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.
Levin’s clarities prompt a question: was Dylan a mirror or a mover? Did he merely reflect epochal changes or did he actually move the needle? Levin leaves me wondering. In the beginning, Dylan’s words helped drive a movement that uplifted the country. Now, though, what’s left mainly is the enigma of Dylan; the man of measured mystery, covering Sinatra songs and tallying up concert merch and t-shirt sales. Out on the road forever, but where is he taking his audience?
Toward the end of Bob on Bob, Levin acknowledges that Dylan has fallen for the call of conspiracists with regard to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Levin writes,
As a political thinker, Bob Dylan was terrific when it came to blowing winds and hard rains, changing times and ships coming in. But when it came to specific cases. Like if you were seriously concerned about, “Who killed Davey Moore?” Didn’t the workers who strung the ring rope against which his neck snapped, deserve a mention?
When it came to what Dylan left out, Pauline Kael seems to have summed it up best in her review of Renaldo and Clara: “Dylan has given himself more closeups than any actor can have had in the whole history of movies.”
Note
1 http://www.theboblevin.com/bio/bob-on-bob/