Andy Gill
"In the dime stores
and bus stations, People talk of situations, Read books, repeat quotations, Draw
conclusions on the wall. Some speak of the future, My love, she speaks softly. She
knows there's no success like failure and that failure's no success at all.
Love Minus Zero/No Limit
Song by Bob Dylan
"In those days,
artistic success was not dollar-driven. It was about having something to
say."
Bobby Neuwirth
"The riot squad
they're restless / They need somewhere to go / As Lady and I look out tonight /
From Desolation Row".
Bob Dylan.
"Of all nations,
the United States, with veins full of poetical stuff, most needs poets and will
doubtless have both the greatest and use them the greatest. Their Presidents
shall not be their common reference as much as their poets shall. "If the
time becomes slothful and heavy, he [the poet] knows how to arouse it . . . he
can make every word he speaks draw blood. Whatever stagnates in the flat of
custom or obedience or legislation, he never stagnates. Obedience does not
master him, he masters it."
Walt Whitman
It would be a foolish
man or woman who would disagree with Andy Gill's supposition that Bob Dylan's
work from 1962-69 was his best and established him as Rock and Roll's only
genius and Noble Prize winner. The book takes the form of a dictionary of songs
in chronological album order, allowing the reader to pick and choose which song
they read about. Each album has an introduction by Gill.
Gill looks at every
Dylan song on the following albums: Bob Dylan, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, The
Times They Are A-Changin', Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back
Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde On Blonde, The Basement Tapes, John Wesley
Harding and Nashville Skyline.
Gill writes on the
recording of Blonde On Blonde, "Given the lyrical malleability […], it's
perhaps best not to try and ascribe too literal an interpretation to 'Visions
Of Joanna,' which is more of an impressionistic mood anyway. If it doesn't matter
to the writer whether it's the peddler or the fiddler who speaks to the
countess, why should it matter to us? The song remains one of the high points
of Dylan's canon, particularly favoured among hardcore Dylanophiles, possibly
because it so perfectly sustains its position on the cusp of poetic semantics,
forever teetering on the brink of lucidity yet remaining impervious to strict
decipherment."[1]
The book chronologically
covers Dylan's formative years in small-town Minnesota, his move to New York
City, and the folk scene in Greenwich Village. It ends with the controversy
surrounding his "electric" conversion up to 1969.
Gill's book examines
Dylan's controversial early period when he was accused of betraying the folk
scene. His move to electric was openly and vocally seen as a betrayal,
culminating in the iconic moment from the 1966 tour of England at the
Manchester Free Trade Hall. When Dylan plugged in his electric guitar for the
second set, a fan shouted, "Judas!" Dylan snarled, "I don't
believe you," before turning to the band and urging them to "play it
fucking loud!".
Andy Gill's Bob Dylan –
The Stories Behind The Classic Songs 1962-1969, while well written and at times
insightful, is limited when it attempts to place Dylan's work in a more precise
objective context. The period between 1962-69 was an extraordinary political
time. Gill does little to examine Dylan's place in this ferment. Gill does not
seem that interested in exploring the relationship between art, artists and
social liberation.
As Paul Bond writes, "The
folk music scene was regaining ground with the decline of McCarthyism and was
seen largely as a product of "the Left." The idea of music that was
able to articulate social and progressive concerns brought many broadly
"leftist" artists to folk. Many of the guiding lights of the folk
movement, like Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and the editorial circles of such
influential magazines as Sing Out! and Broadside, had some affiliation with the
Stalinist Communist Party of the USA. The Stalinists took a somewhat
proprietorial attitude to the folk scene, but it attracted many songwriters
trying to tackle serious social and political subjects in song. They were motivated,
as the opening editorial in Broadside (which published many of Dylan's songs)
put it, by the idea that "a good song can only do good."[2]
He continues, "Dylan's
rejection of what was weakest in the folk scene, which stood in the way of a
more complicated way of representing the world, took place under conditions of
intensifying political crisis in the United States. He seems to have used the
weaknesses of the folk milieu as part of a general move away from tackling
social concerns altogether. (Although he has continued to write topical songs
since that period.[3]
It remains to be seen if
Gill will write on Dylan's more contemporary work. As David Walsh wrote, "A
perusal of Bob Dylan's lyrics, at least its first half a dozen years or
so, reveals a lively imagination at work, and sometimes deep feeling. Dylan can
be witty, satirical, insightful, and genuinely outraged at American society's
injustices. The lyrics can convey physical and psychic longing, both for "the
beloved" and for recognition by society at large ". As said earlier,
Gill is not interested in placing Dylan's art in a social or political context.
He does not seem that interested in Dylan's later work.
As Matthew Brennan
writes of Dylan's later work, "Cutting himself off from the source of the
inspiration for earlier impactful songs, the career ambitions and an unfocused
iconoclasm were nearly all that persisted. Except for some of his more moving
songs about love and heartache in a later period, evasiveness and vagueness
would become Dylan's guiding principles. The protracted process has led to the
current news about the sale of his catalogue. Now very wealthy, Dylan has
nothing to say about events that are overtaking the circumstances of his
younger days.[4]
[1] https://davidmarxbookreviews.wordpress.com/2021/04/20/bob-dylan-the-stories-behind-the-classic-songs-1962-1969/
[2] Ceasing to be the voice of a
generation Paul Bond-9 November 2005 www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/11/dyla-n09.html-
[3] Ceasing to be the voice of a
generation Paul Bond-9 November 2005 www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/11/dyla-n09.html--
[4] Bob Dylan sells his songwriting
catalog to Universal for a reported $300 Million- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/16/bobd-d16.html
