I will never be able to express in words, what a touchstone Bob Dylan has been in my life. A junior high teacher (yeah, I’m older than the title middle school) once called me a Dylanologist, and my world glowed. My older sister had given me his first greatest hits album, and that pulled me away from Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, as well as the Baja Marimba Band. I went from staring at the lusty album cover for “Whipped Cream & Other Delights,” that featured a sexy woman covered in whipped cream, to looking at Bob’s frizzy hair and listened to his lyrics. Wow, man. A close friend of mine just loved the lyrics about “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” for the sing-along line of “Everybody must get stoned” even though we weren’t getting stoned yet … what can I say, we were kids, and it was an isolated part of Vermont.
Oh, yeah, this is about the book. In its nearly 700 pages long, it covers the years 1961 to 2012, from his first album, Bob Dylan, to the album Tempest. The clarity, the simplicity, of the book is that it features a picture of the album cover, the title of the album, followed by the lyric to each song. If you want more information about the man and the meanings, you must go to the hundreds of other Dylan books.
Dylan has never seen his words as cast in stone, they were always changeable, malleable, and if you see him sing the same song in concert three times, most likely the songs will always be different. He plays with his songs. He amuses himself. Most of the time, it seems he doesn’t care to fulfill other people’s expectations about a song or himself. I’ve been to concerts where he performs the entire show with his back to the crowd. He’s Dylan. If you like Dylan great, if you don’t, maybe you will next time. Bob the chameleon.
I could quote my favorite songs to you, but why do that? The songs stand on their own. I think that Dylan is like life, in that he isn’t here to please you, he’s just doing his thing, and if you love his work, great. If you don’t care for it, it will still be the same, he will still do what he wants. It’s all about life. ( )