Dimitrios P. Naskos. And the Nobel Prize in Literature Goes to … Bob Dylan?. Virginia Beach: Koehler Books. 2024. 221 pp.

Reviewed by Thomas G. Palaima, University of Texas

Δεν μένει τίποτα ίδιο / Συνήθειες έρχονται πάνε / Μεταβαλλόμενος κόσμος / Εύκολα οι μνήμες ξεχνάνε

Nothing stays the same / Customs come and go / The whole world is changing / Memories are easily forgotten

Dimitrios Naskos

Everything passes
Everything changes
Just do what you think you should do

                                                                        Bob Dylan “To Ramona,” 1964

 

We are nearing a decade since Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. Most of the controversy, which has now subsided, surrounding the award had to do with whether writers and performers of songs should be eligible because their songs are delivered to us in different ways than written poems are. In the modern age poems are transmitted to an audience by being read aloud and not sung. Mostly we take in poems by reading them silently as printed words on pages and screens.

 

Is there anything more to say about whether Dylan’s songs, or any modern songs, are poems? Does anybody, including succeeding Nobel Prize committee members, have a clear idea of what the 2016 committee meant when it conferred the prize on Dylan because he had “created new poetical expressions within the great American song tradition”? There are many other questions that can be asked or asked again about Dylan’s Nobel Prize award and each one will surely generate many new answers.

 

The curious book under review here gives some good answers.[1] It is well worth reading because it offers what we might consider a unique outsider’s cultural perspective. The author Dimitrios Naskos is Greek, from the Greek “north country” area around Thessaloniki, in many ways now the second city, i.e., the Chicago, of Greece. Thessaloniki has a major international university, well-regarded annual international book, theater and film festivals, and is a prominent scene in Greece for music, theater, movies and literature.

 

Naskos, since he is Greek and well enculturated into the long-perpetuated traditional values of classical Greece, one of the historical foundations for modern high western culture, understands the origins of literature in periods when writing did not exist or was used for limited purposes. The Ur-stages of regional song cycles that formed the basis for the Homeric poems go back to at least the fifteenth century BCE. As Bob Dylan would put it, that is long before the first crusade. It is also long before any controversy about spoken versus sung versus written creativity was made.

 

When I read Naskos’s farrago of ideas and component elements in And the Nobel Prize Goes to … Bob Dylan?, it took me a while to get my bearings. The book is a real smorgasbord with a detailed menu (table of contents) but no index to help in locating specific topics and subjects, for example, the titles of songs discussed in the text.

 

And the Nobel Prize is in line and in spirit with the rather random feel of Dylan’s own Chronicles, Volume One. Like Dylan’s “memoir” that isn’t a memoir, Naskos’s book is not a systematic or logical argument about the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Dylan. However, it does include several long arguments in favor of the award.

 

Mainly it is a collection of “takes,” by a man about half the age of Bob Dylan and possessed of a strong social conscience, on Dylan’s body of work. In these “takes,” Naskos explores various ideas and ideals that Dylan, rightly or wrongly, has been thought to come to represent. In the closing section of his book (pp. 186-220) Naskos enables us to compare Dylan’s accomplishments and contributions to our understanding of humanitas with those of other major figures in world culture, a good many of them Nobel Prize winners. Naskos does not noticeably “cook the books” in Dylan’s favor, despite being solidly in the camp that believes Dylan was eminently worthy of the award.

 

And the Nobel Prize therefore will seem both to be and not to be well titled unless you let yourself do what we do with most of Dylan’s songs, his own and songs of others that he performs. Let whatever you are reading next in Naskos’s book seep into your souls, as Plato says music does, directly. Naskos’s words and thoughts will sink in, and you will be the better for it.

 

After all, the Latin inscription on the gold medallion given out to recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature reads, “it is beneficial to have improved (human) life through discovered arts.” The emphasis is therefore not so much on artistic details or fine points of creativity, but on social impact. Given that Alfred Nobel as he neared death was trying to atone for making a fortune as a “master of war armaments” by setting up the Nobel Prizes, especially, but not only, the Peace Prize, this emphasis by the Academy and by Naskos is understandable and laudable.

 

After five opening chapters (Part One pp. 1-55) that survey Dylan and his career from St. Mary’s Hospital in Duluth on May 24, 1941 to the beginning of the Covid plague years in 2020, readers will find assortments of essays, ample song lyrics placed here and there,^[2] a few discussed in detail, and a discography paired with a “panoramic timetable” (pp. 135-140) that lists in five chronologically arranged columns: (1) date 1941 to 2020 – with many years left out; (2) a selection of Dylan’s albums; and idiosyncratically chosen events in (3) history, (4) science and (5) music.

 

Naskos, who was trained in music and creative writing at universities in Macedonia and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in creative writing while teaching music arts to secondary school students, is not someone who came of age and lived “together through life” with Dylan’s songs. He was born in the environs of Thessaloniki in 1980 after the fall of the right-wing military junta that the United States supported during the Cold War (1967-1974).

 

Naskos approaches Dylan’s music with a much stronger sense of political ethics and social morality than most American or even European writers and critics of Dylan’s music ever have. He is not a member of the now disappearing generation who heard Dylan’s first Columbia Records albums 1962-1965 when they were in their teens and therefore have lived their lives with Dylan’s songs as soundtrack, commentaries, or escape routes – nor even as sources of laughter or wry, knowing mirth.

 

Naskos has some of the same sensitivities of heart and soul – bred from somewhat parallel life circumstances – that Bob Dylan has. Like Dylan, Naskos cares deeply about the long history of songs and poems, in Naskos’s case specifically in Greek culture going back to Homer, Sappho, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Callimachus and extending up through Cavafy, Kazantzakis, Seferis, Ritsos, Elytis, and beyond in modern times. Naskos quotes then secretary of the Swedish Academy Sarah Danius offering up the same defense of awarding Dylan the literature prize (p. 61): “If you think back to Homer and Sappho, that was also aural poetry. It was meant to be performed together with instruments. But we still read them, 2,500-some years later. And in much the same way you can read Bob Dylan, too.”

 

Naskos’s and Danius’s thoughts made me think hard about Homer, oral poetics, Greek poiēma (“song poem,” literally “a thing made”); poiēsis (“the art of making song poems”) and poiētēs (“an agent of making and instantiating song poems”), and the impact of dominant songsters in human societies, ancient and modern. Among the ancient Greeks a “thing made” was a “song poem” and none of the other significant things they made and bequeathed to us. That says a lot about the importance of song poems in ancient Greek culture and by transmission in our European and American song traditions.

 

Naskos in fact emphasizes how inseparable poems and songs are in the Greek tradition extending back over three millennia. As one straight and unequivocal answer to the question implicit in the title of his book, he quotes the keen and influential observations of Gerasimos Spatalas (1887-1971) (p. 89) about how metrical patterns make spoken words “sing”:

 

Though poetry and music may seem to have broken up today, they still are two twin sisters who coexist harmoniously. Poetry makes music with words and music makes poetry with sounds. Whoever denies the verse denies the deeper essence of the poem, which is intertwined with the sonic character of language.

Unfortunately, in recent years younger people have eagerly followed the fashion of writing their poems in arrhythmic and inartistic prose. The acoustical artistic level plummets again to such an extent that almost no distinction is made between artistically sonic verses and constructions.

G. Spatalas, Lyrical Art (1997) pp. 161 and 276.^[3]

 

Naskos is using Spatalas’s own unique term “construction” here pejoratively. He is distinguishing between older and traditional verses that have meter and rhythm and modern poetic prose, which essentially lacks the beauty heard in traditional poetry. Both Spatalas and Naskos have set ideas about how a poem should be crafted even today. They think that any poem written to be read rather than to be heard, if only in our own heads, is to some degree impoverished.

 

Naskos states categorically (p. 89), “In other words, poetry and music have been walking hand in hand for centuries, and verse makes up the music of the poem.” He believes that the first half of his book “accurately answers the question of whether Dylan deserved such an honor” with an emphatic yes.

 

Naskos’s discussion, even as summarized here briefly by me, helps us see how thorny the Nobel Prize question is and what good can arise from contemplating even extreme or downright silly arguments. As a matter of fact, the poems of Homer, Sophocles and Sappho have for centuries been taken in without the music that went with them. Even knowing the intricacies of different forms of meter used by Greek and Roman poets falls into the realm of specialization in many Classics graduate programs. And graduate study of ancient music is hyper-specialized. As for that, except for “Auld Lang Syne,” almost all of us know the folk song collection of the great Scottish ethno-musicologist Robert Burns as poems.

 

It is clear then that Naskos’s book really is about the social significance of Dylan’s music, how taking Dylan’s songs into our souls prepares us to face the challenges of modern life.

 

I am sympathetic to this view because Dylan’s songs give us keenly observant perspectives on the lives we are likely to live as well as sharp criticisms of those who would crush others with wealth and power, feed the military industrial complex, knock us off balance, view problems in our lives as social creatures as insurmountable, and invite us to consider striving to do things for the benefit of all mankind as a vain pursuit.

 

However, about twenty years ago, Willie Nelson told me that he had learned in the Air Force in the 1950’s to “police your own area.”^[4] This translates for Willie as do whatever good you can do with your own unique skill sets whenever you can and wherever you can and for whomever you can. Naskos believes that Dylan’s music helps us do these things. At least his critical take of human social behaviors makes us think twice about what we are doing with our lives, even if it is beyond Dylan’s grasp now and forever (“Tangled Up in Blue” last stanza).

 

Citing John Sutherland’s 2013 book A Little History of Literature, Naskos (p. 88) agrees that “[b]estselling [or ‘mass-trade’] poetry is a contradiction in terms, unless we count balladeers such as Bob Dylan and David Bowie.” Naskos then examines what we would consider Dylan’s bigger or more widely popular songs, not songs familiar only to devoted Dylanologists. One truly singular way of covering a highly socially critical song is the simple and moving short story that Naskos writes (pp. 104-118) to get across the message of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” He puts us at the Baltimore hotel society gathering in February 1963 through the memory of a fictional eighty-year-old black man named Morgan who is thinking back fifty years to when the 51-year-old Hattie Carroll got him as a thirty-year-old a one-night job busing tables at the hotel where she had steady work as a maid of the kitchen. We see the evening’s events unfold through the eyes of Morgan who was nervous because he had never worked even in a lowly cafeteria or diner for whites. Morgan was jumpy around upper-class whites attending the Spinsters’ Ball that evening who expected the black staff to function silently and unobtrusively as “animate tools” (Aristotle’s term for slaves). On page 117 we take in a powerful punch line. I won’t ruin it by giving it here.

 

Naskos covers Dylan’s Nobel Prize speech in full, quoting it in its entirety (pp. 62-74) and again critiquing (pp. 74-77) its cultural meaning through the filter of other critical responses to it and to charges of plagiarism in it and preceding it. These charges periodically flare up. They have reached ephemeral crescendos with Dylan’s newly released songs at various times (2003, 2006, 2010, 2014). Naskos’ arguments are commonsensical and in line with Dylan’s own apologia pro musica sua, given that they are based on how the craft of poetry was practiced from the time of lengthy hexameter oral-aural regional songs in the Greek      Bronze Age through British Romantic poets using ancient Greek and Latin themes and metrical patterns.

 

Bob Dylan is now a world songster. Even though one biographical film title dictum tells us “Don’t Look Back,” Dylan the aoidos (epic bard) or poiētēs (maker of song poems) is perpetually looking back, reverent of tradition and convinced that creativity really is what Ezra Pound said it was, not an abandonment of the past, but making the past new and making the past live on transformed.

 

There is also ample discussion of how the Nobel Prize committee operates, what choices they have made in the past (pp. 202-210), and a rebuttal of criticism of the choice of Bob Dylan by citing two relatively recent winners who also did not fit the mold of a writer of conventionally defined literature: Svetlana Alexievich (2015) and Dario Fo (1997). Naskos also reminds us (pp. 208-210) that the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel in 1913 “for writing songs and hymns for many countries around the world.”

 

As far as the influences of different literary movements, authors and critical approaches upon Dylan, Naskos devotes succinct chapters to Symbolism, Arthur Rimbaud, Surrealism, Intertextuality, Carl Jung, Metalanguage, and Commedia del’Arte.

 

To work out a ring construction and go back to the beginning, the first five chapters might well be effective if assigned to students to get a quick sense of:

1. Bob Dylan and his work (pp. 12-23); key influences on Bob Dylan (pp. 29-46); eighteen key paragraph-length passages (pp. 47-50), well known to serious Dylanophiles and gleaned from Chronicles that explain what kinds of songs seeped into Dylan’s own soul, how he thought about them twenty years ago looking then back forty years, and how they furnished him with a powerful repertory that set him apart from other voices playing folk music;
2. thirty characteristic Dylan quotes (pp. 51-53); and
3. how Dylan’s “sun continues to shine” since the resurrection of his career, which Naskos dates to MTV Unplugged in 1994.

 

That last statement (c.) in and of itself is likely to cause considerable debate.

 

I view Dylan’s career as a continuum that moves like our now polluted oceans once used to move. No death. No resurrection. No comeback, because he’s always moving on. Like the life and adventures of Odysseus, the man of constant sorrow, whose Odyssey Dylan discusses in his Nobel Prize speech, Dylan’s career and life have had highs, lows, and doldrums, but even his doldrums follow Willie Nelson’s observation: “still is still moving to me.”

 

The very notion of a career with peaks and valleys in Dylan’s case, experimental and trail-blazing as his music has always been, is a worthless measurement taken largely by how visible he is in contemporary popular culture at any one time and what consumer dollar figures his music and other endeavors are generating. It is not a criterion we use to judge Dylan’s music. In my view “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” “Shenandoah,” “Ugliest Girl in the World,” “Wiggle Wiggle,” “Love Sick,” “Under the Red Sky,” and “Murder Most Foul” all contain their own important, humanly felt messages.

 

Naskos takes Dylan’s role as a prophētēs, “an agent of proclaiming” or prophet, to be literally significant with songs bearing upon major events in modern American culture. He views three songs “Mississippi,” “High Water,” and “Workingman’s Blues #2” as portending, respectively, the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, and the global financial crisis (2008) that signposted the modern period of pure capitalism unchained. Yet he reminds us:

 

But let us not forget that we live in a postmodern era. Thus, Dylan’s third period, although without a doubt of great musical and poetic interest, was also characterized by a mood of commercial lightness.

While he began his career with hopes, ambitions, goals, and objectives, things are not as he once imagined they would be. Despite his best efforts and his countless struggles for a better and fairer world, he is deeply disappointed with what has emerged. (pp. 54-55)

 

As proof of the second statement, he cites the Victoria’s Secret commercial (2004),^[5] the Chrysler cars ad (2014), and even Dylan’s Sinatra period, Dylan’s “favorite singer … who liked to hang out at bars and disappear into the blue shadows of the night.” Yet, in a Dylanesque gesture, Naskos ends this particular assessment of Dylan’s career with the reminder (p. 55) that Sinatra once said, “alcohol can be man’s worst enemy, but the Bible says to love your enemy.”

 

As a working-class boy myself, from Cleveland no less, and something of a perpetual outsider in the higher circles of Boston, New York and Austin culture, I appreciate Dimitrios P. Naskos’s ways of interpreting the social impact that some of Dylan’s songs might have on listeners.

 

Yet I highly stress that we should keep in mind that, if Dylan’s songs are poems, even they can be remembered as songs are often remembered, for the moods and feelings they create. People can groove on them without really listening to the lyrics. Sappho come back to life would certainly groove on “Love Sick” and its way of getting across the power of “love” as a glukupikron orpeton, a “sweetbitter serpent,” just from hearing “I’m sick of love … I’m love sick” and the ingenious ironic close: “I wish I’d never met you / I don’t know what to do / I’d give anything to / be … with … you.”

 

Citizens of imperial Athens annually held public competitions of poet songsters performing passages from Homer. One overall takeaway I have from And the Nobel Prize in Literature Goes to … Bob Dylan? is that Bob Dylan would have been right at home in fifth-century BCE Athens.

 

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Appendix

Song lyrics quoted at length or fully and discussed in And the Nobel Prize … by page number:

“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” – 14

“Chimes of Freedom” – 15

“Like a Rolling Stone” – 17

“Gotta Serve Somebody” – 23

“Things Have Changed” – 25

“Talkin’ World War III Blues” – 41-43

“The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” – 102-103

“Masters of War” –126-128

“Only a Pawn in Their Game” – 129-130

“Hurricane” – 131-134

“Maggie’s Farm” – 171-172

“Ballad of a Thin Man” – 176-178

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[1] The book was originally published in Greek: Και το Βραβείο Νόμπελ Λογοτεχνίας πηγαίνει στον … Bob Dylan. Athens: ΕΚΔΟΣΕΙΣ ΔΙΑΥΛΟΣ. 2021. 280 pp. info@diavlosbooks.gr

[2] Given the absence of an index, I have appended to this review a list of Dylan songs quoted in substantial part.

[3] The book is a collection of 24 studies of technical aspects of Greek meter. It is available in Greek: as Η Στιχουργική Τέχνη (https://cup.gr/book/i-stichourgiki-techni/) which means literally “the art/craft of poetic-line making.” ISBN 978-960-524-025-7.

[4] Tom Palaima, “Alive and Singing the Truth,” The Texas Observer January 11, 2008, 37-39. https://www.texasobserver.org/2665-alive-and-singing-the-truth/ .

[5] For a positive view of what Dylan is doing in this commercial, see https://sites.utexas.edu/tpalaima/files/2017/11/LookingPast.pdf .

Joan Osborne. Dylanology Live. The Cabot, MA, 7 June 2025.

Reviewed by Britt Eisnor

 

Thirty years after the release of her debut studio album Relish, Joan Osborne is on the road paying homage to one of her earliest influences: Bob Dylan. This tour, affectionately titled Dylanology Live, is in support of a new live album by the same name from Osborne’s 2018 Dylanology tour. That tour followed her successful 2017 album of Dylan tunes Songs of Bob Dylan. While Dylanology Live is the result of this sequence of events, it’s far from the beginning of Osborne’s relationship with Dylan’s music and with the man himself.

 

As she told us from the stage where I saw her in Beverly, Massachusetts on June 7th, 2025, Oh Mercy was the first full Dylan album that Osborne had owned and loved. She honored her devotion to the 1989 album with a cover of “Man in the Long Black Coat,” which sat alongside her inescapable hit single “One of Us” on Relish. That cover, she believes, is what caught the attention of Bob Dylan himself. A couple years after its release, Dylan’s team contacted Osborne and asked her to accompany the songwriter on a new studio recording of “Chimes of Freedom.” The track was intended for use in a now relatively forgotten and less-than-favorably reviewed miniseries called The 60’s – which is described as “an epic blend of music, drama and real live events that bring the decade’s most explosive events to life.” (One chapter on the DVD is titled “Dylan.”) Dylan and Osborne’s duet of “Chimes of Freedom” was the only new recording featured in the series.

 

Osborne began her career, like Dylan, as a live performer. She started playing open mics in the East Village in the early 90s, eventually leaving her established position in the New York City music scene for regional tours. In fact, Relish was preceded by a live album recorded at Delta 88 Nightclub in New York City. Osborne is often referred to not just as a singer/songwriter, but also as an interpreter of music. This seems to be in reference to the fact that she not only performs her original music, but has spent a great deal of time flexing her musical chops in a variety of genres and styles. With projects throughout her career focusing on Motown classics, Dylan, The Grateful Dead, and more, she has always displayed a knack for understanding and digesting different areas of music and turning them back out with her own emotion and character. This moniker of “interpreter” is one that would also do well applied to Dylan, and his constant musical exploration. The way in which the spirit of Dylan’s approach to live music resonates with Osborne was very apparent in the show I saw this year.

 

The run of shows Osborne performed with this concept in 2018, as well as the newly released Dylanology Live album, also share that spirit. With unique interpretation given to each song, and a kinetic energy among the team of musicians she had assembled seven years ago, it’s easy to see why she pulled this show out of her archive for release. And although she could not assemble the same lineup that is featured on the album (among others, Amy Helm, Jackie Greene, and Robert Randolph), the group at present is, as she said enthusiastically in Beverly, “just as good!”

 

Just as good indeed, from veterans like the incredible Cindy Cashdollar (who has her own history working directly with Dylan) and the remarkable Gail Anne Dorsey (most well known for her tenure in David Bowie’s live band from the years of 1995-2004), to relative unknowns Will Bryant and Lee Falco, the band strikes up a hell of a show.

 

At a time when we’re still blessed with the opportunity to see Bob Dylan in concert, there is no replacement for seeing him live. The spirit of reinvention still lives with him, and nobody covering his material is going to top that. However, it is still powerful to see an artist carrying on Dylan’s legacy of collaboration with other talented artists while lending new meaning to his songs. In a 2018 interview following the release of her cover album Songs of Bob Dylan, Osborne told the Dylan Review:

 

When covering any song, it’s the same regardless of the songwriter. The song lives through you. It takes possession of you. It lives in a way it never has. Each version is a different incarnation allowing the songs to live in a new way for another day.[1]

 

Admittedly, I am not one who tends to turn to other artists’ interpretations of Bob’s music very often. I prefer hearing how he has developed the songs over the years, with different arrangements, vocal approaches, and backing bands. It’s hard for me to step outside of Dylan’s own reinterpretations. Osborne’s words on helping these songs “live in a new way for another day” rightfully chastise me for that position. Her show rightfully chastised me for it as well.

 

Not only was I impressed by the masterful reimagining that Osborne gives many of the songs (something that is a highlight of Dylan’s live approach as well), but I was also satisfied by the equal degree of respect that Osborne bestowed on different periods of Dylan’s career. I remarked afterwards that I had, in the past, seen many Dylan cover shows – but had never before seen one feature “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum.”

 

The show spotlighted material across Dylan’s catalog, including, of course, Osborne’s foundational inspiration, Oh Mercy. After opening with a fairly standard “Love Minus Zero” and “Highway 61 Revisited” came “Shooting Star,” one of my personal favorite Dylan songs. Having heard it performed four times on last summer’s Outlaw Festival Tour (and many more times on YouTube, from shows throughout the years) I am no stranger to live interpretation of this deeply emotional tune. Osborne’s delivery stood up to my expectations; it was clear that she was not messing around about her love for Oh Mercy. Her performances of songs off the 1989 album were among the night’s most compelling. Osborne’s voice displayed a deep, dusty passion on “Shooting Star” and the delightful following tune “Everything is Broken,” with Osborne quipping mid-song, “know what I’m saying?”

 

While Joan Osborne is the obvious leader, the assembly of artists she brought along on this journey offered equally enticing performances. The first of those was a theatrical rendition of “Shelter from the Storm” from the delightfully melodic and sweet voice of piano player Will Bryant, brilliantly dressed in a Dylanesque cosplay of a black western shirt and wide-brimmed black hat, all while he perched behind a red keyboard reminiscent of Dylan’s own. In duet with Gail Anne Dorsey, Bryant’s voice was complimented through a delightful contrast of playfulness (Bryant) and soul (Dorsey). One verse was delivered by Bryant as spoken word poetry. It was as unique a version as I’ve heard, and the spoken word element was nothing short of mesmerizing.

 

In fact, the variety of interpretation and style throughout the show was consistently refreshing and exciting. Unlike some Dylan shows that lean heavily on a specific era, or genre, this one was happy to flit between both eras and approach.

 

Osborne regained the mic for a sultry “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and a unique “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.” The latter is a consistent crowd pleaser at any Dylan-related show, and this one was no exception. Its arrangement was almost threatening, presented in a sexy minor tone. This style is where Osborne shines the most.

 

Guitarist and singer Anders Osborne [no relation] was billed as “special guest” for the evening. This means that he was not present for the entire performance, like the rest of the band, but instead joined in occasionally. He first came out swinging with a passionate rendition of “The Man In Me,” and afterwards the band broke into the first rocker of the evening, “Maggie’s Farm.”

 

On “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” Joan Osborne’s sultry voice provided a great deal of emotional depth. A heartbreakingly beautiful slide guitar performance from Cindy Cashdollar carried that voice along. Cashdollar played the slide part on “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” on the actual album version from Dylan’s 1997 Time Out of Mind: a fact that Osborne was delighted to share.

 

After this emotional interlude, the first set of the evening closed with a jaunty version of “Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat.” It brought the show into a jazzy, doowop, swinging zone, supported by backup harmonies that wouldn’t be out of place in the 1950s. I had never heard a Dylan song done that way. It made me giggle, and then it made me want to dance!

 

When the band took to the stage after a brief intermission, I nearly jumped out of my chair at the opening lick to “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum.” This was an intensely cool performance of one of my favorite songs. Osborne made it as smoky and sly as it deserves, leaning into the song’s bluesy elements. An equally smoky “Man in the Long Black Coat” followed, the song that connected Osborne to Dylan all those years ago.

 

The highlight of the show, for me, was a beautiful and emotional “Lay Lady Lay,” sung by bassist and vocalist Gail Anne Dorsey. With the pronouns of the song thoughtfully shifted not entirely in reverse, but rather to suit the gender of the singer and leave the subject well alone (stay lady, stay, stay with your woman a while…), I couldn’t help but think of the song that Dylan contributed in 2018 to Universal Love – Wedding Songs Reimagined. That album took beloved romantic anthems and related them to the relationship experiences of same sex couples. Hearing “Lay Lady Lay” get the same treatment was both moving and revelatory. Whether through Dorsey’s strong yet tender vocal or through the inherently changed narrative of an entreating plea from one woman to another, the song took on new life and new meaning in her hands:

 

Why wait any longer for the world to begin?

You can have your cake and eat it too

Why wait any longer for the one you love

When she’s standing in front of you?

 

It moved me to tears.

 

While “Love and Theft” is the most contemporary well that the setlist drew from, the group still managed to travel a long way across Dylan’s discography. The earliest song performed was about as far back as one can go. The band cleared out, and drummer Lee Falco walked to center stage where he lifted an acoustic guitar and delivered a heartfelt rendition of “Song to Woody.” It was touching, authentic, and helped along by the figure he cuts on stage, his curly hair ducked down in front of the microphone. This was also one of the few times in the show that we were given a rest from the clumsy, distracting lights that persisted at the back of the stage through most of the evening.

 

Anders Osborne returned to the stage to accompany Osborne on “Buckets of Rain.” His presence brought an edge to the whole proceeding. It became a rock show, reminiscent of the kinetic and collaborative energy of the Rolling Thunder Revue. Fittingly, the band then hit us with a double blast of “Mozambique” and “Isis.” In “Isis,” distortion on the guitar was epic, the sound searing and grungy; when it started, I remarked to the stranger beside me, “Is he going to play a Neil Young song?” It felt wrong to be sitting politely in a theater gently bobbing my head.

 

Many aspects of this show, in fact, contained a distinct Rolling Thunder Revue feeling. The Dylanology Revue would’ve been an apt title for the whole endeavor. I had been following Osborne’s Instagram posts in the weeks leading up to the show, and I thoroughly enjoyed the organic, ragtag vibe of the tour. Pictures of band members stuffed together in a van, headed out on the road, called to mind pictures of Dylan and Co. from 1975. With Osborne as the adept band leader – standing in the middle of the stage, introducing her musical compatriots, handing off solos and trading duets – Allen Ginsberg’s words from Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story came to mind: “It is like Dylan is … presenting us. I mean, that’s his conception. I mean, it hasn’t been made overt. His idea is to show how beautiful he is by showing how beautiful we are by showing how beautiful the ensemble is.”

 

That isn’t to say Joan Osborne radiated ego that Saturday night in Beverly. Quite the opposite: she was so proud and enthusiastic to be sharing the stage with these talented people. Every single time Cindy Cashdollar hit a stunning riff, Osborne beamed and praised her name.

 

When “Every Grain of Sand” began, I automatically assumed we’d reached the end of the show. After all, Dylan himself has ended every recent performance on his Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour with this stunning number from 1981’s Shot of Love. For Osborne, however, this wasn’t the grand finale – they followed with “Tangled Up in Blue.” A couple of verses in, Osborne tripped over the lyrics and lost her place. She dealt with the flub in a charming way, though, acknowledging her mistake with a laugh and getting right back into the groove. Afterward, she and the band left the stage to enthusiastic applause before returning with a perfect encore: “I Shall Be Released.” The song has lent itself to beautiful show closing performances many times over the years, most notably at The Last Waltz. Here, it played a similar role in drawing together the artists that we have seen throughout the evening for one last soaring performance.

 

It was abundantly clear throughout the show that Osborne’s aim wasn’t to sing over Dylan’s songs – rather, she puts herself in conversation with his original versions. This seems to be a theme, in terms of her approach to other artists’ material. In her 2018 interview with the Dylan Review, she said of her decisions on which songs to feature that “we asked ourselves, do we have a way to play/arrange the songs in a fresh way, a way to bring something unique to them, make them blossom, open up in a different way?” For the Dylanology tour, she has clearly asked herself that same question again. This wasn’t a hits show and it wasn’t a revival. It was a continuation of the life that these songs have already lived.

 

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[1] “Interview with Joan Osborne Following the Release of Her Album” (2019), The Dylan Review https://thedylanreview.org/2019/06/12/interview-with-joan-osborne-following-the-release-of-her-album/

Bob Dylan: Point Blank. Halcyon Gallery, London. 9 May–6 July 2025.

Reviewed by Angus Gibson

 

Point Blank is an exhibition of 97 new paintings by Bob Dylan at the Halcyon Gallery on London’s New Bond St from May 9th to July 6th, 2025. The gallery is located in the heart of Mayfair, one of the city’s wealthiest districts. King Charles III has his suits made around the corner at Anderson & Sheppard on Old Burlington Street, and the Halcyon itself is flanked by high-fashion boutiques Gucci and Balenciaga. Dylan has regularly presented his artwork at the Halcyon since 2008’s Drawn Blank. On each visit the Dylan fans – imitating our man’s scruffy Greenwich Village style – stand in contrast to the sharply-dressed locals.

 

On one level, Dylan’s now extensive collection of artwork is a commercial enterprise, no different to the luxury handbags and jewelry in the windows of New Bond St’s other shops. Signed prints start at £1,950 ($2,645). An original costs tens of thousands. But the gallery’s plush location also has a rich and authentic artistic history. Handel lived a stone’s throw away at 25 Brook St, in an apartment later rented by Jimi Hendrix. The Beatles’ Apple Records was headquartered at 3 Saville Row, and if you stood outside the Halycon Gallery on January 30th, 1969, you would have heard the Fab Four’s final concert booming out from a nearby rooftop. Notably, Robert Fraser’s Indica art gallery was once in the neighborhood at 6 Mason’s Yard. Here, John Lennon first met Yoko Ono, and Paul McCartney bought the Matisse painting that inspired the band’s apple logo.

 

Art and commerce have long been interwoven in Mayfair, and this duality is also present in Dylan’s artwork. Though Dylan has painted since at least the mid-60s, he held his first exhibition in 2008, titled Drawn Blank and composed of watercolors based on sketches made in the late 80s and early 90s.^[1] After this first exhibition, new collections – from oil paintings to metalworks – followed routinely: the Brazil Series (2010), the Asia Series (2011), Revisionist Art (2012), Face Value (2013), Mood Swings (2013), the New Orleans Series (2013), The Beaten Path (2016), Mondo Scripto (2018), and Deep Focus (2021). Thousands of signed prints from each series are distributed by Castle Fine Art, who also sell works by other celebrity painters such as Billy Connolly and Ron Wood. Dylan has grossed millions of dollars from this business model.

 

It would be wholly unfair, however, to dismiss Dylan’s efforts purely as a cash grab. One of the joys of regularly visiting Dylan’s shows at the Halcyon is witnessing his progress as a painter. What started with Drawn Blank – as relatively simple pencil lines and watercolors – has advanced in ambition both technically and compositionally, culminating in the epic landscapes of The Beaten Path and Hopper-esque oil paintings of Deep Focus. Slowly, Dylan has won over the art establishment. Critic and Turner Prize judge Jonathan Jones wrote of The Beaten Path: “[Dylan’s] drawings are intricate, sincere, charged with curiosity …  He has a surprising amount in common with [David] Hockney. His art looks more serious with every exhibition.”^[2]

 

We can look at Point Blank, therefore, as Dylan showing off his development as a painter in comparison to his first show, Drawn Blank, as the similar titles suggest.^[3] Like that earlier collection, the works in Point Blank started as pencil sketches on thick drawing paper that the artist later painted over in acrylic, using broad brush strokes and bold color. But unlike Drawn Blank, which dazzled in bright primary colors, Point Blank’s use of color is more sophisticated, preferring earthy tones, dark blues and lipstick red. The subject matter is also more varied and complex: portraits of musicians, boxers, cowboys; still life studies of eggboxes, Scotch tape, binoculars; landscapes of rural America. Dylan’s brushwork is also now more skilled; he uses thick blotches of paint to add texture in places, and he frames his subjects with big rectangles of color that have an almost Rothko-like quality. As such, Point Blank evidences Dylan’s considerable progression as a painter.

 

As you enter the Halycon Gallery, you are greeted with a quote from Dylan printed in large black letters on the wall making this connection, while considering his work in poetic but vague terms:

 

The Point Blank series is an extension of the Drawn Blank series that was done some years ago. It can be looked at as an update, or a continual refinement of a certain process … The idea was not only to observe the human condition but to throw myself into it with great urgency … to create living breathing entities that have emotional resonance, colours used as weapons and mood setters.

 

This is evocative writing, but it doesn’t tell us much about Dylan’s real process. It’s naive to expect much insight from the ever-vague artist – especially in a sales blurb – but if Dylan is a serious painter now, it would be fascinating to know how he actually paints. Where does he work – on the road or at home? What brushes does he use? Dylan has previously described his technique in itemized detail, writing in a 2016 Vanity Fair article (“Why Bob Dylan Paints”) of his system for composing The Beaten Path landscapes: “I went to the camera-obscura method … I put a 58-mm 0.43x wide-angle conversion lens onto a used Nikon D3300 Af-p on quite a few paintings.”^[4] The promotional literature accompanying Point Blank is less elucidatory. While a line such as “the idea was not only to observe the human condition but to throw myself into it with great urgency” might describe Dylan’s artistry as a whole, it doesn’t shed much light on Dylan the painter. Still, the evidence of his work – whatever the process – is proudly displayed across Halycon’s two floors.

 

The first paintings on ground level are a dozen or so portraits. These are reminiscent of Dylan’s earlier Face Value collection and display a great leap forward in ability from Self Portrait’s album cover. Unlike that LP sleeve, painted in an underdeveloped style over fifty years ago, the faces here are well-defined and carry emotive human expressions. Dylan tempts the viewer to imagine each subject’s back story. The viewer is led to ask: why is one woman wearing 1920s flying goggles? Is the man with the clean-cut hair and 1940s-style shirt from decades past, or a character from the present day wearing vintage clothes? Some portraits have odd proportions. There is a bearded man with an unusually thin head; another man with an unnaturally bulky chin holds his hand to his eye as if peering through a telescope. Ten years ago, critics might have attributed these strange proportions to Dylan’s poor draftmanship. But there’s now enough evidence to suggest he’s a skilled drawer, making deliberate and effective choices. The strangely-shaped faces make the viewer feel like Mr. Jones in “Ballad of a Thin Man,” staring back at a rogues gallery of sword-swallowers, lepers, and crooks. And the titles of these portraits in the accompanying catalogue add to this sense of carnival. Dylan has evidently enjoyed creating exotic names for each subject: “Dennis Manga (Man with a Crooked Smile),” “Peeping Tom,” “Vag Siska (Stunt Flyer),” and “Mr. Soup Can,” to cite a few.^[5]

 

Among the most interesting entries in the catalogue is the portrait of “Vera Silverlake,” a Black woman with striking features. Like a number of works in the catalogue, this portrait is paired with short prose. However, unlike others, the text beside “Vera Silverlake” is written in first person and uses Dylan’s distinctive voice:

 

I dreamed about her the other night, we were in the bar at the Adolphus Hotel and she was talking about my Nobel Prize, and said that “The only people pissed off about you winning that, were white people. You deserve that Nobel prize honey, you really do. At your best, you’re wonderful.” I asked her if I could see her later. She wrote down her address and gave me instructions on how to get there. Then I woke up. It was one of my better dreams.^[6]

 

It’s unclear if Dylan wrote this himself. The catalogue’s title page notes “Text by Eddie Gorodetsky, Lucy Sante, and Jackie Hamilton,” though the individual entries aren’t credited. And while Gorodetsky and Sante regularly collaborate with Dylan, at the time of writing it’s not obviously clear who Jackie Hamilton is.^[7] This mystery aside, the catalogue is a worthwhile purchase at £45 ($61), with a hardcover, thick high-quality paperstock, and 193 pages of Dylan’s original pencil sketches shown before he added paint.

 

The rear half of the ground floor contains still life studies and a series of paintings of musicians. The still life paintings detail a variety of eccentric objects. A box of eggs recalls the scene in Hearts of Fire (1987), where Dylan’s character opens a fridge filled only with eggboxes.^[8] A painting of a Scotch tape holder is particularly intriguing. While Dylan’s compositions have historically tended towards cliché – open highways, fifties diners, retro Cadillacs – this painting looks genuinely original. Another study is of a wooden crate of grapes, emblazoned with a cartoon logo of a woman holding a bowl of fruit under the words “MIXED GRAPES.” The woman’s face is visibly contorted as if to emphasize that she is part of a logo branded on the box, not a real person. This brings to mind the Ekphrasis – where art depicts other art – discussed in relation to Dylan by Raphael Falco previously in this journal, as well as Warhol’s Brillo box pop art.^[9]

 

On the opposite wall from the still life, the series of musicians is presented as a set of four paintings: two pianists, a guitarist, and a saxophonist. Placed together, they look like a band, with each dressed in a 50s-style suit like some well-regarded jazz combo. It’s hard to view the piano players and not think of Dylan’s current live shows, where he’s usually seen behind a baby grand. These aren’t self portraits, but they are evidence of a musician studying the poses of other musicians. The viewer is naturally inclined to wonder what, if anything, these paintings can tell us about Dylan’s own impression of himself as a pianist.

 

A disappointing aspect of this set of paintings, and indeed of others in Point Blank, is Dylan’s inability to competently draw fingers. In the painting “Young Man with a Horn,” the saxophone player’s digits are long and bulky, like lifeless sausages indelicately sprawled over the instrument. Unlike the misshapen heads in other portraits, this rendering does not have any positive effect, nor does it suggest controlled distortion. Rather it looks amateurish. Dylan’s artistic skill has advanced greatly, but he can still improve if he is to finally paint his masterpiece.

 

Downstairs, the basement is furnished with a similar number of paintings as upstairs and a short film that plays on a loop. The film is a dull hagiography that merely lists Dylan’s various awards, as if to convince deep-pocketed but uncultured clientele of his worth. It’s an unnecessary addition, as the quality of the paintings here is enough to speak for Dylan’s talent alone.

 

As with the quartet of musicians on the level above, the basement walls display several sets of paintings arranged around coherent themes. There is a set of characters in evening wear. One sports a mask and cocktail dress, like the woman on the rear cover of Shadows in the Night. In the next picture, a man in a tuxedo lies on a table. It is unclear whether he is dead or alive. Another set of paintings depicts landscapes, while a further set collects nudes.

 

Of particular interest is a group of four paintings showing couples. Upon first look, they each appear heteronormative, but this assumption gives way on further inspection. One painting is of a pair in a passionate embrace. But up close, the male subject has feminine features accentuated with makeup. A second picture, called “Outlaws,” shows two people in a window. One is wearing a polka-dot dress and hat, the other is in a shirt and tie. Both have feminine features and also seem to be wearing makeup. Someone else’s hand is reaching across them towards the window, as if trying to halt their escape. Awareness of the discipline of gender studies is growing among Dylan scholars, following the “Bob Dylan: Questions on Masculinity” conference at the University of Southern Denmark in 2024.^[10] An examination of these paintings from such a perspective may prove worthwhile.

 

The most moving set of paintings in Point Blank is a collection of eight pictures illustrating a 1940s house. It looks very much like the sort you might find in northern Minnesota. One shows a fireplace, another a staircase, one more a kitchen. But a painting of a crib below a small bedroom window caught my eye. I visited Dylan’s family home in Hibbing, Minnesota recently; the room in this painting, with the upstairs window and neat period furniture, looks strikingly like Dylan’s childhood bedroom. Many people remember the view from an early bedroom window, and carry it with them forever. It’s touching to think that Dylan might have done the same, remembering it one day as he sat down to paint. This picture, titled “Crib” in the catalogue, gets to the heart of Point Blank. Most of these images are about memory. They depict scenes from the past: people in archaic clothes, 50s cars, old-timey gamblers and boxers. Just as Dylan’s music in the two decades since “Love & Theft” has increasingly taken influence from the music of his childhood (Frank Sinatra, Bob Wills, Hank Williams), so too has his visual art focused on subjects from the pre-Bob Dylan era (cowboys, jazz musicians, men in hats and ties). The viewer is left to consider whether these paintings, like “Crib,” are from Dylan’s own memory, or are merely a nostalgic invention of  his imagination.

 

I asked myself this question as I left the gallery and walked past the diamond rings and shiny watches in neighboring windows. Ultimately, for those who buy paintings from the Halcyon Gallery, Dylan’s artwork may be nothing more than another of Mayfair’s superficial luxury gifts – and for Dylan another large check. But there’s more to Point Blank than naked commerce. Dylan is adroitly displaying the progress he’s made as an artist since 2008’s Drawn Blank, and in doing so is furthering his exploration of pre-1960s American culture. That it’s on display in Mayfair, where London’s old-school financiers have long cut loose with artsy bohemians, is perfectly fitting.

 

Angus Gibson is managing editor of the Dylan Review.

 

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^[1] Notable early paintings include covers for Sing Out! magazine and The Band’s Music from Big Pink, and illustrations for the book Writings & Drawings (1973).

^[2] Jonathan Jones. “Bob Dylan: a Hockney-like painter of America’s strange essence” The Guardian, 8 Nov. 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2016/nov/08/bob-dylan-paintings-halcyon-gallery-london-beaten-path

^[3] The title may also reference the 1967 spy film Point Blank, starring Lee Marvin, as suggested by Expecting Rain user Mirte (https://expectingrain.com/discussions/viewtopic.php?t=108402). Indeed, Scott Warmuth has noted (https://www.instagram.com/p/DDDdS7nu9uQ/?img_index=1) that a number of Dylan’s paintings from the recent series Deep Focus are based on stills from Hollywood movies of the late sixties and early seventies. The film Point Blank is of this era, but none of Dylan’s compositions in the Point Blank appear to be based on film stills.

^[4] Bob Dylan. “In His Own Words: Why Bob Dylan Paints.” Vanity Fair, 2 Nov. 2016. http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2016/11/why-bob-dylan-paints

^[5] Bob Dylan. Point Blank (Quick Studies). Castle Fine Art, 2025.

^[6] Dylan, Point Blank, p.126.

^[7] Eddie Gorodesky is credited as writer and producer of Theme Time Radio Hour and received thanks as Dylan’s “fishing buddy” in The Philosophy of Modern Song. Lucy Sante wrote the sermons for the film Trouble No More, included in Bootleg Series Vol. 13.

^[8] Hearts of Fire. Directed by Richard Marquand, performances by Bob Dylan, Fiona, and Rupert Everett, Lorimar Motion Pictures, 1987.

^[9] Raphael Falco, “‘Unheard Melodies’: Ekphrasis and Possible Gaze in Dylan’s Lyrics,” Dylan Review, 5.1 Spring/Summer, 2023.

^[10] Bob Dylan: Questions on Masculinity.” Conference, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, 23–24 May 2024. event.sdu.dk/dylan/conference.