how to write about bob dylan: a step-by-step guide

Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 23, Issue 3, Pages 362–370

REVIEW ESSAY

How to Write About Bob Dylan: A Step-by-Step Guide

Karl Hagstrom MillerUniversity of Texas at Austin

Dettmar, Kevin J.H., Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan(Cambridge Companions to American Studies). Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2009.

Marcus, Greil. Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968–2010. New York:Public Affairs, 2010.

Wilentz, Sean. Bob Dylan in America. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

Now is a good time to write about Bob Dylan. After scores of books, legionsof liner notes, and even a PBS documentary by Martin Scorsese, the basicrules for how to tell the Dylan story have been set. The major charactershave been identified, the myths and morals established. The novelty andtransgression involved in writing about the sixties rock icon may havefaded over the years, but this is only because his canonization is nearingcompletion. It is not quite to the point where writing about Dylan can assurea job in academia. Aspiring historians and English professors best studysomething serious until tenure. But compared to smooth jazz or psychobilly,Dylan is a safe choice—perfectly suited for both trade presses and courseadoption. If you follow the basic template, you too can write a successfulDylan book.

Three recent examples show how it’s done. Bob Dylan in America,by Princeton University history professor Sean Wilentz, and The CambridgeCompanion to Bob Dylan, edited by English professor Kevin Dettmar withcontributions by academics and journalists, add new information and detailto the story without deviating from the basic script. Bob Dylan by GreilMarcus: Writings 1968–2010 is a collection of the short-form pieces aboutDylan published by the eminent rock critic. Marcus began his career afterDylan had released his most renowned music. Much of this collection thusconsists of cranky—often hilarious—critiques of sub-par Dylan or desperateC© 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

How to Write About Bob Dylan 363

attempts to hear greatness in his later work. The collection must be readalongside Marcus’s two book-length celebrations of Dylan’s earlier music(Invisible Republic and Like a Rolling Stone) in order to comprehend thecritic’s commitment to the artist and his perpetuation of the Dylan template.Using these books as guides, here is a recipe for writing your own bookabout the mercurial and elusive voice of his generation. I would write onemyself, but I never really listened to the man.

Start with the First Time You Heard Bob DylanI first heard Bob Dylan over KTSA Top-40 radio in my bedroom

in San Antonio, Texas. It was August of 1979. I was eleven years old.Dylan sang “Gotta Serve Somebody,” a song about construction workers,preachers, state troopers, and barbers. It sounded like Dire Straits doing“The People in Your Neighborhood” from Sesame Street. I liked it, but I waswaiting for Chic’s “Good Times” to come on again.

I had worn out my 45 of “Le Freak,” the disco group’s previoussingle. That song was like nothing I had ever heard. The groove made mybody move, and the mysterious French lyrics signaled that I had arrivedat a place that I was not supposed to be. It was sophisticated and sleek.It was adult. White suits, dapper shoes, and low cut blouses: this is whathappened when we kids were not around. I was hooked. Two months later,I saw KISS at the San Antonio Convention Center, my first rock concert.Obnoxious and loud, full of fun and fantasy, the masked and anonymousband was the perfect foil for Chic in my childhood musical universe.One was tight and in control. One was anything but. These two groupsprovided the foundation for my thoughts about music, pleasure, and popculture for years to come. I did not think about Bob Dylan again for a longtime.

The Dylan authors have more going for them. Wilentz attendedDylan’s famed concert at New York’s Philharmonic Hall in 1964. He wasthirteen. He had already marveled at his friend’s copy of The Freewheelin’Bob Dylan. “I didn’t understand half of the album,” Wilentz notes. Yet he wastransfixed by the cover photo of the singer and Suze Rotolo walking downJones Street, “a picture that, with its hip sexiness, was more arousing thananything I’d glimpsed in furtive schoolboy copies of Playboy” (4). Marcusfirst saw Dylan in concert in 1963. He was amazed and bewildered. “Whilein some ways he seemed as ordinary as anyone in the audience, somethingin his demeanor dared you to pin him down, to sum him up and write him

364 Karl Hagstrom Miller

off, and you couldn’t do it,” he recalls. “As he sang, you couldn’t tell his age.He might have been seventeen, he might have been twenty-seven—and to aneighteen-year-old like me, that was someone old enough” (Bob Dylan xiii).Dettmar offers no such origin story. He substitutes the brash exaggerationscommon to unfettered fandom. In the second paragraph of the CambridgeCompanion, he argues, “David Gates’s description of Dylan as ‘the man whodid to popular music what Einstein did to physics,’ while initially soundinglike hyperbole, really isn’t” (1).

Make it About AmericaExpress the impact that Dylan had on you by insisting the story of

the man and his music is really the story of the nation.Wilentz starts strong, framing his book around the question, “What

does America tell us about Bob Dylan—and what does Dylan’s work tellus about America?” He never quite answers it. He uses the Dylan storyto explore interesting fragments of the American past—Aaron Copland’smusic of “imposed simplicity” and flight from politics is an interestingcontribution—but his literalism tends to undercut his project. Dylan’spassing mention of a “St. James Motel” in the song “Blind Willie McTell”results in a lengthy footnote about all the actual St. James Hotels thatWilentz could find. Nevertheless, the mythical grandeur of his quest almostconvinces that the drama of the nation centered on a small group of artistsand intellectuals, folkies and Beats, congregated in New York during thelate fifties and sixties (8, 202).

Marcus is the master of this rule. The Henry Nash Smith of rockcriticism, he has been using music to generalize about the American mindfor a long time. On Dylan singing “With God on Our Side” at that concert in1963, Marcus writes, “the whole book of American history seemed to openup in that song, the country’s story telling itself in a new way.” Marcus hears“a particular American spirit” in Before the Flood, Dylan’s 1974 live albumwith the Band. “The best of it is brawling, crude, not completely civilized,an old-fashioned, back-country, big-city attack on all things genteel. There’sa lot of Whitman’s YAWP in this music.” He then shifts into his trademarksecond-person voice, insisting that his reader shares his experience of themusic. “Pieces shoot out of a song you’ve heard dozens of times and makesnew claims on your ability to respond. . .you never get to the bottom.” Soonthe music is “calling down from the mountain, Gabriel bent on JudgmentDay, and yes, you’d better run, if only to keep up. That is the burden of


joining a bigger, more mysterious America, of abandoning the comforts ofmy-generation” (Bob Dylan 56–59).

When Wilentz says “America” he often means himself. When Marcussays “you” he always means himself. Take this as your guide. Extend yourfeelings across time, the nation, or your potential readership. You have a lotof myth-and-symbol-school writers’ shoulders to stand on.

Embrace the Newport MythEveryone knows about Dylan’s infamous electric set at the 1965

Newport Folk Festival. It has been called the death of the folk revival andthe birth of rock. Yet if Dylan set the crowd to booing, one wonders how theymight have greeted Muddy Waters playing his regular electric set or PattyWaters wailing “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.” Each wouldhave been more of a shock than Dylan’s electric strumming. Newport wasall in the family. Dylan struck a good rebellious pose, but it was not like anyfolks from the other side of town had invited themselves to dinner.

Nevertheless, if you want to write a successful Dylan book, you haveto call the Newport performance revolutionary. One of the most commonand powerful myths about Dylan—and thus the nation—is about the Artist’squest for freedom. Dylan became a darling of the folk revivalists by playingtheir game. He imitated Woody Guthrie. He wrote stirring protest songssuch as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Masters of War.” He sang “A Pawn inTheir Game” at the 1963 March on Washington. By the following year, hehad rejected the artificiality and simplicity of such “finger-pointing” songs.They were trite and preachy. The Left wanted him to remain the same,but Dylan needed to become his own man. He began following his muse,writing much more abstract and impressionistic lyrics. He began recordingand performing with electric instruments. The shift lit off a “culture war,”in the words of Greil Marcus (Like a Rolling Stone 159).

Beat Up on the LeftThe Left and the folk revivalists lose this fight. In the myth, they

are cast aside as irrelevant squares who do not know which way the windblows. They are strident purists, interested in orthodoxy and doctrine. Dylantriumphs by releasing Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. Hisnew songs crackled. They were open-ended and mysterious, yet serious—like Art. The myth indeed culminates with the emergence of rock music


as an art form, one open to individual expression, experimentation, serioussubject matter, and deep analysis. “Simply, he has grown pop up, he hasgiven it brains,” wrote critic Nik Cohn in 1968 (Dettmar 2).

The sad genius of this myth is that it charts the transition to adulthoodas the escape from politics to Art. Dylan and his fans mature. They movefrom seeing the world as a simple place to grasping its profound complexity.Protest songs, topical songs, songs that take a stand are nursery rhymes andstraitjackets. A move from simplistic politics to complex Art is a necessarypart of growing up. It is a necessary part of achieving freedom. Marcus sumsup “Like a Rolling Stone,” the song that epitomized the shift: “Confused—and justified, exultant, free from history with a world to win—is exactlywhere the song means to leave you” (Like a Rolling Stone 128).

The myth falsely suggests that the direct demands of Americanpolitical rhetoric were the result of naıvete rather than long histories ofcollective action and coalition building. “We Shall Overcome,” “Joe Hill,”“1913 Massacre”: these were adult songs. They were written and sung bypeople who had already moved through youthful confusion and determinedthat freedom could not be had by going it alone. Bernice Johnson Reagon wasa SNCC staffer during the 1961 civil rights campaign in Albany, Georgia. Shelater explained that freedom songs were important precisely because of theacknowledged complexity and diversity of the movement. “After the song,the differences among us would not be as great. Somehow, making a songrequired an expression of that which was common to us all,” Reagon said (inCarson 63). Freedom songs contained the simple stark messages that wereand remain the language of successful political mobilization. Ambiguity andcomplexity could move people, but they could not build movements.

Ignore the RightIt does not matter that “Blowin’ in the Wind” was downright

convoluted compared to the simplicity of the White Citizens’ Council’s“segregation forever” rhetoric. The Bob Dylan template sets the Artistagainst the Left. After the Red Scare that blacklisted young Dylan’s heroes,the Right rarely makes an appearance in Dylan books.

“Like a Rolling Stone” did not set anyone “free from history,” asMarcus would have it. In 1965, the song was the sound of white youthwalking away from the black freedom struggle. Dylan premiered his electric“Like a Rolling Stone” at Newport on July 25. It was two weeks beforethe Voting Rights Act went into effect. After a brief dalliance with Freedom


Rides and Freedom Summer, with Freedom Songs and finger-pointing, whiteyouth like Dylan moved on. By August 11, Watts was in flames. “Sure, youcan go around trying to bring up people who are lesser than you, but thendon’t forget, you’re messing around with gravity. I don’t fight gravity,”Dylan told Playboy the following February. “I do believe in equality, but Ialso believe in distance.” He perfected his hipster detachment by separatinghimself from the freedom movement. “Anybody can be specific and obvious.That’s always been the easy way. The leaders of the world take the easy way,”he told the magazine. “It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and lessobvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific andobvious about” (Cott 101, 104). The movement nevertheless continued.Four months later, SNCC’s Stokely Carmichael emerged from jail after hisarrest for protesting the specific murder of James Meredith. “This is thetwenty-seventh time I have been arrested and I ain’t going to jail no more,”he declared. “What we gonna start saying now is ‘black power’” (Carson209–10).

Embrace IndividualismDylan’s lack of specificity became the basis for a rock music

that was serious without being serious about much of anything otherthan personal autonomy. Fans could maintain a sense of rebellion withoutgetting their heads smashed. It was an individualized rebellion against theauthoritarianism of the Right, the “mass society” of the Middle, and theunions and collective action of the Left (Keightley). Yet, isolated like thecharacters in “Desolation Row,” it became impossible to join or even imaginea collectivity. “What Dylan had abandoned in Highway 61 Revisited is nothis sense of outrage or protest, but the illusion of community,” notes authorMark Polizzotti (12). I understand completely, except for the illusion part.

I grew up in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. My teenage rebelliondid not attack mass society or the confines of a mass movement. There wereno such things. I longed to belong to a collective. Dylan’s odes to alienation,like his quest for artistic autonomy, seemed a perfect match for Reagan’spolitics of selfish individualism. Even in the 1960s, it was a short step fromDylan’s brand of disaffection to the style of consumerism being pushed bythe advertising industry. In January 1966, a month before Dylan’s Playboyinterview, advertising guru Nicholas Samstag appeared in the businessmagazine Madison Avenue. “Marketing should be an emancipator. It shouldunlock locks and cut bonds by suggesting and implying, by hinting and


beaconing, not by defining. It should be the agent that frees, not the agentthat imprisons,” Samstag implored (Frank 93).1 Dylan was hawking the samecombination of vagueness and personal freedom. Such hip anti-conformity,as Thomas Frank has demonstrated, was catnip for advertisers interestedin capitalizing on the new individualism and rebellion. Dylan’s politics ofpersonal freedom had stung when it targeted authority and consensus culture.When he turned it against his own fans, however, Dylan helped to make itacceptable, even cool, to abandon the common good. “I don’t feel I haveany responsibility,” Dylan told Playboy. “Whoever it is that listens to mysongs owes me nothing. How could I possibly have any responsibility to anykind of thousands? What could possibly make me think that I owe anybodyanything who just happens to be there?” (Cott 102). One could trace a linefrom Dylan’s rejection of social responsibility through Madison Avenue’s“conquest of cool” to neoliberalism and the “end of Welfare as we know it.”Do not do it. It does not fit the script.

Rewrite the History of American Folk MusicI did not encounter Dylan again until graduate school, when I wrote

a dissertation about American popular music from the turn of the twentiethcentury. Dylan loomed large in the existing literature. As I was getting startedin 1997, Smithsonian Folkways reissued The Anthology of American FolkMusic. The wildly influential 1952 compilation offered a portrait of Southernmusic from the 1920s and 1930s as imagined by the New York experimentalfilmmaker Harry Smith. Greil Marcus then wrote a book exploring this“old, weird America” through the lens of the Smith compilation and therecording Dylan made with the Band in 1967. None of this rang very trueto me. Having soundly rejected the mid-century folk revival, Dylan and hiscritics celebrated the genuine “folk music” of the 1920s. In their telling,the folk were individuals, black and white, defined by their isolation fromcollectives, from family, and from the larger society. There were a lot ofmurders and gamblers but few unions or meeting halls. I determined thatthe folk revival, Harry Smith, and Bob Dylan had nothing to do with themusic of the early twentieth century. I tried to figure out how to write aboutit without invoking them or becoming trapped in their assumptions aboutthe era—to travel back to the South of the twenties without going throughmid-century New York.

My own youthful obsessions seemed a better place to start. Chichad taught me that music was about pleasure and that black musicians were


sophisticated and professional, the most serious players in the room. KISStaught me that music is about fantasy. Musicians wear masks on stage andoff. It is part of the gig. They also demonstrated that white musicians wearoutlandish costumes, make googly eyes, and act the fool. Dylan sounded likeJohn Lomax, claiming folk music offered fundamental truths not accessibleby other means. “I felt right at home in this mythical realm made up notwith individuals so much as archetypes,” he wrote. “It was so real, so moretrue to life than life itself” (Dylan 236). KISS was more like P. T. Barnum,understanding that the public knew the Fiji mermaid was a fake but paidtheir money anyway.

Bonus Points: Deracinate MinstrelsyWhen discussing Dylan’s 2001 album Love and Theft knowingly

reference Eric Lott’s book about blackface. Conclude that Dylan is a “modernminstrel,” tapping into the venerable tradition of creative appropriation thatis at the heart of American music (Wilentz 261). Do not mention the morewidespread American experience of getting ripped off. Minstrelsy is aboutpastiche, not white supremacy.

RepeatThere is always room for one more book about Bob Dylan as long as

it sticks to the template. The Right never abandoned its politics of specificity,but what remains of the Left still puts cash on the barrelhead for sixties-eraromances about complexity, poetry, and rebellion. Personally, I will not takethe time to read that story again. In the thick of Wisconsin Governor ScottWalker’s recent war against public unions, I had no desire to hear “Balladof a Thin Man.” I needed the Almanac Singers’ “Which Side are You On?”Now that’s a song that says a lot about America.

Note

1. See also Nicholas Samtag, How Business is Bamboozled by the Ad-Boys.New York: James H. Heineman, 1966. 24.

Works Cited

Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s.Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981.


Cott, Jonathan, ed. Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews. New York: Wenner Books,2006.

Dettmar, Kevin J. H., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan. Cambridge:Cambridge UP, 2009.

Dylan, Bob. Chronicles, Volume 1. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.

Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and theRise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997.

Keightley, Keir. “Reconsidering Rock.” The Cambridge Companion to Pop andRock. Ed. Will Straw, Simon Frith, and John Street. Cambridge: CambridgeUP, 2001. 109–142.

Marcus, Greil. Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968–2010. New York: PublicAffairs, 2010.

Marcus, Greil. Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. New York: HenryHolt and Company, 1997.

Marcus, Greil. Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. New York:Public Affairs, 2006.

Polizzotti, Mark. Highway 61 Revisited. New York: Continuum, 2008

Wilentz, Sean. Bob Dylan in America. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

how to write about bob dylan: a step-by-step guide

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