In 1963, fresh back from India, poet Allen Ginsberg was at a party in California when he heard Bob Dylan's new song “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall.” As Sean Wilentz relates in Bob Dylan in America, Ginsberg “wept with illuminated joy at what he sensed was a passing of the bohemian tradition to a younger generation.” Dylan the next generation's new hipster angel? Flipping through Wilentz's book, it becomes clear that what you clasp in your substance-starved paws is much more than just another Bob Dylan book. Rather, it's an examination of the constantly evolving stew of American culture and Dylan's place in it.
From the Village to Princeton: Wilentz's America
Wilentz is no tourist. The Princeton historian's family owned the 8th Street Bookshop, one of Greenwich Village's pivotal literary nerve centers, while his uncle lived in the apartment above Izzy Young's legendary Folklore Center (the apartment in which journalist Al Aronowitz would introduce Dylan to Ginsberg). Although only 13 at the time, Wilentz was there in the Village during the zenith of that cultural bazaar, when the Beat literary movement shapeshifted into the folk music revival. And it was during this changing of the guard that Dylan descended on the scene, guitar in hand, soaking up influences from both contemporaries and musical giants of bygone eras, then wringing out songs that captured the spirit of the times.
The author of The Age of Reagan and The Rise of American Democracy, Wilentz spun out an article in 1998 about Dylan for Dissent magazine. It must have impressed someone; in 2001 Dylan's office called asking him to whip up something for BobDylan.com about the new album “Love and Theft.” As the Web site's new historian-in-residence, in 2003, he was handed the honor of writing the liner notes for Dylan's Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall (incidentally Wilentz's first Dylan concert), for which he was consequently nominated for a Best Liner Notes Grammy. A book about Dylan seemed like the natural progression. Wilentz's mission? To write a “coherent commentary on Dylan's development as well as his achievements, and on his connections to enduring currents in American history and culture.”
Multiple Perspectives of Dylan
The chapters stand alone as solid forays into important events in American culture. As a whole though, the book seems fragmented and disjointed, mainly because Wilentz writes from so many perspectives—from historian to personal witness to fan to analyst (the book “shifts gears and changes shape as the occasion warrants,” the jacket copy warns). Right from the beginning, Wilentz apologizes that some of the book may seem unrelated to Dylan, but this “important background material” is necessary to establish the bigger picture: “I ask for the reader's indulgence to hang on during all of these chapters, assured that the connections to Bob Dylan will be revealed soon enough.”
Fair enough. The first chapter breaks into a biographical sketch of composer Aaron Copland, a one-time leftist who emerged from the red scare and McCarthyism with his career intact and his reputation relatively unscathed. In chapter two, Wilentz segues into the Village scene and the mutually influential relationship between Dylan and Ginsberg. The author then veers off in a different direction, recapping the 1964 Philharmonic Hall concert, interspersing personal memory with song analysis and concert coverage. With chapter four, the author ricochets into yet a different direction with a blow-by-blow account of the making of Dylan's 1966 studio album Blonde on Blonde, a chapter largely informed by '60s rock luminary Al Cooper, who has said (as relayed by Wilentz), “nobody has ever captured the sound of 3 a.m. better than that album. Nobody, not even Sinatra, gets it as good.” (Whatever that means).
Dylan as Modern Minstrel
The book eventually slides back into the culture groove with a detailed chapter about John Lomax, who made a field recording of Blind Willie McTell in 1940 Atlanta. Were it not for Lomax's important work with the Archive of American Folk Music, McTell and other important musicians of that era would have slipped into obscurity, cheating revivalists—and Dylan—of a rich vein of influence. Finally, the last quarter of the book covers Dylan's Post-9/11 exploits: a defense of Dylan's pastiche songwriting in response to recent charges of plagiarism, a look at Dylan's “Love and Theft” of 2001, an analysis of the film Masked and Anonymous, a run-through of his XM/Sirius Theme Time Radio Hour program, sewing it up with a quick review of Dylan's 2009 album Christmas in the Heart.
Although Wilentz is dealing in the currency of historical fact, rather than hard conclusions, the book is more impressionistic. But impressions are often more effective in penetrating a subject's essence—especially in the case of someone as elusive as Bob Dylan. Until now, no one has yet framed the singer-songwriter in terms of American cultural history, and understanding how those influences shaped Dylan is essential in weighing the impact of his legacy. Bob Dylan in America captures that legacy through a potpourri of loosely arranged vignettes that culminate in the overall summary: that Dylan, with his Western stage wear and a pocketful of song-collage, has evolved into a modern minstrel, sans blackface—a vaudevillian performer carrying a time-honored tradition into the Information Age.