Music Arcades: Bob Dylan: Shot of Love

I spent four hours on the train yesterday, to and from a lovely wedding. Instead of pressing on with Timothy Taylor's Buried Soul, I took Paul Williams' Watching the River Flow with me, so I could read the 70-page "Dylan: What Happened?" essay about his early Christian period. Better to have read it at the same time as Slow Train Coming, or even Saved but I figured if I didn't read it now, I never would.

About ten pages in, I came to the view that it would have been no great loss never to have read it. But by then I was on the train, with nothing else to read but by iPhone instapaper collection, so I stuck with it. It's exactly the kind of art-as-autobiography/criticism-as-artist-biography that Greil Marcus deplores in this interview about his new Van Morrison book:

I don't have any interest in the private lives of the people I am intrigued by and that I might end up writing about. To trace anybody's work, what they produce, what they put into the world, what you or I respond to, to somebody's life, their biography, is utterly reductionist. It's simply a way of protecting ourselves from the imagination, from the threat of the imagination. Some people are very uncomfortable with the idea they can be moved, they can be threatened, they can be thrilled by something that is just made up.

I think I agree with Marcus. Who cares exactly when Bob and Sara separated, re-united, divorced, and why would you want to map that onto the sequence of songs. Besides, Bob has created such a smokescreen around his personal life that seeking to explain the work from the life, or read the life from the work seems like a fool's errand. I didn't think Williams' essay was much better than a blog. You know the kind of thing: raking through some crank's pet theories and idiosyncratic opinions about which are the good songs and why. I guess it offers the same modest pleasures as reading blogs: chuckling at the theories, squirming at the self-revelation and disagreeing with the favourites. So I was surprised to find out (in the subsequent essay) that Bob had read "What Happened?" and liked it.

Earlier last week, I was reading this interview with Alex Neilson (of Trembling Bells and Directing Hand, where he talks at some length about his reading of Dylan, including his enthusiasm for the seventies and eighties albums: "Of the so called ‘classic trilogy’ I really like Bringing It All Back Home, but I get a lot more out of Changing of the Guards and I Believe in You than I do Tombstone Blues or Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands". Me too. I can't hear anything on Shot of Love that I like as much as Changing of the Guards or I Believe in You. But Bob's singing is still really good here. According to one of the better Wikipedia entries, which provides interesting detail on the recording sessions, Bono agrees with me. Hooray.

Thirty years on, the interesting question seems not so much What Happened? as What If It Hadn't Happened? Whatever the short-term disappointments, Bob's career would surely have less interest, less form, less mystery and less gravitas if he hadn't been born again. What else could he have done that would have had equal impact? Maybe he could have done a David Sylvian and retreat into ambient soundscapes and low-key collaborations. I can't see it, somehow, can you?