Everyone remembers their first Dylan concert. Mine was historic: When Dylan switched guitars, from acoustic to electric, when crowds stormed the stage in protest. No, this was not the more famous concert in Newport. This was a few days later, in Forest Hills. A friend and I, two immigrant teens took the subway from Brooklyn to Queens to find America. Up until that day, Dylan was to me an anti-war poet/ a scratchy singer in the manner of Phil Ochs. But that day the Dylan fans were waging their own war against HIM, booing, unseating, moving forward as a mob.
It was clear: Dylan mattered. But the question was, did the rage matter to him? If it did, he took the advice of The Beatles, who advised, ‘Don’t worry about the fans, they will come back.’ And, of course, the rest is, as they say, history.
Cut to Tulsa, May 2022. The opening of The Bob Dylan Center. Why Tulsa, everyone asked. Because his archive could be housed right next door to his hero’s Woody Guthrie. Parties, music, academic meetings marked the occasion. Visiting, I could see a photograph from the concert of my youth amid the incredible collection of guitars, vinyl, notebooks, artwork—memorabilia of a creative life. And now readers of Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine, edited by Mark Davidson and Fishel, can revel in their own nostalgia and more in this elegant, meaty tome—a chronology of the archival Tulsa haul, a backstory for a great biography. The publishers at Callaway took the step of creating a lengthy and helpful index.
To the photos with EVERYONE: Joan Baez, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Robbie Robertson, Allen Ginsberg, Barack Obama, footage from D. A. Pennebaker, torn ticket stubs, song lists, lyrics, stuff, add smart essays by Greil Marcus, Lucy Sante, Raymond Foye, Richard Hell limning Dylan’s writing process from foundational tapes to recordings and artifacts. Read a facsimile of Dylan’s essay on Jimi Hendrix. Peter Carey’s grim look at Tulsa’s racial divide, how the famed riots serve up classic Dylan material. A section on Dylan and the Beats illuminates the formative literature and influence that would lead to song themes and his novel Tarantula. Michael McClure, Peter Orlovsky, as well as Ginsberg were certainly on his road, but Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was a main attraction when he first arrived in the Village for the free-wheeling character based on Neal Cassady, whose amorality he would later reject.
Word in Tulsa was he never laid those eyes on the Archive, not even when he came to town to play. This book, a tribute to his art, should matter to him. But even if he turns away in the manner of his Nobel Prize for Literature, it’s a rich read and the deepest dive into his work to date.
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