In the wake of the recent hit biopic No Direction Home this probing appreciation asks: Do the
lyrics of Bob Dylan tell the true story of the ever-changing ever-radical life and career of
the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter? In a dingy windowless bungalow on the Warner Brothers
back lot in Hollywood in 1977 in the midst of what may have been the longest interview he ever
gave (it stretched over ten days) a chain-smoking Bob Dylan confessed to journalist Ron
Rosenbaum that he was troubled by something missing from his music. Dylan — who was editing a
dramatic movie based on his life even as his life seemed to be falling apart — told Rosenbaum
there was a sound he was after that he’d only come close to on one record so far. The sound he
told Rosenbaum was of “thin wild mercury.” This is a book that captures the elusive
mercurial artist and his work in a way no other has — a vivid compelling pursuit of Dylan
successively a hipster folkie a Greenwich Village sparkplug of a cultural revolution who
plugged into an amplifier to drive away folkie solemnity then became a countrified crooner
the man who just months after Rosenbaum’s interview became a fire-breathing proselytizing
Christian . . . before returning to being a non-religious Jew. What was behind it all
Rosenbaum asks and how can we understand him through his lyrics? Tracing it from Dylan’s
childhood — when his father hired a Brooklyn rabbi to come to remote Minnesota to prepare his
son for his bar mitzvah — through the still touring singer’s late often inscrutable lyrics
Rosenbaum probes Dylan’s “argument with God ” his differentiation between authenticity and
sincerity and his relentless heretical stances. Of course complicating matters for anyone
trying to trace the development of Dylan and his life’s work is Dylan’s recurrent denial of the
continuity of self. (Whenever asked why he doesn’t sing the old songs the same way as on the
record Dylan typically responds with an irritated “That’s not me.”) Ron Rosenbaum has
covered Dylan for almost the entirety of his — and Dylan’s — career starting as a Village
Voice culture reporter in 1969. In this deeply personal and literary appreciation and as Dylan
continues to tour and compose new songs still refusing to play old songs the old way
Rosenbaum offers a moving and involving portrait of an icon who may have been more constant
than it appeared after all.
