The second volume of Paul Williams' widely acclaimed writings on the music and performances of Bob Dylan. The most lucid and informed interpretation available of the mature work of this major twentieth century artist, who Williams regards as comparable to Joyce, Chaplin and Picasso.
"The most infectiously enthusiastic introduction to Dylan yet"
-David Sexton, Times Literary Supplement
"The only Dylan book that matters"
-San Francisco Chronicle
"One of the only two truly indispensable books about Dylan that have yet been written"
-John Hinchey, The Telegraph
"That rarest of Dylan books, a substantial, compelling study"
-David Fricke, Rolling Stone
"Pinpoints what drives Dylan and what made him what he is today"
-Paul Honeyford, Vox
"Williams remains the most eminently readable of all the Dylan commentators"
-Record Collector
Paul Williams was the founder of Crawdaddy!, the first American rock music magazine. He has also written eighteen books. His writing has been described by Rolling Stone as... "head and shoulders and arms and maybe even legs above everyone else...smart, daring, knowledgeable, and he writes like a whiz. The essential oils of rock permeate his every sentence."
Excerpt
Dylan is challenging himself and his band, looking to create an entirely new show and new sound to reflect the new moment he finds himself in, emotionally and creatively. Among the other noises crowding him from within and without, Dylan had the recent (April 9) suicide of Phil Ochs to contend with: Ochs, a tortured and sometimes violently crazed man during his last sad months, had an obsessive, competitive love/hate relationship with Dylan (largely in his own mind, though Dylan was not above twisting the knife in public, responding to Ochs' goading with cool, vicious putdowns) going back to the Sixties and the Village folk scene. Ochs told friends that not being included in the Rolling Thunder Revue was the final blow for him, thus setting Dylan up as "responsible" for his death (though Ochs was in no condition to be included on anyone's tour). Dylan's long slow break-up with Sara had obviously reached the fire and brimstone stage, and, according to Spitz, he was juggling wife, family, and new girlfriend and going through at least a fifth of bourbon a day. "Right now I've got not much to lose," he sings in the Lakeland "If You See Her," and that seems a pretty good summation of the place Dylan was performing from each night of this 1976 tour.
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The movie's triumph is that it allows spirit, not some thinking filmmaker, to be in control, and a (still life) portrait of spirit in motion is what results. The same with Renaldo's blue hat, symbol of performance ("who's Dylan?" "he's the one with the hat"), moving through the scenes (so nice the dissolve from Phil Ochs putting it on his head - "the hat, Bobbie!" - to hat on table in Yetnikoff's office, one feels the camera following the hat and understands therefore how we got here), sometimes the flower's on the hat -"