WHAT ABOUT BOB?

Abstract

1 4 7 R W H A T A B O U T B O B ? P A U L G R I M S T A D Making Bob Dylan canonical is not hard to do. He fits right in with those who have managed to fuse popular forms with an intricacy typically associated with modernism: George Gershwin did it with his Ragtime + Ravel formula; Dashiell Hammett in the glazed tableaux of The Maltese Falcon; Miles Davis with the lush nonet on The Birth of the Cool; Judy Garland channeling the great American songbook into jittery delirium. Dylan does it by turning Dust Bowl folk idioms into acidy urbanity, as if Woody Guthrie were sitting in on Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Part of what is tricky about this hybrid is what to make of the early political songs that seemed to some a call to arms, to others a pose – and one Dylan discarded when it came time to be a star. This was already clear in D. A. Pennebaker’s 1965 vérité documentary Don’t Look Back: all those dorky reporters asking him questions about ‘‘protest’’ music, and Dylan rifling back those tart rejoinders. Eric Bulson captures something of this tension in his essay in the Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan. Producer John T h e C a m b r i d g e C o m p a n i o n t o B o b D y l a n , edited by Kevin J. H. Dettmar (Cambridge, 204 pp., $81, $24.99 paper) 1 4 8 G R I M S T A D Y Hammond, who signed Dylan to Columbia Records, was, as Bulson puts it, ‘‘looking for somebody who would allow Columbia to tap into the emerging folk music craze.’’ To Hammond, Dylan was not just a songwriter and performer; he was a set of antennae translating what was in the air into what people wanted to hear. And herein lies the ambiguity of Dylan’s place in the folk scene: Was he a fellow traveler or a shrewd opportunist? Did he embody the moment or was he just aping the vibe? Whatever it was, it got him signed to the label, led to the making of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in 1962, and introduced the world to ‘‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,’’ ‘‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,’’ the once-again relevant ‘‘Masters of War,’’ and the beautiful, enigmatic ‘‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’’ It wasn’t long before Dylan dropped the folk shtick, got himself a swinging combo, and plugged in, which pissed o√ the purists and launched the first about-face in a career that has been full of them. If the A-side of Bringing It All Back Home is an early indicator that solo strumming was becoming an ensemble jangle, and the B-side that the text was getting to be less like a sermon and more like a riddle (‘‘she wears an Egyptian ring that sparkles before she speaks’’ does not exactly smack of moral indignation the way ‘‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’’ does), it is not until Highway 61 Revisited that we get the full-blown metamorphosis from hick troubadour to Electro-Orpheus. As Robert Polito reminds us, the album is packed with characters: Miss Lonely, Galileo, Mr. Jones, Napoleon in Rags, Cinderella, Einstein, Sweet Melinda, Queen Jane. Polito is also spot-on in cataloguing the record’s recurring motifs: the hang-up about a privileged, Upper East Side-ish girl whom Dylan for some reason delights in taking apart; a now predictable but then exotically Beat-tinged sneer at safe, middle-class respectability, embodied in the übersquare Mr. Jones, who knows ‘‘something is happening’’ but doesn’t know ‘‘what it is,’’ a line I thought was cool when I was sixteen, pedestrian when I was twenty-three (Dylan’s age when he wrote it), and which now seems completely profound; and the apocalypticism that hangs around the record like a yellow fog in ‘‘Tombstone Blues,’’ ‘‘Desolation Row,’’ and the underrated ‘‘Queen Jane Approximately ,’’ whose fey bile became the template for Blonde on Blonde. Highway 61 is the record on which...