Dylan's Anthem Of Freedom Promised "No Direction Home"

Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan At The Crossroads by Greil Marcus. Illustrated. 286 pp. Public Affairs. $14.00 (paperback)

Is one song a viable focus for a book almost 300 pages long? Yes, if the study is written by music and cultural historian Greil Marcus and if the song is Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone," listed by Rolling Stone Magazine as number 1 on their "500 Greatest Songs of All Time."

Marcus recounts how the song was part of Dylan's penchant for defying expectations. "Like A Rolling Stone" was composed during the period when he threw off the folk purists by pioneering the folk rock sound, for which he was booed at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 and the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England, in 1966. 

It wasn't just the folkies who were upended by Dylan's compositions; it was also the pop music teams of Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Said Goffin, "I wish we had tried more to write some songs that–really meant something... Dylan managed to do something that not one of us was able to do: put poetry in rock 'n' roll, and just stand up there like a mensch and sing it." Elvis Costello registered the song's impact: "What a shocking thing to live in a world where there was Manfred Mann and the Supremes and Engelbert Humperdinck and here comes 'Like A Rolling Stone.' "

The shock of the song brought with it various interpretations of this portrait of a spoiled young woman who found herself on the streets, among the very people she once looked upon with condescension. Some saw the song as self-righteous put-down, "refusing women any middle ground between the pedestal and the gutter" or "sneeringly and contemptuously sung to a spoiled rich girl" with "the reactionary stagnation of the social order...personified as female."

The song that promises "no direction home" can also be viewed, however, as an anthem of freedom, especially in the context of the 1960s. Rolling Stone Magazine founder Jann Wenner offered this perspective: "So now you're without a home, you're on your own, complete unknown, like a rolling stone. That's a liberating thing. This is a song about liberation. About being liberated from your own hangups, your old knowledge, and the fear, the frightening part of facing that." On a broader level, Wenner applied the song to "a comfortable society suddenly discovering what's going on in Vietnam–the society we're taught about, and you realize, as you become aware, drug aware, socially aware, the disaster of the commercial society." Marcus agrees with this perspective: "Confused–and justified, exultant, free from history with a world to win–is exactly where the song means to leave you."

Marcus's depictions of the musical traditions and landscapes of America can rise to pure poetry. "Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan's first folk music hero" is described as a "troubadour of the dispossessed, poet of the Great Depression, ghost of the American highway, a man blown by the wind and made out of dust." Highway 61, which took Dylan to cities where he discovered folk music, "...would have seemed to go to the ends of the earth, carrying the oldest strains of American music along with businessmen and escaped cons, vacationers and joy-riders blasting the radio–carrying runaway slaves north before the long highway had a single name, and, not so much more than a century later, carrying Freedom Riders south."

The descriptions of the studio sessions leave an impression of the contingent nature of recordings. The musicians were fumbling around with the song until they came upon the single take that did it justice. Al Kooper was originally not even supposed to be part of the ensemble, but he happened to be in the studio and sat down at the organ. One also hears fresh elements of the song after reading the book: blues guitarist Michael Bloomfield's leads that form a bridge between stanzas, or the sound of the tambourine throughout. Forty-four years later, "Like A Rolling Stone" can be discovered anew, as is always the case with great art.

Suggestions for further reading:

• "Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'N' Roll Music" by Greil Marcus

• "Down The Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan" by Howard Sounes

• "Positively Fourth Street" by David Hadju

• "Chronicles: Volume One" by Bob Dylan

"Bob Dylan In America": The Roots Of An Icon

Bob Dylan In America by Sean Wilentz. 397 pp. Anchor Books. $16.95 (paperback)

There have been legions of straightforward biographies of Bob Dylan–and this isn’t one of them. Instead, Sean Wilentz provides a cultural history of Dylan as an artist in the American grain. He starts not with the oft-cited example of Woody Guthrie, but with Aaron Copland, whose music gained renown throughout the country when Dylan was a boy. Copland’s incorporations of folk music and tributes to the common man influenced the Greenwich Village folk revival in which Dylan played a major role. Dylan’s readings of the Beat poets, with their spiritual and alienated sensibility, prompted him to turn away from political concerns and write from within, emphasizing the personal and the surreal, to the dismay of the folkies (epitomized by his “going electric” at the Newport Folk Festival, 1965). This period resulted in the masterpieces “Bringing It All Back Home” (1965), “Highway 61 Revisited” (1965) and “Blonde On Blonde” (1966).

After a long spell from 1984-1991 in which Dylan seemed to have lost the creative wellsprings of his art, he initiated his own revival by going back to the roots in the acoustic blues albums “Good As I Been To You” (1992) and “World Gone Wrong” (1993). The result has been a string of acclaimed works that incorporate American blues, country and folk, including “Time Out of Mind” (1997), “Love and Theft” (2001), “Modern Times” (2006) and “Together Through Life” (2009).

Wilentz considers Dylan’s “appropriation” of the work of other musicians, convincingly making the case that "plagiarism" is an unfair charge. While copying others like all major artists do, Dylan has also transformed each musical influence: “For more than half a century, Bob Dylan had been absorbing, transmuting, and renewing and improving American art forms…” Sean Wilentz has provided us with a thoroughly illuminating account of the American sources of Dylan’s music–and the ways in which Dylan has influenced those sources and become an American icon.

“A Freewheelin’ Time”: A Memoir By Dylan’s First Muse

A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties by Suze Rotolo. 371 pp. Broadway. $14.95 (paperback)

Suze Rotolo, who recently passed away, became Bob Dylan’s girlfriend shortly after he arrived in New York in the early 1960s–and she also became his muse. Daughter of communist Italian immigrants, Rotolo raised Dylan’s awareness of social issues, inspiring his protest songs as well as his most poignant love ballads. She and Dylan were pictured on Jones Street in Greenwich Village on the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan" album (1963).

Rotolo depicts a time when it was possible to live cheaply in the Village as a theater set designer, which she was–or a soon-to-be discovered folk singer, as Dylan was. The earlier sections of the book encompass a more innocent period, as the couple lived together and took in the Village's folk clubs, experimental theaters, bookstores, foreign films and art galleries. Dylan’s growing fame, however, broke them apart. Rotolo refuses the role of the musician’s “chick” or “a string on Bob Dylan’s guitar.” When she came back from a period in Italy, Villagers  accused her of not being there for him. Folk music itself was “a boy’s club.” Indeed, the sexism in bohemian circles was as prevalent as in the wider society, a point also made in Joyce Johnson’s “Minor Characters,” a memoir of her time among the Beat writers. According to Rotolo, Dylan also didn’t handle fame graciously; she eventually perceives him as “tight and hostile," holding court as “the reigning king.” Dylan’s relationship with Joan Baez, though alluded to only briefly, was doubtless another factor in their breakup.

While her relationship with Dylan is central to the book, this is ultimately Rotolo’s story. As such, it doesn’t stop as her relationship with Dylan declines. She recounts her trip to Cuba in defiance of the U.S. travel ban, as well as iconic events of the time: the assassination of President Kennedy, the growth of the counterculture, the Vietnam war protests. She regretfully concludes that Greenwich Village is now too expensive to remain a center of bohemia. What endures, though, is the Village as a “state of mind,” a “calling” for the “creative spirit.” However we refer to it, that era and place, in all its artistic and political fervor, is preserved in Suze Rotolo’s illuminating memoir.