Don't look back

A good deal of time is wasted, too, on sketchy summaries of the politics and culture of the times. Trying to track the origins of Dylan's music, Sounes tells us piously that "Bob respected African American people from the start, partly because they were the originators of much of the music he loved." (Sounes could have written liner notes for Peter, Paul and Mary albums.) Here's how he describes the cultural and political backdrop that Dylan encountered when he came to the Village: "John F. Kennedy was newly sworn in as President; there were serious racial problems in the southern states and real fears that the Cold War could escalate into world war. In this social climate, folk music became highly popular." OK, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that Dylan could have stayed home in Hibbing, Minn., and still known all that.

Sounes is dogged and sincere in his pursuit of Dylan and the world he emerged from, but Bob Dylan -- the Bob Dylan who, when he first heard Elvis' voice, "just knew I wasn't going to work for anybody and nobody was ever gonna be my boss" -- never quite seems to inhabit the book. Simply put, "Down the Road" never rocks, primarily because Sounes doesn't seem to really, well, dig the music.

He writes, "Rock 'n' roll, a form of music that had begun in America most popularly in the 1950s with artists like Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and Little Richard, had dwindled away into formulaic top-forty in its native country. The Beatles, however ... had come from Liverpool to prove in the space of one year that this form of music could still be exciting and hugely popular." This sounds like a space alien trying to explain to another space alien about rock 'n' roll, and it's nonsense; the early '60s were a time of Sam Cooke and Gene Pitney and Dion and the Shirelles and the Beach Boys and the Drifters and Del Shannon; of the great Jackie Wilson, of Phil Spector and of early Motown; of "Louie, Louie" and "It's My Party" and "Twist and Shout." There was nothing wrong with early-'60s rock; if anything, it was a richer and more varied music than it was the day Buddy Holly died.

Dylan and the Beatles didn't "save" anything. What Dylan and the Beatles (and later the Dylan-influenced Beatles and the Beatles-influenced Dylan) did was to set the stage for a rock music that could be appreciated by older, college-age kids who had grown up on Buddy Holly and wanted something that reflected the more complex universe they now lived in. Dylan didn't save rock 'n' roll; it was rock 'n' roll that saved Dylan, saved him from a lifetime of godawful, humorless "protest" music. Or, in the revelatory words of rock critic Lester Bangs: "He wanted to be Elvis, but there was an opening for Woody Guthrie so he took it."

Sounes, to his credit, does dispense with several of the old Dylan-folkie myths, particularly the ones concocted by Mr. Zimmerman himself. Far from being Guthrie's anointed successor, it appears that Dylan, in the words of one of Guthrie's old friends, "was just another visitor ... I don't think Woody thought anything about him." (Bangs, again: "Dylan faked his whole career; the only difference was that he used to be good at it and now he sucks." Bangs wrote that, by the way, in 1977.) The supposed outrage exhibited by fans when Dylan "went electric" at the Newport Folk Festival was, it turns out, mostly disgust over the quality of the sound system. And -- as if anyone who actually listens to those dreary early records needs to be told -- Bob Dylan was never very political. It's just that most fans and critics were afraid to take him at his word when he scandalized Joan Baez by telling her that he wrote "Masters of War" because he thought it would sell.

Next Page: Why Dylan had to dump Baez

• View blog reactions