is a brilliant collection of essays, short pieces, reminiscences, Rabelaisian lists, and so much more.[1] All devoted to (“The”) Bob Levin’s love for, and obsession with, Bob Dylan. I was struck by the book’s design. It reminded me of the early releases of Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books. Levin’s style is a smorgasbord of pithy observations and freewheeling narrative that makes reading him a pleasure. Every page is tasty.
Levin has attended more than a dozen live performances of Dylan’s, beginning in 1963 at Brandeis University, which in Levin’s telling was close to the center of one version of high American culture—a culture that Dylan would transform. It helped that Dylan was an outlier, hailing from Minnesota and born on the less than urbane side of the tracks—“Like Ginsberg, Corso and Kerouac/ Like Louis and Jimmy and Buddy and all the rest…” He belonged among the un-jocked and un-classical—the artful strivers not the upwardly mobile conformists. Levin credits Dylan with making rock ‘n’ roll respectable to the culture’s next generation of cool rulers when he chose to go electric.
Per Levin, Dylan beats Hemingway (and every other artist of the last century) as a creator and character-shaper. It was Dylan’s shape-shifting that instantiated the counterculture’s previously unimaginable range of possible selves/worlds.
