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BOOK lVJKWSSOMEDAY I MAY BE HUNG AS A THIEFBob Dylan: ARetrospective” - edited Craig McGregor.Abridged Picador edition 19.75.Our of ail the people who just lay around and ask why? How many do you figure really want to know7” (Bob Dylan in (he ''PlayboyInterview,The man was putting them down rather well at this stage. I’m glad he said it - sitting down to review yet another book about Dylan requires, firstly, the mental state of a child, and secondly, a good opening line. I guess that’s what you do when you pick up one of these books - you're feeling appropriately trendy, and you wanna mumble to yourself “why? why? why?” about the Man and his life and what he has for breakfast and all those brilliant lines in his songs. Your curiosity is aroused, and so you get yourself a good open fire/mind and travel backwards into the sixties around New York. And you reach the last page (somewhat wcaned,_a little more knowledgeable, a lot more confused) and you think: WHY THE FUCK DID THEY EVEN TRY?Ellen Willis said in her article from ''Cheetah'’ (1967):“Instead of an image, Dylan has created a magic theatre in which the public gets lost willy nilly . .. Reading Bob Dylan A Retrospective”, one docs tend to wander up the garden path for a while, only to find a blank wall at the other end. So you retrace your steps, arrive back at the beginning, and the garden has vanished, to be replaced by a dying cabbage patch, or a desert full of empty gin bottles- orDAVE’S MOVIES AT ROMAFridays Sot unlays 10.50pm Oct 10/11: Kurt Vonnegut's •‘SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE”Oct 17/18; Peter Cook, Dudley Moore Barry Humphries “BEDAZZLEDNOW AT THE ROM A CINEMAtbetween Bathurst Liverpool)tbetween Bathurst Livcrpc628 Georee StStudent ConceptionsLATE SHOW at the AUSTRALIAFrt and Sot 10.30pm Oct lOth/llth - Take » trip Into terro see SISTERS (M)October 17th/18th — Glenda Jackson with Oliver Reed in THE TRIPLE ECHO lt;M)59 GoulDurn St. 211-5220-(Student concessions)Happy Hunting Ground for Students’Cash Discount. Alternative Books. Cards and Posters.OXFORD BOOKSHOP161 Oxford St-(near Taylor Sq.)Ph 335831.may be an insurmountable Himalaya of words.Some of the words in this book make sense to you, now, here in the year of regression 1975. Others, you feel, might have made sense back in 1966/68/69, but somehow the language has changed and you feci uncomfortably foreign (did they really worry about Dylan’s hair being “long”? and what in the name of god is a “combo”?- sort a makes you feel your youth ...) and may be a bit smug and amused at all those journalists running around with fogged up brains and contact lenses that just don't FIT the deadshits. For example, Steven Goldberg (1970 Saturday Review) rates nearly 15 pages of the most amazing collection of esoterica (sic) to be found outside the English Lit. section of a university library. Goldberg must have busted a gut writing the thing - I kind of respected the academic turmoil cum cosmic heights he must have struggled with He genuinely digs SOMETHING about Dylan— but when someone who 1ms — for years, been simply listening to that checeegrater voice mixing words like a good barman suddenly reads:. . (Dylan) stands at the vortex: when the philosophical, psychological, and scientific lines of thought are followed to the point where each becomes a cul-de-sac, as logic without faith eventually must, Dylan is there to sing his songs thatsomeone becomes more than a little indigested. Maybe if you’ve been drowning in Arts for the last five years or something, you’ll dig it. However, if you like your windows clean and your mind games and other shit kept in the toilet-bowl, you’ll discover that a good third of this book produces an unsteadying biliousness.But - CONTROL! Before you chuck your 280 or-so pages of paperback into the depths of the broom cupboard, or chop it up for tomorrow’s sandwiches, get your teeth into all the interviews. There are eight one or two only short, others tend towards raves of the three hour variety, The “Rolling Stone interview is Dylan at his most conversational basic. Jann Wenner says Bob was very cautious in everything he said and took a long lime between questions to phrase exactly what he wanted to say, nothing more and sometimes a little, less . . . hut (he was hip. ” (This is 1969, don’t forget . . .) At the other end of insanity, the “Playboy” interview with Nat lientoff in '66 saw my rihs and brain really hurting . . . lientoff understatedly describes Dylan’s answers as a bit surrealist . . .” Personally, 1 would imagine Hentoff went out that night and wrote himself off on straight Scotch or something. I mean, wouldn’t you if this guy answered your (very straight) questions with 'Folk music is aCVUVCV IT 11 MM A L'CPC t'C\ nllHD A TI\/Pbunch of fat people ” and Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer anymore than I’m an ashtray. I mean it's obvious to anyone who’s ever slept in the back seat of a car that I’m fust not a schoolteacher ...” and . . . all this talk about long hair 'is fust a trick. It’s been thought up by men and women who look like cigars - the anti-happiness committee . . . you can tell who they are: they’re always currying calendars, guns or scissors ...If you had a brain that could natter to itself like that for hours on end, plus reap millions of bucks from it, you’d have no qualms about slipping middle-America a multimedia mickey finn either, now would you?Anyway, blunder through ‘‘Bob Dylan: A Retrospective (edited by our very own Craig McGregor, the Antipodean trendy who at least knows how to dig up the best and the oddest and the most laughable from The Archives all at once). There’s bound to be something you can take as gospel, which is one of those little securities in life - I mean, if you can’t quote a single line of crap about that poor Zimmerman bastard, you may as well join the Public Service after all. If nothing else, you'll end up convinced of at least three (three's that satisfyingly stable number, remember . . .) — one: Living in America in the Sixties must surely have been even more peculiar than now; two: that free-lance journalists, while they do seem to try hard, must all commit suicide/go on the pension before they’re forty; and three: that Dylan, con-artist that he may be, Is no more insane and no less together in the head than any other genius.Victoria Reynolds Fr~
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Kensington Tharunka
Kensington, New South Wales, AU
Wed, Oct 08, 1975
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