Bob Dylan: American Troubadour

By Donald Brown

“The book’s strength is a thorough assessment of Dylan’s career, album by album, song by song. Both longtime fans and newcomers . . . will appreciate.” —Library Journal


With Bob Dylan’s receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature, his iconic status as an American musical, cultural, and poetic giant has never been more apparent. Bob Dylan: American Troubadour is the first book to look at Dylan’s career, from his first album to his masterpiece Tempest. Donald Brown provides insightful critical commentary on Dylan’s prolific body of work, placing Dylan’s career in the context of its time in order to assess the relationship of Dylan’s music to contemporary American culture.

Each chapter follows the shifting versions of Dylan, from his songs of conscientious social involvement to more personal exploratory songs; from his influential rock albums of the mid-1960s to his adaptations of country music; from his three very different tours in the 1970s to his “born again” period as a proselytizer for Christ and his frustrations as a recording and performing artist in the 1980s; from his retrospective importance in the 1990s to the refreshingly vital albums he has been producing in the 21st century.


“This concise examination of the Dylan corpus is especially good for younger generations who may want to better understand how a musician in his early seventies can still be so compelling and relevant in twenty-first-century America.”. —Booklist
 
 “Fascinating . . . Highly recommended. All readers.  —Choice Reviews

“A nearly album by album retrospective of one of the most culturally significant and musically influential musicians in modern history.” —Examiner

“A must read for Dylan enthusiasts.”  —Journal of American Culture
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9780810884212

Donald Brown

Donald and Diane live in Midland, TX, and worship at Christ Church Anglican. After High School, Donald enlisted in the US Navy. Upon release from active duty, Donald attended Texas Tech University graduating with a BBA. After graduation he worked for several years in various industries at various levels of management. He married but being a work-a-holic his marriage ended in divorce. His lovely daughter Elizabeth was born from that union. Donald and Diane were married in 1986 at St. Paul’s Bakersfield, CA on the first Sunday after Easter. In 1990 Donald received an MDiv from Trinity (Episcopal) School for Ministry and subsequently, in 1996, he was ordained Deacon and Priest in the one holy catholic and apostolic Church (Episcopal/Anglican communion). He is presently retired from active parish leadership.

Book preview

Bob Dylan

Tempo

A Rowman & Littlefield Music Series

on Rock, Pop, and Culture

Series Editor: Scott Calhoun

Tempo: A Rowman & Littlefield Music Series on Rock, Pop, and Culture offers titles that explore rock and popular music through the lens of social and cultural history, revealing the dynamic relationship between musicians, music, and their milieu. Like other major art forms, rock and pop music comment on their cultural, political, and even economic situation, reflecting the technological advances, psychological concerns, religious feelings, and artistic trends of their times. Contributions to the Tempo series are the ideal introduction to major pop and rock artists and genres.

The American Songbook: Popular Music for the Masses, by Ann van der Merwe

Billy Joel: America’s Piano Man, by Joshua S. Duchan

Bob Dylan: American Troubadour, by Donald Brown

Bon Jovi: America’s Ultimate Band, by Margaret Olson

British Invasion: The Crosscurrents of Musical Influence, by Simon Philo

Bruce Springsteen: American Poet and Prophet, by Donald L. Deardorff II

The Clash: The Only Band That Mattered, by Sean Egan

The Kinks: A Thoroughly English Phenomenon, by Carey Fleiner

Kris Kristofferson: Country Highwayman, by Mary G. Hurd

Patti Smith: America’s Punk Rock Rhapsodist, by Eric Wendell

Paul Simon: An American Tune, by Cornel Bonca

Ska: The Rhythm of Liberation, by Heather Augustyn

Sting and The Police: Walking in Their Footsteps, Aaron J. West

U2: Rock ’n’ Roll to Change the World, by Timothy D. Neufeld

Warren Zevon: Desperado of Los Angeles, by George Plasketes

Bob Dylan

American Troubadour

Donald Brown

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield

A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowman.com

Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB

Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright © 2014 by Donald Brown

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brown, Donald, 1959– author.

Bob Dylan : American troubadour / Donald Brown.

pages cm. — (Tempo : a Rowman & Littlefield music series on rock, pop, and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8108-8420-5 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4422-7953-7 (pbk : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8108-8421-2 (electronic)

1. Dylan, Bob, 1941—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Dylan, Bob, 1941—Influence. I. Title.

ML420.D98B77 2014

782.42164092—dc23

[B]

2013044394

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

In memory of my mom, Elaine Taylor Brown,

and my dad, Fred Earl Brown

For Kajsa

Series Editor’s Foreword

For a book series such as this, which examines popular and rock music within the cultural context of its time, one could not find a better case study than the American musician Bob Dylan. Born into the first generation of rock and rollers, he has marked time with his changing times since his first public performance in 1960. Every few years since then, there have been new songs, new albums, and new live performances, up through the publication of this volume, all of which have drawn their strength from the swirling forces of change Dylan has sought to bear witness to. His music often critiques forms of complacency and intolerance without mentioning a social ill or an institutional abuse by name. But because he first appeared in Greenwich Village at the start of the 1960s and melted right into the spirit of those times—a decade when protest was the conspicuous function of folk and rock music—many felt Dylan was their sympathizer. With each new offering, fans and critics alike have approached the singer-songwriter of Americana, that mixture of folk, roots, blues-rock, Western swing, and country, looking for a Jesus but sometimes meeting a Judas. Generally, though, Dylan has won everyone over for being both.

We would do well to remember that while Robert Allen Zimmerman was born in 1941, Bob Dylan didn’t exist until 1960, and he didn’t invent himself to be our friend. As a product of changing times, Dylan has embodied the constant of change and has offered us a commentary on the human experience by developing into one of the most enigmatic public performers in the history of American popular music. Once or twice a decade he has re-formed himself; or rather, he has revealed a new side of Bob Dylan the searching poet of the restless self. Keeping in mind that Bob Dylan is an invention crystallizes the fact (or is it a myth?) that Americans are as much inventions unfolding over time as they are a people connected to a place. In Dylan’s search and out of his own unease has arisen a defiant spirit, fueling him to challenge cultural conventions and his fans’ expectations of what Bob Dylan should do or who he should be. His particular defiance, as an expression of living the American Experience, can be heard in the dialect of snarl. As prolific as Walt Whitman, but with a lot less of that American bard’s love for the self and optimism for mankind, Dylan sings the conflicted body electric. His has mastered this form of the American voice and his fluency has never been better expressed than in his now iconic question: How does it feel / To be on your own / With no direction home / Like a complete unknown / Like a rolling stone? In this question Dylan concedes the blessing and curse of America. Here, there is freedom to invent oneself and set out on your own; but here, you will live alone as you follow the long, frustrating path of turning dreams into lesser forms of reality. Dylan has clearly enjoyed the artist’s freedom to create himself and explore his medium, but he declaims those who rest in America as though this is the promised land. Judging by the frequency with which Dylan himself adopts this perspective, one wonders if it’s the voice he finds the most comfort in, too. Many listeners, however, like this side of Dylan and seem to revel in his Old Testament–prophet persona. Misery does love company.

But the trap of studying Bob Dylan as a cultural symbol, a seething-sage, or a cipher for the changing times he appears to be singing about is in listening to his work only for specific comment on the correspondingly specific modern dilemmas he seems to link himself to. As good a study as he is for hearing the decline of a cohesive cultural narrative of hope in post–World War II America, he is a better poet of the injustice felt in the human heart in any given time or place. Dylan lays the trap himself with a brilliance of familiar and obscure allusions, but if we are not ensnared in the literal lyric, then we find his art assays the timeless longings of the human heart: for an end to suffering; for justice against oppressors; for reward for perseverance; for love that remains.

As a troubadour, Bob Dylan arrives in mystery and includes the material of our lives and our times in his songs. Inasmuch as we think Dylan speaks for us, we think so because we know our times as well as he does; he just helps us realize that we do. In as much as we feel he has an answer to our questions, we do so because he is amplifying what we already feel in our bones or hear blowin’ in the wind. It turns out that as an American troubadour, Dylan is us, only more so. But while he sings for us, he sings first for himself. He is on a fulltime, singular search for happiness while we typically search in snatches and bursts when we feel we can spare the time. He is as kind, as sincere, and as greedy as we are. He is as dissatisfied as we are with the incompleteness of things. But he spends more time dwelling on it, and then he plays us a song about it. He entertains us by performing the American consciousness, which we don’t realize until the song is over and he is gone.

Scott Calhoun

Series Editor

Timeline

Acknowledgments

I want to thank those who have made listening to music a collective experience of tastes and songs and shows in common: my siblings Tom, Kathy Simpson, Jerry, Eric; friends, Tim Gilfillan, Paul Moliken, Lori Bachman, Pat Hinchey, Nancy Shevlin, Eddie Meisel, Mark Rohland, Harvey Weinreich, Mike Gallagher, Rick Moore, Joe and Gail Scuderi, Anna Livia Scuderi, Karen Smyser, Andrew Shields, Sumanth Gopinath, Rob Slifkin and Amanda Durant, Gabrielle Gopinath, Eric Brown, Jim Laakso, Ann Yi, Chang Suk Kim, Brian Francis Slattery, Jason Lee Oakes, Paul Grimstad. And for making this book a reality, I’d like to thank my editors at Rowman & Littlefield: Bennett Graff, architect of the Tempo Series, Scott Calhoun, its series editor, and Jehanne Schweitzer, this book’s patient, helpful, and efficient production editor.

I’m thankful beyond words for the years, over thirty at this point, with my daughter Kajsa, who knew all the words to Desolation Row by the time she was ten, and for all the tapes and songs and shows we’ve shared. And there’s no end of gratitude to my wife and companion Mary, for all the years and all she’s done for me—Something there is about you that strikes a match in me.

Finally, I’m grateful to Bob Dylan for his songs, his voice, his memorable words, and for being an inspiration, consolation, provocation, and vast source of entertainment and reflection in his fifty-plus years of recording and performing—for me and for so many others.

Introduction

When I was eleven, in the fall of 1970, my older brother Tom was seventeen and the arbiter of everything that was cool or worth knowing about in contemporary music. He had recently shared things like The Rolling Stones’ Through the Past, Darkly, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Cosmo’s Factory, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Déjà Vu, Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, and the Greatest Hits of someone called Bob Dylan. On the back of Dylan’s album were the covers of his seven prior albums. Unlike the posturing rock stars on most albums, Dylan appeared as a scrawny, odd-looking guy whose hair became more unmanageable as he got older.

The first side of the album contained the song Tom had been seeking, the one that said everybody must get stoned, but wasn’t called that. On other songs on that side, the voice sounded naked, uncomfortably so. I remember cringing through It Ain’t Me Babe. In our house, folk music was represented by The Brothers Four. Layered harmonies, catchy arrangements. I was about ready to pass on this one, until . . . the song that overthrew my pre-teen skepticism was the last track on side 1. Like a Rolling Stone. Somehow I had never heard it before. I have a distinct memory—I can still picture where the plastic, fold-up phonograph player was located in the bedroom I shared with my brothers—of playing the song over and over again. Picking the needle up after each verse and putting it down again, until I was certain I knew every word. Such was my initiation to the unprecedented talent and fascination of Bob Dylan.

The purpose of this book is to give an account of Bob Dylan’s career that may be helpful to anyone like I was in 1970, coming upon a body of work that is significant, changeable, disappointing, perplexing, inspiring, and still unprecedented and unmatched. Since 1970, much has happened in Dylan’s body of work. If, as I didn’t know then, two major phases of his career were already over, there were many others still to come. Now, in 2013, with Dylan’s live shows getting much good press after the release of his latest album—Tempest (2012)—it’s anyone’s guess how many more shifts in perspective on this mercurial artist lie ahead. What is certain is that Dylan has made his mark, many times over, and that he continues to be lionized as one of the unavoidable creative forces of his generation in the popular arts—and mocked or criticized for not living up to the false ideas, images and distorted facts that often count as informed opinion about