Volume 52, Number 4 · March 10, 2005
'I Is Someone Else'
By Luc Sante
Chronicles, Volume One
by Bob Dylan
Simon and Schuster, 293 pp., $24.00
Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader
edited by Benjamin Hedin
Norton, 336 pp., $24.95
Lyrics: 1962–2001
by Bob Dylan
Simon and Schuster, 610 pp., $45.00
Tarantula
by Bob Dylan
Scribner, 137 pp., $14.00 (paper)
Be careful what you wish for, the cliché goes. Having aspired from early youth to become stars, people who achieve that status suddenly find themselves imprisoned, unable to walk down the street without being importuned by strangers. The higher their name floats, the greater the levy imposed, the less of ordinary life they can enjoy. In his memoir, Bob Dylan never precisely articulates the ambition that brought him to New York City from northern Minnesota in 1961, maybe because it felt improbable even to him at the time. Nominally, he was angling for Leading Young Folksinger, which was a plausible goal then, when every college town had three or four coffeehouses and each one had its Hootenanny night, and when performers who wowed the crowds on that circuit went on to make records that sometimes sold in the thousands. But from the beginning Dylan had his sights set much higher: the world, glory, eternity—ambitions laughably incommensurate with the modest confines of American folk music. He got his wish, in spades. He achieved Leading Young Folksinger status almost immediately, then was quickly promoted to poet, oracle, conscience of his generation, and, in a lateral move, pop star.
Review, 6495 words
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