By Bruce Handy
Published: New York Times, September 5, 2010
By Sean Wilentz
Illustrated. 390 pp. Doubleday. $28.95
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible.
Illustration by Joe Ciardiello
Bob Dylan
The subsequent ups and downs of his career — the initially confounding “Self Portrait” album in 1970, the rebirth in the mid-1970s with “Blood on the Tracks,” the literal rebirth (at least, presumably, in Dylan’s eyes) of his evangelical period, the 1980s slump, the third rebirth in the 1990s and 2000s as the grand old omnivore of American vernacular music, last year’s croaky Christmas album — while not as fetishized as his landmark 1960s peaks, have made him an even more alluring, ever more elusive target.
Thus, Books in Print lists more than 150 distinct titles on the subject, a library woozy with humid overstatement and baby boomer mythology. (“Bob Dylan seemed less to occupy a turning point in cultural space and time than to be that turning point,” or thus spake Greil Marcus.) That’s one trap for the Dylanologist. Another is a fondness for disappearing down rabbit holes in search of tasty minutiae. (If you have been toying with the idea of writing a book that “itemizes Bob Dylan’s copyright registrations and copyright-related documents,” I’m afraid to report that it’s been done.)
The only pop performer who has had as protean, as chameleonlike, as resonant a career is arguably Madonna, who makes up in costume changes what she lacks in lyrical acuity; but few take her seriously enough to write really poorly about her, at least among the straight white males who still make up the rock intelligentsia. Fashion writers and Camille Paglia are something else.
Sean Wilentz is an old Dylan hand, having contributed Grammy-nominated liner notes to Dylan’s official “Bootleg Series” release of his 1964 concert at New York’s Philharmonic Hall, which Wilentz attended as a 13-year-old. He has also served as the unofficial “historian-in-residence” at bobdylan.com. (His day job is being a history professor at Princeton and publishing books on subjects like Andrew Jackson.) Among those who write regularly about Dylan, Wilentz possesses the rare virtues of modesty, nuance and lucidity, and for that he should be celebrated and treasured.
Full review at NYT.
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