Reviews – Page 2 – The Dylan Review

Bob Dylan. The Bootleg Series Vol. 18: Through the Open Window 1956–1963. 8CD, Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings, 31 Oct. 2025.

Review by Gayle Wald, The George Washington University

Through the open window the voice of the beauty of the world came murmuring, too softly to hear exactly what it said—but what mattered if the meaning were plain?

— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

The 18^th volume of The Bootleg Series is titled Through the Open Window, a phrase with mythological overtones. In Joseph Campbell’s typology of the Hero’s Journey, the open window is the Call to Adventure. The Hero may initially resist the Call, but its lure is strong. Leaving home, the Hero encounters obstacles as well as helpers. He is tested. But because he is the Hero, these tests will plant the seeds of his transformation. He will emerge from the tests with new knowledge, ready to take on new adventures.

The cover of the boxed set, released on October 31, gives visual form to the myth. It pictures Dylan on a New York City rooftop. The buildings behind him appear puny, reaching no further than Dylan’s knees. He gazes slightly upward, looking beyond the camera’s frame. His fingers are in his jeans pockets. His stance is a wide and grounded “V.”^[1]

The hero’s narrative is borne out over the eight CDs that comprise the Deluxe Edition of this latest boxed set. (The streaming and LP versions are leaner, featuring “highlights.”) It begins in 1956, in a recording booth in St. Paul, Minnesota, as Bobby Zimmerman and friends tromp through a ragged but enthusiastic version of “Let the Good Times Roll,” a Shirley & Lee song then in high rotation on Black radio programs. It travels with Dylan to the college towns of Minneapolis and Madison, Wisconsin, where he first discovered folk music via Odetta and then Woody Guthrie; to the small and agreeably grungy Greenwich Village clubs where he honed his skills before a live audience; and to venues like Riverside Church and Town Hall, where he established his performing bona fides. It takes us into the studio with producers John Hammond and Tom Wilson as he records Bob Dylan and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. And it culminates with a complete recording of Dylan’s career-defining October 1963 concert at Carnegie Hall, the nation’s most prestigious stage.

As this itinerary suggests, Through the Open Window is best approached as a document of the alchemy of painstaking labor, furious determination, and creative inspiration that is the condition of possibility of every artistic breakthrough. At no point in Dylan’s journey is his success guaranteed or inevitable. Indeed, I came away from my listening with a powerful sense of the work behind the creation of “Bob Dylan.” Cumulatively, the dozens of tracks that record his efforts circa 1959-1962—to teach himself dozens of songs, refine his picking and harmonica skills, experiment with vocal stylizations, and sharpen his abilities as an interpreter of songs born in times and places beyond his own lived experience—provide a useful context for the emergence of Dylan as a composer. They bring to mind Patti Smith’s notion of the musician as worker, reminding us that even familiar and beloved songs were made, not plucked from the ether.^[2]

Yet although the tracks on Through the Open Window are the achievements of a particular person, at a particular time and place, in some quarters the boxed set has been received with a Robert-Johnson-at-the-Crossroads zeal. Reviews published less than 36 hours after the boxed set dropped reprise some of the very language that gave Dylan so much indigestion in the mid-1960s. (That said, they are dutifully reproduced on the Bob Dylan website.) MOJO referred to “Dylan’s miraculous New York transformation” and breathlessly declared, “every damn song is a transcendence.” Uncut described the boxed set as a document of “the dawn of a legend.”^[3]

Perhaps it is inevitable that Through the Open Window will only solidify the “genius” narrative that has long trailed Dylan.^[4] Words like “miraculous” and “transcendent” express admiration, of course, but they are also deeply ahistorical, running contrary to the evidence of the boxed set itself. This air of romantic inevitability also hangs over A Complete Unknown, the 2024 biopic that covers much of the same period as Through the Open Window, and might be seen as its companion piece (in terms of content as well as marketing). But while James Mangold’s movie culminates in Dylan’s electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the new boxed set, by culminating at Carnegie Hall in October 1963, shifts the frame. The difference is telling. In A Complete Unknown, the Hero’s journey culminates in his need to symbolically slay his father (Pete Seeger) and rid himself of straightjacketing emotional encumbrances (Joan Baez, Suze Rotolo) so that he may become the Voice of a Generation. The result is an at times compelling but strangely depoliticized depiction of the folk revival. In Through the Open Window, in contrast, the Hero’s journey ends on a heady note of arrival. At the 1963 Carnegie Hall concert, unlike at Newport in 1965, Dylan is thoroughly enjoying himself, basking in the glow of artistic validation, of which fame is one measure. It would still be a while before the glow turned into a conflagration.

After the period of 1964-65, the years chronicled in Through the Open Window are the most studied of Bob Dylan’s career, covered exhaustively in work since Toby Thompson’s 1969 Village Voice series on Dylan’s “Main Street” origins and Anthony Scaduto’s Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography. Most of the tracks it collects have circulated for years: on tapes traded among collectors; via social media (the complete April 1963 Town Hall concert, posted to YouTube before it was embargoed for copyright violation); and in earlier anthologies, including The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3: Rare and Unreleased 1961-1991 (1991); Live at Carnegie Hall 1963 (2005); and The Bootleg Series Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964 (2010). But as Sean Wilentz points out in the boxed set’s novella-length liner notes, it “differs from other renditions because it tells the story entirely through recordings.” The visual abundance of the boxed set—with its dozens of images of Dylan and reproductions of material artifacts including handbills, lyric sheets, posters, and recording-studio ephemera—somewhat belies this notion of sonic storytelling. But Wilentz is of course correct. Through the Open Window constitutes an unparalleled sonic chronicle of Dylan’s early musical formation, up to and including its “completion” at Carnegie Hall.

To listen to Through the Open Window track-by-track is not necessarily to have a linear experience, however. The quality and appeal of its tracks vary widely, with some—for example, unused studio takes from sessions for Bob Dylan (1962) and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963)—being of interest primarily because they represent the road not taken. Home tapes—including from the living rooms of friends including Bob and Sid Gleason, Mel and Lillian Bailey, and Mac and Eve McKenzie—lack the energy of live concert recordings, in which we hear Dylan figuring out ways to put over his songs for strangers. On the other hand, such tapes give us insight into Dylan’s artistry at the moment in late 1961 when New York Times journalist Robert Shelton first extolled Dylan as “bright new face” and allow us the pleasure of observing Dylan trying out material in intimate settings.^[5] Although his development as a guitar player and singer is most apparent, Through the Open Window attests to Dylan’s distinction as a harmonica player within the New York folk scene, and reminds us that his earliest recording work was as a harmonica accompanist for Carolyn Hester, Harry Belafonte, and Big Joe Williams and Victoria Spivey.

There is texture and detail in recordings that were never intended for public consumption. Among these, tracks with fly-on-the-wall snippets of conversation are some of the most interesting moments on the boxed set. We hear Belafonte suavely advising the 21-year-old Dylan to “Take your time, baby” as Dylan fumbles with his harmonica during a February 1962 recording session for Belafonte’s Midnight Special. (Did this make Dylan more or less nervous, I wonder.) Elsewhere, we eavesdrop on an impromptu November 1961 conversation in the Columbia Records studio between Dylan and producer John Hammond, after Dylan has played him an assured interpretation of the Kentucky folk ballad “Man of Constant Sorrow.” Written out, it reads almost like the script of a play, in which the dialogue hints at unstated but palpable feeling:

Hammond (nonchalantly): What was the name of that, Bob?

Dylan (echoing the nonchalance): “Man of Constant Sorrow.” Did you get that?

H: I did.

D (more hopefully): Oh, did you like that one?

H (understated): Sure, it’s all right. Who wrote that?

D: (deflecting) Uh, I don’t know. I don’t know who wrote that.

H: Has it been recorded?

D: Uh, not that way.

H: How has it been recorded?

D: Uh, a different way I guess.

H: Who did it?

D (more insistently): Judy Collins did it, but not a version like that. That’s a different one. Judy Collins on Elektra.

H (thinking ahead): Elektra. We’ll find out from Elektra who wrote the damn thing.

Columbia Records did “find out,” of course, slotting “Man of Constant Sorrow” on the A side of Bob Dylan. But what fascinates is the window this dialogue offers into the delicate relationship of producer and artist. The conversation surfaces untold emotional depths, as Hammond, clearly interested in Dylan’s performance, keeps his enthusiasm in check, while Dylan, even as he solicits Hammond’s approval, displays total confidence in his work.

While such outtakes place listeners in the recording studio, the live concert performance tracks on Through the Open Window give us a seat at some of Dylan’s earliest club appearances. We hear Dylan introducing his first public performance of “Blowin’ in the Wind” for a small Gerde’s Folk City audience on April 16, 1962. “It ain’t a protest song, or anything like that, cause I don’t write protest songs,” he protests, in an uncanny anticipation of the song’s reception. “I wrote this song …. I didn’t actually write it. I just sort of recorded it,” he explains, acknowledging the composition’s indebtedness to the spiritual “No More Auction Block” while echoing contemporary accounts of the feverish pace of his songwriting, including Joan Baez’s recollection of him “turning out songs like ticker-tape.”^[6]

Other tracks afford us insight into Dylan’s earliest audiences. Hearing the patrons of the Gaslight Café join Dylan in singing the title phrase to “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” in October 1962, just a month after he debuted it at a Carnegie Hall hootenanny, we understand how passionately they embraced the song and its challenging lyrics. I was particularly interested in hearing Gerde’s Folk City patrons react to an April 1962 performance of “Talkin’ New York”—not the G-rated version that would appear on the Bob Dylan album, but a more risqué one befitting the Greenwich Village counterculture. When the song’s narrator, a hayseed visitor to the Big Apple, describes an encounter with a crossdressing prostitute—“Well I got on the subway, took a seat / and got off on 42^nd Street / I met this fella named Dolores there / He started rubbing his hands through my hair”—the crowd laughs uproariously, presumably in response to the comical image of the yokel caught off-guard by a trans woman turning tricks at Times Square. Clearly the Gerde’s audience is hip to the 42^nd Street sex trade.

Dylan’s knowing satire of the yokel-and-Dolores in “Talkin’ New York” is only one example of the comedic and occasionally subversive early 1960s Dylan, who is well-documented on Through the Open Window. In this, the boxed set conveys both the ambiance of the downtown folk scene and Dylan’s ingratiation of himself to audiences through humorous crowd-work. As is well known, Dylan himself credited Charlie Chaplin as an influence on his early stage persona. Picking up on his Chaplinesque mannerisms, Shelton in 1961 described him as “both comedian and tragedian,” who embellished his Gerde’s sets with a “variety of droll musical monologues.” Hammond’s pseudonymous liner notes to Dylan’s 1962 debut further secured this association of Dylan with Chaplin, describing him as “nervously tapping his hat, adjusting it, using it as a prop, almost leaning on it,” in the manner of the silent film icon.^[7]

In his own liner notes, Wilentz picks up on these themes by characterizing Dylan as a “droll singing comedian who could turn even a story occasion into a farcical frolic.”^[8] His observation comes in the context of his discussion of a recording of “Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues” from a September 1961 Gaslight Café performance. But he could just as easily have referenced Bonnie Beecher’s 1961 Minneapolis home recording of Dylan doing a comic shtick about East Orange, New Jersey (where his friends the Gleasons lived, not far from Woody Guthrie when he was at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital) or his version of “Talkin’ War III Blues” from a taped show at Cambridge’s Club 47 in April 1963.^[9] Many eyewitnesses have described the comic Dylan of these early years. But experiencing Dylan’s sharp humor and excellent comedic timing on this newest boxed set is still fascinating, particularly for those of us (present writer included) who grew up with Bob Dylan-the-Legend and who discovered the looser, funnier Dylan only in retrospect. Through the Open Window presents listeners a Dylan who is quite different from the detached, often standoffish performer of the present.^[10] The humorous, joking Dylan of the boxed set arrives at a moment when Instagram users, in response to this seemingly gloomier, glummer Dylan of the 21^st century, have seized upon the photographic trope of “Bob Dylan smiling” as a humorous meme.^[11]

This raises a series of questions: What happened to the Chaplinesque Dylan? Was he a casualty of the suffocating adulation of the early 1960s? By virtue of ending in late 1963, Through the Open Window is silent on such issues. On the other hand, it offers much to listeners interested in Dylan’s well-documented attraction to Black music and musicians, beginning with his teenage forays into Black pop. In particular, Through the Open Window highlights Dylan’s immersion in the recordings of Robert Johnson, whose work became newly available to folk revivalists with the 1961 release of the King of the Delta Blues Singers compilation. Dylan drew overtly on Johnson for the melody of his version of “Corrina, Corrina” (included here in a Gerde’s Folk City rendition); but Johnson’s influence can also be heard in Dylan’s explorations of his falsetto register. Although many of the tracks that register Dylan’s relationship to blues have been heard before, it is still interesting to revisit these early years of experimentation. How did Dylan approach songs that emerged from circumstances so utterly distinct from his own? How did he insert himself into songs of the wanderer, the outcast, the impoverished Southern laborer? By what imaginative leaps—or sleights of hand—did he discover himself in the blues, and how did he bend the music of Black America toward his own expressive needs?

But the young Dylan was not only “discovering” Black music on vinyl or shellac. Through the Open Window documents the young performer’s interactions with contemporary blues musicians including the Rev. Gary Davis, Big Joe Williams, and Victoria Spivey. As these tracks helpfully demonstrate, when Dylan arrived in New York in late 1961, blues was very much a living tradition, not an inert, romanticized art form. Spivey was particularly important to Dylan’s formation. The New York-based Blues Queen indulged his blandishments and invited him to play harmonica on March 1962 sessions with Big Joe Williams, later released on two albums from her own imprint. (Dylan would confirm the importance of Spivey’s mentorship by featuring a photograph of the two of them, from the very same 1962 sessions, on 1970’s New Morning LP.) “Wichita” and “It’s Dangerous,” the Spivey Records tracks included on Through the Open Window, thus helpfully recall the centrality of an older generation of Black musicians to Dylan’s—and other young white folk singers’—musical development. In that sense, the boxed set is a welcome rejoinder to A Complete Unknown’s disparaging depiction of the fictional bluesman Jesse Moffette, played by Big Bill Morganfield (Muddy Waters’ son). The blues singers Dylan knew in 1962—and who are pictured in images printed along with the Through the Open Window liner notes—would not have arrived on the set of the TV show Rainbow Quest disheveled, drunk, and clutching a whiskey bottle. They were dapper professionals, struggling to make a living from their art, even as a new generation of white musicians would ultimately come to profit from it.

In light of the boxed set’s reminders of the many Black people who scaffolded and supported Dylan’s early career, I found it hard not to detect a reference to interracial relationships in the lyrics to “Kingsport Town,” an arrangement of “Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet” here captured as an outtake from the November 1962 Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan sessions. “High sheriff on my trail boy / high sheriff on my trail,” Dylan sings, “All because I’m falling for / a curly dark-eyed gal.” The lyrics are traditional, recorded decades earlier by Woody Guthrie, but the phrase “a curly dark-eyed gal” evokes the African American women—including Mavis Staples and Delores Dixon—who attracted (or is rumored to have attracted) Dylan’s romantic interest in the early 1960s. Through the Open Window makes such questions possible, even if it cannot answer them.

I cannot end this review without mentioning Through the Open Window’s documentation of the quantum leap in Dylan’s songwriting between the period of “Talkin’ New York” and “Song to Woody,” the two originals on Bob Dylan, and his utterly self-assured Carnegie Hall performance of October 1963. The setlist of either half of that concert would have been enough to cement Dylan’s reputation as a major 20^th-century composer: “The Times They Are A-Changin,’” “Boots of Spanish Leather,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “North Country Blues,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” before the intermission, followed by “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “Masters of War,” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” in part two. It is genuinely thrilling to hear the Carnegie Hall set in its entirety, rather than through snippets stitched together from Live at Carnegie Hall (Columbia, 2005), earlier Bootleg Series releases (Vols. 1-3 and Vol. 7), and the ultra-rare six-LP set The 50^th Anniversary Collection 1963 (Sony Music, 2013). After listening to them for this review, I would not revisit much of the material on the first six CDs of Through the Open Window. But I can imagine listening to the Carnegie Hall set for its immersive pleasure.

It goes without saying that the target audience of the Bootleg Series, currently retailing at $160 (list price) or $138.36 (on Amazon), consists almost entirely of people who do not need to be convinced of its merits. (That includes readers of this review.) It is impossible to find fault with the boxed set’s thesis that in a few remarkable years between 1959 and 1963, with the assistance of New York City and a large cast of musical mentors (both living and on recordings), muses, friends, and frenemies, Bob Dylan developed into a musician of great originality, interpretive intelligence, and lyrical subtlety. The overabundance of the boxed set only cements the narrative of the Hero’s journey. But that does not mean that we cannot peek through the open window to catch sight of less noticed aspects of his early career.

[1] The image is from a 1963 photo shoot by Ralph Baxter, who mostly placed Dylan in more terrestrial settings: standing at a corner at Gramercy Park, posing with a cigarette on a balcony overlooking a crowded urban courtyard.

[2] See Jacob Uitti, “Patti Smith Is Always Going to Be a Worker,” Interview, October 20, 2020. https://www.interviewmagazine.com/music/patti-smith-is-always-going-to-be-a-worker

[3] See https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/bob-dylan-the-bootleg-series-volume-18-review-dylans-miraculous-new-york-transformation/ and https://www.uncut.co.uk/reviews/bob-dylans-through-the-open-window-the-bootleg-series-vol-18-1956-1963-reviewed-documenting-the-dawn-of-a-legend-151807/. While track-by-track discussions of “Through the Open Window” began popping up online after the stroke of midnight on October 30, 2025, I particularly benefited from Ray Padgett’s detailed listening guide—sent to subscribers of his “Flagging Down the Double E’s” newsletter.

[4] Here I mean to differentiate the romanticized image from the notion of Dylan’s exceptionalism as a musician.

[5] Robert Shelton, “Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Folk-Song Stylist,” New York Times, September 29, 1961.

[6] “In the dead of the night, he would wake up, grunt, grab a cigarette, and stumble over to the typewriter … turning out songs like ticker tape.” Joan Baez, And a Voice to Sing With: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 86.

[7] Billy James, “Bob Dylan: The First Interview, October 1961, available at https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/bob-dylan-the-first-interview; Robert Shelton, “Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Folk-Song Stylist,” New York Times, September 29, 1961; Stacey Williams (John Hammond), liner notes, Bob Dylan (Columbia Records, 1962).

[8] Wilentz, p. 28.

[9] Some of this material appeared on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3: Rare & Unreleased 1961-1991 (Columbia Records, 1991) or The Bootleg Series, Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964 (Columbia Records, 2010).

[10] I am thinking of the Dylan of the fall 2025 Outlaw Music Festival, who seemed to intentionally hide from the audience. See the “‘I’m Not There’: Why is Bob Dylan Hiding?” (September 14, 2025) episode of Laura Tenschert’s Definitely Dylan. https://www.definitelydylan.com/podcasts/2025/9/14/zu3x709n5k6gifhcha53kt3w039e8i

[11] See, for example, the Instagram account of dylan.ologist. https://www.instagram.com/p/DA3AfODRliZ/

February 22, 2026/by Nicole Font

Review of And the Nobel Prize in Literature Goes to … Bob Dylan?

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:

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;
thirty characteristic Dylan quotes (pp. 51-53); and
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.

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

[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 .

August 8, 2025/by Nicole Font

Review of Six Sermons for Bob Dylan

Lucy Sante. Six Sermons for Bob Dylan. Tenement, 2024. 74 pp.

Reviewed by Michael Gilmour, Providence University College, Canada

Lucy Sante’s Six Sermons for Bob Dylan is the script she prepared for the Jennifer LeBeau film Trouble No More – A Musical Film (2017), and consequently a review of her book ought to have some parallel discussion of that setting. The eight CD, one DVD boxset Bob Dylan, Trouble No More, the Bootleg Series Vol. 13 / 1979–1981, Deluxe Edition (2017) is a revelation (fitting term), adding considerably to the three-album gospel trilogy – Slow Train Coming, 1979; Saved, 1980; Shot of Love, 1981 – that previously constituted the official record of this divisive period. Some love(d) it, some loath(ed) it. Joel Selvin’s oft-quoted ‘79 review “Bob Dylan’s God-Awful Gospel,” written after hearing the singer in concert beat “the drum for God as surely and thoroughly as Billy Graham,” encapsulates the latter camp’s assessment. For many on both sides, Dylan’s post-Street-Legal turn to fundamentalist Christianity remains a lyrical and attitudinal shift that continues to baffle. This bootleg collection takes us well beyond that earlier trinity of albums, providing listeners with more material to sort through, all of it previously unreleased, as they attempt to make sense of Dylan’s changed way of thinking.

Without question, the pearl in this oyster of a release is Trouble No More–A Musical Film, produced and directed by LeBeau. The concert and rehearsal footage that constitutes the bulk of the hour-long film includes many familiar songs from the time but also lesser-known ones like “Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody,” and a touching rehearsal cover of Dick Holler’s “Abraham, Martin and John” (which Dylan sings with Clydie King). What concerns us here is the series of scenes interspersed among the twelve songs involving “The Preacher,” played by actor Michael Shannon. With the camera focused on him, Shannon delivers brief, two-or-so-minute homilies, each a tirade on a moral issue directed at an implied congregation. The titular six sermons of Sante’s recent book, Six Sermons for Bob Dylan, are the full text scripts used for Shannon’s clergyman, somewhat abbreviated for the film.

Those interested in this bootleg collection, and sympathetic to or curious about Dylan’s work during his gospel years more generally, are likely to appreciate Sante’s short book and the peek-behind-the-curtain it offers. It opens with a brief account of how the assignment came about, and her process for researching and writing it. This was not the first time the Dylan camp reached out to her. Earlier assignments included “speeches, press kits, prefaces, [and] a Buick commercial” (13). A request for sermon scripts was something altogether different from previous requests coming through Jeff Rosen’s emails. But what kind of sermon would suit such a project? It required research to ensure the texts produced matched the spirit (another fitting term) of the film’s musical setting. Sante then explains how the hunt for appropriate source material took her back to early twentieth-century recordings of preachers like Reverend J. M. Gates, Reverend D. C. Rice, Reverend A. W. Nix: “These were Black, mostly Southern preachers of the 1920s and ‘30s, whose recorded sermons, often unaccompanied, handily outsold the blues issued on the same labels” (13). The Sante-LeBeau-Shannon “Preacher” and his messages are thus an amalgam that captures a homiletical style with deep American roots, one “grounded in the rhythms and imagery of the King James Bible” (14). A series of black and white photographs of churches, clergy, wall-mounted Bible verses, baptisms, and other sacred gatherings from those bygone days help evoke this slice of interwar American religion.

With respect to content, Sante explains that “Bob had assigned me six topics: Hypocrisy, Virtue, Gluttony, Temperance, Justice, [and] Prudence” (16), a list perhaps meant to be loosely suggestive of the traditional seven deadly sins. In the film, LeBeau divides these six topics into eight separate episodes. The concert recordings included come from different shows, so “The Preacher” segments provide a degree of continuity to the film. Shannon delivers all the exhortations in the same church, standing most often near his pulpit, Bible in hand, with stain glass windows and organ pipes in the background. His suits and ties change topic-to-topic, so presumably we should imagine these to be services across a series of Sundays delivered to the same congregation.

Quite apart from Shannon’s preacher, the gospel-era concerts themselves already had a Sunday-go-to-meetin’ vibe about them, which is evident in the footage included in the film. This goes some way toward explaining why Sante found appropriate inspiration in the southern American gospel traditions she describes in the book’s introduction. Shared elements include the presence of Black gospel singers with tambourines in hand, use of an organ in the musical arrangements (played admirably by Spooner Oldham), and structurally the call and response pattern so characteristic of southern preaching, with audiences responding to everything Dylan said or sang just as congregations did and do with an animated pastor. “If you don’t know Jesus,” the singer advised his San Diego audience on November 27, 1979, “you better check into it. He’s real,” to which, and without missing a beat, a woman in the audience shouted back, “He’s real!” (transcript in Clinton Heylin’s Trouble in Mind: Bob Dylan’s Gospel Years, What Really Happened, 302). Much of the stage-to-seats back and forth of these shows resembles the pulpit-to-pews exchanges in many churches where shouts of “Amen” and “Hallelujah” and the like are a hallmark of the community’s shared worship experience. And these church-styled performances of 1979–1981 included sermons. The Dylan of earlier and later decades is not known for stage banter, so it is hard to imagine him evangelizing from the stage during the gospel years, often antagonizing concertgoers in the process. “People were walking out of the shows,” writes Amanda Petrusich in her essay “Fire in My Bones,” part of the Bootleg Vol. 13 liner notes. “In Tempe, Arizona, in the fall of 1979, Dylan was seething at the crowd’s reaction, admonishing his hecklers for their Godlessness. It is hard to say whether any of these sanctified jeremiads – and they were frequent – actually furthered his message” (10). In one harangue early in the tour, the singer shouts down calls for “Rock ‘n’ roll!” from an audience frustrated that he wouldn’t perform the old songs: “Pretty rude bunch tonight! You all know how to be real rude. You [all] know about the spirit of Antichrist! … If you wanna rock ‘n’ roll … You can go see KISS, and you [can] rock ‘n’ roll all your way down to the pit!” (Heylin, Trouble in Mind, 105).

Since Dylan preached this way during the shows, it makes sense to include an equivalent in a film meant to replicate them. Sante’s Shannon-delivered homilies thus stand in for those “sanctified jeremiads.” Viewed one way, there’s a bit of revisionist history at play here, and it’s possible to see this official release engaging in reputational mending. Dylan’s own sermons at the time were earnest but arguably meandering, and often confrontational and odd, if not incoherent. Among examples that could be cited are Dylan’s end-times rants that reflect some awareness of writings by doomsday evangelist Hal Lindsey, best-known for books like The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) and Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth (1972). “In a short time,” according to Dylan, “I don’t know, maybe in three years, maybe five years, could be ten years – there’s gonna be a war … called the war of Armageddon. It’s gonna happen in the Middle East. Russia will come down and attack first. You watch for that sign.” And again: “Russia is gonna come down and attack the Middle East. It says this in the Bible” (taken from Heylin, Trouble in Mind, 101, 103). Such abstruse dialogue (the Bible doesn’t say anything about Russia attacking the Middle East) would certainly have puzzled more than informed. The film does not include any of those rambling talks, so the insertion of the eloquent Shannon-Sante sermons between songs not only serves to reproduce the rhythm of the concerts but also serves to rehabilitate that aspect of the shows. Sante is a great writer and Shannon a brilliant actor, and quite apart from the religious content, however off-putting that may be to some, we encounter something elegant when reading, watching, and listening to the Sante-LeBeau-Shannon hexalogy of performances. Consider, to illustrate, this simple but elegantly crafted conclusion to the “Prudence” sermon, based on Proverbs 13:16 in the Authorized Version (“Every prudent man dealeth from knowledge, but a fool layeth open his folly” [55]):

… if we are living right, we prepare for our passage into the next world. We read the

manual, which is scripture. We take out insurance, which is good work. We trim down

our luggage, by cutting out sin and vice. We speak to the manager, who is almighty God. And even if we are fools in every other part of our lives, but we prepare for heaven, then we are the wisest of all. (56)

No arcane esoterica, no strange end-time speculations. The “Preacher’s” messages are uncomplicated and easily translated into a moral takeaway.

The book itself is rather spartan in design – plain cover, black and white pictures, lots of unadorned, blank pages, generous spacing – and whether intended or not, this otherwise irrelevant detail subtly reinforces the atmosphere of both the text and the Shannon sermons. The preacher that emerges on the page and screen is not flashy either. No trappings of high church religion here. The man is well groomed, wearing dark-toned suits (if I had to guess, off the rack as opposed to tailored), sometimes lightly accessorized with a vest, matching pocket handkerchief, and a cross worn overtop the tie. He’s humorless and plain spoken, perhaps shepherding a small, rural, evangelical church. The messages delivered are not theologically sophisticated nor do they allow for ambiguity on moral matters. In his lesson on “Temperance,” the Preacher comes out swinging in his opening sentence: “I feel that I should not have to tell you about the evils of strong drink, brothers and sisters” (43; with proof text Proverbs 20:1: “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging, and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise”). On the subject of “Gluttony,” he is equally blunt in his assessment of fast food: “When you replace the fruits of nature’s bounty with that sweet, fat, salty, dripping mess made in a factory somewhere … you are spitting in the temple [of God]! You are drawing devil’s faces on its walls! You are cursing God just as you are cursing yourself” (39; with proof text 1 Corinthians 3:16–17). He sees the world in black and white. I imagine him closing his sermons with altar calls, not invitations to debate interpretations of his chosen proof-texts. He likely graduated from a fundamentalist Bible college, perhaps along the lines of a Bob Jones or Liberty University, rather than the religious studies department of an Ivy league school. He prefers the Authorized Version to any other translation and would be more comfortable at a tent revival meeting than a scholarly biblical studies conference. The sermons are folksy, practical, and accessible, and at moments charming, even if harsh and judgmental.

For my part, I enjoy the film and Shannon’s performances. They are beautifully crafted by LeBeau. But it’s not the content of the messages that appeals, with their critical tone, lack of nuance, condescension, and oversimplified worldview. And I don’t mean that as a criticism of Sante. She set out to capture in these homiletical snapshots a glimpse of a uniquely American form of religious rhetoric, and she achieved it admirably. It is the artistry of the whole project I admire: Sante’s research and writing; LeBeau’s directing; Shannon’s acting; and of course, Dylan’s music. As Greil Marcus puts it in his Afterword (59–66), Sante’s sermons “sing on the page” (64), and when experienced as part of this larger whole, they offer fans an education in this expression of American religiosity and its attendant culture. For those interested in this period of Dylan’s career, it is well worth reading, and for full appreciation ought to be paired with LeBeau’s film.

August 8, 2025/by Nicole Font

Review of Dylanology Live

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.

[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/

August 8, 2025/by Nicole Font

Review of The Wandering Painting

Norman Raeben (1901-1978): The Wandering Painting, edited by Fabio Fantuzzi. Livorno, Italy: Sillabe, 2025, pp. 250.

Reviewed by Alessandro Carrera, University of Houston

This luscious book is the catalog of Norman Raeben’s exhibition hosted in Venice, Italy by the Venice Jewish Museum and other artistic associations (Ikona, Lab Space, Azzime) from November 24, 2024, to January 14, 2025. The project was conceived and directed by Fabio Fantuzzi, with the supervision of Stefania Portinari (associate professor of Art History at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice) and funded by the European Union under a Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant. It contains a preface by Dario Calimani (President of the Jewish Community in Venice), introduction by Fabio Fantuzzi, six essays by various authors (one was a Norman Raeben student), and, possibly, the most complete selection of paintings, drawings, and studio works from Norman Raeben, the painter-teacher who perhaps never knew the impact he had on that scruffy guy who in the early months of 1974 took painting classes in his studio on the eleventh floor of the Carnegie Hall building in New York. Raeben would certainly have been surprised to know that his teaching helped Dylan conceive a new approach to the narrative ballad genre, one in which the song must be contemplated like a painting where different events seem to happen at the same time, or in no time at all.

“I had the good fortune to meet a man in New York City who taught me how to see. He put my mind and my hand and my eye together in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt.”^[1] This is Dylan’s first oblique reference to Norman Raeben, given in a 1978 interview (all other references are oblique as well). As we know, the immediate result of this re-learning was the manipulation of time in the lyrics of Blood on the Tracks, where it is often impossible to place the events described in a linear chronology. Dylan’s newly found ability to suspend or twist narrative time shows up in other songs of the 1970s, such as “Isis,” “Señor,” and “No Time to Think” (a title, as Chistopher Ricks observed, that must be read both ways, “there’s no time to think” and there’s “no-time” to think about).^[2] In fact, Dylan’s new style extends all over the 1980s, leaving traces in “Jokerman,” “Blind Willie McTell,” “Foot of Pride,” and “Brownsville Girl” (and, years later, “Highlands” and “Tempest”). The process that Dylan learned was his personal adaptation of Horace’s well-known saying, namely, that painting and poetry have a lot in common (ut pictura poesis, or “as is painting, so is poetry,” Ars poetica, 361). The seven stanzas of “Tangled Up in Blue” are either the story in chronological order of a man desperately in love with the same woman or the same story with scrambled chronology. The song could also be the story of one man chasing seven different women, or seven men chasing the same woman. The listener is supposed to “stop time” and contemplate the song as one synchronic event.

Dylan, who attended Raeben’s classes five days a week (something that he had never done, that is, sit down in a classroom and pay attention, since his high school years) never revealed the name of his teacher, probably to protect him from unwanted exposure. The first Dylan sleuth to name him was Bert Cartwright in the early 1990s.^[3] Clinton Heylin, Howard Sounes, and Sean Wilentz picked up from Cartwright. When I was working on the first edition of my Dylan book, I did some research at the Bobst Library of NYU, and I found more biographical details in the Who’s Who in American Art.^[4] Ten years later, my few pages on Raeben spurred Fabio Fantuzzi, then an undergraduate student at the Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice, to investigate further. He wrote to me, asking if I thought that he could submit a Norman Raeben research project for a Ph.D. in American Studies. I remember that I was skeptical. I was afraid that no American Studies professor in any Italian university might find the Raeben project worthy of a doctoral fellowship. How wrong I was! He was accepted at Università Roma Tre under the guidance of Professor Maria Anita Stefanelli and immediately started hunting the legacy of Norman Raeben. He went to New York, found Raeben’s old students, interviewed them, found the location of his remaining paintings, motivated art historians to delve into the life and works of a quasi-forgotten heir to the Ashcan School of realist painting, wrote his dissertation, and published his first findings in a 2020 book on Dylan as an artist.^[5] Fantuzzi has now crowned his research with this gorgeous catalog, which will be the mandatory reference for anyone who wants to know about this Norman Raeben, Dylan or not. Raeben was born Numa Rabinovitz in Ukraine and was the youngest son of Shalom Rabinovitz, better known as Shalom Aleichem, one of the major figures of modern Yiddish literature, and whose stories inspired the musical The Fiddler on the Roof.

The Wandering Painting is a tribute to Norman Raeben with and without Dylan, as it should be, because there’s a lot to say about Raeben himself: “a sophisticated artist,” Fantuzzi writes in his introduction, and:

an erudite, influential teacher whose long career spanned across some of the most influential 20th-century American and European artistic movements and cultural milieus […] The project analyzed Raeben’s career and his artistic collaborations as a case study to deepen the knowledge of the evolution of Ukrainian Yiddish-derived culture and art in New York in the 20th century. […] The most substantial part of the research, however, consisted in examining private collections belonging to the artist’s students, collaborators, and relatives. The study of these archives uncovered a wide range of information […]; it also unearthed a corpus of unpublished materials, including letters and documents, videos and audios of his lessons, various lectures, excerpts of an unfinished book on art history, and an extensive collection of his paintings. (pp. 11-12)

During the 1920s and 1930s, Raeben’s works were displayed in several collective exhibitions. In 1946, he opened his school in the heart of New York, and it is amazing that the Venice retrospective of his work has been the first. Raeben, who was good at many things, was not good at publicizing himself. It is also true that many of his works, located in a studio in Connecticut, were lost in a fire.

Why “The Wandering Painting”? Because, as Fantuzzi explains, “most of his works were made ‘on the road’.” Moreover, and starting from the mid-1930s, “Raeben stopped giving titles to cityscapes and intentionally did not provide indications, dates, or progressive numbering, forcing the viewer into a journey, both real and ideal, among and within the works in a circular path with no beginning and no end.” Just like in “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Where Are You Tonight,” and possibly “Changing of the Guards,” “the journey thus becomes the very substance of the artistic process as both subject and method. Such transposition of a wandering approach, rooted within traditional Jewish and American culture, into painting foreshadowed the incoming cultural zeitgeist that shortly thereafter would mark the essence of 1950s and 1960s Americanism” (p. 12). That may very well be, but it must be remembered that the zeitgeist that put people on the move, albeit anticipated by the Beatniks, only began in the second half of the 1960s.

Clearly a post-impressionist modernist, leaning sometimes toward expressionism (no mere “copy from life” was allowed in his school), Raeben was neither avant-garde nor retro-garde. Raeben could do good, traditional portraits, and he did them on commission. In his personal work, however, as Fantuzzi says, he was “mid-garde,” between the realism of the Ashcan school and a more stylized approach to the American genre of cityscape. In fact, the similarities between Raeben’s cityscapes and the 1990s Dylan paintings cannot be missed. In more recent years, however, Dylan’s large paintings have moved toward a stricter realism that probably would not have impressed his old teacher that much, but that’s a different story.^[6]

The volume includes six essays: “Locating Norman Raeben in American Art,” by Andrea Pappas; “‘Way of Seeing and Being Seen’: Norman Raeben in Paris,” by Stefania Portinari; “Norman Raeben, American in Paris, European in New York,” by Nico Stringa; “Portraits of Wandering: An Artistic Journey from Sholem Aleichem to Bob Dylan,” by Fabio Fantuzzi; “Norman Raeben: Art Telescopes Time,” by Roz Jacobs (one of Raeben’s students), plus the technical approach of Antonella Martinato in “Maintenance and Conservative Restoration Process Diagnostics and Study of Materials.” Except Fantuzzi, the authors are not Dylan scholars, yet they share the temptation to understand what made Raeben so important to Dylan. Because, as it seems, Raeben showed Dylan the way to consciously regain access to his unconscious, Portinari comments:

When Dylan attended that school for two months in the spring of 1974, he was encouraged not to focus on details and was taught ‘to see,’ to become aware of what he already felt ‘in an unconscious way.’ He benefited from a welcoming philosophical counseling environment that fit within a culture of synesthesia, very Yiddish yet also idealistic, existing in America within the intellectual climate of neo-avant-gardes, stemming from the European theosophies that passed to the Bauhaus masters exiled in America, to the 1970s climate of minimalist artist-thinkers like Sol LeWitt and Smithson. (p. 37)

Certainly, any investigation on “theosophies” that were passed on to Dylan, no matter how second-hand they were, would be fascinating. I have doubts, however, that it will ever be undertaken, except maybe for the Tarot symbolism in Desire.

Fantuzzi’s essay opens with Raeben’s alleged portrait of Bob Dylan, showing a bespectacled young man in a light-brown jacket, just a hint of a beard, and sleeves that end without hands coming out of them. The Poet with No Hands (A Portrait of Bob Dylan) is now at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma (reproduced in the book at page 46, 54, and 79). Before we delve into the psychoanalytic interpretation game of the poet with no hands, however, Fantuzzi informs us that Raeben did that painting as an exercise a few days before Dylan showed up at his school. So, was the title already there or did Raeben add it later? Did he retouch the painting to make it more a portrait of Dylan? We don’t know, and Fantuzzi doesn’t say. A better question would be, did Dylan have heart and mind but no “hand” at painting (or writing) when he enrolled in Raeben’s class? And did he regain his “hand” afterward”? There is no doubt about that. We leave the rest to the goddess of synchronicity.

The second part of the volume is dedicated to the retrospective. As Fantuzzi explains, placing Raeben’s paintings in any order is a difficult task. Fantuzzi has done all he could to reverse the artist’s decision, date, and locate the paintings, as it was his duty to do so (artists and scholars rarely see eye to eye on these matters), and the result is impressive in terms of scope and precision. Thanks to The Wandering Painting, we can see now in sequence the portraits of Raeben’s father and mother dating back to the 1920s, many cityscapes and landscapes from places known and unknown (Venice included), charming drawings, nudes and dancers reminding us of Degas, figure studies oscillating between cubism and realism, many instances where the brush strokes break free from realism to create a structure of pure signs, and studio works that do not seem to need further completion.

In the end, was Norman Raeben a “great painter”? Maybe not, but that’s not the point (Dylan isn’t a “great painter” either). Because of his European upbringing and the time he spent in Paris, where he was familiar with Chagall, Matisse, and Soutine, Raeben never really broke with post-impressionism. He did not become a fully “American artist” like the new masters of abstract expressionism – who were not “great painters” either, yet were able to conjure up great paintings from pure concepts. Still, Raeben was a painter, to the extent that he had a vision of the America he wanted to portray. The world is full of “great painters,” just as it is full of “great poets.” What we miss, most of the time, are just painters, like Raeben, and just poets, like Dylan.

^[1] Interview with Jonathan Cott, “Rolling Stone,” November 16, 1978, in Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, ed. By Jonathan Cott (New York: Wenner Books, 2006), 260.

^[2] “In terms of the transitory language, it is not that there is no time to think, but rather that one of the things that must be promptly thought about is that there’s no time.” Christopher Ricks, “American English and the Inherently Transitory,” in C. Ricks, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 427.

^[3] Bert Cartwright, “The Mysterious Norman Raeben,” in Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan, ed. by John Bauldie (New York: Citadel Press, 1991), 85-90.

^[4] Alessandro Carrera, La voce di Bob Dylan. Una spiegazione dell’America (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2001, 2011), 296-310. The title of the third, expanded edition is slightly different: La voce di Bob Dylan. Un racconto dell’America (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2021). In his bibliographical references, Fabio Fantuzzi has conflated the two titles.

^[5] Fabio Fantuzzi, “Painting Songs, Composing Paintings: Norman Raeben and Bob Dylan,” in Bob Dylan and the Arts: Songs, Film, Painting, and Sculpture in Dylan’s Universe, ed. by Maria Anita Stefanelli, Fabio Fantuzzi, and Alessandro Carrera (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2020), 209-232.

^[6] For an assessment of Dylan as a painter, see Bob Dylan: Retrospectrum, ed. by Shai Baitel (Milan: Skira -MAXXI Museum, 2022), and Alessandro Carrera, “Bob Dylan: pittore realista americano (minore),” in Changes. Riscritture, sconfinamenti, talenti plurimi, ed. by Angela Albanese (Sesto San Giovanni: Mimesis, 2024), 71-88.

August 8, 2025/by Nicole Font

Review of Bob Dylan: Point Blank

Dylan Review Vol. 6.2, Fall/Winter 2024-2025, Reviews

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.

^[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.

August 8, 2025/by Nicole Font

Review of Bob Dylan on Film

Dylan Review Vol. 6.2, Fall/Winter 2024-2025, Reviews

Jonathan Hodgers. Bob Dylan on Film: The Intersection of Music and Visuals. London: Routledge. 2024. 252 pp.

Reviewed by Timothy Hampton, University of California, Berkeley

Lovers of classic Hollywood cinema will remember a feature of many films featuring the devastatingly handsome Cary Grant. Grant was a heart throb, but his films often made fun of his good looks. No matter how debonaire or brave Grant appeared to be, some part of his character was always standing back and casting an ironic eye on his own movie idol persona. This quirk of Grant’s filmography is worth recalling when we consider Jonathan Hodgers’ scrupulously researched and insightful account of Bob Dylan on film. Hodgers argues that there is a particular kind of “Dylan effect” that hovers around such films as Dont Look Back, Renaldo and Clara and even the more conventional Masked and Anonymous. Hodgers shows that all of Dylan’s films explore the relationship between cinematic reality and some version of the “real” or non-cinematic world. Put differently, if handsome Cary Grant is never merely handsome, neither is Bob Dylan, on film, ever merely Bob Dylan (or not Bob Dylan). And the contrast between filmed Dylan and the Dylan who by his very presence shapes the film, Hodgers shows, is an important feature that links all of Dylan’s films together. It’s an impressive and productive thesis that lends Hodgers’ book weight and intellectual cogency.

Hodgers pursues this feature of Dylan’s history through an extended opening meditation on the question of the author or auteur in cinema. There is of course a sizable body of writing about the extent to which directors of films are their “authors,” and about the history of the auteur film, which emerged out of the French New Wave in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Hodgers begins by distinguishing between filmic vehicles which repurpose Dylan’s earlier music for some type of “re-creation” or “re-authoring” (xi), such as Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There or Martin Scorcese’s Rolling Thunder Revue, on the one hand, and films such as Dont Look Back or Renaldo and Clara, where the emphasis is on the more or less simultaneous emergence of a figure on screen and the creation of new musical performances. It is these latter films that interest Hodgers, and one of the goals of the book is to argue that there is a kind of dramatic and thematic consistency across a body of films that otherwise might seem to be quite diverse in genre and tone.

Hodgers devotes much of his analysis to Dylan’s two 1960s films, Dont Look Back and Eat the Document. Both cover Dylan’s tours of the UK during the time of his shift away from folk music to some sort of more impressionistic, often electric, music. Dylan’s status as counter-cultural hero, in his fancy clothes, wild hair and affected stage mannerisms is captured in these cinema-vérité productions, one by D.A. Pennebaker, and one worked up collaboratively by Dylan and Howard Alk (with, it would seem, some residual assistance from Pennebaker). Hodgers stresses the tension between the claims of cinema-vérité, to put us inside the action, watching real people in real time, and the avant-gardism of Pennebaker’s narrative technique, which insists on rapid cuts, lack of context, and an insistence on the presence of the camera as part of the action. This, asserts Hodgers, is one of the reasons Dylan called the film “dishonest” in an interview. And, indeed, the film somewhat shockingly avoids uncut takes of single songs, choosing rather to break them up and generally to film Dylan only from the front. Both Dylan and Pennebaker were involved in putting the film together, however, and the multiplicity of voices generates a kind of confusion that makes the thematic arguments we might expect from a documentary difficult to discern. Though the film offers an “interpretation” of events, it does so not through narration or thematic material, but through “organization, editing, and arrangement” (22).

I would note, in addition, that it was certainly influenced by the Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night, yet whereas that film had the advantage of offering four protagonists, joking and playing, here we have a single focus. This gives the film a curiously argumentative dimension, as if, in order to create social interest, Pennebaker and Dylan had to focus on scenes in which people are yelling at each other or trading insults. Dylan yells at people, reporters yell at Dylan, fans yell at Dylan and each other, and so on. Yet at the same time, Dont Look Back establishes a problem that will characterize much of Dylan’s work – the problem of figuring out how much of what we see is a film of Bob Dylan, and how much is a film by Bob Dylan – influenced by his preferences, input, and suggestions.

For Hodgers, the problems visible in Dont Look Back are at least partially resolved in the hard-to-find Pennebaker work Something Is Happening, and then in the still officially unreleased Eat the Document. Dylan put Eat the Document together with help from Howard Alk and Pennebaker out of footage from his 1966 tour with The Hawks, who later became The Band. Here, the “surrealism” of the approach frees the film from the structures of chronology. Eat the Document’s disavowal of meaning or logic might be seen as a rebuke of Dont Look Back. Hodgers shows how Eat the Document works dialectically, setting up contrasts between images and scenes and using images to comment on lines in performance. Alk also records in color and ventures on stage, among the musicians, in a way that provides a more powerful cinematic experience.

Hodgers also uses his close analysis of these early films to set up a series of thematic oppositions that, he avers, are consistent across Dylan’s work. There is often a “double” who stands over against the protagonist (for example, Donovan in Dont Look Back), often a plot involving Dylan’s character and some mysterious or dangerous woman, often a tension between the heroic performer and “management” (corporate or, in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, legal), and usually the presence of some journalistic figure introduced to raise questions about the integrity of performances. Hodgers traces these thematic elements across Dylan’s film work, adding as well a longer list of more abstract oppositions (youth-age, innocence-experience) of the kind we might expect in the work of a pop star.

Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid provides a greater challenge for Hodger’s analysis, since Dylan didn’t make the movie, and only had a small role as a minor character. However, Hodgers’s analysis of the film does a good job of looping it into Dylan’s camp by stressing the ways in which it is a film that, like much of Dylan’s songwriting, draws obsessively on clichés and tropes from earlier art works: “All in all, Pat Garrett as a whole is deeply concerned with story, memory, and reminiscence. Into this intertextual milieu, Dylan brings abundant references from his own output” (75). And Hodgers goes on to detail the ways in which Dylan’s music intervenes in certain moments of the plot, adding resonance to what is happening visually.

The centerpiece for any analysis of this kind would certainly have to be Dylan’s 1977 self-directed film Renaldo and Clara. The film is long, a bit boring, and was a commercial and critical failure. However, Hodgers makes a strong case for the creativity of Dylan’s approach, linking it back to two major inspirations, Shoot the Piano Player and Children of Paradise (both in different ways important documents in the emergence of the French auteur theory of cinema). Yet the film is also deeply influenced by a documentary tradition, which it both uses and upends, as we see multiple scenes where it is difficult to discern whether we are watching Dylan, or some version of Dylan playing another character. This confusion is highlighted, Hodgers shows, by the careful use of music, which fades in and out as a commentary on the action. Hodgers’ careful account of the film, supplemented by his work in the Dylan archive on early versions, is an impressive contribution to our knowledge of the movie. It made me want to watch it again.

More challenging for Hodgers are Dylan’s two Hollywood films, 1987’s Hearts of Fire and 2003’s Masked and Anonymous. Hearts of Fire is pretty bad, and Hodgers makes no attempt to defend the film. However, he does point out that Dylan’s presence twists some of the representations. “Part of the film’s interest … lies in the fact that Dylan plays himself with a veneer of fiction” (144). Hodgers points out that Dylan “nudged” the script to correspond to his own cadences as a way of bringing his character closer to how he wanted to be seen. Or, one could add, to what he could do, given his limited acting chops.

Hodgers is on happier ground with Masked and Anonymous, where he traces the interactions between Dylan, who partly wrote the scenario, and director Larry Charles. He points out that the film draws heavily on references to Dylan’s career, evoking songs and earlier moments, using musical performance in an effective way. Hodgers argues that the film might be seen in a kind of dialogue with Dylan’s deeply citational album “Love and Theft” which came out around the time of filming. He points to the fact that Dylan was deeply involved in the early work on the film, before fading out, as he often seems to do in collaborations.

Bob Dylan on Film is a learned and insightful guide to an important feature of Dylan’s career. By focusing on the histories of the various productions, Hodgers shows a rarely glimpsed aspect of Dylan’s persona. It is a book that will appeal to students of cinema as well as to fans of Dylan’s music, and it illuminates both areas of activity. Hodgers has wonderful insights into how Dylan’s presence shapes (or, we might say, distorts) the cinematic enterprise. Whereas some other musical figures might just show up on the set, hit their marks, and strum their chords, Dylan’s restlessness makes films about him into hybrid productions, never sure of their own status. In this way, we might say, the cinematic record of Dylan’s career parallels much of his songwriting. It bends genres, redraws boundaries, and opens up new avenues for reflection.

March 2, 2025/by Nicole Font

Review of Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God

Dylan Review Vol. 6.2, Fall/Winter 2024-2025, Reviews

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 Nicole Font

Review of Teaching Bob Dylan