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Basement Tapes and Good As I Been To You , although this, I suspect, is due more to my respect for Greil Marcus, who has written so persuasively and brilliantly about Dylan’s folk and blues roots, than to my Dylanphilia. And I have somehow picked up along the way Street Legal , Desire , and John Wesley Harding . Oh, and I bought Oh Mercy because it contains the lovely ‘Most of the Time’, which is on the High Fidelity soundtrack. There are, therefore, around twenty separate Bob Dylan CDs on my shelf; in fact I own more recordings by Dylan than by any other artist. Some people – my mother, say, who may not own twenty CDs in total – would say that I am a Dylan fanatic, but I know Dylan fanatics, and they would not recognize me as one of them. (I have a friend who stayslogged on to the Dylan website Expecting Rain most of the day at work – as if the website were CNN and Dylan’s career were the Middle East – and who owns 130 Dylan albums, including a fourteen-CD box of every single thing Dylan recorded during 1965 apart from – get this – Highway 61 Revisited , the only thing he recorded during 1965 that sane people would want to own. He’s pretty keen.) I can’t quote whole songs – just the odd line here and there. I do not regard Dylan as any more important, or any more talented, than Elvis Presley, or Marvin Gaye, or Bob Marley, or several other major artists. I have no opinion as to whether he was a poet, and especially not as to whether he was a better poet than another poet, I don’t own any bootlegs, I have no desire to see him play live again (I saw him twice, and that was more than enough), I have no theories about any single song . . . I just like some of the tunes, and that, I have been led to believe, is Not Good Enough.
    There is a very clever English artist called Emma Kay who has done a series of artworks which consist entirely of her (verbal) memories of Shakespeare plays. If I were to do the same for the life of Bob Dylan, it would consist of the following list:
Zimmerman
    Hibbing, Minnesota
    New York coffee houses
    Joan Baez (But what about her? I’m not sure.)
    The Band, formerly The Hawks. Electricity. ‘Judas!’
    Motorbike crash. Never as good afterwards. (Is that true? I fear I may be getting the crash confused with Elvis’s spell in the army.)
    Sarah (Sarah who? Don’t know). Divorce.
    Eye-liner
    Christianity
    Farm Aid
    Lots of tours
    This, it seems to me, is way too much knowledge. (Why on earth am I able to name his home town? And why should I recall that he fell off his bloody motorbike?) I will not attempt a similar list pertaining to the life of William Shakespeare, because it would be far too shaming, but suffice to say that it would not extend much beyond Stratford-upon-Avon, Anne Hathaway and her cottage, the Globe and the Dark Lady. Jane Austen: Bath; unmarried; once went to my sister’s house, apparently, although some time before my sister moved there. (That must be right,mustn’t it, dates-wise?) Obviously I have no one but myself to blame for my ignorance of our major literary figures. I’m not responsible for my intimacy with the Life of Bob, however. That’s the fault of all sorts of other people: friends, music writers, university professors, editors at my publishing house. He’s hard to avoid – mostly because his status as a major poet allows one to like him without inducing the feelings of intellectual insecurity that usually accompany devotion to a pop star. I suppose I resent that. In my book, you’re either in or you’re out, and if you’re in, then get in properly, and find as big a place in your heart for the stupid stuff – ‘Mmmm Bop’ and ‘Judy Is a Punk’ – as for the stuff that you can pass off as poetry. Obviously I wouldn’t ask you to find as big a place in your head for ‘Mmmm Bop’, but then, that’s