Sean Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America.

Frank, David

Sean Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America (Doubleday: New York 2010)

WHEN BOB DYLAN played his first Massey Hall concert in Toronto in November 1964, he was already a star among the new "folk singers" of the time. He had released his first four albums, with their mix of folk and blues, ballads, broadsides, personal whimsy, imagistic poetry and social commentary. He had written a score of searing anthems and other songs that are permanently embedded in the memory tracks of the early 1960s. My own vague recollection is that the Toronto show was at least partly promoted by the Young Socialists, and the Toronto Star reviewer described it as "almost like a peace rally," observing that various factions in the audience--"pacifists, socialists, beats and Dylanites" --each exploded in their own rounds of applause as he made his way through the familiar material, as well as several long new songs from the as yet unreleased Bringing It All Back Home. In settings such as this, Dylan was performing for what cultural historians would call a contemporary version of the "folk," in this case an audience of like-minded people, not all of them young, who believed that Bob Dylan was the voice of their movement for social change. Although Sean Wilentz does not discuss this particular concert, it very much resembled the Halloween concert at Philharmonic Hall in New York City a few weeks earlier, which he attended as a teenager. Like many of us, Wilentz has continued to listen to Dylan, with greater interest at some times than at others, but always with an appreciation that somehow Dylan was one of our own, even when he went wrong. Almost half a century later, it is that shared history, and especially that moment of his emergence, that has continued to make Dylan a relevant subject of interest and curiosity --even fascination. Historians will take a special interest in Wilentz's Bob Dylan in America, because it is not only the writing of a sometime "fan" (and lately "historian in residence" at Dylan's official website) but also the work of a leading practitioner of American social and political history whose titles include the classic Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (1984) and the more recent Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008 (2008).

Wilentz's first four chapters give a highly contextualized presentation of the roots of Dylan's America. Perhaps the most striking fact about the book is that it begins not with Dylan but with the composer Aaron Copland (1900-90), like Dylan a descendant of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who made his way into the main streams of American culture. The young Copland actually spent the summer of 1934 (the same year Dylan's parents Abraham and Beatrice Zimmerman settled in Duluth) in the Minnesota north country before he went on to participate more fully in the cultural popular front of the times, producing orchestral work such as Fanfare for the Common Man (which Dylan himself has used to introduce live concerts). Among other things, this is a way of pointing out that Dylan (b. 1941) was nota baby boomer but a child with roots in the era of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Wilentz argues that Copland and Dylan shared "common origins and sensibilities" in their attempts to rescue and renew American folk traditions, which Copland once described as an aesthetic of "imposed simplicity." Of course, the general point is that this was a much broader cultural effort and that "the old radical America" reached Dylan in other ways, most directly through Woody Guthrie and his legacy. Indeed, Wilentz may even understate the relevance of the old left to the environment Dylan encountered in New York City upon his arrival in 1961. Dave Van Ronk introduced him to the traditional and contemporary folk traditions, and Pete Seeger brought him in contact with groups such as SNCC's Freedom Singers, with whom Dylan famously joined hands and voice on occasions such as the March on Washington in 1963. Since the appearance of her recent memoir, A Freewheelin' Time (2008), we are also coming to recognize the importance of the late Suze Rotolo; she was hot only the subject of several of Dylan's lasting love songs but also brought him in contact with the broader cultural left, in part due to her own interests in theatre and her own family background (her mother was an editor for the Italian-language communist press; her father had been a union organizer and artist and a close friend of Ralph Fasanella). Meanwhile, another fine chapter focuses on Dylan's relationship with the Beat poets, whose repudiation of convention and celebration of improvisation was another one of the alternative Americas that attracted Dylan in the early 1960s and gave him the inspiration to give full voice to his inner imagination. Interestingly, his lifelong friendship with Allen Ginsberg, another key figure with a leftist family background, started at a Boxing Day party in 1963 upstairs from the Eighth Street Bookshop owned by Wilentz's uncle. Dylan drew amply and creatively from both these sources, and by the time of his famous "electric turn" in 1965 he had married them to the even earlier influences of rhythm and blues and rock and roll that he had grown up with and performed in high school in Hibbing. The resulting new Dylan had an enormous impact on the direction of popular music, and in retrospect, only the purest of folk purists could consider an album such as Highway 61 Revisited anything less than a howl of relevant social criticism.

Documenting these kinds of overlapping influences and affinities is the strong suit of social history, and Wilentz pursues the changing Dylan from a selection of observation points in the following decades, capturing him at moments such as the Rolling Thunder Revue (1975), "Blind Willie McTell" (1983), "Lone Pilgrim" (1993) and "Love and Theft" (2001), right up to the unexpectedly sentimental Christmas in the Heart (2009). The performer who emerges from this tour is described as a kind of "modern minstrel" who drifts through the back alleys, town squares and high plains of American popular culture without ever quite finding the right place to take his rest. In this itinerary Dylan's apparent abandonment of "folk music" for "rock and roll" has less significance than in most popular treatments. Instead, Wilentz demonstrates that this transition was beside the point for those who had followed Irwin Silber's "Open Letter to Bob Dylan" in Sing Out! after the release of Another Side of Bob Dylan in 1964. Silber famously complained that Dylan had produced too many "inner-probing, self-conscious" songs and appealed to him not to become "a different Bob Dylan than the one we knew." That was a critique of a very spare acoustic album, and in retrospect, it is clear that Dylan was already changing perspective and persona well before he "went electric." The unsubtle claim in Silber's critique was that Dylan "belonged" to the social movement that had nurtured and promoted his success as a cultural figure. After that, Dylan seemed to be more concerned with his onward and inward journey than about forging a lasting partnership between performer and audience. As he reinvented, amplified and accelerated new versions of himself, there would be lots of different Dylans to consider, but he was never going to be a Field Commander or even a common foot soldier in a new left cultural front. His fellow musicians knew this early on, and most of Dylan's audiences, including those who counted themselves part of a new left culture, came to the realization that Dylan had all their own flaws of self-absorption and political detachment. "We Shall Overcome" gave way to "I Shall be Released," observed Brian Morton in a 1991 novel entitled The Dylanist, in which the main character is summed up in these words: "You're a Dylanist. You don't believe in causes. You only believe in feelings." By contrast, another character, a self-described "union guy," spends his time "talking about solidarity and other corny ideas to people who are just too hip to believe in anything but their own feelings."

Wilentz's own approach to these matters is more circumspect than rendered here, though in his chapter on the Rolling Thunder Revue of 1975, a decidedly non-commercial production, he detects a level of nostalgia for that fractured relationship. Cultural studies tell us that the identity between performer and audience becomes increasingly difficult to sustain for an artist living in the bubble of tour schedules, hotel rooms, studio dates and album releases. At the time of his Canadian tour in the spring of 1997, for instance, Dylan had already recorded Time Out of Mind, one of the more surefooted productions of his career, but he shared none of this material with audiences, who were treated instead to a superior road show of his classic music. The timing in turn has given rise to the myth that Time Out of Mind was a response to his own brush with serious illness later that spring (the album was released in the fall). This is worth dwelling on as it illustrates the disjuncture between creation and reception that arises with the commodification of culture. The "folk" performer, whatever the instrumentation or genre of the music, needs opportunities to present and revise material in response to audience reception, thus cementing a relationship between performer and community. "Blowin' in the Wind," for instance, entered the culture long before Dylan himself released a recording of it, and much of his early repertoire was practised and polished in the interactive settings that one can still hear on the live recordings of early concerts. Other performers have also faced the same loss of engagement but none have experienced the contradictions on the same scale as Dylan. He has carried on brilliantly in many ways, but there is no doubt his muse has deserted him more than once along the way. The disengagement of his relationship to anything but a very generalized "folk" may be at least one part of the answer. Yet because Dylan's songwriting is unusually allusive and metaphoric (or can be listened to as such), when it works well it still manages to capture the mentalities and moods if not the actual moments of our history, and this in turn is more evidence of its success as modern poetry.

These days there is a small industry in Dylanology, and it is no easy challenge to keep up with the production of titles, not to mention the various archives of bootleg recordings. With the appearance of his own well-received Chronicles in 2004, and with more recollections to come, the subject himself has also entered the field. Wilentz has delved deeply into the roots and has also advanced bravely, though selectively, into more recent history. In these pages there is much to learn about the influences and meanings contained within Dylan's various voices, and it is a sign of his cultural significance that Dylan continues to attract such informed and intelligent commentary. Wilentz does not claim Bob Dylan in America to be a major contribution to historical scholarship, and his general conclusions are surprisingly modest. Dylan is more or less reduced to "a musical modernist with strong roots in traditional forms," and accordingly, he takes his place in the pantheon of American popular music. This is perhaps how Dylan himself might want to see his legacy assessed, but shall this be all? There is little doubt this will not be the lest word on the man.

DAVID FRANK

University of New Brunswick