Bob Dylan Read Online Free PDF Page B

releasing more music than he’s been—say, a single three times a year, an album every six months or so—then the weight that fixes itself on whatever he does release would be lessened. But the pattern is set now, for the biggest stars—one a year, if that. It’s rather degrading for an artist to put out more than one album a year, as if he has to keep trying, you know? Well, three cheers for John Fogerty.

(19)
    Because of what happened in the middle sixties, our fate is bound up with Dylan’s whether he or we like it or not. Because Highway 61 Revisited changed the world, the albums that follow it must—but not in the same way.
     
    (19) “Take a Message to Mary”: the backing band didn’t seem to care much about the song, but Dylan did. My ten-year-old nephew thought “It Hurts Me Too” sounded fake but he was sure this was for real.

(20)
    Ralph J. Gleason: “There was this cat Max Kaminsky talks about in his autobiography who stole records. He stole one from Max. He had to have them, you know? Just had to have them. Once he got busted because he heard this record on a juke box and shoved his fist through the glass of the box trying to get the record out.
    “We all have records we’d steal for, that we need that bad. But would you steal this record? You wouldn’t steal this record.”

    You wouldn’t steal Self Portrait? It wouldn’t steal you either. Perhaps that’s the real tragedy, because Dylan’s last two albums were art breaking and entering into the house of the mind.
     
    (20) Songwriting can hardly be much older than song-stealing. It’s part of the tradition. It may even be more honorable than outright imitation; at least it’s not as dull.
    Early in his career, Bob Dylan, like every other musician on the street with a chance to get off it, copped one or two old blues or folk songs, changed a word or two, and copyrighted them (weirdest of all was claiming “That’s All Right,” which was Elvis’s first record, and written—or at least written down—by Arthur Crudup). Dylan also used older ballads for the skeletons of his own songs: “Bob Dylan’s Dream” is a recasting of “Lord Franklin’s Dream”; “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” finds its way back to “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill.” “Pledging My Time” has the structure, the spirit, and a line from Robert Johnson’s “Come on in My Kitchen”; “Don’t the moon look lonesome, shining through the trees,” is a quote from an old Jimmy Rushing blues. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” comes off of Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business.” This is a lovely way to write, and to invite, history, and it is part of the beauty and inevitability of American music. But while Dylan may have added a few words to “It Hurts Me Too,” from where he sits, it’s simply wrong to claim this old blues, recorded by Elmore James for one, as his own. That Self Portrait is characterized by borrowing, lifting, and plagiarism simply means Bob will get a little more money and thousands of people will get a phony view of their own history.

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    That splendid frenzy, the strength of new values in the midst of some sort of musical behemoth of destruction, the noise, the power—the totality of it! So you said, well, all right, there it is . . .
    The mythical immediacy of everything Dylan does and the relevance of that force to the way we live our lives is rooted in the three albums and
the two unforgettable singles he released in 1965 and 1966: Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Those records defined and structured a crucial year—no one has ever caught up with them and most likely no one ever will. What happened then is what we always look for. The power of those recordings and of the music Dylan was making on stage, together with his retreat at the height of his career, made Dylan into a legend and virtually changed his name