not to marry. Some couldn’t find a husband, but there were some who definitely chose not to marry. And they came here instead of living in a terrible marriage.

 

DR: It’s a beautiful location, and you showed us around the various rooms and offices. Was it a deliberate choice to have this conference on masculinity here in a woman’s convent?

AM: Yes. It was thought provoking to have this discussion on modern masculinity in these surroundings where women for centuries have been studying, have been writing, have been discussing things. I figured it would be nice to continue that tradition with this study of masculinity.

 

DR: You’ve hosted other Dylan conferences before.

AM: We had two Dylan conferences – one in 2009 when we first started discussing his nomination for the Nobel Prize. We were so unhappy that a member of the Swedish Academy had declared that no American author could get the prize again, because artistically they were no good. That was what the secretary at that time had said of American literature: it is not qualified for the Nobel Prize. We decided this couldn’t be right. And I’m asked every year, as are several other literature professors all over the world, to nominate for the Nobel Prize. But you’re also asked not to tell who you nominate. But I decided I’d make it public because the Secretary made it public that American literature is no good. So we wanted to show that there were strong candidates.

 

DR: Allen Ginsberg had made it public that he was nominating Dylan for years, right?

AM: That’s right. There were some Norwegian professors who did it, perhaps influenced by Ginsberg. He asked them to nominate Dylan.

 

DR: He lobbied the nominators?

AM: Yes. Both for Dylan and himself.

 

DR: So that conference in 2009, you were discussing Bob Dylan

AM: We were discussing him as a poet, actually. That was a great conference, and then after he won the Nobel Prize, we had our conference in Odense.

EC: Is that when you [Anne-Marie Mai] published your book, Bob Dylan the Poet?

AM: That was after he won the Nobel Prize in 2016. On the day he won, I was actually not engaged in what was happening. I’d been waiting by the phone for a couple of years. The BBC had asked me to be ready to give an interview because they knew that I had done it publicly. So they wanted to have an interview. And I waited for two or three years and figured I wouldn’t wait any longer. Then on the day that he actually won the prize, I wasn’t prepared at all. I’d forgotten that this was the day. We had just opened a research project on the uses of literature, and when we finished our first meeting the phone began to ring. And it kept ringing. Lots of interviews, and my publisher asked me if I could write a book on Bob Dylan. I said “Yes, of course!”

 

DR: So here at the third Bob Dylan conference you’ve hosted, have you noticed certain themes or ideas about Dylan and masculinity that have come to the fore the last couple of days?

AM: I should say so. I think we have the impression of “I contain multitudes” also in regard to gender and masculinity. But I think, to me, it has become clearer that there are also contradictions. It’s not just multitudes, it’s also contradictions. And, of course, you might realize we are all full of contradictions.

EC: I think the theme of brotherhood, and then some of the archetypal masculine identities, we kept seeing. Like today, when Sean [Latham] presented and said to Court [Carney], “I thought you were gonna steal my thunder with the Gunslinger,” and so we were all converging on these similar themes. And it could be that maybe one of the benefits was that it was a small enough conference that we could engage in meaningful dialogue. Perhaps if we had a bigger conference, we would’ve seen more themes emerge. But I think the theme of fraternity, also contradictions, and the multitudes that he’s occupied or performed throughout his career, became apparent. His relationship to women, and I think that Rebecca [Slaman] did a nice job with that this morning [with her paper “When God and Her Were Born: Dylan and the Divine Feminine”], and how Sara [Dylan] fit into the framework of that identity.

AM: And I think Andrew [Fehribach, whose paper was titled “Another Side of Bob Dylan: Another Archetype for Generation Z”] made it clear how male dominated the folk revival actually was. We think of it as a more equal breakthrough of a musical trend, but it was very male dominated in his interpretation.

 

DR: Can you say, in brief, what each of your papers were about?

EC: My paper [“Mixing Up the Medicine: Bob Dylan’s Basement Carnival and Homosocial Masculinity”] was essentially looking at the space following the motorcycle accident, the hiatus he took from touring, as a Bakhtinian Carnival, but also as a family space that deviates from his previous life. But within that, recording The Basement Tapes creates even a deeper sense of carnival with the homosocial relationships he creates with the members of The Band. And that then allows him to go back to what I think is an industrial, patriarchal, capitalist masculinity as a wage earner. He’s a contracted wage earner as a recording artist.

AM: I just have finished the review [“Images of Bob Dylan”] that we did from 2020 to 2022. And I think it shows that our respondents, fans and followers, are mainly elderly men who grew up with a prevailing modern masculinity. They use Dylan’s songs to find ways to create other gender relations and to understand their masculinity in another way than their fathers did. We will always think of the youth rebellion as a rebellion of youth against an older generation, but to me, this review shows that it’s definitely also a rebellion against the modern, prevailing masculinity practiced by their fathers and grandfathers. So I think that’s interesting. And that music and song can have great power in this.

 

DR: Do you have a hope or an idea that the next generation can listen to Bob Dylan in order to evolve from the masculinity they’ve adopted from their own fathers? Does a conference like this help extend Bob Dylan to future generations?

AM: Hopefully, but it seems difficult. I have to say I’m a little disappointed with the Danish youth, how little they know of Dylan. There were some fans that were very eager at our last conference. We had some high school students who really wanted to attend and we had no room, so they offered to do the cleaning just to be there, serve coffee, and participate. So there are some, and perhaps more will come. But it needs communication and explanation.

EC: Timothée Chalamet is going to open Dylan up to a new generation in a way that we don’t expect. We don’t even know what the result of that will be. It will have an impact on the younger generation. But look at how Rebecca [Slaman] addresses masculinity, and even the way Andrew [Fehribach] did. Each generation brings a new perspective, especially as theory develops, and we see progress. Hopefully each generation will bring something new to Dylan. That will expand how we look at his identity performance, and the way that we see Dylan. What gives me hope for the future is that we’re not stuck with the first generation, as with any academic pursuit. We’ll keep pushing back or expanding what previous scholars have done. So I’m hopeful that conferences like this, especially those involving young people and people of different ages, will help us to broaden the conversation.

AM: It was interesting too that we had invited a young female musician [Alexandra Løvedal] to interpret Dylan’s songs because it was so obvious that her interpretation is different. And it still works, still has something to it. The sensibility of the songs are so special. She has also signaled that Dylan can be communicated to younger generations, and that they can pick it up and become as interested in it as she is.

 

DR: The younger generation’s out there, but it seems they need to communicate with each other because we can’t dictate to them how they’re going to talk about Bob Dylan. At the same time you [Erin Callahan] spoke about gatekeeping, right? How we need to keep the gates open so they can come through.

EC: Absolutely. They’re still on TikTok, Dylan Twitter, Instagram. We need to meet them on their platforms, so they can have exposure to what’s going on in Dylan World and share their ideas, which I think makes us better too as older scholars, older fans, that it opens up our understanding of Dylan when they share their ideas.

 

DR: In terms of Dylan and questions on masculinity, what questions remain to be asked?

EC: In two days, you can only scratch the surface of his gender performance and identity. And so many of us have been saying, “this is part of a larger piece.” Laura [Tenschert] spoke for 51 minutes today, and she cut her paper [“Before You Call Him a Man: Bob Dylan and the Crisis of Masculinity”]. There are still a lot of questions to look at more deeply in terms of other people who have performed Dylan, female covers of Dylan. Also the interplay between how the songs tend to occupy masculine space, and what happens when women perform them. And in terms of him being a father, there’s a lot out there to still cull and bring forward.

AM: I’d also like to include more on his artwork. Because there are so many interesting things going on there. To go deeper into an analysis of some of these paintings that have both male and female figures in them, that are similar and yet different. I’m also interested in Dylan and melancholy. I wrote an essay on his use of this feeling of melancholy, and perhaps this is also gendered in some way: is this male melancholy, or how does it relate to gender issues? I would like to study that further. And of course the artwork.

 

DR: What are each of you working on Dylan-wise at the moment?

AM: I’m writing a monograph. “The whole package,” as one of my respondents said. I actually have written a small book for a university publisher, only 32 pages. But they wanted so many anecdotes and stories of Dylan, all the usual stuff we’ve heard so many times, so I gave it up and decided to write a larger book, perhaps 150 pages. It’s on the whole package. And I want to do something about the artwork, and his advertising practice that is also so heavily debated and interesting.

 

DR: The whiskey bottles with those gates on them.

AM: The whiskey bottles, for instance. And why does he take this up? Is it because all other rock stars seem to be producing liquids? Or is there something else to it?

EC: Court Carney and I were asked to co-write a chapter by some scholars in France on Dylan and myth, and so we decided to focus on Together Through Life and border music, borderlands. And then we’re working on – with both of you [Anne-Marie Mai and Paul Haney] – a volume reconsidering Dylan in the 80s. And then the podcast. I started the podcast, Infinity Goes Up on Trial, and I put that out monthly.

 

DR: Can you give us an overview of the podcast?

EC: My idea is essentially from the lyric from “Visions of Johanna”: “Inside the museum infinity goes up on trial / Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while.” My first guest was a friend, Jason Nadler. He sent me a text in December, saying what I was thinking in the most beautifully articulate way, that in Dylan’s works there are ideas that are universal, and that’s what infinity is. We’re bringing scholars in that are Dylan focused or Dylan adjacent – my second guest was someone who’s a theologian and doesn’t really study Dylan – to talk about the ideas that are in Dylan, and how they approach ideas and how these ideas are universal. And what they see in Dylan. My third guest is a Dylan scholar. I don’t want to get in the same echo chamber of people that we talk to all the time. I want to talk to folks who are new to Dylan, or maybe new to the Dylan community, so we broaden the conversation, focusing on the ideas. Elizabeth Cantalamessa, I’m going to talk to her when I get home. And she’s going to talk about the Dylan community, the fan perspective, but also that convergence between the academic and the fan culture.

 

DR: Are there any other questions you feel like the Dylan Review should be asking?

AM: [At the conference] we touched upon The Philosophy of Modern Song several times. I opened th discussion last night with Sean [Latham] on that, and he is perhaps more skeptical than I am in regards to that book. But that might be because I’m European, and I don’t know so much about the American song tradition. I found [the book] so full of energy, and anger, and strong emotions, and I was impressed with it in that way. I would like to continue the discussion of this book. How should we approach it, understand it, and analyze it?

EC: I agree with that. I think we’re constantly catching up to Dylan. He’s so prolific, I don’t know what questions to ask because I’m still trying to catch up to what he’s done. And he keeps going. It’s hard to say what questions we should ask. Maybe what’s next from him?

August 6, 2024 by
,

Designing Dylan: Form and Content in Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine

Go Back

Other Issues

Designing Dylan: Form and Content in Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine

BY Jason Grant

 

Books are aesthetic objects. As much as the collected material it documents, Bob Dylan:  Mixing Up the Medicine – the official publication of The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma  – is a physical design artifact, and the content it holds is just as constructed. Like all aesthetic objects, Mixing Up the Medicine is a product of the choices of its creators, the imprint of its historical moment, and the inextricable link between the two. Following Alessandro Carrera’s review of the book in The Dylan Review’s previous edition[1], our challenge here is understanding what was actually designed, in the sense of consciously created, and what is also routine cultural reflex, born from the systemic, ongoing effects of design and its evasive relational complexity.  

 

Any published account of Dylan’s career is automatically epic due to the mythology of its shape-shifting subject. Mixing Up the Medicine, like many of the earliest literary works, is an adventurer’s log book charting the landmarks of a pioneering explorer’s discoveries. From the very first book, the travails of Gilgamesh, transcribed in cuneiform on clay tablets, to  Chinese Song-dynasty block-printed travel literature, books have long been produced as mythological and historical records of heroic travelers’ adventures.  

 

In their day, the lead-set printed European colonial conquests were a publishing phenomenon. I recently donned white gloves to view the first ever published account of Captain  James Cook’s (ultimately genocidal) journey around the world, and the rarest published work relating to Cook’s Endeavour voyage, a collection of charts of the east coast of Australia and  New Zealand. Until the late 19th century most books did not have illustrated covers, so in the absence of pictures, extravagantly descriptive titles were needed to evoke content and attract readers. Although from a contemporary perspective, reading the whole title almost risks negating the need to read any further. One of the Cook books is titled: Astronomical  observations made in the voyages which were undertaken by order of his present Majesty, for  making discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, and successfully performed by Commodore Byron, Captain Carteret, Captain Wallis, and Captain Cook, in the Dolphin, Tamer, Swallow,  and Endeavour.

 

In contrast, Mixing Up the Medicine’s front cover is all image. The single striking photo without a title, or any text at all, may reveal as much about evolving socio-technical conditions as it does about Dylan’s fame. For centuries, books have been sold in brick-and-mortar stores,  romantic sites that persist in our imagination even as they vanish from our communities  (support your local independent bookstore!). Like the album covers increasingly designed to be viewed as thumbnails on digital streaming platforms, the majority of books are now viewed initially on a screen and sold online (by 2020, over 71.2% of the United States publishing industry’s total revenue was coming from online book sales).[2] As a consequence, covers are becoming simpler, bolder, and in some cases are exaggerating their formal, material qualities in opposition to the intangible ephemerality of digital information. The distillation of visual information on book covers isn’t just down to a new diminished virtual viewing context, but also the ability for less literal images to be accompanied online by descriptive texts. It’s also worth noting that the magnetic, unadorned photo on Mixing Up the Medicine’s cover is by Jerry  Schatzberg from a post-Highway 61 Revisited studio shoot, and prefaces his Blonde on Blonde cover shot, which began a brief, anomalous period (1966–1970) when most of Dylan’s album covers were similarly devoid of title typography. 

 

There are thousands of photographs of Dylan at every age and in every era. However,  reinforcing the archaic characterization of Dylan as a folksinger singing protest songs defaults stubbornly to the 60s. As Dylan himself said in a 1985 interview: “It’s kinda funny… When I  see my name anywhere, it’s (often) ‘the 60s this or the 60s that.’ I can’t figure out sometimes  if people think I’m dead or alive.”[3] As a marketable medium, perhaps an image of iconic 60s  Dylan is highly legible, while Dylan’s older visage is just harder to read. Regardless, the cover image suspends him in amber as some kind of estranged historical subject. A “walking antique”  for the hypnotist collectors. For the cover of a Dylan book published in 2023, at the tail end of an unprecedented seven-decade career, should designers still be searching through mid-century photographic proofs? At the time of writing, Bob Dylan is 83 years old. Can’t this resilience and maturity be visually celebrated, rather than habitually ignored? Give me a portrait of the  old explorer still powerful and relevant: “I can see the history of the whole human race / It’s  all right there – it’s carved into your face.” 

 

The book exists because of its subject, for its subject’s audience. Then again, Dylan, as a popular performer and songwriter, is actually the direct result of the book form – not just as a source of content, or influences (“I read Erica Jong!”) but more fundamentally as a transformative technology. The development of the printed word manifested the possibility of an audience. This is Marshall McLuhan’s idea that books created the phenomenon of a public:  “The old manuscript forms were not sufficiently powerful instruments of technology to create  publics in the sense that print was able to do — unified, homogeneous, reading publics.”[4] One of Dylan’s influences acknowledged in his Nobel lecture, Charles Dickens, caused a riot in  1841, as legend has it, when frenzied readers stormed the New York harbor in anticipation of the British ship arriving with the final installment of his serialized novel, The Old Curiosity Shop.[5] Long before recorded music and film, books manifested fans, not just for a writer, but  for an actor, artist and “song and dance man”: “I see the turning of the page / Curtain risin’ on  a new age.”[6] Gutenberg’s printing press and Dylan’s guitar are playing the same song. 

 

Offering the book’s content as a more broadly accessible online archive would involve obtaining unlikely permissions from rights holders, but who knows, they may yet. Even so, the digital transmission of the written word, for all its convenience, has not replaced traditional print, especially not for longer texts (and not always as a foolproof monetizable commodity).  Popular predictions of prints’ extinction now seem obsolete themselves. The unique sensorial qualities of the printed page, with its ink solvent aromatics, the vanilla and almond notes from a complex organic polymer in the paper called lignin, and the medium’s tactility – as well as the ways in which light is absorbed and reflected from its surface – combine to offer unique haptic, optical and olfactory pleasure. Then there’s the growing body of research showing the reading benefits of a book’s physicality, for example, that print reading can enhance comprehension by up to eight times more than reading on digital devices.[7] And Mixing Up the  Medicine’s hefty 608-page hardcover format is plenty of print, enabling provisional global dissemination of the Dylan museum’s Oklahoma-based collection.  

 

There is a typical limit to the scale of a large format hardcover, that relates to both the economics of conventional publishing efficiencies and the human body itself. To accommodate more of the museum’s collection, Mixing Up the Medicine could have easily been many multiple times its current length. The authors, Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel, claim the book represents just 2% of the Bob Dylan Archive.[8] But it deserves to be read, not just looked at, and that means conforming to some physical constraints. Odds are you’re not reading many of German publisher Taschen’s “Sumo” sized books in bed, for example, some of which are  44 pounds and come with their own custom stands. Mixing Up the Medicine’s own publisher,  Calloway, has titles that include the limited edition “super-deluxe” Sistine Chapel, with a total of 822 pages across three volumes, weighing 75 pounds and costing $25,000.[9]

 

A museum can update and rotate its collection, and a website is a bottomless pit of mutable data, but a book is a fixed and finite codex. This is the printed publication’s simultaneous strength and limitation. Carving something in stone takes nerve – it stays carved,  while history dissolves around it. In a limited exhibition space, as on the bounded pages of a book, the quantity of information is as critical a design decision as choices regarding the nature and presentation of the content. Squeezing too much in can result in missing a lot out. As Mixing Up the Medicine emerges from the 60s and 70s, many entries list awards and industry honors, as if to reassure the reader of the subject’s ongoing cultural relevance. Maybe the aim here is to ground Dylan in the pop-culture context of the day, but traces of hagiographical deification taint the book’s otherwise focused editorial narrative. This is evidenced, not by the celebratory tone, which is arguably unavoidable, but by the omission of shadow, struggle, and failure.  

 

It’s well acknowledged that one of the artist’s most defining qualities is his creative risk-taking, his willingness to chance falling down and failing, and his ability to pick himself up and forge ahead in new directions, just to risk it all again. Not to mention the creative bravery of changing tack just when success is assured. But we can’t have it both ways. Glossing over career missteps, personal misadventures, and creative miscarriages never works out as intended. Rather than elevate the art, it robs it of substance. Can’t we also accept the failure,  the sexism, the appropriation, the reactionary rants, the lingerie peddling, the dud films, the sub-par songs, and more? “Won’t you descend from the throne, from where you sit?” This is the challenge for the creators of a book like Mixing Up the Medicine, as it is for all custodians of cultural legacy: how to honor an artist without selectively airbrushing their art and life. After  all, “To live outside the law, you must be honest.” 

 

The design, by Nicholas Callaway, Jerry Kelly, and Toshiya Masuda, fares best when playing it straight, especially with the texts of the twenty-nine invited writers who contribute essays responding to material in the archives. These are distributed regularly amongst the editorial sections and visually differentiated with a gray background, alternate typography, and more consistent, full-page column widths. The book’s main body text is set in Century  Schoolbook, a highly legible, transitional serif typeface designed for the American Type  Founders by Morris Fuller Benton in 1924. Here again, the design reaches back to the comfort of the past, with the typeface bathing the book in an aura of authoritative nostalgia. Century  Schoolbook was ubiquitous in the first half of the 20th Century in US American textbooks, and will be subconsciously familiar to many US Americans as the typeface they learned to read with. 

 

If reviews mention the book’s form at all, they invariably praise its design:  “immaculately designed compendium”;[10] “the very design of Mixing Up the Medicine may be  its greatest virtue”;[11] “gorgeous and luxurious.”[12] But for all its considerable merit, the book is not quite any of those things. It looks handsome at first glance, but the book’s sensitive typography and compelling images excuse compositional and rhythmic lapses. For example,  with the Newport Folk Festival spread (pages 158-159), the layout gets cramped and cluttered, with too many images, every one a different size and shape, and text in awkward spaces between.  

 

With a dynamic page composition, not unlike songwriting and performing, the appearance of effortlessness belies considerable ingenuity and dexterity. Making it look easy is never easy.  

 

Perhaps a mix of messy scrapbook and grid-conforming template could have worked,  mirroring Dylan’s own inventiveness on albums like Blood on the Tracks. If it’s good enough for Dylan, it’s good enough for a book about Dylan. Here’s Greil Marcus from the infamous  1970 review of Self Portrait: 

 

What matters most is Bob’s singing. He’s been the most amazing singer of the last ten years, creating his language of stress, fitting five words into a line of ten and ten into a line of five, shoving the words around and opening up spaces for noise and silence that through assault or seduction or the gift of good timing made room for expression and emotion. Every vocal was a surprise. You couldn’t predict what it would sound like.  The song itself, the structure of the song, was barely a clue. The limits were there to be evaded.[13]

 

Raymond Foye describes some of this in more formal terms in his essay “Reflections on  Dirge,” where he considers Dylan’s “unique rhythmic sense,” his use of syncopation, as well  as rubato: “borrowing time from one bar while giving it back to the next, without disrupting  the overall rhythmic flow.” From liberated page to unbound song, Dylan himself has made these kinds of direct visual/musical comparisons. Speaking about “Tangled Up in Blue,” Dylan  said: “I guess I was just trying to make it like a painting where you can see the different parts,  but then you can see the whole of it.”[14]

 

Now I’m fantasizing that if Dylan had discovered pioneering modernist designers like  Kurt Schwitters and Paul Renner, instead of Woody Guthrie and Arthur Rimbaud, he might have made an inspired avant-garde editorial designer… 

 

Mixing Up the Medicine compares with other “inside-out biographies” (as Davidson  and Fishel describe the volume in their introduction), such as Nick Cave’s Stranger Than  Kindness, another ephemera-built biography whose material artifacts Cave introduces as a  “wild-eyed and compulsive superstructure… a support system of manic tangential  information.”[15] Designed by Tom Hingston and Rasmus Koch, the “peripheral stuff” is beautifully photographed and controlled on the page. Or something like A History of the World in 100 Objects, based on the BBC’s radio series, in which a “history of humanity” is told with illustrated and interpreted artifacts from the British Museum.[16] To be fair, these are not exactly the same kind of book as Mixing Up the Medicine, the former having far fewer texts and a much smaller archive to draw from, and the latter’s vast collection winnowed by an arbitrary tally, both allowing for a more disciplined sequencing and layout. They do however demonstrate the potential of ensuring the design is equal to the other creative contributions. 

 

The best of the book’s essays use the Archives’ manuscripts and other records for revelatory excavations of Dylan’s work. This great round-up tempts readers to curate their own wish lists: how about Nick Cave, Salman Rushdie, and Haruki Murakami, or Patti Smith,  Stephen King and Molly Ringwald? The texts, accompanied by images of related artifacts,  support a re-evaluation of previously neglected or denigrated periods. Griffin Ondaatje’s investigation of Dylan’s relationship to Joseph Conrad, and the way Conrad’s novel Victory regularly surfaces in Dylan’s songs, is exciting, convincing detective work. Raymond Foye’s reflection on “Dirge” from 1974’s Planet Waves goes to the manuscripts and uncovers Leonard  Cohen as the initial “animating spirit behind the song,” even though the final lyric erases the explicit namecheck. For Foye, the Archive manuscripts also reveal a “long-standing  interpretation of any given album to be diametrically opposed by the drafts in the notebooks.”  With Planet Waves, what he had assumed were songs informed by fond childhood memories  of Dylan’s Minnesota youth were manifestly forged as a “dark lament for a country where  things have gone seriously wrong.” Larry Sloman’s more instinctive, personal take on “Handy  Dandy” from 1990’s Under the Red Sky charts the evolution of the song’s lyrics on pages of painstakingly reworked drafts. Entries such as these are an overdue expansion of Dylan’s popular anthology, illuminating dark corners of his oeuvre. However, many of their accompanying images deserve to be treated with greater respect and sensitivity. For example,  some of the smaller images just don’t work at their reduced scale, and an artificial, overbearing drop shadow has been grafted onto many of the images, clumsily signifying three-dimensionality. This lack of finesse doesn’t do the material justice.  

 

For many readers, the publication’s encyclopaedic, chronological structure will be an invitation to leaf straight to a personal watershed album or period. For this reader, that album was Oh Mercy. Coming out of an eclectic diet of late punk, early hip hop, and top forty radio,  I fell into Dylan’s ocean in the late 80’s when I was 16 or 17 years old. And it was a deep and mysterious abyss to get lost in. But with his last three records being Down in the Groove, Dylan  and the Dead, and Knocked out Loaded, it was also an unflattering period in which he’d been widely written off (“dismissed, derided and misunderstood” as Amanda Petrusich writes in her essay about Tarantula) – when his previous eminence was diminished, and future multi-generational canonization was implausible. Nevertheless, for a hungry teenager in working-class suburbia there were still a couple of decades of potent music to explore, and just a short train ride away, the local library had most of it on cassette. Then one day, while skipping Uni to browse for records, popular music’s past warped into my personal present when I came across a newly released album of Dylan originals at my local record store. Oh Mercy was a revelation and felt like a vindication. The songs were at once sublime and uneasy. Amid late  80s Australian radio dross, I was getting my head around “Most of the time / I can’t even be  sure / If she was ever with me / Or if I was ever with her,” and “There are no mistakes in life  some people say / And it’s true sometimes you can see it that way.” That extraordinary voice  didn’t sound like a cornered “legend,” it sounded like a seething spirit: “Whatever you wanted  / What could it be / Did somebody tell you / That you could get it from me?” 

 

That sustained rejection of conditional acceptance, that endless creative struggle, is part of Dylan’s story, perhaps even the heart of it. Any narrative twisting of Dylan’s art towards infallibility betrays legitimate artistic triumph. There is so much that is remarkable about  Mixing Up the Medicine, yet as a designed object, it could have gone further in mirroring its subject’s creative ambition and inventiveness. The two paradoxical sides to Dylan’s creative process, so powerfully evidenced by the Archive’s manuscripts and recordings, are persistent iteration and inexplicable inspiration – a good method for making books as writing songs.

 

[1] https://thedylanreview.org/2024/02/21/review-of-bob-dylan-mixing-up-the-medicine/

[2] https://wordsrated.com/online-book-sales-statistics

[3] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-11-17-ca-7231-story.html

[4] Marshall McLuhan interview by British literary critic Frank Kermode, on BBC, Monitor, 1965, published as a transcript in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews. Editors Stephanie McLuhan, David Staines. (McClelland & Stewart, 2003), 59

[5] Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, (HarperCollins, 1990), 319

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcPoZZVm3Dk&t=152s

[7] https://www.uv.es/uvweb/scientific-culture-innovation-unit-chair-scientific-dissemination/en/recent-news/playful-reading-paper-helps-understanding-more-than-if-it-is-done-digital-media-1285899375231/Novetat.htm

[8] https://www.reddit.com/r/bobdylan/comments/17v5dyg/we_are_mark_davidson

[9] https://www.callaway.com/sistinechapel

[10] https://www.bookpage.com/reviews/bob-dylan-mixing-up-the-medicine-book-review

[11] https://www.allaboutjazz.com/bob-dylan-mixing-up-the-medicine

[12] https://thefm.substack.com/p/mixing-up-the-medicine-book-review

[13] Greil Marcus, “Self Portrait No.25” review in Rolling Stone Magazine (#63, July 23, 1970), 14

[14] Bob Dylan, Biograph liner notes. (CBS, 1985), loose leaf

[15] Nick Cave, Stranger Than Kindness. (Canongate Books, 2020), 3

[16] Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects. (Penguin Press, 2010)

August 6, 2024 by
,

Bob Dylan and Our Plague Years

Go Back

Other Issues

Bob Dylan and Our Plague Years 

BY Roberta Rakove 

 

On March 19, 2020, California became the first state to issue a stay-at-home order due  to the Covid-19 pandemic. One week later, Bob Dylan sent a midnight message on his website  and social media:  

 

Greetings to my fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty across  the years. This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find  interesting. Stay safe, stay observant, and may God be with you. 

 

With that message, Dylan released “Murder Most Foul,” one of the most remarkable songs in  his catalog. None of us, including Dylan, knew that we were entering a period of twenty months  when a pandemic would dramatically constrain our lives. But over that time, he gave us  extraordinary work that included “Murder Most Foul,” a major new album, and a unique  concert stream. Through the surprise of the releases and the startling imagination of its content  and creative use of technology, his art offered a respite from both our fear and our pandemic imposed limitations. During a time of traumatic isolation, Dylan used music to create a sense  of community among millions around the world. 

 

Art and pandemics are not strangers. Dylan is part of a long tradition of using art as a  response to plagues. As Frank Snowden points out in writing about the bubonic plague in  Epidemics and Society, From the Black Death to the Present: 

 

An entire genre of plague literature arose including works by Giovanni Boccaccio,  Daniel Defoe, Alessandro Manzoni, and Albert Camus. It also transformed the  iconography of European painting and sculpture, and it deeply affected architecture  with the construction of major cathedrals and churches dedicated to the redeemer, the  Virgin Mary, and the plague saints Sebastian and Roch… As late as the 20th century the  disease inspired Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal. (31-32)

 

Later contagious outbreaks continued to generate art from the cholera outbreak that inspired  Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Masque of the Red Death” to the visual art of the HIV  pandemic that was closely linked to political activism. 

 

While pandemics gave rise to many kinds of art, the role of music is different in its  impact. Music has been credited with unique therapeutic roles in helping individuals and  communities cope with epidemics, but as Remi Chiu notes in Plague and Music in the  Renaissance, “while much research has been conducted on the political, economic, medical,  and even literary and artistic consequences of plague, the connections between pestilence and  music have been comparatively understudied” (5). Chiu’s work catalogs how music was  recorded in plague tracts by Renaissance physicians as a part of a therapeutic regimen “to  counteract the effects of fear with joy… and to distract the mind from vile imaginings” (16).  The phenomenon of plague processions created a communal experience and an appearance of  social order at a time of isolation. Music, including anti-pestilential musical prayers written to  the plague saint Sebastian and others, was central to these processions (118-120). 

 

Dylan was not alone in finding innovative ways to combine music and technology to  ease the isolation and fear of the Covid-19 pandemic. Frontiers in Psychology compiled a list  of over forty articles under the research topic “Social Convergence in Times of Spatial  Distancing: The Role of Music During the Covid-19 Pandemic.” The impact of music during  Covid-19 on both emotions and isolation was similar to its use in plague outbreaks in the  Renaissance. In a December 2020 article in Frontiers of Psychology, Remi Chiu compares the  uses of music in the outbreak of plague in Milan in 1576 and the Covid-19 pandemic noting,  “It is perhaps not surprising that the mood maintenance and social cohesion functions of music  emerge so clearly during epidemics past and present, given the sustained emotional turmoil  and social isolation that result from widespread outbreaks of contagious disease” (“Functions  of Music-Making Under Lockdown”). Examples during Covid-19 included the balcony flash  mobs in Italy singing their national anthem, the citizens of Montreal singing the songs of  Leonard Cohen from their windows, the streaming concerts by musicians from their homes,  Yo-Yo Ma’s songs of comfort on YouTube, the use of Zoom to create choral and instrumental  experiences, and the sharing of curated playlists on Spotify.  

 

But Dylan, as always, was different.  

 

Let’s start with that midnight announcement of “Murder Most Foul.” Dylan’s virtual  audience may not be the size of Taylor Swift’s, but it is significant. His official X/Twitter  account has over 400,000 followers. His YouTube channel following is three times that size, at 1.3 million subscribers. “Murder Most Foul” on YouTube has amassed 5.3 million views.  Dylan’s announcement reached a large community. 

 

At the time of the release of “Murder Most Foul,” the United States had been in  lockdown for just a week. Just a few days before sending out “Murder Most Foul” Dylan had  announced a cancellation of fifteen April concerts in Japan due to the Covid-19 outbreak.  While it is possible that the song’s release was already scheduled, Dylan accompanying it with  a personal message was highly unusual. As anyone who attends his live shows knows, he  famously does not chat to the audience. When he says “thank you,” his audience goes berserk.  If he tells a dad joke during the band introduction, Dylan social media lights up.[1] The fact of  communication is powerful by virtue of its rarity. He is talking to us! In the first sentence,  “Greetings to fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty across the  years,” he acknowledged his community and reinforced our communal identity. In the second  sentence, “This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find  interesting,” he shocked us to attention. We might find it interesting? He must know that his  community finds the smallest details about him interesting. An unreleased song, his first new  song since 2012, isn’t interesting. It’s a 7.4 earthquake. In his last sentence, “Stay safe, stay  observant, and may God be with you,” he sent a message of concern. One week into our  isolation, we didn’t know what our lives would be, when we would be able to see our family  and friends, and how we could avoid a frightening new illness. Bob reached out.  

 

The gift he gave us was more than a song. It was a cultural and historical opus, not  meant to soothe but to challenge. As the Renaissance physicians prescribed, the power of the  song gave us something to think about other than our fear. Ian Grant, co-host of the Jokermen and Never Ending Stories podcasts, describes what that moment meant to him. In conversation  with his podcast co-host Evan Laffer, he says: 

 

I still remember where I was the first time I was hearing this song. I was in my kitchen  in my little shoebox fucking apartment on Franklin in Bed Stuy and I was texting you  about it and it was like seven in the morning, and it was several months before the show  ever even started. It was just like I woke up and it was like “Bob Dylan 16 minute song,  listen to this” and we were also like seven days into the shit that’s been going on for the last two and a half years at this point and it just really felt like a flash bulb moment for  me and it just kept going and going and going and I remember the fucking moment it  got to “rub a dub dub” and I just cracked a grin like I was in, I was in… (and in texting  Evan in California) “hey wake up, there’s a 17 minute song from Bob Dylan about the  JFK assassination!” (Jokermen, 11/20/2022) 

 

Grant’s description of the power of “Murder Most Foul” to distract is even more powerful  because at that moment in time, the city he was living in was in crisis as an early global  epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic.  

 

Of all the songs recorded for Rough and Rowdy Ways, the complexity of “Murder Most  Foul” allowed it to transport us out of obsessing about the virus and into a shared experience.  Simon Vozick-Levinson was right when he wrote in Rolling Stone on March 27, 2020, “Murder  Most Foul Is The Bob Dylan Song We Need Right Now,” but not for the reason he states:  “Murder Most Foul is really about the ways that music can comfort us in our national trauma.”  There is a lot going on in the song, but comfort is not at the top of the list. The song’s power  came from the fact that you couldn’t stop listening to it, couldn’t stop thinking about it, and  couldn’t stop analyzing it. As Anne Margaret Daniel notes reviewing the song in the summer  2020 issue of the Dylan Review, “From that first seventeen minutes to subsequent quarter-hours  plus, one does not so much listen to ‘Murder Most Foul’ as be washed over by it… ‘Tempest’  may be his song about the Titanic but ‘Murder Most Foul’ is titanic.” Immediately, reviews,  news reports, and podcasts appeared. NPR had a curated setlist of all the songs mentioned in  “Murder Most Foul” up within hours of the release. Parodies were posted and arguments broke  out. It became the first of Dylan’s songs to reach number one on the Billboard chart. On the 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination in 2023, fans continued to share the song on social  media. It is unimaginable that any other songwriter could create a work that would produce  this reaction.  

 

“Murder Most Foul” was the musical remedy prescribed by the Renaissance physicians  during their plague. We stopped thinking about washing our groceries and sanitizing our hands.  Instead, we thought about Wolfman Jack and the history of American music, the triple  underpass, and the last thoughts of a martyred president. We shared our thoughts through  technology within our community, restoring some social cohesion. 

 

“Murder Most Foul” was quickly followed by the releases of “I Contain Multitudes”  on April 17 and “False Prophet” on May 7. It became apparent that something was indeed happening here, creating a sense of anticipation that led up to the release of Rough and Rowdy Ways on June 19. 

 

At the time Rough and Rowdy Ways was released, the United States was in the middle  of another shockwave. On May 25, a white police officer murdered George Floyd, a Black man  living in Minneapolis, while three other officers looked on. A shocking video of the murder  went public. Large protests broke out in Minneapolis and spread to hundreds of cities and towns  across the United States with estimates of between 15 and 26 million people taking to the streets  (Buchanan, Bui, Patel New York Times July 3, 2020). There was widespread speculation and  hope that perhaps this largest and most diverse demonstration in the history of the country  would lead to historic change. 

 

Bob Dylan was aware of these events. In a June 12, 2020, interview with Dylan in the  New York Times the historian Douglas Brinkley wrote:

 

I had a brief follow up with Dylan, 79, one day after Floyd was killed in Minneapolis.  Clearly shaken by the horror that had occurred in his home state, he sounded depressed.  “It sickened me no end to see George tortured to death like that,” he said. “It was beyond  ugly. Let’s hope that justice comes swift for the Floyd family and for the nation.” 

 

But Dylan did not comment musically at the time nor since. That lack of comment was certainly  not due to a failure of commitment or insight from someone who has written and performed a  long list of songs related to racial injustice for decades, many of which already addressed the  issues raised by the George Floyd murder.  

 

Added to the social upheaval of the reaction to George Floyd’s murder was the ongoing  impact of a pandemic that had grown in geography, numbers, and mortality. The U.S. Centers  for Disease Control (CDC) created a timeline of the pandemic, noting of May, 2020: “The  unemployment rate in the U.S. is 14.7% – the highest since the Great Depression with 20.5  million people out of work” (https://www.cdc.gov/museum/timeline/covid19.html). By the end  of the month, the recorded death toll from Covid-19 in the U.S. surpassed 100,000. By early  June, the number of confirmed cases in the country exceeded 2 million. Vaccines were being  developed but not yet in sight. The President was at war with the public health establishment.  We were exhausted and uncertain. 

 

Fortuitously, Rough and Rowdy Ways had been recorded just weeks before all activity  shut down in March of 2020. Its arrival in June was definitely welcomed. In his June 15, 2020 Rolling Stone review Rob Sheffield captured the intersection of Dylan’s music and the moment  in time in which it was released: 

 

Another apocalypse; another side of Bob Dylan. The man really knows how to pick his  moments. Dylan has brilliantly timed his new masterwork for a summer when the hard  rain is falling all over the nation: a plague, a quarantine, revolutionary action in the  streets, cities on fire, phones out of order. Rough and Rowdy Ways is his first batch of  new songs in 8 years, and it’s an absolute classic – it has the bleak majesty of latter-day  Dylan albums like Modern Times and Tempest, yet it goes beyond them, tapping even  deeper into cosmic American mysteries.  

 

In other words, a masterwork that was just what the Renaissance doctors ordered, distracting  us in perilous times with compelling music. But in July of 2021, Dylan had another surprise up  his sleeve, this one created specifically for a pandemic release and reflecting our response to it  in its staging: the unexpected streaming concert film, Shadow Kingdom. Like the passion plays  written and performed in Oberammergau and the anti-pestilential musical prayers used in  religious processions during bubonic plague outbreaks, our 21st century pandemic was a central  part of the production of Shadow Kingdom. The creation of the songs from Dylan’s “early”  period obviously preceded the pandemic by decades, but the film’s art direction and  distribution were dictated by and reflected precautions and restrictions imposed by Covid-19.  Rather than being constrained by these limitations, Dylan and his director, Israeli-American  filmmaker Alma Har’el, used them to liberate the viewers from their isolation.  

 

The announcement of the streaming event was a surprise. What it would actually be  was unknown to everyone, including the owners of the livestreaming platform Veeps that  would broadcast Shadow Kingdom. The media and the Dylan fans around the world bought  tickets for what they were told would be 48 hours of access to …something. Viewers got their  money’s worth both in the music and the production. In his review of the album release of the Shadow Kingdom music, Michaelangelo Matos writing in Rolling Stone on June 1, 2023 called  Dylan’s reinterpretation of his earlier songs on the Shadow Kingdom album a triumph. But  beyond the music, Shadow Kingdom offered an experience that challenged the pandemic limitations we had experienced for sixteen months.

 

In certain ways, the stream of Shadow Kingdom provided many of the features of  attending a live concert. Viewers would have a limited number of hours to view it, although  that time was extended. Just like a live Dylan concert, the bootleggers were ready to capture it and play a cat and mouse game with Dylan Inc., keeping videos up on YouTube. Importantly,  the stream also allowed a form of audience engagement that moved the viewing of Shadow Kingdom from an individual experience to a communal one. Opening the concert site early  with a worldwide chat room allowed viewers to not only gather in a virtual venue but to speak  to each other, identifying their locations and sharing their excitement and hopes for what they were about to see. This type of virtual communication in a period of isolation is no small thing.  In a study from Frontiers of Psychology on successful audience engagement with Covid-19- era YouTube music broadcasts, the authors identify five themes: interaction, unity, resilience,  identity, and emotion (Fraser, Crooke, Davidson). The online messaging that preceded the start  of Shadow Kingdom certainly allowed for most if not all of these.

 

Streaming concerts were commonplace during the pandemic. These were usually cozy  events from an artist’s living room or an empty performance space. Of course they were  enjoyable, but at the same time their settings were visual reminders of our inability to have a communal live concert experience. In Shadow Kingdom, Dylan and Har’el effectively removed  the conventions of time and space to distance the viewers from pandemic physical restrictions.  The Shadow Kingdom audiences in the different locations in the film seem to be from multiple  eras and places. Are we in the Bon Bon Club in Marseille that is thanked in the final credits?  Are some of the performances happening in an indeterminate year before smoking was banned? Are we in a Western saloon? Is this taking place before color film existed? Have we landed in  the barroom with the jukebox on the cover of Rough and Rowdy Ways? As Kitty Empire noted in her five-star review of the Shadow Kingdom stream in The Guardian on July 24, “there is  no drummer to keep time because that would be too definite, and we are in a realm where it  could be the 20s or the 40s, night or day.” Through the visual clues in the different venues in  which Dylan was performing, the film took us traveling across countries and decades. 

 

This does not mean that Shadow Kingdom ignores the disorientation caused by the  Covid-19 pandemic. As Nathan Schmidt notes in his review of Shadow Kingdom in Dylan Review 3.2, the juxtaposition of “masked band and unmasked audience members signify the  duality of the way things are and the way they used to be.” By presenting both, Dylan and  Har’el acknowledge the present but do not restrict the viewers to it. The film does not offer a  vision of a post Covid-19 future, but it effectively recalls a past of live performances that may yet come again. 

 

Other forms of shared communication among Dylan fans, beyond those related directly  to Dylan’s musical output, grew virtually during Covid-19. The growth of podcast listeners  during Covid-19 has been well documented and Dylan devotees have certainly had a wide choice. Craig Danuloff, the founder of the FM Podcast Network, identified fourteen Dylan  podcasts in his panel on Dylan podcasting at World of Bob Dylan 2023 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  Of these, three were launched during Covid-19, including The Bobcats, Jokermen, and The Dylantantes. London-based podcast host Laura Tenschert utilized her influential Definitely Dylan program to create a virtual international group of subscribers who continue to meet  monthly over Zoom. As a proxy indicator for the popularity of these podcasts, Definitely Dylan has almost 9,000 followers on X/Twitter and close to 20,000 on Instagram. Jokermen has close  to 12,000 followers on X/Twitter and 8,000 on Instagram. Music writer Ray Padgett’s Dylan Substack e-newsletter, Flagging Down the Double E’s, launched two months before the March  2020 shutdown, has over 12,000 subscribers. When the University of Tulsa Institute of Bob Dylan Studies was forced to move its second symposium, Dylan at 80, online in 2021, the sold out attendance was almost double that of its initial and highly successful first in-person World of Bob Dylan in 2019. Dylan at 80 drew an international sold-out enrollment of close to 1,000, and presentations from Italy and Denmark.  

 

By the fall of 2021, a combination of effective vaccines, physical and electronic evidence of vaccination, and ready supplies of high-quality masks made the possibility of live  indoor performances of music once again available. Dylan was among the first performers to  respond to this opportunity. On September 26, 2021, his website and Twitter account published  the message: “Bob Dylan’s Fall U.S. tour dates have been announced. The first dates go on  sale starting Friday, October 1.” Perhaps even more optimistic was the attachment of the poster  for the tour with the message “Bob Dylan Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour 2021- 2024.” When an 80-year-old man announces a three-year worldwide tour and invites us to join  him, who are we to think we don’t have a future? Concerts commenced in November, 2021,  many including meetups of followers who had first engaged online during the pandemic. When  he completed the last concert of his triumphant 2024 American spring tour in Austin on April 6, 2024 he had performed 202 concerts in North America, Asia, and Europe over a period of  thirty months, something that seemed unthinkable when society shut down in March of 2020.  

 

It is not always clear when pandemics end. Though the World Health Organization  called an end to Covid-19 as a public health emergency in May, 2023, 10,000 people died of  the virus that December. It is even more difficult to understand the effect of pandemics on  society until we have the perspective of distance. But unquestionably, Covid-19 has been a  traumatic event. Music was not a cure for that trauma, but there is evidence that it helped relieve  stress and isolation. The music that Dylan provided and his use of technology to make it  available achieved both of these outcomes. As Dylan noted in his interview with Jeff Slate in December 2022, “Technology can nurture us, or it can shut us out.” At the height of our  isolation, he merged his art and technology to nurture us. In the same interview, Slate asked  Dylan why, in The Philosophy of Modern Song, does he thank the crew from Dunkin’ Donuts. Dylan responded, “Because they were compassionate, supportive and they went the extra mile.” During our plague years, so did he. 

 

 

[1] The Dylan site Expecting Rain has an ongoing list of Dylan’s dad jokes which generally appear  during band introductions such as this painful one about drummer David Kemper: “He once  swallowed a roll of film, we’ll see what develops.” (www.expectingrain.com/jokes.html)

 

Works Cited 

Brinkley, Douglas. “Bob Dylan Has a Lot on His Mind,” New York Times, June 12, 2020. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/arts/music/bob-dylan-rough-and-rowdy ways.html 

Buchanan, Larry; Bui, Quoctrung; Patel, Jugal K. “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest 

Movement in U.S, History.” New York Times, July 3, 2020.  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd size.html 

Centers for Disease Prevention Museum. “CDC Covid-19 Timeline.”  

https://www.cdc.gov/museum/timeline/covid19.html

Chiu, Remi “Functions of Music Making Under Lockdown: A Trans-Historical Perspective 

Across Two Pandemics,” Frontiers in Psychology, December 16, 2020, Sec. Cultural  Psychology, Volume 11-2020.  

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.616499/ full 

Chiu, Remi. Plague and Music in the Renaissance. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press,  2017. 

Daniel, Anne Margaret. “Murder Most Foul.” Dylan Review, Vol. 2.1. Summer 2020.

— “Functions of Music Making Under Lockdown: A Trans-Historical Perspective Across  Two Pandemics. Frontiers in Psychology, December 17, 2020, Sec. Cultural  Psychology. Volume 11 – 2020 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.616499 

Empire, Kitty. “Bob Dylan Shadow Kingdom Live Stream Review: Dylan’s Juke Joint of 

Dreams.” The Guardian, July 24, 2021.  

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/jul/24/bob-dylan-shadow-kingdom-live stream-review 

—. “Bob Dylan the Jokerman.” Expecting Rain. https://www.expectingrain.com/jokes.html

Fraser, Trisnasari; Crooke, Alexander Hew Dale; Davidson, Jane W. “Music Has No  Borders:

An Exploratory Study of Audience Engagement With YouTube Music  Broadcasts During Covid-19 Lockdown, 2020,” Frontiers in Psychology, July 8,  2021, Sec. Cultural Psychology, Volume 12 – 2021.  https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.643893 

Gensler, Andy. “Veeps’ Joel Madden On Bob Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom Livestream: “We’re  on

the Edge of Our Seats Like Everyone Else.”  

https://news.pollstar.com/2021/07/07/veeps-joel-madden-on-bob-dylans-shadow kingdom-livestream-were-on-the-edge-of-our-seats-like-everyone-else/

Grant, Ian and Laffer, Evan. “Bob Dylan: Murder Most Foul,” Jokermen, November 22,  2023. 

Matos, Michaelangelo. “Bob Dylan Makes His Classic Songs Seem Stunningly Brand-New on

Shadow Kingdom,” Rolling Stone, June 1, 2023. 

Schmidt, Nathan. “Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan.” 

Sheffield, Rob. “Bob Dylan has Given Us One of His Most Timely Albums Ever

With Rough  and Rowdy Ways.” Rolling Stone, June 15, 2020.  

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/bob-dylan-rough-rowdy ways-1015086/ 

Slate, Jeff. “Bob Dylan Q&A About The Philosophy of Modern Song.” December 20, 2022. 

https://www.bobdylan.com/news/bob-dylan-interviewed-by-wall-street-journals-jeff slate/ 

Snowden, Frank M. Epidemics and Society From the Black Death to the Present. New Haven and

London: Yale University Press, 2020. 

Vozick-Levinson, Simon. “ ‘Murder Most Foul’ Is The Bob Dylan Song We Need Right  Now,’ ”

Rolling Stone, March 27, 2020.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music features/bob-dylan-murder-most-foul-974108/ 

August 6, 2024 by