Sean Wilentz's book comes trailing such claims to glory – Philip Roth digs it! Martin Scorsese reckons it's as "thrilling" as a Dylan song! – that, for a while, one is reluctant to trust the evidence of one's eyes. It's not that Bob Dylan in America is uninteresting or unintelligent; it's both interesting and intelligent – but it's never more than either.
This is surprising and expected in equal measure. Wilentz has the qualifications and the pedigree. As a kid he grew up in Greenwich Village where, in 1963, Dylan met Allen Ginsberg in the apartment above Wilentz's dad's bookstore. As a grown-up, he wrote the liner notes for the 1964 Concert at Philharmonic Hall recording in the "official" series of Bootleg releases, and he's a history professor at Princeton. In the right hands, this combination of the authoritative and the personal can be potent indeed.
Wilentz was 13 when he saw Dylan – 23 at the time – play at the Philharmonic. So Wilentz was formed, in part, by the artist who was formed by – and, in turn, made – the history the professor teaches and writes. As Wilentz points out, while it's often said that Dylan "owns the 1960s", he is "largely a product of the 1940s and 1950s".This isan understatment, or at least compresses the time span at Dylan's disposal:the key to his genius has always been the "ability to write and sing in more than one era at once".
We start well – by going backwards. Since the influence of Woody Guthrie is well known and celebrated by Dylan himself, Wilentz explores a pervasive but less explicit connection with Aaron Copland. Copland might not have been an influence on the young Dylan but he was in the air – on the airwaves – and he forms an interesting precedent in the way that his early "left-wing Popular Front politics" gave way to widespread acceptance "among the general public as well as concertgoers".
It's interesting, it's informative – and it's a bit of a plod. The passion of the fan is ingrained with the habits of the professor: spot an area that no one has researched before, do the research, write it up, draw conclusions. The problem is that Wilentz must have wanted his conclusions to be more drastic – Copland anticipated Dylan "in ways that help make sense of both men's achievements" – than these discovered coincidences permit. Perhaps it's the historian's uneasiness in the realm of the suggestive and tentative that leads him, elsewhere, to buttress the coincidental with a hint of something else. Thus the opening of Dylan's "Rainy Day Women No 12 & 35" is "eerily" similar to another song that hit the charts in 1966, while Columbia "eerily" released Love and Theft on the day of the 9/11 attacks. Sends a shiver up the causal spine, dunnit?
The chapter on the relationship between the folkies and the Beats – particularly Dylan's with Ginsberg – is the best in the book. It's here that the convergence of historical understanding and personal experience generates a current that animates characters, setting and period. Ditto the section on the Philharmonic concert.
The stuff on the recording of Blonde on Blonde is fascinating – how could it not be? – but it's at this point that the book begins to lose any claims to unity of purpose and approach. A narrative inventory of which songs were attempted on which day, it has less in common with the purpose of the preceding chapters than it does with the equivalent section in Behind Closed Doors, Clinton Heylin's history of Dylan in the recording studio.
The chapter on the Rolling Thunder Revue reels between reminiscence (Wilentz went to one of the gigs), research into the historical precedents of the Revue's carnival aesthetic and Dylan's interest in film. Nor should the influence of Norman Raeben be forgotten: he taught Dylan painting in 1974 and "some of the stanzas" on some of the songs featured on the tour are "painterly". Hmm.
Thereafter, the feeling that various pieces have been recycled and stitched together gr ows hard to ignore. The hope, presumably, is that the sheer mass of content – from Infidels to the nadir of last year's Christmas songs – will distract readers from the Sellotape holding the whole endeavour invisibly together. If there is a consistency, it is in the ever-present whiff of the classroom. Take the chapter on Blind Willie McTell. Wilentz has found out everything you could want to know about the singer on whom Dylan based his greatest song of the past 30 years. Good, good. But then he quotes a line of Greil Marcus's – "Perhaps the most entrancing challenge in 'Blind Willie McTell' is to hear in its namesake's music what Bob Dylan heard" – and it's like a flash of sunlight breaking into a gloomy archive, threatening to turn everything to dust.
We are, it must be noted, still playing to Wilentz's strengths. He's altogether shakier when trying to evoke music in words. On the released version of "Absolutely Sweet Marie", drummer Kenny Buttrey "builds the complexities to the point were he is defying gravity or maybe Newton's third law of motion". One's response to this watered-down claim – in the proof copy it was "the second law of thermodynamics" – is twofold. First: wow! And I thought Elvin Jones laid down some complicated shit when he played drums with Coltrane! Second: did no one at Princeton alert Wilentz to the first law of prose composition: that if you defy sense, you are talking bollocks?
Still, he's better writing about Dylan's music than he is about his words. Wilentz is great when he's setting out the facts of the life of Ruben "Hurricane" Carter as opposed to Dylan's mythical version of events on Desire. Probing the song itself, we learn that "Dylan's lyrics feature street slang – 'stir' for prison, 'heat' for police – and 'shit' reappears along with 'sonofabitch'." And that's not all. "There is some interesting word play" and "visual imagery" too. Christopher Ricks, eat your art out!
Presenting the socio-historical backdrop or conducting an archaeological dig of Dylan's musical and verbal sources – these are tests of knowledge and organisational skill; but if you can't write about Dylan's lyrics with a light touch you trample them to death. Wilentz would have done well to have absorbed the lessons of Simon Armitage's analysis of "Tangled up in Blue". The poet-fan goes through this "great song" line by line, mercilessly exposing its redundancies and cliches – how remarkable, for example, that the "basement" is "down the stairs" – before turning things round and concluding that conventional literary analysis might be the wrong tool for dissecting song lyrics.
Weak on Dylan's music and weaker still on the language that he used, Wilentz plumbs the depths when he combines the two in his analysis of "Nettie Moore" on Modern Times. As if it weren't impressive enough that Dylan is requoting words from old songs "in a clever and amusing way", "with his backbeats and his pauses, he is also having fun playing around with rhythm". The descent from the sweeping ambition of the mission statement at the book's beginning to nibbles like these at its close has been gradual but inexorable.
Geoff Dyer's book of essays, Working the Room, will be published by Canongate in November.
