How Bob Dylan changed the world through song
Stav Sherez on three new books that attempt to unravel the great Dylan mystery

29 May 2009

Dylan shakes hands with John Paul II after performing for him in Bologna in 1997

There have been more books written about Bob Dylan than about any other musician. This should come as no surprise. Dylan changed everything in the world of popular music, his effect much deeper and more profound than even that of the Beatles. He turned a plastic, teeny-bopper form into something serious, into art. And yet for someone whose songs have defined a generation, it's very hard to define exactly what any of Dylan's songs are about. Like all the best literature they are highly allusive, polysemic, and deeply metaphorical.

Among the handful of biographies, collections of interviews, rough guides and picture books, the overwhelming majority of books have been attempts at trying to impose meaning on Dylan's lyrics.

So it's refreshing to come across a book entitled The Songs He Didn't Write (Chrome Dreams £15.99) - even if the cover features Dylan at his sartorial nadir. Derek Barker's book alphabetically compiles all the songs Dylan has ever covered, be it on record or in performance. This may not seem like much of a project until you realise that over the last 47 years Dylan has covered more than 550 songs, more than most artists' entire repertoires.

Dylan's recording career began in 1962 with the release of his eponymous first album. Yet only two of the songs were written by Dylan himself; the rest were covers of old folk, blues and gospel standards. Of course, he then went on to write some of the most famous and distinctive lyrics ever but in recent years the man who once proudly proclaimed "don't look back" has returned to his old influences. Since then, Dylan's own compositions have harked back and played off numerous traditional songs making a kind of neat circularity in his career.

Each entry starts with basic statistics relating to the song's performance but then develops into a mini-essay providing a commentary on the song and its composer as well as looking at its historical context.

For example, Dylan began most shows in 2001 with the gospel-flavoured "I Am the Man, Thomas". Barker tells us this is the first song about Jesus sung in the first person by Dylan for 20 years. He then gives us a biography of Bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley who wrote the song, and a potted history of Bluegrass music itself.

With Dylan's tastes in music being so catholic (as witnessed by the boggling array of pre-1960s tracks he's played on his Theme Time Radio Hour show) what you get is a wonderful compendium of American roots music. Barker's entries are thorough and engaging, fleshing out contexts and meanings and making a case for Dylan the great folklorist as opposed to Dylan the great songwriter.

Clinton Heylin's Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan 1957-1973 (Constable £20) is the antipode of Barker's book. Heylin is regarded as one of the foremost Dylanologists, contentious and pretentious but also engaging and exciting.

Revolution attempts to chronicle Dylan's development as a writer by putting the songs in chronological order and tracing patterns and trajectories. Heylin has no definite way to know which songs were written before which but, though the methodology may be spurious, the results succeed in offering us a rare glimpse of Dylan's early development.

Dylan's first attempts at song-writing in 1961 show an enormous debt to his then hero Woody Guthrie - plaintive Left-wing laments for the working man. Yet, barely a year later, the 21-year-old Dylan has already left Guthrie in his wake and was writing songs of such startling originality and power ("Hard Rain", "Blowing in the Wind") that they would remain classics nearly 50 years later.

The majority of Heylin's book traces Dylan's whirlwind mid-Sixties output, when every song was being picked apart for its meaning and Dylan himself became sick of being labelled the voice of a generation. We see him moving away from protest politics to a more abstract stream-of-consciousness style, heavily influenced by the Beats and French Symbolists such as Rimbaud. The Basement Tapes era is well chronicled, with Heylin describing how Dylan always had a Bible open on his work desk as he was writing the gnomic parables that would populate John Wesley Harding. The book ends in 1974 just as Dylan's marriage was breaking up and his songs took on a more personal, recriminative air.

Also available is a double DVD set, Both Ends of the Rainbow (Chrome Dreams, £12.99), a documentary charting Dylan's difficult Eighties. Unauthorised by Dylan and not featuring the man himself, it includes such Dylanologists as Heylin and Nigel Williamson attempting to make sense of Dylan's scattered Eighties oeuvre including his much-derided conversion to evangelical Christianity (through Hal Lindsey and the Vineyard Fellowship). It's a fascinating documentary partly because these are fascinating years for Dylan, turbulent and troubled and yet full of great, searching music.

Best of all, the second DVD contains nearly an hour of radio interviews with Dylan in 1979 and 1980 when he was trying to explain his conversion to his audience. It's a hair-raising, eye-opening artefact, Dylan sounding possessed by his new vision and with a streak of certainty that had never been seen in him before. Putting down unbelievers, proselytising the Vineyard Fellowship message, predicting the End Times and rapping on the Way and the Truth, there's no doubting Dylan's sincerity and conviction, nor his commitment to Christ. The interview with Tucson radio is a particular highlight. The radio DJ explains how the American Atheist Foundation is picketing Dylan's "born-again" shows. Dylan is as scathing about the non-believers as he was about the non-hip in the Sixties.

"The spirit of the atheist will not prevail. It is a defeating spirit," Dylan spits. "Jesus Christ is no religion," he continues. "Jesus Christ is the Way and the Truth and the Life." By 1981 Dylan was already doing what he always did: moving on and not looking back as his hard-line evangelicism mutated into a much more profound and inclusive spirituality evinced by such songs as the masterful and mysterious "Every Grain of Sand".


Stav Sherez's second novel, The Black Monastery, published by Faber, is out now