My Favourite Books

Number 8 - Song & Dance Man III - The Art of Bob Dylan - Michael Gray In recent weeks Bob Dylan has been presenting a radio show in America. Perhaps you might not expect it but Bob is a terrific DJ - informative and amusing - and is playing great records. The programmes I have heard have been 'themed' - the first one was about the weather ('Stormy Weather', 'The Wind Cries Mary', 'Just Walking In The Rain' etc) and the one I'm listening to as I type is about 'mother' ('Mama Tried', 'Mama Told Me Not To Come' 'Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby' etc). This even enables Bob to launch into Les Dawson mode - "I bought my mother-in-law a new chair, but she won't let me plug it in". More seriously, Bob tells of the member of the Prisonaires vocal group who in the 1950's was jailed for 99 years for 'rape' of a white woman (he was 11 years old at the time and in Tennessee 'rape' included a black person looking lasciviously at a white woman). On his release on parole many years later he married a white woman AND BEING SEEN WITH HER IN PUBLIC BREACHED HIS PAROLE, resulting in him being recalled to the Fed Pen for 6 years !!! Bob Dylan is the most written about individual in popular music. The bookshelf behind me groans with more than 40 tomes exploring various aspects of the man and his life and work - and I possess the merest fraction of the available literature. This book is, in my opinion, the greatest book, not only about Dylan, but about any aspect of popular entertainment. It is a big book - a heavy book - both physically and metaphorically. However entertaining tales of Bob on tour, Bob on stage, Bob in the studio, Bob writing masterpieces, Bob making films, Bob on TV, Bob en famille, etc may be (and they are usually VERY entertaining) nothing can hold a candle to this intense exploration of the corpus - the actual body of work created by this unusual and fascinating man. This book dissects, in incredible detail, all the various literary and musical influences operating on Dylan, in an attempt to illuminate the work and enlighten the reader. To the extent that it is a serious work of academia it is plainly not for the casual reader who wants some quick and easy thrills. For the more serious and literate reader, however, the thrills are there in abundance, but you do have to work hard to get them. (I don't make this point in an effort to be snobby or elitist - but it is self-evidently the case that you will derive more enjoyment from a comparison between Dylan and Rimbaud if you know who Rimbaud is and are familiar with any of his poetry). The Chapter titles give clues as to where we are going. The early chapters have simple titles like 'Dylan and the Folk Tradition', 'Dylan and the Literary Tradition' and 'Dylan and Rock Music'. But as we move on the titles become more complex - 'Dylans Use Of Language : Towards Complexity' , 'Lay Down Your Weary Tune: Drugs and Mysticism' etc including my favourite ' Even Post-Structuralists Oughta Have The Pre-War Blues'. The learning and research involved in writing this book is phenomenal. Michael Gray runs to ground every source, explains every nuance, casts light on every dark corner. The learning ranges over history, geography, literature, music (of every genre), religion, science, philosophy, nursery-rhyme, folk culture, folklore, biography, autobiography, you name it, the author seems to have it at his control. The wealth and variety of musical routes which Gray points the reader down is one of the thrills. Obscure blues records are one of life's major pleasures and this book gives you plenty to track down. And jazz...and folk....and Scottish/Irish....and calypso...and opera.....and, and, and.... The analysis and explication of Dylan's use of religious themes and allusions is simply staggering - that feature on its own would be more than worth the price of this book. Naturally, some of the author's opinions are contentious and I didn't agree with several of them. That is, of course, precisely as it should be. But this book represents the most stimulating consideration of Dylan's work yet available and can be recommended to anyone prepared to put the work in. It is exhausting. As a postscript, about a fortnight after I finished reading this book I was at a Dylan concert in Manchester and via a mutual friend I met and spoke to Michael Gray. He seemed a charming and modest person. Several years later Michael Gray was on a lecture tour of the UK talking about Bob's work - for some extraordinary reason one of the venues was in Falkirk - unfortunately due to other committments I was in England at that time and couldn't attend. However, a friend bought me another copy of this book and asked Michael to autograph it - his message is reproduced here