Bob Dylan is shown here doing his famous Bette Davis impression, to the obvious delight of Allen Ginsberg and obvious despair of aging boytoy Peter Orlovsky. The photo illustrates an extract in the New Yorker from Chapter 2 of Sean Wilentz’s upcoming doorstop/blockbuster Bob Dylan in America.
I was never a Dylan guy at all, not by a mile, so even this extract of a chapter was way too much Bob for me, but it makes interesting skimming if not reading, giving numerous examples of Bob’s name-dropping oneupsmanship, notably when Bob bemoans the agony of living in a country where it’s commonly believed that “Norman Mailer is more important than Hank Williams”—likely payback for a comment from an obviously irritated that is to say jealous Norman that “if Bob Dylan is a great poet so is Cassius Clay [Muhammad Ali]”—a line that poor Norman would live to eat, figuratively if not literally, when, desperate for a byline, he would proclaim a punchdrunk, brain-damaged Ali as “the spirit of the age” (Dylan of course he would continue to ignore, unwilling to give the time of day to a scrawny Jewish kid who couldn’t head-butt his way out of a paper bag).
It’s a measure of the stunning devotion that Dylan continues to invoke in his admirers that Wilentz can maintain his obsession with Dylan and his work despite acknowledging Dylan’s absolutely relentless pursuit of fame, despite acknowledging his massive insensitivity to anyone close to him, and despite, well, despite reading all the pathetic shit Dylan wrote—despite everything, Wilentz can still go out and absolutely bust his ass to “explicate” it all. You don’t need to explicate bullshit, Sean. It fucking stands on its own. It explains itself.
Afterwords
While I enjoyed some of Dylan’s songs, I always disliked his arrogance intensely. This, I suspect, is what his true fans most admired. I reviewed D.A. Pennepacker’s early documentary on Dylan, Don’t Look Back, here.
[NOTE: I make some, but not all, of the same jokes in both pieces.]
