A spellbinding, passionate, and unprecedented deep dive into the ever-changing but ever-radical life and career of the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter, from his rural Minnesota upbringing through his sofa-surfing days in Greenwich Village through his many tumultuous conversions -- to electric guitars and country music and Christianity and on . . . "One of the most original journalists and writers of our time.” –David Remnick Renowned culture critic Ron Rosenbaum discovered not only the world-changing music of early Bob Dylan, but the man himself, in the 1960s, when Rosenbaum was a young journalist living in Greenwich Village just around the corner from Dylan, and working for the legendary alt-weekly, It was the time, and the place, where an essential idea of Dylan''s character was formed -- that of the whip-smart, angry, too-cool-for-school icon, a kind of James Dean in denim. The raspy voice, not to mention the brilliantly cutting lyricism, only somehow added to his cultural dangerousness. The Dylan, in other words, recently portrayed in the hit movie But Dylan has had many changes of character since then. There was the smoother-voiced country crooner of In a probing and personal literary appreciation, Rosenbaum examines what Dylan nonetheless revealed about himself in his lyrics and writings, and his infrequent interviews. Rosenbaum, in fact, was one of the few to interview Dylan in those years, and may own the record for longest interview, sitting down for ten days with Dylan for a Playboy interview in 1978. His history with Dylan prompts Rosenbaum to discuss a side of Dylan largely ignored for fear of controversy. What sparked his various conversions? What precisely did Dylan''s Jewishness, his mysticism, and his visits with psychics have to do with it all? Rosenbaum also offers a key to reading Dylan’s late career lyrics, which some have called unintelligible. As Dylan continues to tour the world nonstop with his band and continues to compose new songs, while refusing to play old songs the same way, Rosenbaum offers a moving and involving portrait of an icon who may have been more constant than it appeared....

Autorentext

Ron Rosenbaum is a long-time journalist and columnist who has written for the Village Voice, New York Observer, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and Slate. He is the author of The Shakespeare Wars as well as the New York Times bestseller Explaining Hitler, which was also a New York Times Notable book of the year.

Zusammenfassung
In the wake of the recent hit biopic A Complete Unknown, this probing appreciation asks: Do the lyrics of Bob Dylan tell the true story of the ever-changing, ever-radical life and career of the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter?

In a dingy windowless bungalow on the Warner Brothers back lot in Hollywood in 1977, in the midst of what may have been the longest interview he ever gave (it stretched over ten days), a chain-smoking Bob Dylan confessed to journalist Ron Rosenbaum that he was troubled by something missing from his music. Dylan — who was editing a dramatic movie based on his life, even as his life seemed to be falling apart — told Rosenbaum there was a sound he was after that he’d only come close to on one record so far. The sound, he told Rosenbaum, was of “thin, wild mercury.”

This is a book that captures the elusive mercurial artist and his work in a way no other has — a vivid, compelling pursuit of Dylan, successively a hipster folkie, a Greenwich Village sparkplug of a cultural revolution, who plugged into an amplifier to drive away folkie solemnity, then became a countrified crooner, the man who, just months after Rosenbaum’s interview, became a fire-breathing, proselytizing Christian . . . before returning to being a non-religious Jew.

What was behind it all, Rosenbaum asks, and how can we understand him through his lyrics? Tracing it from Dylan’s childhood — when his father hired a Brooklyn rabbi to come to remote Minnesota to prepare his son for his bar mitzvah — through the still touring singer’s late, often inscrutable lyrics, Rosenbaum probes Dylan’s “argument with God,” his differentiation between authenticity and sincerity, and his relentless heretical stances.

Of course, complicating matters for anyone trying to trace the development of Dylan and his life’s work is Dylan’s recurrent denial of the continuity of self. (Whenever asked why he doesn’t sing the old songs the same way as on the record, Dylan typically responds with an irritated, “That’s not me.”)

Ron Rosenbaum has covered Dylan for almost the entirety of his — and Dylan’s — career, starting as a Village Voice culture reporter in 1969. In this deeply personal and literary appreciation, and as Dylan continues to tour and compose new songs, still refusing to play old songs the old way, Rosenbaum offers a moving and involving portrait of an icon who may have been more constant than it appeared after all.