His recent scrapbook compilation, “Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010,” shows him in a decades-long game of chess against the man who is his favorite subject, bugaboo, muse, hobbyhorse and intellectual crush object. Dylan will try to pull a fast one, and Marcus will usually catch him in the act and call him on it. Amusingly enough, he cannot stand one of Dylan’s most beloved songs. “Line by line,” Marcus writes, “ ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ is pious, or falsely innocent — isn’t it obvious whoever wrote ‘Yes, ’n’ how many seas must a white dove sail / Before she sleeps in the sand?’ already knows the answer, assuming he or anyone can actually bring him or herself to care about such a precious question?” Neither does he care for “The Times They Are A-Changin.’ ” Or Dylan’s religious period. Or most of his 1980s output. Same with a lot of his 1970s material. He takes special glee in pointing out the horridness of a little-heard Dylan composition, from 1963, called “You’ve Been Hiding Too Long.” After quoting a few of its stilted lines, Marcus reports that it “is so awful it’s been erased from Dylan’s published song collections.” He piles on, calling it “self-congratulatory spew” and “the deformed spawn of the impulses behind ‘Masters of War.’ ”
His prose can get overheated, a little loopy even, but Marcus can tell a story simply and effectively, as he does when describing his first encounter with Dylan, at a tent concert in 1963. He was 18 years old at the time. His future subject was 22. Marcus had gone to the show to see the main act on the bill, Joan Baez, but the guest performer was the one who captured him. “When the show was over, I saw this person, whose name I hadn’t caught, crouching behind the tent,” Marcus writes. “He was trying to light a cigarette, it was windy, his hands were shaking; he wasn’t paying attention to anything but the match. . . . ‘You were terrific,’ I said.” When the future star finally made his reply to the future author, in this cultural-Americana version of the old “Little Archie” comics, he described his performance that day with a word not fit for a family newspaper.
Another recent Dylan book, “Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown,” written by a younger critic, David Yaffe, comes in at a pleasing 135 pages of text. The structure is tidy. Its four main sections deal with essay-worthy subjects: Dylan’s voice; Dylan in film; Dylan’s relationship to race and minstrelsy; Dylan and plagiarism. But too many of Yaffe’s sentences hurt your puzzler. Perhaps because he is writing about the composer of trippy songs like “Visions of Johanna,” Yaffe feels the need to drift into high style himself, as when he writes, “He exists onstage and in our dreams, our fantasies, our real and concocted histories, our colleges, our state fairs and our concert halls at the same time.” What does that even mean? First guy: “Hey, did you know Dylan is playing at the concert hall tonight?” Second guy: “Really? He’s also at my college.” Third guy: “That’s funny, because he’s in my concocted history.”
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Jim Windolf is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.
via nytimes.com