The Best American Poetry

Will Dylan Survive? (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Salvatore Quasimodo wasn't the Hunchback of Notre Dame. He was the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature fifty years ago. Also in 1959, Robert Lewis Taylor won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Susan Kohner and Juanita Moore were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. And who made more money for RKO in the 1930s than Cary Grant or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers? The comedy team of Wheeler and Woolsey did.

Today's success does not guarantee tomorrow's fame. Many popular artist have their hour or even decades in the spotlight and then are gone. Maybe public tastes have so shifted that the artists no longer resonate with audiences. Maybe the artists represented a particular era, that that era has receded from the public's attention. Maybe the artists weren't as good as they seemed to be when they were famous.

It is hard to imagine that Bob Dylan will be forgotten in fifty years. He is clearly the best songwriter of the second half of the 20th century. A convincing argument can be made that he is the best songwriter in American history. His talent certainly deserves survival. But, sad to say, talent is not enough either to become famous or to survive. No one is certain where Dylan will be unrecognized, known just by his name and a brief identifier, or be seen as the dazzling songwriter he is now. I assume that an artist like Dylan must be concerned about this. After all, his legacy continues in his children and his music. But family provides only a private memory. If he also wants a public memory, I have a suggestion.

The suggestion is based on the career of Woody Guthrie. Woody was not well-known even as he was producing his rousing songs. Two particular efforts, beyond his sheer talent, helped propel him to ongoing fame. Pete Seeger was responsible for the first effort. A blacklisted Seeger was forced to play not in night clubs but in camps and schools. The pay wasn't so good, and while the audience was enthusiastic it was young and unsophisticated. But the nimble Seeger had stumbled onto a great opportunity. Those impressionable minds heard Seeger sing Woody's songs, and, having heard them as children, they carried the songs into adulthood.

The second effort involved a man who deserves wider recognition. Howie Richmond had worked as a press agent for Frank Sinatra. He knew his way around the business. In 1951, Richmond was serving as Woody's music publisher and listened as Woody tape recorded hundreds of songs. Richmond's incredible ear picked out "This Land is Your Land." He made copies of the song and sent them free to school publishers that produced songbooks for young people. The publishers then sold the books to schools. It took about a decade and a half, but by then the song had been sung by untold numbers of young people, as it continues to be sung even now.

Howie Richmond had discovered the key to continuing fame. Dylan needs to use that key. The crucial first step for him to take to ensure survival of his material is to choose the most appealing (that is emotionally moving and easy to sing) songs for young people and make those songs available for free to schools, camps, and anyplace else where children gather.

Will Dylan survive? Look to America's children for the answer.

Dylan's Christmas Album (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

No one ever made a living betting on what Bob Dylan will do next. But a Christmas album? The balladeer of anthemic protest, the poet master of surreal imagery has recorded Christmas In The Heart, a collection of familiar Christmas tunes filtered, as an ad appropriate to the pre-rock feel of the album might put it, through Bob Dylan's unique vocal stylings.

I'm with those who applaud him for his giving all his profits in perpetuity to a variety of hunger charities. (Some places couldn't resist this. The Brisbane Times headlined their review: "Yule be surprised what Dylan has done for a good Claus.)

But I don't know how to review the album. Instead, let me made a few observations. First of all, this whole project is sincere. This is not some sort of in-joke or ironic post-modern creation. Dylan's not wearing a Santa Claus mask. I'm not sure what to make of a contented Bob Dylan. He seems to have found his direction home. I'm glad for him. but it was the little boy lost who fashioned so many rhyming guideposts for our journey through life. It was in moments of contentment that Dylan's songwriting suffered. Dylan's voice, even as its cheerful, still strikes me as more appropriate for melancholy than joy. His voice was built for a blues sound wailing despair or unleashing sarcastic anger. But it is cruel to wish someone sadness so there will be more songs, and doing so would certainly not be in the spirit of the album. I therefore limit this comment to an observation that doesn't cross the border into a hope.

There is no clear way to provide an analysis of the material, pondering its reverberating layers, dissecting its sources and allusions, locating its place in the ongoing Dylan narrative. The sole possible exception is the to consider the album's title. At first glance, Christmas In The Heart seems innocuous, sentimental, and familiar. but, and maybe only because this is Bob Dylan, it is tempting to unpack its meaning. For example, if Christmas is in the heart, it's inside us, a feeling more than a holy day. In that case, this is a spiritual Christmas rather than a religious one. On this reading, Dylan sees in Christmas a time for charity, for joy, for a celebration of life. This is Christmas in the Heartland.

And if that is so, then this is an American album more than a Christian album. For those alert to every twist and turn in the ongoing saga "Is He a Jew or a Christian?" this album provides less data than its subject matter might suggest. The album is about a good-hearted singer content to be a loyal citizen in the Land of the Great American Songbook and singing his heart out with some seasonal standards to help those in need.

Of course, don't get used to this Bob Dylan because who knows where he'll go next? It's okay to anticipate, but I wouldn't place any bets.

Bob's Nobel: A Modest Proposal (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

So once again Bob Dylan didn't receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Oh, sure, he can take solace from the fact that a few other literary artists didn't get it, folks like Tolstoy, Ibsen, Proust, Joyce, Zola, Twain, Chekhov, Auden, and Borges, among others. But I don't think Bob should give up. He has until next February 1st when the nominations close and until early next October when the Prize is announced. He should begin preparing now.

To nudge Bob along, I have come up with a few suggestions for what he can do to improve his chances. I urge readers to supplement these ideas with others. Bob, it's time to get to work. Here's what you can do:

1. Make fun of mathematicians. There is no Nobel Prize in Mathematics. The standard rumor about this is that Nobel didn't want such a prize because it might go to a Swedish mathematician named Mittag-Leffler who supposedly had an affair with Nobel's wife. This is a good rumor, but it's considerably weakened by the small fact that Mr. Nobel never married. Never mind. The reason doesn't matter. Just start making fun of people who use numbers instead of words.

2. Buy a house near the Swedish Academy. These people decide who wins the Literature Prize, Bob. Get to know them. Start a never-ending tour just of Sweden. Start casually inserting the Swedish words "ombudsman' and "smorgasbord" frequently in conversation. Drop hints about how you love Swedish meatballs.

3. Write an album of songs that will help your cause. Include titles like "The Gates of Sweden." Avoid titles like "Stuck Inside of Stockholm With the Memphis Blues Again."

4. Rediscover your Hibbing roots. Note how its climate always reminded you of a Scandanavian country, but in a nice way. I mean the football team for the state is named the Minnesota Vikings. Come on, Bob, the Vikings. It's perfect. Get a helmet. Wear it at concerts. See #3 above about songs.

5. Use your connections. Shmooze with Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden. He is the King, after all. And he did present you a music prize in 2000. I know you didn't speak when you got the award, but the times they are a-changin' Bob. You've got to talk yourself up now.

So, Bob, there you go. Your fans are rooting for you. Don't think twice. It's all right.

Bob Dylan On the Watchtower (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

In "All Along the Watchtower," Bob Dylan envisions America's decline and accepts the role of warning people about it. The song opens with Dylan having a conversation with two parts of his self. The joker thinks life is absurd. The thief part of his self--the part that steals lines from other singers and poets and ideas from the cultural air--reassures the joker that confusion is not their fate. They will see clearly and sing out a warning to the people.

Dylan sees American social collapse as strikingly similar to the collapse of Babylon in the Bible. Babylon was bloated with wealth, weakened by self-indulgence, and ready to fall. The comparison is not unique to Dylan. F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, called New York City "Babylon on the Hudson." Dylan seeks guidance from the Biblical prophet Isaiah who foretold the fall of Babylon in the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 21. Here are the pertinent lines from the King James translation, the one I assume Dylan used:

5 Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise, ye princes, and anoint the shield.
6.For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth...
8. and he cried, A lion...
9. and, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen.

Dylan uses all this imagery in the next part of the song. There's the watchtower, the princes, the lion--in the form of a wildcat, and two riders. Dylan assumes the role of the watchman, the sentinel prepared to maintain a watchful eye and proclaim exactly what he sees. (Dave Van Ronk correctly noted that a watchtower has no wall to walk along, but the image of walking is more resonant than standing because the movement demonstrates the watchman's anxiety.)

Women and barefoot servants are not included in the Biblical verses. Why did Dylan include them? "The women came and went" echoes T.S. Eliot's refrain from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": "In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michaelangelo." I think Dylan is describing the anxiety of relationships, the difficulty for men to prevent women from going, as a metaphor: the decaying of relationships exemplifies a decaying society. The "barefoot servants" I take to be an attack on the thoughtless rich, the princes in the society who need their servants so servile and poor that no shoes are allowed or allowable.

Beyond Isaiah and T.S. Eliot, Dylan finds another poet in the tradition he follows. He ends the song with the title word of Allen Ginsberg's angry poem about what he sees as the sad fate of the weak, the innocent, the outsider, and the artist in America. Buoyed by the company of a Biblical prophet and two iconic modern poets, Dylan is ready to take his place on the watchtower.

The song, though, is incomplete. It does not adequately confront Dylan's own paradox: he's a paradigm of the wealth and self-indulgence he sees as dooming the society even as he's an artistic prophet who can see the fall caused by such behavior. In that sense, the song is a call from the depths of his soul to save himself as well as the society.

When Dylan Spoke For God (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

A deeply religious person is a tourist in life, thinking eagerly about returning home to God. A less religious or secular person is a traveler, unsure of any desire to return home, uncertain if there is a home. Put another way, from a religious perspective, we are all unwilling immigrants in the land of the living, exiled from paradise and placed into the broken and happily temporal world where we must struggle against the temptations to do evil and instead choose to do good. To the religious person, there are signs of truth everywhere. To the secular, reality is only reality without intimations of Godly designs or Heavenly destinations.

In "I Pity the Poor Immigrant" Bob Dylan wonders what God thinks of all this. Indeed, the song is told from God's point of view. The tune is taken from the folk song "Tramps and Hawkers" which celebrates life on the open road. The language for "Poor Immigrant" is taken from the 26th chapter of Leviticus in the King James translation. For example, Leviticus 26:20 reads: "Your strength shall be spent in vain: for your land shall not yield her increase" and Leviticus 26:26 reads: "Ye shall eat, and not be satisfied." Leviticus 26 is about the blessings of obedience to God and the costs and consequences of disobedience. This song is about those who disobey. Dylan sings for God and sends a warning.

"God" expresses pity in the first two lines, but then spends the rest of the song--with a few repetitive invocations of pity--detailing how the "immigrant" uselessly disobeys. That immigrant employs his every power to cheat and lie, but all to no avail; loneliness is the only result. The godless hate their lives, but, trapped in a choice between two forms of torture, fear death as well. The immigrant worships money and, God laments, "turns his back on me." After a review of the mistakes the immigrant makes, Dylan speaking as God ends with: "I pity the poor immigrant/When his gladness comes to pass." The dire prediction in this line, with its suggestion of a harsh judgment to come, drains the expressed pity of mercy.

Given Dylan's later talk about the Devil, some have interpreted the song as the immigrant being under the spell of the Devil. I see instead an immigrant making a free choice between good and evil and choosing evil. That is, the song takes a traditional Jewish view and not a Puritanical view of evil. This is somewhat surprising given the Christian imagery that suffused Dylan's previous album, Blonde on Blonde. But much had taken place in Dylan's life between that album and John Wesley Harding such as his motorcycle accident, recovery, and the beginning of his family.

Such a reading of evil from a Jewish perspective is helpful in understanding why Dylan takes quotes from the Hebrew Bible (if still using the King James translation.) It is also helpful in explaining the only confusing line in the song: "Whose Heaven is like Ironsides" (the "I" is capitalized in the lyrics section of bobdylan.com). With a capital "I" and in the plural, the word refers to soldiers who served under Oliver Cromwell. The iron in them referred both to their implacable method of fighting and to their dogmatic Puritanism. Interpreted that way, God in the song is saying that the Puritan vision of Heaven is incorrect. That is, the song may be an attack on the very strain of Christianity that Dylan would later embrace. In this song, Dylan allies himself with the Hebrew prophets who spoke on behalf of God to warn the people that they must follow God's ways.

But this is only one song in the ongoing competition for Dylan's soul between two forms of religious strictness and between such strictness and the alluring wild life of a romantic artist.

"The Dylan Watch" (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

 Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan's Road from Minnesota to the World. Colleen J. Sheehy and Thomas Swiss, Editors. University of Minnesota Press, 2009. $22.95.

This is an uncommonly intelligent collection of 20 essays about Bob Dylan's origins and influence. Some readers will wish that a more discernible thematic thread ran through the book, but no serious Dylan reader will be disappointed in the scope or quality of the material.

The book is dedicated to B.J. Rolfzen, Dylan's influential high school English teacher. Greil Marcus' opening essay is a model of good writing about Dylan. Rolfzen, it is clear, loved poetry. He once told me, "I used to read names on tombstones and repeat the names in claass. I liked the sound of the names." Marcus mentions a paper Dylan wrote about The Grapes of Wrath. Rolfzen told me he gave Dylan a "B" and still regrets it. Anyone who wishes to see Rolfzen in action should view Mary Feidt's wonderful documentary Tangled Up in Bob.

There is an intriguing article by Anne Waldman on Dylan's relationship to the Beat poets. Waldman and Allen Ginsberg were among those who accompanied Dylan on the Rolling Thunder Revue.

Robert Polito has a suggestive, even eye-opening, examination of "the folk process," a euphemism for stealing. Polito looks at the materials Dylan took from others and inserted into his own work to create songs in which the past and the present mingled.

There are four essays that connect Dylan to race in America. There is a wider point to be made here, one that might have been included in a more expansive approach to Dylan and otherness. Dylan saw African-Americans as only one group of others he was drawn to explore. He famously looked at other religions. In the very album from which the book's title is taken, Dylan examined his feminine side.

David Yaffe's essay reviewing Dylan's connection to race is particularly compelling. Yaffe ends his essay with a revelatory pun tying together Dylan's fascination with blackness in America and a song title from his album Time Out of Mind. Seeking a summary of Dylan and race, Yaffe writes: "He's not dark yet, but he's getting there."

This book asks new questions and, most significantly, amply illustrates that Dylan scholarship can be lively without being trivial and serious without being pedantic.

"The Dylan Watch" (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

In this post, I want to offer an alternative way of viewing three songs on Dylan’s album Highway 61 Revisited. Those songs can be seen as a dialogue between different parts of Dylan’s self.

Many interpreters understandably consider "Like A Rolling Stone" as a mockery of some woman. Candidates have included the pop actress Edie Sedgwick, Joan Baez, and others. But, especially in the context of other songs on the album, it is also possible to view the song in another way completely.

This alternative interpretation is that a new creative part of Dylan, formed by a reaction to maddening internal confusion and the roar of demands from the world, is angrily snarling and singing to the old Dylan, the one who was sure of himself and clear about his identity as king of the folk singers.

What makes the song particularly intriguing is that the new Dylan refers to the old Dylan as a woman. The old Dylan is "Miss Lonely." Why a woman? One interpretation is that this newer creative self sees self itself as fragmented and is allowing one part of the self to explore another. Additionally, within a self are all sorts of “others” that the uncreative self suppresses. So the new self notes the existence of a feminine side.

In one verse, the new Dylan sings to the old Dylan about Albert Grossman. Dylan's enigmatic manager is called his "diplomat" in the verse, and the concluding line is about Grossman's supposed taking of Dylan's money:

You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain't it hard when you discover that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you everything he could steal.

At the end of the song, Dylan pleads with his former self to go see someone who used to amuse him with language: 

You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse

Who is “Napoleon in rags”? He is Dylan (the “Napoleon” of singers) before the fame and before the money, when he lived in “rags” but was pleased with himself, when he was excited by his bursts of creative language, a Dylan driven by artistic motives not business interests.

In 1970, Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston interviewed Dylan and asked about the identity of Queen Jane in the song "Queen Jane Approximately." Dylan answered in what must have appeared to be one of his whimsical and nonsensical responses. He said: "Queen Jane is a man." But he was having fun with them by sneaking in the truth in a barrage of evasive responses.

In the song, the new Dylan is speaking to the old Dylan, again represented as a woman. In this case the king of folk music is appropriately a Queen. The "approximately" in the song’s title is there because such a feminine representation is not precisely his former self. The speaker mentions the exhaustion Dylan must feel about his self and his songs ("you're tired of yourself and all of your creations") and the anguished folk crowds angry that he is not singing protest songs ("all of your children start to resent you"). The speaker then invites "Queen Jane" to see him, to get away from the “bandits” in the commercial world in which “Queen Jane” lives out a musical life. The speaker is Dylan’s untainted creative self urging the successful Dylan to return.

Dylan’s dialogues with his self continue in another way on the album in "Ballad of a Thin Man."

Most critics see the song as an attack on journalists, who don't understand Dylan at all but continue to write about him. This is certainly plausible--especially considering the mention of a pencil in the first verse--but the song seen in its entirety leads to a very different interpretation.

In this interpretation, the new genuine and creative Dylan calls the old, confused Dylan “Mr. Jones” and sees him as someone who doesn’t understand the homosexuality around him and is confounded by it. The language of the song is filled with very explicit gay imagery:

Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you
And then he kneels.
He crosses himself
And then he clicks his high heels
And without further notice
He asks you how it feels
And he says: "Here is your throat back
Thanks for the loan."

Given this imagery, it is more sensible to understand the "bone" the geek hands Mr. Jones and the "pencil" in Mr. Jones' hand as he walks into the room as phallic images.

The new Dylan is angry at the old Dylan for not understanding what is happening to him, for not comprehending the warping of his own creative core, the part of himself that was genuinely thrilled by the creative possibilities of combining language and music. The song is a cry from within mourning for what has happened to that part of Dylan’s self.

"The Dylan Watch" (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

This is the story, so far as I know never told, of Bob Dylan's first meeting with Woody Guthrie. I tell it now in honor of Dylan's new album and in memory of Mark Eastman, the man who told me the story and who died on October 4, 2008. I cannot verify the facts, so I will let readers decide for themselves.

Heading to New York for the first time, Dylan found his way first to Madison, Wisconsin and then to Chicago. Once there, Dylan headed immediately to see Kevin Krown. The two had met in the summer of 1960 in Central City, Colorado, and Krown had told Dylan to stop by if he was ever in Chicago.

Mark Eastman was a friend of Krown's. Eastman recalled that Dylan arrived at a dorm in Chicago looking like a "lost soul carrying a guitar." He was very shy, Eastman said. "He seemed like a little lost boy, with a frail quality, like he couldn't cook a cup of soup. He was in constant motion."

At some point, Dylan, Krown, and Eastman determined to head east to meet Woody Guthrie, and they did so several weeks later. Eastman and Krown hitchhiked to New York, and Dylan got a ride in a '57 Impala. Krown had a friend who had a vacant apartment in midtown, and the people said they could stay there. The three--and a fourth person whose name Eastman didn't recall--met at the apartment.

Dylan probably arrived sometime after the snowstorm on January 20, 1961. Eastman recalled there was snow on the ground when he got there and that he would have gone to New York on Fridays and weekends. Therefore, Dylan most likely arrived in New York on Friday, January 27th.

On the day after they got to New York, Dylan, Krown, Eastman, and the mysterious fourth person took a bus trip of about an hour and a half to Greystone Hospital to visit Woody Guthrie. Eastman said, "We walked into the floor where someone asked for Woody." There were "chairs along the wall, attendants in green mopping the floor." Eastman looked at the patients wandering around and felt depressed. "We sat down on some chairs in the corner of the room. Finally an attendant walked out with Woody, whose body was bent in strange angles. He almost looked like a prisoner from Auschwitz. However, he seemed happy and excited to have company. It was hard to understand Woody. Dylan played him some songs. Woody was very interested. He really bonded with Dylan. It seemed as if everyone present paid attention and felt that something significant was happening. The mopping of the floor stopped. I remember Woody asking the attendant to bring out how own guitar. Somehow even under the terrible weight of the crippling effects of Huntington's disease, Woody hammered out some chords to This Land is Your Land, and Bob and he sang the song together.

"As we were getting ready to leave, Woody wrote a few words for each of us." Eastman couldn't recall all the words Woody wrote on his. From other evidence, it seems that on Dylan's Woody wrote, "I ain't dead yet."

Eastman continued his story: "That evening we went to a party in Greenwich Village near NYU. Dylan played a couple of songs, but he wanted to leave. So he and I left and walked down the street [MacDougal] and went into The Commons or some other club. Dylan convinced the guy to let him play and a basket was passed around." The Commons, later named the Fat Black Pussycat, is the most likely place they went.

Bob Dylan had arrived.

"The Dylan Watch" (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Bob Dylan is on what must seem to him to be  be an ever-quickening nonstop journey to his next birthday. He'll be 68 on May 24th. Such an age might prompt him to consider retirement. But age seems to have sped up his pace, as though some hyper-awareness of the ever-reducing time he has left requires a defiant burst of creative activity. But then throughout his career the palpable presence of death-- sometimes menacing, sometimes alluring--has always brought out his fiercest yearning for creation. It still does. He has a new album coming out later this month. He's working on a second volume of his memoirs. He tours as though on a mission.

Why does he keep going? I'd like to believe he's trying to demonstrate that artistry endures through life, that behind his weathered face and dissipated voice is a soul that still houses a yearning youth with a fire in every vein. And if he doesn't quite have the agility of youth, he has the cagey mind of the experienced and determined.

In his youth the flashing images burning in his mind found their way into memorable songs during extraordinary moments in social history. He changed the age enough so that he now paces nervously in the penthouse of what Leonard Cohen has called the "Tower of Song." It's enough for several lives. But Dylan never did like limits imposed on him. He wants to see just how far the human spirit can stretch, to explore all the still dark corners of his seemingly boundless mind.

So others can sum up his achievements. I want him to rage against the dying of the lyric. I hope when he's 120 he'll be refusing interviews and be pessimistic about the world and still be struggling to find love.

For him, there are always the songs. Art is all that lasts. That's the love that won't desert him, won't be faithless, won't break his heart with slick words or empty promises. And so Dylan the artist won't stop looking for ways to produce that art. For him the rest is very far from silence.

"The Dylan Watch" (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Clinton Heylin is the author of Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, which I find the most useful of all the Dylan biographies. Among his other groundbreaking books, Heylin took on the jaw-dropping task of compiling a day-by-day Dylan chronology through the mid 90s and detailing Dylan's recording sessions through 1994. Heylin has made a compelling case to be considered the best Dylan researcher in the world.

In his new book, Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1957-1973 (Chicago Review Press), Heylin discusses Dylan's first 300 songs. The book is informative on every page. The songs are placed in the order in which they were written, not released. When the information is available, Heylin lists where the lyric for each song is published, its first known performance,and studio recordings and then offers some background and assessment. In many cases, the songs are either rumors or barely-known, such as the first song in the collection "Song to Brigit" written, according to guesswork, when Dylan was 15. Here is where Heylin shines, unearthing valuable information and compiling it in a way that makes the book an indispensable reference work for anyone seriously interested in Dylan.

I do have some quibbles with the book. I don't like Heylin's unpleasant penchant for denigrating other Dylan researchers. I wish that some of the songs were accompanied by more complete or revealing stories. For example, Heylin notes that Dylan wrote Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues in one night after Noel Stookey (Paul of Peter, Paul & Mary) showed him a newspaper story. But there's an important addition to the story. Stookey told me that it was because Dylan could write such a song and not just sing traditional songs that Stookey told Albert Grossman, his manager and soon Dylan's, to keep an eye on the young man. Similarly, there's more interesting material about "Blowin' in the Wind" than presented here. I differ with some of Heylin's analyses. I find him too willing to conclude that Dylan was simply after a feeling, an assertion that renders analysis at best useless and at worst an interference with the purity of the feeling.

But these are good kinds of arguments to have with a book. Heylin is himself argumentative, so he invites such wrestling with his work. What's important is that the book makes the wrestling worthwhile.