Bob Dylan is the best songwriter in the world. The best singer. Bar none. By miles. He deserved the Nobel Prize and the citation was spot on. He “created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” No one is arguing. He has made extraordinary work over many years of a long life, an accolade very few artists in any media can lay claim to.
His first book, Tarantula, is a genuine one-off, a curio, a document for those turbulent long-ago 1960s. His second, Chronicles Volume 1, could be the best book by a celebrity ever written. But his third and latest tome, The Philosophy of Modern Song, well… sorry Bob, the backlash starts here.
The inside cover tells us Dylan began working on the book in 2010, so we can surely ask why it has taken so long to write so little. And the questions get more urgent the more we venture in. He discusses 66 songs. Most of them are from the 1950s, hardly modern at all. How they were selected is never mentioned. A lot of them are not that interesting, some of them are a perverse pick and others just pretty grim.
‘People disagreeing everywhere you look, makes you wanna stop and read a book.’
Watching the River Flow from Greatest Hits Vol II
There is next to no philosophy. There is a lot of padding. It seems like two thirds of the book is what Simon & Schuster’s press release tells us are ‘carefully curated’ photographs. Curated by whom is never said. But this is maybe not the point: the songs are just a framework for Dylan to declaim and expound.
The presentation, as determined by the pictures and their layout, is great: noir-ish, moody, opaque, attitudinal. But honestly, the guy who wrote Chronicles and who helmed 100 episodes of the much-loved Theme Time Radio Hour could have knocked this all off in a couple of afternoons in his hammock with a beer and a Dictaphone, safe in the knowledge that the Sunday Times would praise the “acidity, acuity and cynicism in his writing”, as well as “the love, enthusiasm, whimsicality and lightly worn wisdom that delight. That, and the sheer depth and breadth of his dogged scholarship and restless inquisitiveness.”
‘Sometimes people ask songwriters what a song means, not realising if they had more words to explain it, they would’ve used them in the song.’
Extract from The Philosophy of Modern Song
Well! This, and an avalanche of other hype, got me off to a grumpy start before I even saw the book. More aggravation was to follow. When The Philosophy of Modern Song was first announced early last year, Simon & Schuster gave a selling price of £19.99. By the time it appeared, all dressed up for Christmas, the price had rocketed to £35, with a personally signed limited-edition copy for $599.
That’s right! At the post Brexit exchange rate we’re talking 500 quid. But before the book was even in the shops, distributors had an inkling something was amiss. Apparently, the signatures in the exclusive copies were a bit too uniform. A few copies had already leaked and it was then apparent that Dylan’s mark must be by autopen, albeit with more than 15 different variations. Cue denials from all parties followed by abject apologies from Simon & Schuster, grovel grovel and boo hoo and refunds all round. As it turns out, money wasn’t talking, it was swearing.
Unusually, Dylan must’ve felt he had to go public: “I had a bad case of vertigo and it continued into the pandemic years. It takes a crew of five working in close quarters with me to help enable these signing sessions, and we could not find a safe and workable way to complete what I needed to do while the virus was raging. So, during the pandemic, it was impossible to sign anything and the vertigo didn’t help.”
Can we just leave that there? It’s an unedifying spectacle but here’s a link to remind you of Bob in the pre-vertigo days and to show the uninitiated what the fuss is about and why we’re reviewing this book.
‘Ultimately, money doesn’t matter. Nor do the things it can buy. Because no matter how many chairs you have, you only have one ass.’
Extract from The Philosophy of Modern Song
“When the artist,” Karl Jung said, in a lecture in 1935, “creates a character on the stage, or in his poem or drama or novel, he thinks it is merely a product of his imagination; but that character, in a certain secret way has made itself. Any novelist or writer will deny that these characters have a psychological meaning but as a matter of fact you know as well as I do that they have one. Therefore you can read and write his mind when you study the character he creates.”
Can we read anything from Dylan’s mind from The Philosophy of Modern Song? Dylan has always denied his stuff is autobiographical but with this book he is giving a lot a way, and some of it quite deliberately. And this is where there is finally some fun. Scattered amidst all the riffing on these 66 songs, most of them less interesting than Dylan’s own songs, are lots of jokes, put-ons, asides and winks.
‘Someone’s got it in for me, they’re planting stories in the press.’
Idiot Wind from the album Blood on the Tracks
The very first line of the book, on Bobby Bare’s Detroit City, has: “In this song, you’re the prodigal son”, then: “Your life is unravelling, you came to the big city, and you found out things about yourself you didn’t want to know, you’ve been on the dark side too long.” Stories of a hungry 20-year-old Dylan scuffling around a freezing New York in the winter of 1962 are part of the currency these days but this was where it all started. This was more than just a character he created.
Then we have a piece on Jonny Paycheck. “There’s lots of reasons folks change their names … (some are) on the run from some unseen demon or heading towards something else ….Donald Eugene Lytle knew he was born for more than his birth name had in store. And by the time he was a teenager, his hometown of Greenfield, Ohio, could barely contain him.” Ring any bells? “He had already run the table of all the local talent contests starting when he was nine years old…” This is a more complex story than it looks and this IS a character Dylan created.
‘Knowing a singer’s life story doesn’t particularly help your understanding of a song. Frank Sinatra’s feelings over Ava Gardner allegedly inform I’m a Fool to Want You, but that’s just trivia. It’s what a song makes you feel about your own life that’s important.’
Extract from The Philosophy of Modern Song
Just a few weeks ago, while out on my trig point quest (still ongoing – see next issue), I diverted to Bournemouth to see Dylan’s gig there. He’s over 81 now and frail and, more than ever, you can’t help wondering at the little Bobby Zimmerman who climbed into that Bob Dylan costume 60 years ago and is still in there pulling the levers and the strings.
The section on Johnnie Taylor’s Cheaper to Keep Her is almost as sour and nasty a tale as the song. Mind you, Dylan has had his share of expensive divorces and should know something about it. More ‘hide and seek’ jumps out of the piece about Ricky Nelson: “Rick was the only one out there trying to do new material but people booed.”
Most people interested in popular culture will realise what Dylan is talking about here. But then, he writes, Rick “wrote a song about it.” The song is called Garden Party and what Dylan omits to mention is that he himself is name-checked in the song. Keep that for the pub quiz evenings.
Then there is this beauty, almost worth the price of the book alone. Writing about Willie Nelson’s On the Road Again, Dylan lets us in on why he has spent much of the last 35 years (and several years before that) sitting on a bus. Touring, he writes, is about “the joy of moving, not staying anywhere. Because they don’t pay you to stay. They pay you to move… Nobody’s mad because you didn’t take the garbage out, acquaintances don’t just drop in unannounced, neighbours don’t give you the stink-eye every time the wind shifts.”
Goodness, why isn’t there more like that? If Dylan really spent 10 years writing this book, what were Simon and Schuster doing all that time? As well as curating the pictures maybe they could have edited the manuscript a bit better. Cut the repetition, cut the filler, put in more stuff like the paragraph above. Try and encourage the old boy to write something a bit more interesting.
But it’s too late now, never mind my carping, the day is getting dark. The book has been successful. It was in the Top Five in The New York Times nonfiction bestsellers’ list. Everybody loves it. Or they say they do.
But it’s really only an insignificant postscript to Dylan’s colossal portfolio. Even if you can somehow find a genuine hand-signed copy somewhere.
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