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BOOK R€MI€WSSOMEDAY I MAY BE HUNG AS A THIEFBob Dylan: ARetrospective” - edited Craig McGregor./I bridged Picador edition 1975.Our of all the people who just lay around and ask why? How many do you figure really want to know?” (Bob Dylan in the Playboy ”Interview,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 slate 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 wearied,.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 Cheetair (1967):“Instead of an image, Dylan has created a magic theatre in which the public gets lost willy nilly . .. Reading Boh 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 beeinnine and I he parden hasmay 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?- sorta 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 csoterica (sic) to be foundoutside the English Lit. section of a university library. Goldberg must have busted a gut writing the thing - 1 kind of respected the academic turmoil cumcosmic heights he must havestruggled with He genuinely digs SOMETHING about Dylan— but when someone who has -for years, been simply listening to that chceecgrater 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 ...” that someone 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 andbunch 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 just not a schoolteacher . . .” and , . . all this talk about long hair 'is just 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 lake 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 satislyingly 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
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Kensington Tharunka
Kensington, New South Wales, AU
Wed, Oct 08, 1975
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