Bob Dylan : things have changed : a sort of biography / Ron Rosenbaum.

By:

Rosenbaum, Ron [author.]

Material type: Text

text

Media type:

unmediated

Carrier type:

volume

ISBN:

9781685892258

Subject(s):

Genre/Form:

Biographies.

Summary: "A spellbinding, passionate, and unprecedented deep dive into the ever-changing but ever-radical life and career of the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter, from his rural Minnesota upbringing through his sofa-surfing days in Greenwich Village through his many tumultuous conversions - to electric guitars and country music and Christianity and on ... "One of the most original journalists and writers of our time." -David Remnick Renowned culture critic Ron Rosenbaum discovered not only the world-changing music of early Bob Dylan, but the man himself, in the 1960s, when Rosenbaum was a young journalist living in Greenwich Village just around the corner from Dylan, and working for the legendary alt-weekly, The Village Voice. Rosenbaum, in fact, became the Voice's de facto Dylan reporter. It was the time, and the place, where an essential idea of Dylan's character was formed - that of the whip-smart, angry, too-cool-for-school icon, a kind of James Dean in denim. The raspy voice, not to mention the brilliantly cutting lyricism, only somehow added to his cultural dangerousness. The Dylan, in other words, recently portrayed in the hit movie A Complete Unknown. But Dylan has had many changes of character since then. There was the smoother-voiced country crooner of Nashville Skyline; the white-faced ringmaster of the Rolling Thunder Review; the enraged proselytizer who saw Jesus in a Tucson motel room and converted to Christianity ... and more. And throughout, the famously recalcitrant Dylan would tell people, "I'm not that person anymore," whatever previous character he was asked about. In a probing and personal literary appreciation, Rosenbaum examines what Dylan nonetheless revealed about himself in his lyrics and writings, and his infrequent interviews. Rosenbaum, in fact, was one of the few to interview Dylan in those years, and may own the record for longest interview, sitting down for ten days with Dylan for a Playboy interview in 1978"-- Provided by publisher.

List(s) this item appears in: New Adult Nonfiction

Average rating: 0.0 (0 votes)

Holdings
Item type	Current library	Collection	Shelving location	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode	Item holds
Adult Book	Phillipsburg Free Public Library	Adult Non-Fiction	New Books	780 ROS	Available		36748002633552

Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In the wake of the recent hit biopic A Complete Unknown , this probing appreciation asks- Do the lyrics of Bob Dylan tell the true story of the ever-changing, ever-radical life and career of the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter?

In a dingy windowless bungalow on the Warner Brothers back lot in Hollywood in 1977, in the midst of what may have been the longest interview he ever gave (it stretched over ten days), a chain-smoking Bob Dylan confessed to journalist Ron Rosenbaum that he was troubled by something missing from his music. Dylan - who was editing a dramatic movie based on his life, even as his life seemed to be falling apart - told Rosenbaum there was a sound he was after that he'd only come close to on one record so far. The sound, he told Rosenbaum, was of "thin, wild mercury."

This is a book that captures the elusive mercurial artist and his work in a way no other has - a vivid, compelling pursuit of Dylan, successively a hipster folkie, a Greenwich Village sparkplug of a cultural revolution, who plugged into an amplifier to drive away folkie solemnity, then became a countrified crooner, the man who, just months after Rosenbaum's interview, became a fire-breathing, proselytizing Christian . . . before returning to being a non-religious Jew.

What was behind it all, Rosenbaum asks, and how can we understand him through his lyrics? Tracing it from Dylan's childhood - when his father hired a Brooklyn rabbi to come to remote Minnesota to prepare his son for his bar mitzvah - through the still touring singer's late, often inscrutable lyrics, Rosenbaum probes Dylan's "argument with God," his differentiation between authenticity and sincerity, and his relentless heretical stances.

Of course, complicating matters for anyone trying to trace the development of Dylan and his life's work is Dylan's recurrent denial of the continuity of self. (Whenever asked why he doesn't sing the old songs the same way as on the record, Dylan typically responds with an irritated, "That's not me.")

Ron Rosenbaum has covered Dylan for almost the entirety of his - and Dylan's - career, starting as a Village Voice culture reporter in 1969. In this deeply personal and literary appreciation, and as Dylan continues to tour and compose new songs, still refusing to play old songs the old way, Rosenbaum offers a moving and involving portrait of an icon who may have been more constant than it appeared after all.

"A spellbinding, passionate, and unprecedented deep dive into the ever-changing but ever-radical life and career of the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter, from his rural Minnesota upbringing through his sofa-surfing days in Greenwich Village through his many tumultuous conversions - to electric guitars and country music and Christianity and on ... "One of the most original journalists and writers of our time." -David Remnick Renowned culture critic Ron Rosenbaum discovered not only the world-changing music of early Bob Dylan, but the man himself, in the 1960s, when Rosenbaum was a young journalist living in Greenwich Village just around the corner from Dylan, and working for the legendary alt-weekly, The Village Voice. Rosenbaum, in fact, became the Voice's de facto Dylan reporter. It was the time, and the place, where an essential idea of Dylan's character was formed - that of the whip-smart, angry, too-cool-for-school icon, a kind of James Dean in denim. The raspy voice, not to mention the brilliantly cutting lyricism, only somehow added to his cultural dangerousness. The Dylan, in other words, recently portrayed in the hit movie A Complete Unknown. But Dylan has had many changes of character since then. There was the smoother-voiced country crooner of Nashville Skyline; the white-faced ringmaster of the Rolling Thunder Review; the enraged proselytizer who saw Jesus in a Tucson motel room and converted to Christianity ... and more. And throughout, the famously recalcitrant Dylan would tell people, "I'm not that person anymore," whatever previous character he was asked about. In a probing and personal literary appreciation, Rosenbaum examines what Dylan nonetheless revealed about himself in his lyrics and writings, and his infrequent interviews. Rosenbaum, in fact, was one of the few to interview Dylan in those years, and may own the record for longest interview, sitting down for ten days with Dylan for a Playboy interview in 1978"-- Provided by publisher.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

Preface (xi)
Chapter 1 Both Sides Now (3)
Chapter 2 In Which the Author Eats a Grilled Cheese Sandwich with Bob Dylan and Asks Him about God (33)
Chapter 3 "Screaming Sounds Inside the Barn" (59)
Chapter 4 "Hitler WAS History": Dylan's Argument with God (79)
Chapter 5 Thaddeus Stevens and Ellen Willis (111)
Chapter 6 "That Thin, That Wild Mercury Sound" (125)
Chapter 7 Christ / Antichrist (135)
Chapter 8 Dylan's Escape: The Bayou Revelations of Sun Pie (149)
Chapter 9 God and Willy Loman (177)
Chapter 10 Love and Other Variants (199)
Chapter 11 Woody vs. Buddy: The Great Transmittal (213)
Chapter 12 Sincerity vs. Authenticity (227)
Chapter 13 Late Dylan-or, the Dylan Nobody Knows (235)
Chapter 14 The Gates of Sweden (263)
Chapter 15 Dylans Last Album (275)
Acknowledgments (287)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Literary critic Rosenbaum (In Defense of Love) takes a winding, rhapsodic look at Bob Dylan's life and work. In 1977, Rosenbaum conducted a weeklong interview with Dylan, who was working on Renaldo and Clara, a 1978 film that received dismal reviews and was quickly pulled from theaters. That disappointment, Rosenbaum suggests, in combination with Dylan's impending divorce and exhaustion, precipitated a "profound spiritual crack up" wherein he encountered a vision of Jesus in a Tucson motel and became a born-again Christian. By the early 1980s, Dylan had "recovered" and returned to secular Judaism, moving on from "scolding, sermonic" performances to an "utterly unexpected" songwriting style that "entangled" thoughts and ideas without totally refusing coherence. The author also highlights Dylan's return to metaphysical themes, a lifelong focus evident in such songs as "Desolation Row." With a digressive style that vacillates from barroom banter to academic criticism, Rosenbaum ranges far and wide across Dylan's oeuvre, holding forth not only on the possible origins of his "mystical" leanings but also his voice and mannerisms ("I'm prepared to argue that no one today smokes cigarettes more expressively than Bob Dylan"). In his obsessive effort to understand his subject, Rosenbaum vividly--if sometimes eccentrically--succeeds in capturing what it means to be a Dylan devotee, burdened with awe, ambivalence, and an overload of unanswered questions. It's a trip. (Oct.)

Booklist Review

In 1977, journalist Rosenbaum interviewed Bob Dylan over a 10-day stretch--reportedly the longest interview the singer ever gave--in a Warner Bros. back lot as Dylan was going over the footage of his widely panned film, Renaldo and Clara (Rosenbaum makes a case for its rerelease). Rosenbaum's intention, he says, is to write a book not only for Dylanologists but also for those "who wonder what the fuss is about." In this "kind of biography," Rosenbaum focuses on particular aspects of Dylan's songwriting and asks, What makes Dylan Dylan? Rosenbaum discusses Dylan and the Holocaust, his northern Midwest sensibility, his Jesus period, his prophetic vision and poetic genius, and his ability to create Jewish art "with a wide multicultural reach." Influences also play a key role. Rosenbaum has a subtle and sly sense of humor, as when he notes that Dylan has a "rusty ore-cart voice that still drives some people mad" and the time he "caused a tempest in a cappuccino cup" when he left the folk scene. An idiosyncratic discussion of Dylan's artistry and impact on mainstream culture.

Kirkus Book Review

A counterintuitive look at the underlying, too-little-understood themes of a shape-shifter's work. Rosenbaum's "Sort of Biography" proposes that Bob Dylan's work is influenced, however subconsciously, by "theodicy," an argument with God over the justification of evil in the world in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Equally inventively, the author proposes that the Nobel Prize winner's constant reinvention is foreshadowed by the "discontinuity of selves" described by Jorge Luis Borges. Everything old is new again. These are dizzying, certainly arguable theories, but one would expect no less from Rosenbaum, an eclectic New Journalist whose previous work includesExplaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, which may help explain his theological bent here, and anEsquire piece on "phone phreaks" that reportedly inspired Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak back in the day. Rosenbaum previously interviewed Dylan as the singer was editing his four-hour epic,Renaldo and Clara, in which Dylan identified the "thin, wild mercury sound'' he was seeking, in a phrase that's since become the lodestone for innumerable blogs. It's a jumping-off point for this book, which avoids the temptations of conventional recitations of the singer's life and career and the nodular exegeses of the "Bobolators" who lose objectivity in the pursuit of obsessed fandom. In a turn of thought that may seem equally obsessive, the author denounces Dylan's ChristianSlow Train Coming era as the byproduct of a "mind-control…brainwashing cult," though it might be equally valid to acknowledge it as a response to the personal challenges he was facing at the time. Regardless, it's a pleasure to encounter a mind as brilliant and unpredictable as its subject. An essential, contrarian volume that offers rare insights and rewarding perspectives. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.