CHAPTER ONE – TIME IS AN ENEMY
1.According to the indefatigable fans who insist on keeping count, Dylan’s last concert of 2012 – in Brooklyn, New York, on 21 November – was performance number 2,480 in the unending tour. The first show is dated to 7 June 1988. The lives devoted to these studies are not refundable.
2.The Hearst Greek Theatre, 19 October 2012. Madonna had just picked up $7 million for a couple of nights’ work in Las Vegas during the previous week.
3.Edition of 27 September 2012.
4.‘We’re all familiar with Fitzgerald saying that there are no second acts in American lives and this clearly disproves that.’ (Greil Marcus, nbcnews.com, May 2011.) ‘When F. Scott Fitzgerald declared that “there are no second acts in American lives,” he obviously hadn’t envisioned the existence of Bob Dylan.’ (Douglas Heselgrave, www. musicbox-online.com, January 2009.) And so on.
5.‘Bob Dylan’s Invisible Republic: Interview with Greil Marcus’, Paolo Vites, Jam magazine (Italy), 1997.
6.Allen Ginsberg: Beat Poet (2010), p. 460.
7.The verses come, respectively, from the songs ‘Narrow Way’, ‘Pay in Blood’ and ‘Tempest’.
8.Edition of 27 September 2012.
CHAPTER TWO – WRITTEN IN MY SOUL
1.See Bert Cartwright’s ‘The Mysterious Norman Raeben’ in Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan (1990), ed. John Bauldie.
2.That Dylan made an editorial choice is not seriously in doubt. Two or three of the notebook’s unused blues songs would have given him enough for a double album. Blonde on Blonde, the most famous double-disc set of them all, runs to just under 73 minutes. Clearly, the notebook overmatter was not up to scratch, or a distraction from Dylan’s purpose. In years to come he would be less scrupulous. In 1988, in arid times, Down in the Groove, barely 32 empty minutes long, would be deemed fit for release.
3.Down the Highway (2002, paperback ed.), p. 332.
4.Dylan’s 1964 poem acquired a curious history of its own. The actor-singer Ben (Benito) Carruthers, who had travelled with him in Europe that year, set an adapted version of the piece to music and released it as a UK single in the summer of 1965. The Dylan/Carruthers ‘song’ was in turn recorded by Fairport Convention for their eponymous first album in 1968. Richard Thompson was still performing this version in 2004.
CHAPTER THREE – A WANDERER BY TRADE
1.Foreword to Sam Shepard’s The Rolling Thunder Logbook (1977, reissued 2004), p.viii.
2.‘Patti Smith’ by Barry Miles, from the anthology Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan (1990), ed. John Bauldie.
3.The first pair of quotations appeared in the issue of 18 December 1975. Ginsberg’s remark was reported by Nat Hentoff in the issue of 15 January 1976.
4.‘Jacques Levy and the Desire collaboration’, first published in the British fan magazine The Telegraph in April of 1983, reprinted in All Across the Telegraph: A Bob Dylan Handbook (1987), edited by Michael Gray and John Bauldie.
5.www.reddit.com. The exchanges, in one of the site’s regular ‘Ask Me Anything’ features devoted to almost-live exchanges between notable individuals and the public, appeared on 14 November 2012.
6.On the Road with Bob Dylan (1978, reissued 2002), Chapter 1.
7.SongTalk, winter issue, 1991.
8.See, if you truly must, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003) takes certain of these speculations to their preposterous conclusions. An equally good Provençal fairy tale holds that the Romani are survivors of Atlantis who clambered ashore locally.
9.See, for example, p. 247 of Tim Dunn’s daunting The Bob Dylan Copyright Files 1962–2007 (2008) as it concerns the ownership of the song ‘Isis’. Since Dylan would surrender ‘an undivided fifty percent (50%) of his fractional interest’ in such works in January 1978 as part of the settlement made on Sara Dylan, he actually wound up making less from the writing deal than Levy. In 2012, equally, the director’s son would tell his online audience that his father had earned little for his efforts.
10.Edition of December 1977.
11.Sam Shepard, The Rolling Thunder Logbook (1977, reissued 2004).
12.‘Rita May’ would also turn up on the 1978 three-disc compilation Masterpieces, a ‘greatest-hits’ package sold to Dylan fans in Japan and Australia – and to those among us prepared to pay absurd import prices for a couple of unfamiliar tracks.
13.See the Desire session notes at Olof Björner’s inestimable resource bjorner.com.
14.Dr Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter LLD (with Ken Klonsky), Eye of the Hurricane: My Path from Darkness to Freedom (2011). Klonsky’s introduction to the tale of a ‘spiritual journey’ concedes of Carter: ‘There are those who focus on his character flaws, his difficult past, his long-windedness. He owns up to it all, often good-naturedly.’
15.The Sixteenth Round, p. 15.
16.Ibid., p. 42.
17.Larry Sloman, Rolling Stone, issue of 4 December 1975.
18.See Paul B. Wice’s Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter and the American Justice System (2000), p. 90.
19.‘Algren in Exile’, Chicago magazine (February 1988). Carter appears in The Devil’s Stocking as ‘Ruby Calhoun’.
20.Artis spent 14 years in prison before his parole in 1981. He was sentenced in August of 1987 to six years by a New Jersey court for ‘conspiracy to distribute cocaine and to receiving a stolen handgun’. According to the New York Times (9 August 1987), Artis accepted one drug charge ‘in exchange for dismissal of two other drug counts’. He would later work as an articulate ‘juvenile counsellor’.
21.‘Early in 1966 the reform mayoral candidate, Laurence “Pat” Kramer, declared, “Paterson doesn’t need a mayor, it needs a referee.”’ Wice p. 1, ‘Prologue’.
22.See ‘Hurricane Carter: The Other Side of the Story’, www.graphicwitness.com, or ‘Top Ten Myths about Rubin Hurricane Carter and the Lafayette Grill Murders’, members.shaw.ca/cartermyths.
23.‘The Real Record on Racial Attitudes’ by Lawrence D. Bobo, Camille Z. Charles, Maria Krysan and Alicia D. Simmons. The paper appears as Chapter 3 in Social Trends in American Life: Findings from the General Social Survey (2012), ed. Peter V. Marsden.
24.See the Human Rights Watch website: www.hrw.org/reports/2000.
25.Bruce Western: ‘The Impact of Incarceration on Wage Mobility and Inequality’, American Sociological Review, August 2002.
26.1985 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 14085.
27.Wice, p. 2.
28.Later supplied as an ‘extra’ to early purchasers of The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue (2002).
29.On the Road With Bob Dylan, p.13.
30.Rockline with Bob Coburn, 17 June 1985.
31.The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (abridged ed. 1922), p. 383.
32.The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 1.
33.Pages 424 and 147 respectively.
34.Chapter 2.
35.Pages 186f and 175 respectively.
36.On the Road with Bob Dylan, p. 14.
37.From the Uniform Crime Reporting Program database maintained by the FBI at www.ucrdatatool.gov. Clearly, America’s population had increased greatly over the intervening years, but the trend was indisputable. In 1960, 5.1 homicides were reported per 100,000 of the population; by 1975, the figure was 9.6.
38.‘Joey Gallo Was No Hero’, 8 March 1976. A slightly different version would appear in the April 1976 edition of the magazine Creem, for which Bangs acted as ‘senior editor’.
39.Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 2: 1974–2008 (2010), p. 79. Dylan’s website disagrees with Heylin, stating that the song was performed in Salt Lake City, Utah, on 25 May 1976, during the last of all Rolling Thunder concerts. Les Kokay’s Songs of the Underground: A Collector’s Guide to the Rolling Thunder Revue 1975-1976 (privately published, 2003) notes the supposed performance but accepts that the claim is based on a single unsupported report of a show for which no bootleg tapes exist. One performance or no performance, Dylan hasn’t exactly embraced ‘Black Diamond Bay’.
40.Song & Dance Man III, p. 185.
41.Still On the Road, p. 84.
42.Song & Dance Man III, p. 83; The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, p. 589.
43.p. 19.
44.‘In Blonde on Blonde I wrote out all the songs in the studio. The musicians played cards, I wrote out a song . . .’ (Interview with Newsweek, published 26 February 1968.) ‘I just sat down at a table and started writing [‘Sad Eyed Lady’]. At the session itself.’ (Rolling Stone, November 1969.)
CHAPTER FOUR – THUNDER ON THE MOUNTAIN
1.Rolling Stone, 4 December 1975. Roger McGuinn would later be quoted in Sloman’s book On the Road with Bob Dylan (p. 149) stating ‘slyly’ that the noises Dylan had heard were ‘probably’ sonic booms from aircraft at Vanderburg Air Force Base near Malibu, California.
2.On the Road with Bob Dylan, p. 71.
3.Rolling Stone, 15 January 1976.
4.Down the Highway, p. 341.
5.See Clinton Heylin’s Behind the Shades Revisited, p. 394.
6.No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (1st ed., 1986), p. 450.
7.Bob Dylan in America (2010), Chapter 5. The McGuinn tale can be found under the title ‘Roadie Report 31’ at http://rogermcguinn.blogspot.co.uk/2007_12_01_archive. html.
8.People, 10 November 1975.
9.Hank Reineke, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott: The Never-Ending Highway (2010), p. 225.
10.Shelton, p. 15.
11.Barry Miles, Allen Ginsberg: Beat Poet, p. 457.
12.The Rolling Thunder Logbook, p. viii.
13.Songs of the Underground, pp. 8–10.
14.Sloman, On the Road with Bob Dylan, p. 20.
15.Rolling Stone, 15 January 1976.
16.Shelter from the Storm: Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Years (2010), p. 35.
17.Reineke, p. 226.
18.And a Song to Sing With, Part 5, Chapter 1.
19.The details come largely from a 1998 interview with a local witness conducted by Dave Conlin Read. See http://www.berkshirelinks.com/bob-dylans-rolling-thunder- revue-party-mama-frascas-dream-lodge/.
20.Lucian K. Truscott IV, edition of 28 August.
21.Just before he hanged himself on 9 April 1976, in Far Rockaway, in the New York borough of Queens, Phil Ochs was diagnosed finally as suffering from bipolar disorder.
22.And a Voice to Sing With, Part 5, Chapter 1.
23.Barry Miles, Allen Ginsberg: Beat Poet, p. 458. Miles also says that Dylan, playing the piano, went down very well among the mah-jong players with a version of ‘Simple Twist of Fate’.
24.On the Road with Bob Dylan, p. 70.
25.Ibid., p. 71. In July 1963, having just turned 13, Larry Sloman hadn’t yet heard – by his own admission – of Bob Dylan.
26.Ibid., pp. 117 –18.
27.Rolling Stone, 18 December 1975.
28.In 1975, for the purposes of comparison, it would have cost a fan $10 to see the Rolling Stones and $8.50 to catch Led Zeppelin. The Kinks, on the other hand, were available in smaller halls for $4.50. The issue of ticket prices is complicated by the additional fees imposed by many venues.
29.Sloman, On the Road with Bob Dylan, pp. 177–8.
30.Barry Miles, Allen Ginsberg: Beat Poet, p. 469.
31.Peter Guralnick, Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley (1999), pp. 587 –8.
32.Sloman, On the Road with Bob Dylan, p. 379.
33.New York Times, 9 December 1975.
34.Edition of 4 February 1977.
35.On the Road with Bob Dylan, p. 404.
36.Interview with Allan Jones, published in Uncut magazine, 8 January 2013. Ronson died of liver cancer on 29 April 1993, aged 46.
37.People, 10 November 1975
CHAPTER FIVE – THE PALACE OF MIRRORS
1.22 January 1978.
2.11 March 1976.
3.Rolling Stone, 24 February 1977. ‘Night of the Hurricane (Or Was It Just an Idiot Wind?)’ ran the magazine’s headline.
4.Issue of March 1978.
5.Issue of 26 January 1978.
6.Interview with Gregg Kilday, 22 January 1978.
7.Interview with Philip Fleishman, 20 March 1978.
8.Issue of 11 September 1976.
9.‘The State of the Union: 1975’, first published in Esquire, May 1975, reprinted in United States: Essays 1952 –1992 (1993).
10.John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Why America Is Different (2004), p. 72.
11.Levon Helm and Stephen Davis, This Wheel’s On Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of The Band (1993, 2000), p. 312. Danko had been arrested in Japan in 1996 for possession of heroin. The multi-instrumentalist Richard Manuel, co-writer with Dylan of ‘Tears of Rage’, had hanged himself in Florida in 1986. Over time, Robertson bought out the interests of each member in The Band save Helm.
12.The incident is discussed in David Fricke’s sleeve notes to the 2002 reissue of The Last Waltz album, broadly confirming the account given in Helm’s book.
13.Joel Selvin, San Francisco Chronicle, 4 April 2002.
14.See Sounes, Down the Highway, p. 360.
15.Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, p. 638.
16.Melody Maker, 29 July 1978.
17.As recalled in an article by J. Hoberman in the Village Voice, 13 November 2007.
18.As republished in the wholly self-effacing Teenage Hipster in the Modern World: From the Birth of Punk to the Land of Bush – Thirty Years of Apocalyptic Journalism (2005), pp. 132–4.
19.Issue of 13 February 1978.
20.Interview with Robert Hilburn, published 28 May 1978.
21.Masterpieces, valued by many fans thanks to the inclusion of a handful of previously unreleased tracks, would soon be imported to Britain and America at horribly inflated prices.
22.In 1999, the album would be remixed and remastered by Don DeVito, once again Dylan’s nominal producer. The result was a great improvement, but the exercise did not solve all of Street-Legal’s technical problems.
23.The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, p. 643.
24.Rolling Stone, 24 August 1978.
25.Song & Dance Man III, p. 216.
26.The versions of Dylan’s lyrics preserved by bobdylan.com and by his Lyrics 1962 –2001 are often unreliable guides to the words as he has performed them on the albums. To put it kindly, the process of transcription - by whose hand, we don’t know – has been erratic. It may be that Dylan himself has rewritten passages. Again, we don’t know.
Similarly, the arrangements of the words in verse form in Lyrics and at bobdylan.com are often at odds with the recordings. Sometimes, in fact, book and website disagree. All that being the case, I have used the words as they are heard on the albums and ordered the lines to reflect Dylan’s performance.
This verse is a case in point. Book and website say ‘But Eden is burning, either brace yourself for elimination . . .’ There is no ‘brace yourself’ on the Street-Legal album and the backing vocalists provide a clear line break after ‘burning’.
27.Melody Maker, 29 July 1978.
28.Rolling Stone, 13 July 1978.
29.Issue of 1 July 1978.
30.The monologue, as contained in ‘circulating’ bootlegs, is derived from a necessarily abysmal mono recording made by a member of the San Diego audience. Contrary to the impression given in a couple of biographies and disseminated in various reference sources, there is no extant Dylan interview in which the story is told.
CHAPTER SIX – GOD SAID TO ABRAHAM . . .
1.The description of a presence in the hotel room, the room moving, Dylan’s claim to have been ‘relatively content’ and the declaration that he was ‘willing to listen’ are statements taken from an interview with Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, 23 November 1980. The descriptions of an unseen hand, of trembling and of being ‘knocked down’ are from an interview conducted by Karen Hughes in Dayton, Ohio, on 21 May 1980 during Dylan’s third gospel tour. The Hughes piece was published in New Zealand’s The Star on 10 July 1980.
2.Hilburn, Los Angeles Times interview, 23 November 1980.
3.Ibid.
4.From the Dylan fan magazine On the Tracks, autumn issue, 1994.
5.Karen Hughes, The Star, 10 July 1980.
6.According to Cameron Crowe’s booklet for the 1985 Biograph compilation, Dylan devoted five months to Bible studies in the first half of 1979. The claim is nowhere corroborated.
7.Bert Cartwright, The Bible in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan (1985, rev. and expanded 1992).
8.Interview with Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone, 27 September 2012.
9.On the Tracks magazine, autumn issue, 1994.
10.www.tempevineyard.com.
11.With Gulliksen no longer involved, the contemporary Vineyard Association has an interesting habit of describing Wimber as its ‘founder’.
12.Interview with Kurt Loder, Rolling Stone, 21 June 1984.
13.Interview with Dan Wooding for the ASSIST (‘Aid to Special Saints in Strategic Times’) Christian news service in Anaheim, California, 25 April 1999.
14.The Right Nation: Why America Is Different (2004), p. 325.
15.Ibid., pp. 83–5.
16.‘Satan had mobilised . . .’ The Reverend Jerry Falwell, Southern Baptist evangelical founder in 1979 of the Moral Majority. Mickelthwait and Wooldridge, p. 84.
17.In its issue of 14 April 1980, Time magazine reported Reagan’s declaration during a televised interview. The magazine observed, however, that he ‘seemed shaky about the evangelical concept of personal belief’. Reagan’s best guess was ‘I suppose I would qualify’.
18.The Barna Group is a self-described ‘research and media development organisation’. It has also been called ‘an evangelical Christian polling firm’. Its methods are both respectable and rigorous, however, and its findings are not always welcomed by born-again creeds.
19.Joan Acocella, ‘Seeing and Believing’, The New Yorker, 2 April 2012.
20.Interview with Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone, 17 July 1986.
21.John S. Dickerson, senior pastor of the Cornerstone Church in Prescott, Arizona. The piece was published in the New York Times Sunday Review, 15 December 2012.
22.In Britain in 2010, according to a Eurobarometer poll, 37 per cent reported a belief in God; in France the figure was 27 per cent. Both countries found majority support instead for an impersonal ‘spirit’ or ‘life force’. The 2011 census in England found 59.4 per cent professing Christianity while ‘no religion’ was given as 24.7 per cent.
23.www.vineyardusa.org/site/task-forces/blessing-muslims
24.Nicholas de Lange, Judaism (1986).
25.Report by the ASSIST News Service, 10 March 2011.
26.The interview appeared via continentalnews.net, a news service specialising in Christian issues, on 1 October 2012.
27.ASSIST News Service, 10 March 2011.
28.Interview with Karen Hughes, The Star, published on 10 July 1980.
29.See Introduction to New and Alternative Religions in America, ed. William M. Ashcroft and Eugene V. Gallagher (2006), Vol. 2: Jewish and Christian Traditions, pp. 193–7.
30.Dylan Redeemed: From Highway 61 to Saved (2006), p. 81.
31.Ibid., p. 11 and p. 16.
32.Interview with Kurt Loder, Rolling Stone, 21 June 1984.
33.www.umjc.org.
34.Daily News, 8 June 1986.
35.13 January 1984.
36.In a videotaped interview posted on YouTube in January 2013, Friedman cast doubt on whether sexual abuse was a significant averiah (sin). He also questioned why victims should feel damaged. The rabbi further stated that ‘there is hardly a kid who comes to a yeshiva [religious school], to a program, that hasn’t been molested’.
37.21 June 1984.
38.Interview conducted in September of 1985 and published in the December issue of Spin.
39.‘Don’t You Ever Pray?’, Chris Cooper interview with Helena Springs, published in Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan, ed. John Bauldie (1990), p. 125.
40.See, generally, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy and Politics in the Book of Revelation (2012) by Elaine Pagels.
41.See Adam Gopnik’s review of Pagels, ‘The Big Revival’, New Yorker, 5 March 2012.
CHAPTER SEVEN – WADE IN THE WATER
1.Interview with Bert Kleinman and Artie Mogull for the Westwood One network. First broadcast on 17 November 1984.
2.Jerry Wexler and David Ritz, Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in American Music (1993), Chapter 2.
3.Mojo magazine, January 1997.
4.See Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (1988), pp. 335–41.
5.12 July 1979.
6.See Matthew Zuckerman’s essay, ‘If There’s an Original Thought Out There, I Could Use It Right Now: The Folk Roots of Bob Dylan’ (1997). It can be found at http:// www.expectingrain.com/dok/div/influences.html.
7.See Robert V. Wells, Life Flows On in Endless Song: Folk Songs and American History (2009), p. 112.
8.Chris Bohn, Melody Maker, August 1979.
9.‘Amazing Chutzpah’, New West magazine, 24 September 1979.
10.Rolling Stone, 20 September 1979.
11.Interview with Scott Cohen, September 1985, published in Spin magazine in December 1985.
12.Interview with Scott Marshall for the Dylan fan magazine On the Tracks, issue 17, autumn 1999.
13.‘Don’t You Ever Pray?’, Chris Cooper interview with Helena Springs, published in Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan, ed. John Bauldie (1990), p. 125.
14.http://www.tonywright-art.com/Pages/AlbumDetails/Dylan-Saved.html
15.The first Dylan quotation comes from an interview with Paul Zollo published in the 1991 winter issue of SongTalk magazine. The second fragment – in which Dylan also said that ‘Every Grain of Sand’ was a ‘very painless song to write’ – comes from an interview with Robert Hilburn published in the Los Angeles Times on 9 February 1992. 16.
16.Interview with Robert Hilburn, 23 November 1980.
CHAPTER EIGHT – JOKERMAN
1.Micklethwait and Wooldridge, The Right Nation, p. 71. The National Elections Studies database at the University of Michigan is cited.
2.New York Times, 19 April 2005.
3.Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance (1994), Chapter 12.
4.Address to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Washington DC, 20 March 1981.
5.Rolling Stone, 15 October 1981.
6.The last of three complete takes captured at that session according to Michael Krogsgaard’s painstaking ‘Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions (Part 5)’ published in The Bridge (Issue 1, summer 1998).
7.Still on the Road, pp. 187–95.
8.See Krogsgaard, as before.
9.See Howard Sounes, Down the Highway, pp. 394, 400–2.
10.New York Times, 9 March 2013, citing the General Social Survey.
11.From the introduction to Faye D. Ginsburg’s Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (1989, rev. ed. 1998), pp. 1–2. As an intriguing, if inadvertent, sidelight on Dylan’s North Country upbringing, the anthropology professor at one point remarks that her Jewishness was regarded as ‘culturally strange’ in Fargo. This was in 1981, not 1941.
12.13 January 1984.
13.Many accounts continue to insist, for as much as it matters, that the son in question was Jacob (later Jakob) Dylan. Since Jewish law says that a boy becomes a bar mitzvah on reaching the age of 13, this doesn’t seem likely. Jacob didn’t reach that age until 9 December 1982, whereas Samuel was 13 until his birthday on 30 July. New York magazine’s informant had also made it clear that the ceremony was to take place in LA and not in Israel, as has sometimes been reported. Dylan was leaving New York in March 1982 because ‘He has to be in California by the 20th for his son’s bar mitzvah’.
14.Christopher Connelly, 24 November 1983.
15.At some point, Dylan grasped that his verse was liable to leave half the species unimpressed. Should you check his website these days, you will find that ‘Taking care of somebody nice’ has been replaced by the less egregious, if clumsy, ‘Watching out for someone who loves you true’.
16.‘The life and crimes of the music biz’, The Observer, 20 January 2008.
17.To be fair to Asher, he had by this time earned a reputation for fighting corruption within the industry. In 1983, his stance would cost him his job. Described as ‘a company man’, ‘blunt and a bit awkward’, the former Marine was no diplomat. Asher had been promoted to deputy president to cut costs, a fact that might have a bearing on any clash with Dylan. Asher’s claim to fame as a hit-maker was the success of Julio Iglesias. See Frederic Dannen’s Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business (1991), pp. 1–13, ‘The Education of Dick Asher’.
18.Interview conducted on 5 July 1983 and published in Britain by the New Musical Express on 6 August 1983.
19.Interview with Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, 30 October 1983.
20.Bootleggers tend towards the opposite extreme. At their most extravagant, they turned this single Dylan album into The Complete Infidels Sessions, a seven-CD box set with a concert DVD from 1984. If six versions of ‘Neighborhood Bully’ and seven of ‘Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight’ are what you seek, the capacious set answers most prayers.
21.In December 2001, the Associated Press (AP) news agency published a three-part investigation into the theft of land from black Americans that began even before the Civil War and had continued almost to the present. ‘Torn From the Land’ established that property worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, had been stolen.
Amid a mass of documentation, AP noted: ‘In 1910, black Americans owned at least 15 million acres of farmland, nearly all of it in the South, according to the U.S. Agricultural Census. Today, blacks own only 1.1 million acres of farmland and are part owners of another 1.07 million acres . . . [Black] ownership has declined two and a half times faster than white ownership according to a 1982 federal report.’
22.Merline Pitre, In Struggle Against Jim Crow: Lulu B. White and the NAACP, 1900 –1957 (1999), pp. 5–6.
23.Texas State Historical Association (http://www.tshaonline.org).
24.Song & Dance Man III (2000), pp. 527–45.
25.Bob Dylan in America (2010), Part 3, Chapter 6: ‘Many Martyrs Fell’.
26.See, generally, the marvellous Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell (2007), to which I am indebted for biographical information and much else besides.
27.Rolling Stone, 7 September 2006.
28.Edition of 21 June 1984.
29.Interview with Kurt Loder, Rolling Stone, 21 June 1984.
30.Interview with Martin Keller, New Musical Express, 6 August 1983. Asked the same question by the Australian writer Karen Hughes in 1978, Dylan had replied that he believed in reincarnation ‘In a casual but not astonishing way’. (Rock Express, April 1978).
31.Song & Dance Man III (2000), p. 464.
CHAPTER NINE – WORLD GONE WRONG
1.‘September 1, 1939’, The English Auden: Poems, Essay and Dramatic Writings 1927 –1939, (ed. Edward Mendelson) (1977, pb. 1986), pp. 245 –7.
2.The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987), p. 73.
3.Scott Stossel, The Atlantic, 2 September 1998.
4.And a Voice to Sing With (1987, repub. 2009), Part 5, Chapter 1.
5.Sunday Times, 1 July 1984.
6.Edition of 25 November 1985.
7.Michael Gray deals with this issue in fascinating and exhaustive detail in his The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (2006), pp. 225–31. Gray also points out that the album’s title derives in part from the fact that there once were movie houses called Empire Burlesques. One such pops up in Philip Roth’s 1983 novel The Anatomy Lesson.
8.Behind the Shades Revisited (2000), p. 575.
9.4 July 1985.
10.Interview with Denise Worrell, Time, 25 November 1985.
11.Howard Sounes, the biographer who brought the Dylan of secret marriages and love children to public attention, has more in Chapter 9 of his Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan.
12.The film, part of the BBC’s Omnibus strand, would not be broadcast until September 1987.
13.The Farley interview was published on 17 September 2001; the Inskeep interview
14.Allan Jones, ‘Editor’s Diary’, Uncut, www.uncut.co.uk/blog/uncut-editors-diary/the-greatest-shows-on-earth
15.18 October 1987.
CHAPTER TEN – BORN IN TIME
1.Edition of 22 December 2001.
2.Rolling Stone, 7 September 2006.
3.Ben Rayner, Toronto Star, 15 November 2012.
4.Interview with Douglas Brinkley, published 14 May 2009.
5.Encyclopedia, pp. 173–4.
6.The Independent, 21 October 1988.
7.Edition of 29 July 1988.
8.Interview with Jon Pareles, 28 September 1997.
9.Chronicles, p. 165.
10.Both quotations come from interviews given to Uncut magazine, November 2008.
11.21 September 1989.
12.Interview with Ellen Futterman, St Louis Post-Dispatch, 7 April 1994.
13.See Ian Bell, Once Upon a Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan (2012), p. 101.
14.4 February 1991.
15.Andrew Muir, Razor’s Edge: Bob Dylan & the Neverending Tour (2001), p. 71.
16.Published in July 1991.
17.The interview was conducted in Los Angeles on 14 April but not published until the winter 1991 edition of the magazine SongTalk.
18.Interview with Ryan Cormnier, Delaware Online, 9 October 2008. Retrieved from www.delawareonline.com/blogs.
19.The Ryan quotations are from an interview published online by Uncut magazine in October 2008.
20.Requiem for a Nun (1950).
21.See Bell, Once Upon a Time, p. 138.
22.See, generally, three books by the late Paul Williams: Bob Dylan: Performing Artist 1960 –1973 (1990); Bob Dylan: Performing Artist: The Middle Years 1974 –1986 (1992); Bob Dylan: Performing Artist 1986 –1990 and Beyond (2005). Each is admirable, learned and somehow beside the point. See also Stephen Scobie’s fine Alias Bob Dylan Revisited (2003).
23.Song & Dance Man III, p. 389.
24.Interview with David Gates, Newsweek, 5 October 1997.
25.Bob Dylan: The Never Ending Star, p. 21.
26.Ibid., p. 209.
27.Song & Dance Man III, p. 389.
28.Down the Highway, p. 475.
29.Ibid., pp. 488–9.
30.Biograph booklet.
CHAPTER ELEVEN – THINGS HAVE CHANCED
1.The melodrama began to get out of hand when Barry Dickens, Dylan’s British agent, described the infection as ‘potentially fatal’ (The Independent, 29 May 1997). The New York Daily News (29 May 1997) preferred ‘potentially deadly’. By 8 June, Newsweek had reported claims from the previous week that Dylan ‘might be dying’. By 16 October, Der Spiegel was stating that he had ‘almost died of a heart disease’.
2.The Oxford Companion to Medicine, Volume I, p. 546.
3.Edition of 26 August.
4.Interview with David Gates, Newsweek, 5 October 1997.
5.Ibid.
6.Interview with Jon Pareles, 28 September 1997.
7.USA Today, 29 September 1997.
8.Rolling Stone, 7 September 2006.
9.Interview with Edna Gundersen, USA Today, 29 September 1997.
10.Ibid.
11.Serge Kaganski, Mojo magazine, February 1998 edition.
12.Alan Jackson, press-conference report, Times magazine, 8 September 2001.
13.Interview with Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone, 22 November 2001.
14.San Francisco Chronicle, 2 November 1997.
15.While it is true that only 49 per cent of eligible voters bothered to turn out for the election in November 1996, giving 49.2 per cent of the popular vote to Clinton and 40.7 per cent to his opponent, Bob Dole, polling organisations weight their findings to take account of participation, party affiliation, if any, and other factors besides. Clinton was popular.
16.The population statistics come from a Bureau of the Census document entitled Population Profile of the United States 1997. The firearms figures are from a National Institute of Justice survey published in May 1997.
17.Sidney Blumenthal, The Clinton Wars: An Insider’s Account of the White House Years (2003).
18.Mojo, February 1998. The piece was provided by Serge Kaganski of the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles. He had been part of a group of European journalists who had interviewd Dylan in London on 4 October 1997.
19.A Norwegian committee and John Bauldie, editor of the Dylan magazine The Telegraph, were equally important to the campaign. Bauldie died in a helicopter crash just after the nomination was submitted. Contrary to some reports, the submission, though lodged in 1996, was made too late for consideration that year.
20.From Bill Pagel’s Bob Links, a website ‘dedicated to providing Bob Dylan concert information’, (http://www.boblinks.com/dates11.html.)
21.Berkshire Eagle, 22 July 1999.
22.Reported by Dave Fanning, Irish Times magazine, 29 September 2001.
CHAPTER TWELVE – SKETCHES FROM MEMORY
1.Rolling Stone, issue of 7 September 2006.
2.Interview with Mikal Gilmore, 27 September 2012.
3.Charles Seeger put some of his thoughts on process and plagiarism in print in the journal Western Folklore in April 1962. See Bell, Once Upon a Time, pp. 374 –5.
4.Interview with Seth Rogovoy, Berkshire Eagle, 8 June 2001.
5.Pete Seeger and Peter Blood (eds), Where Have All the Flowers Gone?: A Singer’s Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies, (1993) p. 33.
6.Interview with Paul Zollo, SongTalk magazine, 1991 winter issue (Vol. 2, Issue 16). Republished in Singers on Songwriting (1993, rev. and expanded 2003).
7.Rolling Stone, 14 September 2012.
8.Mikal Gilmore interview, 27 September 2012.
9.5 October 2004.
10.The Marqusee review appeared on 16 October 2004, the Appleyard piece on the following day. Carlo Wolff’s notice was published on 5 October.
11.8 July 2003.
12.Lott, p. 5.
13.Edition of 4 November 1963. Dylan had in fact taken his inspiration from the spiritual ‘No More Auction Block/Many Thousands Gone’, but its resemblance to ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ was not self-evident.
14.Junichi Saga, Confessions of a Yakuza (trans. John Bester, 1991), p. 6.
15.14 September 2006.
16.‘Bob Dylan: Henry Timrod Revisited’: www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178703.
17.Issue of 27 September 2012.
18.No Direction Home, Chapter 2.
19.To be found at swarmuth.blogspot.com.
20.As a specialist in Aramaic and Hebrew, Cook was probably more alert than most to the biblical connotations of Dylan’s title. Cook’s translations of the Scrolls, with Michael O. Wise and Martin G. Abegg, were published in 1996 with a revised edition in 2005.
21.See Bell, Once Upon a Time, pp. 348–9.
22.Los Angeles Times, 22 April 2010.
23.The blog can be found at ralphriver.blogspot.com. The relevant entry is for 30 July 2011.
24.‘Highlands’, Time Out of Mind (1997).
CHAPTER THIRTEEN – HAND ME DOWN MY WALKIN’ CANE
1.1 August 2003.
2.4 August and 5 September 2003, respectively.
3.29 July 2003.
4.2 September 2001.
5.Interview with Austin Scaggs, Rolling Stone, 26 October 2004.
6.Interview with Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, 16 September 2001.
7.Seth Stevenson, www.slate.com, 12 April 2004. Brian Steinberg, Wall Street Journal, 2 April 2004.
8.Interview with Austin Scaggs, Rolling Stone, 26 October 2004.
9.Corcoran, who first saw Dylan in Newcastle in 1965, was the editor of the useful collection Do You Mr Jones?: Bob Dylan With the Poets and Professors (2002). With contributions from Paul Muldoon, Simon Armitage, Sean Wilentz and an impressive legion of others, the book contains more sense about its subject than is usually available.
10.From the Guardian’s notably vicious review of a ‘bizarre’ performance at London’s Wembley Arena (17 November 2003). It seems the paper was having another of its little turns where Dylan was concerned.
11.Sunday Telegraph, 26 September 2004; USA Today, 4 October; Newsweek, 4 October.
12.Edition of 26 October 2004.
13.See, for example, ‘The Sweet Troubles of Proust’, a New York Review of Books blog by Colm Tóibín, 22 February 2013 (www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/feb/22/sweet-troubles-proust/)
14.Interview with Douglas Brinkley, Rolling Stone, 14 May 2009.
15.The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (2006), p. 497.
16.Rolling Stone, 7 September 2006.
17.Jon Pareles, 20 August 2006.
18.Interview with Douglas Brinkley, Rolling Stone, 14 May 2009.
19.7 October 2006.
20.See Richard F. Thomas, ‘The Streets of Rome: The Classical Dylan’ in the journal Oral Tradition, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 30–56 (March 2007).
21.2 August 2012.
22.The first headline comes from the New York Times (12 July 2003), the second from the online Daily Beast (30 April 2010). What’s interesting is that in both cases the writers, Jon Pareles and Sean Wilentz respectively, found the charges groundless. As mentioned previously, Joni Mitchell staged her attack in an interview with the Los Angeles Times published on 22 April 2010.
23.Nelson Mail, 7 October 2006.
24.Rolling Stone, 7 September 2006.
25.In an interview with Rolling Stone’s Mikal Gilmore (22 December 2001), Dylan once again said that he had lost the desire to make albums, that ‘It was clear to me I had more than enough songs to play. Forever.’
26.Interview with Jonathan Lethem, Rolling Stone, 7 September 2006.
27.Interview with Mikal Gilmore, 27 September 2012.
28.Robert Sullivan, ‘This Is Not a Bob Dylan Movie’, 7 October 2007.
29.15 May 2006.
30.Dreams From My Father (1995); The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006).
31.17 January 2007.
32.www.gallup.com/poll/116500/presidential-approval-ratings-george-bush.aspx.
33.Interview with Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone, 27 September 2012.
34.5 June 2008.
35.The promotional interview was conducted by Bill Flanagan and published on bobdylan.com. The excerpt was published by Newsweek on 6 April 2009.
36.Interview with Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone, 27 September 2012.
37.‘The Cost of Racial Animus on a Black Presidential Candidate’, 24 March 2013. www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~sstephen/papers.html.
38.‘The Return of Old Fashioned Racism to White Americans’ Partisan Preferences in the Age of Obama’, Journal of Politics, Vol. 75 (1), pp. 110–23 (January 2013).
39.Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, Sylvia Allegretto, The State of Working America 2006/2007 (2007), p. 2.
40.‘America’s Image in the World: Findings from the Pew Global Attitudes Project’, released 14 March 2007.
41.New York Times, 23 May 2013.
42.Chris Woods, Bureau of Investigative Journalism, August 10, 2011 (http://www. thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/08/10/most-complete-picture-yet-of-cia-drone- strikes/)
43.See The National Priorities Project (Mattea Kramer, Chris Hetman et al.), A People’s Guide to the Federal Budget (2012), pp. 134–6.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN – PAY IN BLOOD
1.13 April 2008.
2.Richard Williams, The Guardian, 16 August 2008.
3.Rolling Stone, 14 May 2009.
4.Alexis Petridis, The Guardian, 24 April 2009.
5.Uncut magazine, January 2010.
6.Douglas Brinkley, Rolling Stone, 14 May 2009.
7.Mojo magazine, January 2010.
8.Interview with Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone, 27 September 2012.
9.Kasper Monrad, ‘The Painter Bob Dylan: An Introduction’; John Elderfield, ‘Across the Borderline’. In the catalogue/book The Brazil Series (2010).
10.Agence France-Presse, 7 September 2010.
11.Interview with Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone, 27 September 2012.
12.In the United States, ticket prices increased by more than four times the rate of inflation between 1996 and 2008. (Associated Press report, Billboard, 27 December 2010.)
13.4 April 2010.
14.Both stories published 7 April 2011.
15.9 April 2011.
16.10 April 2011.
17.Sunday Herald, 10 April 2011.
18.The Herald, 21 May 2011.
19.This book, like its predecessor, like almost every book written about Dylan over the last two decades, owes eternal gratitude to the Swede for his extraordinary researches, tracking both public performances and recording activities from 1958 until (at the time of writing) 2013. See, in all circumstances, www.bjorner.com.
20.Neil McCormick review, 1 July 2012.
21.16 August 2012.
22.Interview with Mikal Gilmore, 27 September 2012.
23.Ibid.
24.Ibid.
25.The American Songbag (1927 edition), pp. 254–5.
26.Ozark Folksongs Vol. IV: Religious Songs and Other Items – Collected and Edited by Vance Randolph (1946–50; reprinted 1980), p. 144.
27.New York Times, 5 September; Vancouver Sun, 13 October; Los Angeles Times, 27 October; Chicago Tribune, 12 November.
28.Walt Whitman, ‘Starting from Paumanok’ (‘Protoleaf).