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partly the trouble: the best music connects to the soul, not the brain, and I worry that all this Dylan-devotion is somehow anti-music – that it tells us the heart doesn’t count, and only the head matters.
    Elsewhere in this book you will find fanciful comparisons between literature and music, specifically novels and songs, but you sure can exhaust a great song much more quickly than you can clean out a great novel, and – partly, I suspect, because I am not interested in Dylan as poet – I’ve exhausted Bob, or at least the bits of Bob that I’minterested in. I wish I hadn’t; there’s a density and a gravity to a Dylan song that you can’t find anywhere else. But even more than I regret mining the seam for all it’s worth (or all it’s worth to me), I regret never having heard any of the songs at the right age, in the right year. What must it have been like, to listen to ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ in 1966, aged nineteen or twenty? I heard ‘White Riot’ and ‘Anarchy In The UK’ in 1976, aged nineteen, but the enormous power those records had then has mostly been lost now. Much of the shock came from their volume and speed and brevity, and records consequently became louder and faster and shorter; listening to them a quarter of a century later is like watching old film of Jesse Owens running. You can see that he won his races, but all sense of pace has been wiped away by Maurice Greene. ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, however, still sounds perfect. It just doesn’t sound fresh any more. In Victorian London they used to burn phosphorus at seances in an attempt to see ghosts, and I suspect that the pop-music equivalent is our obsession with B-sides and alternate versions and unreleased material. If you can hear Dylan and The Beatles being unmistakably themselves at their peak – but unmistakably themselves in a way we haven’t heard a thousand, a million times before – then suddenly you get a small but thrilling flash of their spirit,and it’s as close as we’ll ever get, those of us born in the wrong time, to knowing what it must have been like to have those great records burst out of the radio at you when you weren’t expecting them, or anything like them. ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?’ is, I accept, a minor Dylan track, one of his snarly (and less than poetic) put-downs, but it is from my favourite period (electric, with that crisp, clean organ sound), and I haven’t heard it a million times before, so it sneaks its way on to car tapes now. And ‘Rain’ is a great Beatles song from a great year in their career, the year that Oasis have been trying to live in for the last ten years, and it’s wonderful to listen to a Lennon/McCartney song that hasn’t quite had all the pulp sucked from it. I’ll get sick of both these songs in the end, of course – they just don’t last long enough to keep their mystery and magic for ever. But they’ll do for now.

11 ‘I’ve Had It’
– Aimee Mann
    You’d think that self-reflective songs about the music-biz life – about the pain and joy of being a talented but struggling singer-songwriter (‘I’ve Had It’), or about the difficulty of maintaining a relationship and a career in rock’n’ roll (‘You Had Time’) – would suck. You’d think that these songs would reek of self-indulgence, or betoken a failure of imagination and creativity and empathy; you’d think that DiFranco and Mann are three-quarters of the way down the road that leads to songs about room service, concession stands and the imbecility of local-radio presenters. So how are these two of the most moving and beautiful pieces of music one could hope to come across on pop albums?
    â€˜You Had Time’ sets itself a further handicap: it begins with more than two minutes of apparently hopeful and occasionally