Bob Dylan In America [Paperback]

The number of books on Bob Dylan keeps growing but this one really stands out from the crowd. That is because it is by an American historian who excels at putting what Dylan does in the context of wider American history and culture.It puts academic rigour and in depth knowledge first, but without sacrificing readability and warmth - it is not a dry textbook and Wilentz prose is very accessible. The erudition (e.g.the Beat influence on Dylan, the way that Copland and the Popular Front of the '30s and '40s laid the groundwork for Dylan's appropriation of high culture and popular culture) always serves to provide insights that you will not find in other books (by Heylin, Ricks, Marcus, Gray, Williams etc). I was also struck by how well chosen and artfully placed the illustrations are - they're not the same pictures that get used again and again in books and articles about Dylan. It will make you want to go back and listen to even your most familiar Dylan albums again - which is probably the highest praise I can give it.

You really want to be in the whole of your health to do certain things: ice trucker, deep sea diver, astronaut, Dylan author. Not for the fainthearted or the thin skinned, particulary the latter. There's a whole internet out there waiting for a mistake, any mistake, no matter how trivial. And of course there are the other authors waiting to skewer any slip-up (real or imagined). Needless to say there is also the subject, who, inconveniently, refuses to lie down. And, worst of all, the gnarly old fecker himself has written the best book about Bob Dylan (fiction and nonfiction).
So, Sean Wilentz bit off a lot. But fair play to him he went for it: Bob Dylan in America. That's putting it up to everyone alright.
And, with grace, wit, charm, erudition and skill, he largely succeeds.
Wilentz has wisely chosen not to write a biography nor a blow-by-blow explanation of the songs, rather his book aims to get a sense of what went into the ongoing making of Dylan. The frame of the book is chronological, but Wilentz moves forwards and backwards and sideways as needed (not unlike Chronicles in that sense). So, we get an overview of Aaron Copland and his role in the development of a distinctly American song that works well, if the links between Copland and Dylan feel a little shoehorned at times. He dips back to the turn of the 19th/20th centuries to unpick the tale of Delia (and Blind Willie McTell), he digs deep into the heart of the pre-Civil War American south to explain the development of sacred songs. His chapter on the Beats (and Ginsberg in particular) and Dylan is fantastic: evocative, insightful and exciting. He deals with Dylan's recent output head on and his writing it at its most forensic (by necessity) in dealing with the charges of plagiarism levelled at Dylan. His defence is forceful, well reasoned and, in the context of all that went before it in the book, perfectly contextualised.
The book has been lavishly praised and pilloried already, neither of which are not totally fair. It is a really good book, skilfully researched and written yet not reading like an academic text. It has, however, been lagely compiled from previous pieces Wilentz has written (which he acknowledges) and it feels a little stuck together at times. If that makes for a jerky read at times, then so be it; on the other hand it makes it immensely easy to dip in and out of.
So, who is this for? Well, if you're a certain fan you already have it and have read and annotated it. If you're interested in getting to grips with what all the fuss was and is about Dylan then this gets right into it. Wilentz doesn't overplay his hand nor is he shy in pointing out where Dylan's work has been sloppy, poor or ill-judged. He acknowledges other Dylan authors (including Dylan) freely and generously without falling into pastiche; he's worked with Griel Marcus before but the book is non-Marcusian (grielishly so, you might say) and he stays away from the vitriol usually associated with Clinton Heylin (who reckons he would be a better Dylan than Dylan himself, maybe he's right).
The Dylan that emerges here is a curiously American beast: restless, imaginative, questing, seeking, trying to figure out who he was and who he's yet to be. Way back in 1991 on a tour bus Dylan was handed a book compiling all the shows and cities he'd played; he wasn't interested in that, he said, he'd already been there, he wanted to read a book of all the places he had yet to play. He might enjoy this book though.
Wilentz has taken on a massive topic and has largely succeeded. This is a provocative, entertaining, informative and generous book. Go on, do yourself a favour and dip in. You won't regret it.

This is a book by a serious academic who loves the work of Bob Dylan. So there are some tensions there,but they are resolved by the selective nature of the book. For this reader, there are some chapters of little interest-- Dylan and Copland ; Dylan after 1997. But the chapters on the Beats, the 1964 Philharmonic Hall concert, the making of Blonde on Blonde, the New Haven concert of the Rolling Thunder tour, Blind Willie McTell, and best of all the 1992-3 period, Delia and the Lone Pilgrim are good stuff and relatively accessible.
One personal comment. The experience of the Halloween concert in 1964 in New York was arguably not so different from that of the British audiences in spring 1965. Even if the material was by then (over?)-familiar to BD, half the concert was unfamiliar to the audience and came as a stunning surprise. For anyone brought up on a diet of seeing groups performing their greatest (or only) hits, BD in the Don't Look Back tour was a revelation. In his description of 31/10/64, Wilentz brings it all back.And better than the sleeve notes on the CD, you can actually read it.