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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Two new books make it clear why Bob Dylan had to ditch the phony, self-righteous Greenwich Village folk scene.
May 14, 2001 | Of all the American musical subcultures of the past century, the most boring was the so-called folk scene centered in Greenwich Village coffeehouses during the 1950s and early 1960s. Anyone who has ever been subjected to the self-righteousness of the politics and to the fake authenticity of the music from that time and place will love Howard Sounes' "Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan" and David Hajdu's "Positively Fourth Street: The Life and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña" -- because everyone who had anything to do with the scene gets thoroughly and satisfyingly trashed and exposed for the pretentious, self-centered phonies they were. Sounes' book has the definite virtue of being the last one you'll ever need to read about Dylan (unless you think that the Oscar Dylan just won signals yet another creative outpouring at this late stage in his life), while Hajdu's is more openly malicious and thus more fun.
Sounes certainly faced the greater challenge. The literature available on Dylan is almost certainly more voluminous than that on any figure in popular music, and the prospect of finding new and juicy bits must have at first seemed daunting. But patience and persistence have been rewarded, and those interested will be able to read about the secret marriage and family that Dylan has succeeded in keeping from the world until now. Frankly, though, none of the information about the hidden family is nearly so interesting as the revelations from Dylan's children by other women. They testify that Bob, whatever his failures as a husband, was a good and devoted father.
What Sounes doesn't seem to understand is that the principal reason Dylan was able to keep his later marriage from the press is that, despite a handful of truly great songs such as "Blind Willie McTell" in 1983 and four or five tracks from the surprising "Time Out of Mind" album (1997), Dylan's music over the past two decades hasn't been interesting enough to provoke much media coverage. Like Louis Armstrong from the '40s to the '60s, Dylan has been living for a long time in the twilight realm of the praised but unheard. (Allen St. John, when he was reviewing albums for Stereophile, bet me that he could name 10 singer-songwriter rockers whose work over the last quarter-century was more interesting than Dylan's during the same period. He named Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Van Morrison, Elvis Costello, Lou Reed, Randy Newman, Paul Simon, Richard Thompson, Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits. I paid up.)
Unfortunately, Sounes seems to think that his job isn't just "the challenge of writing a major biography" but also writing one "that conveys the full grandeur of Bob Dylan's artistic achievement." This is a mistake; Sounes is a fan, not a critic, and he can't really distinguish the good Dylan albums from the bad ones except by sales. As a result, a great deal of time is wasted correcting the record on which ex-girlfriends or Village hangers-on inspired which venomous lyrics before Sounes gets to the actual biographical parts.
