Three Articles about Bob Dylan and Fandom

November 1, 2014 4:37 AM

The Halloween Concert That Reinvented Bob Dylan by Sean Wilentz (an excerpt from his Bob Dylan in America) is an article about Dylan's concert in New York's Philharmonic Hall fifty years ago yesterday, which was released ten years ago in Bob Dylan's Bootlegs series. Music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, not the super-fan Wilentz is, wrote about another defining event in Dylan's career, his life in Woodstock, playing music along with The Band. Why did Dylan go to Woodstock? To flee his fans, who have been the subject of a recent book, The Dylanologists by David Kinney, which was reviewed at length by Ian Crouch in The New Yorker.
posted by Kattullus (4 comments total)

That Sasha Frere-Jones article was a pleasant surprise. I'm not normally a fan of his writing, and I do like reading about Bob Dylan (I still reread from time to time this Alex Ross piece from 1999), so I was really Frere-Jones article turned out so well.
posted by Nevin at 9:02 AM on November 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

If you don't have a New Yorker subscription, you can read Ross's article here.
posted by Kattullus at 12:22 PM on November 1, 2014

I find that if you think of "Gotta Serve Somebody" as absurdist gospel, it works. The lyrics are hilarious, in the context of what's typical for the genre. The nasty hectoring comes later in the album. (Also, what does fitting or not fitting in with Brooklyn of the late '70s have to do with "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35," which was recorded in a studio setting in Nashville and is partly an odd-duck Dixieland homage? Is fitting in with gritty urban settings the gold standard? That hippies latched onto an album recorded with professional country session players in Nashville wasn't Bob Dylan's fault anyway.)
posted by raysmj at 1:07 PM on November 1, 2014

Huh, I just came across the same idea in the Alex Ross article as in the Wilentz piece.

Ross: ...his best political songs, such as "The Lonesome Death of Hattic Carroll," were the character-driven ones.

Wilentz: His most powerful political material often involved human-sized stories, like “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.”
posted by Kattullus at 1:34 PM on November 1, 2014 [1 favorite]