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Bob Dylan in America
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Bob Dylan in America (2010) (edit title/settings)

by Sean Wilentz (Author) (edit contributors)

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One of America’s finest historians shows us how Bob Dylan, one of the country’s greatest and most enduring artists, still surprises and moves us after all these years. Growing up in Greenwich Village, Sean Wilentz discov­ered the music of Bob Dylan as a young teenager; almost half a... read more

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  • “One of the trickier difficulties in appreciating Dylan’s art involves distinguishing it, as far as is possible, from his carefully crafted, continually changing public image. To be sure, his image and his art are closely related, and each affects the other. The same could be said for any performing artist and for any number of literary figures, not just in our own time, but going back at least as far as that of Jenny Lind and Walt Whitman. But Dylan has been particularly skilled at manufacturing and handling his persona and then hiding behind it, and this can mislead any writer.”
    Wilentz
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • Don’t try to figure out what the song, or what any work of art, “really” means; the meaning is in the imagery itself; attempting to define it is to succumb to the illusion that truth can be reached through human logic.
    Highlighted by 9 Kindle customers
  • It could be 1927 or 1840 or biblical time in a Bob Dylan song, and it is always right now too.
    Highlighted by 7 Kindle customers
  • Dylan’s preservation of shards from a bygone world—including the world of his younger self, a world being overtaken by virtual reality—while embedding them in a wholly different context recalled Eliot’s dictum that “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”
    Highlighted by 6 Kindle customers
  • Now and then, over the years to come, recognizable lines and images of Kerouac’s would surface in Dylan’s lyrics, most conspicuously in the song “Desolation Row.”
    Highlighted by 6 Kindle customers
  • But every artist is, to some extent, a thief; the trick is to get away with it by making of it something new. Dylan at his best has the singular ability not only to do this superbly but also to make the present and the past feel like each other.
    Highlighted by 6 Kindle customers
  • The idea that artistic genius arose out of derangement of the senses was, to Trilling, a dismal legacy of what he called the Romantic movement’s solipsistic, hedonist conceit that mental disturbance and aberration were sources of spiritual health and illumination “if only because they controvert the ways of respectable society.”
    Highlighted by 5 Kindle customers
  • (“I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music,” Dylan told an interviewer in 1997.6 “I don’t find it anywhere else … I don’t adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists … I’ve learned more from the songs than I’ve learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.”)
    Highlighted by 4 Kindle customers
  • “My daddy once said to me, he said, ‘Son, it is possible for you to become so defiled in this world that your own Mother and Father will abandon you. If that happens, God will believe in your own ability to mend your own ways.’ ”
    Highlighted by 4 Kindle customers
  • The most familiar way of understanding Dylan’s musical origins goes back to Woody Guthrie. But another, strangely related way goes back to Aaron Copland, whose orchestral work raises some of the same conundrums that Dylan’s songs do—about art and politics, simplicity and difficulty, compromise and genius, love and theft.
    Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers
  • Bob Dylan’s proximity and debt to the World War II era and its aftermath always need emphasis. It is said that he owns the 1960s—but he is, of course, largely a product of the 1940s and 1950s.
    Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers
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Table of Contents edit see section history

Introduction

I.BEFORE

1. Music for the Common Man: The Popular Front and Aaron Copland’s America

2. Penetrating Aether: The Beat Generation and Allen Ginsberg’s America

II. EARLY

3. Darkness at the Break of Noon: The Concert at Philharmonic Hall, New York, NY, October 31, 1964

4. The Sound of 3 A.M.: The Making of Blonde On Blonde, New York, NY and Nashville, TN, October 5, 1965 – March 10 (?), 1966

III. LATER

5. Children of Paradise: The Rolling Thunder Revue, New Haven, CT, November 13, 1975

6. Many Martyrs Fell: “Blind Willie McTell,” New York, NY, May 5, 1983

IV. INTERLUDE

7. “Delia,” Malibu, CA, May 1993

8. “Lone Pilgrim,” Malibu, CA, May 1993

V. RECENT

9. The Modern Minstrel Returns: “Love and Theft,” September 11, 2001, and the Newport Folk Festival, August 3, 2002

10. Bob Dylan’s Civil Wars: Masked & Anonymous, July 23, 2003, and Chronicles, Volume One, October 5, 2004

11. Dreams, Themes, and Schemes: Modern Times, August 29, 2006; Theme Time Radio Hour with Your Host Bob Dylan, May 3, 2006-April 15, 2009; The Bootleg Series, Volume 8: Tell-Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased, 1989-2006, October 7, 2008; and Together Through Life, April 28, 2009

CODA:

Do Your Hear What I Hear?: Christmas In The Heart, October 13, 2009

Series & Lists edit see section history

This book is in New York Times Bestsellers (Current). (authoritative list)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Sean Wilentz (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Doubleday
Country: USA
Publication Date: September 7, 2010
ISBN: 9780385529884
Page Count: 400

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: ML420.D98 2010
  • Dewey: 782.42164092

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
  • Chronicles
  • Bob Dylan Concise
  • Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus
  • Bob Dylan Revisited
  • Shelter from the Storm: Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Years
  • The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad
  • Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1957-1973
  • Still on the Road

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