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By Bill Altreuter

For some reason I'd missed this: a Bob Dylan interview by Jonathan Lethem. (Actually, I know why I missed it: it was in Rolling Stone.)

"Let me take a moment and reintroduce myself, your interviewer and guide here. I'm a forty-two-year-old moonlighting novelist, and a lifelong Dylan fan, but one who, it must be emphasized, doesn't remember the Sixties. I'm no longer a young man, but I am young for the job I'm doing here. My parents were Dylan fans, and my first taste of his music came through their LPs ? I settled on Nashville Skyline, because it looked friendly. The first Dylan record I was able to respond to as new ? to witness its arrival in stores and reception in magazines, and therefore to make my own ? was 1979's Slow Train Coming. As a fan in my early twenties, I digested Dylan's catalog to that point and concluded that its panoply of styles and stances was itself the truest measure of his genius ? call us the Biograph generation, if you like. In other words, the struggle to capture Dylan and his art like smoke in one particular bottle or another seemed laughable to me, a mistaken skirmish fought before it had become clear that mercurial responsiveness ? anchored only by the existential commitment to the act of connection in the present moment ? was the gift of freedom his songs had promised all along. To deny it to the man himself would be absurd."

Lethem is making a valuable point here, and one that I think is too seldom made. Point of entry matters with Dylan's work. The reason going electric at Newport mattered to so many people, and is still probably the most written about event in his career, is that so many people came to him as a folksinger. My point of entry was a bit later-- I took "John Wesley Harding" out of the library, and the first Dylan side I bought was "Greatest Hits, Vol. II". (Did I own "Concert for Bangladesh" before that? I can't recall.) I was confused by "Self Portrait" but I didn't own it. Truth to tell, when I bought a copy last year to research my (still ongoing) Dylan live project it was largely unfamiliar to me. (Retrospectively it is still pretty bad, but it is not his worst, and there are things on it that are worth hearing. The material benefits from popping up randomly on "shuffle", let's put it that way.)

Full post as published by Outside Counsel on November 14, 2009 (boomark / email).