If you lined up every copy of every book by and about Bob Dylan, they’d stretch all the way from Highway 61 to Desolation Row. They include volumes that discuss his songs or contain lyrics or sheet music, a memoir, an abstruse novel, umpteen biographies, and assorted scholarly tomes. There are also interview collections, including my own Dylan on Dylan: Interviews and Encounters, and books about pivotal periods, such as Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric!, the inspiration for the recent film A Complete Unknown. There’s even a book called Dreaming of Dylan: 115 Dreams about Bob.
Into this crowded field comes yet another missive, this one titled Decade of Dissent: How 1960s Bob Dylan Changed the World. Can there really be anything more to say about the man and his music? As it turns out, the answer is a qualified yes. Just don’t hold your breath awaiting major revelations.
Written by British music journalist Sean Egan, the volume is part biography and part album reviews. It also includes discussions of studio sessions that incorporate quotes from the author’s interviews with assorted musicians and other Dylan associates. Like Wald’s book, this one focuses mostly on the 1960s, but while Wald’s narrative ends with the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Egan offers a detailed discussion of every LP from Dylan’s eponymous 1962 debut through 1969’s Nashville Skyline. His book title notwithstanding, he also comments a bit on such later albums as 1970’s Self-Portrait, 1975’s Blood on the Tracks, and 1997’s Time Out of Mind.
Decade of Dissent assumes too much knowledge on the part of the reader to be recommended to Dylan neophytes, and contains a lot that Dylan fanatics have already read elsewhere. However, that second group will find incisive, frequently fresh-sounding commentary about the albums, and the author’s interviews with people who were on the scene—such as Al Kooper, Roger McGuinn, and photographer Daniel Kramer—include lots of illuminating tidbits.
The book is mostly well-written, though Egan’s sentence structure is occasionally mangled. (Talking about producer John Hammond, for example, he writes, “Born in 1910, his privileged hinterland can be guessed at…” Egan also almost always gets his facts straight, though, here too, he occasionally messes up. For instance, he refers to the mid-’70s as Dylan’s “married-bliss period,” though his relationship with his wife was unraveling by the time he recorded Blood on the Tracks in 1974. (They divorced in June 1977.)
Fans will forgive such minor slipups but might well take issue with Egan’s opinions about the music, which often seem loaded with conjecture. When Dylan sings, “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,” for example, Egan takes that to mean he is saying “beats me, pal” and states that this is “a quite extraordinarily sustained study in non-commitment” and that some people “might assume that it represented the composer pulling a fast one on his listeners, even mocking them.”
Egan also cites the last line of Nashville Skyline’s lighthearted “Peggy Day” (“By golly, what more can I say?”) and states that it could lead some fans to “conclude that they are being treated with contempt.” And he says the reason Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You, Babe” was “immediately understood to be a Dylan pastiche or even rip-off” was all because of the word “babe,” which was “so inextricably associated with Dylan.” Egan adds that “I Got You, Babe” “can feel merely like a sexist putdown,” even though Sonny and Cher both sing the line.
Moreover, Egan speaks harshly of albums that many people (including this writer) consider classics. He calls Nashville Skyline “lazy and slender,” for example. He also dismisses the music on Blonde on Blonde as “overly archetypal” and says many of the lyrics give “the impression of very elevated graffiti on a toilet stall wall.”
While Egan can be provocative, however, he’s almost invariably articulate, well-versed, and interesting. And he sounds passionate about the albums he most admires. Dylan fans may well take issue with portions of Egan’s book, but they’ll likely be glad they read it.
Noteworthy New Albums
The Bongos, The Shroud of Touring: Live in 1985. The Bongos, who spearheaded Hoboken, New Jersey’s vibrant indie-pop scene in the 1980s, featured vocalist, lead guitarist, and principal songwriter Richard Barone, who went on to have a distinguished career as a songwriter, producer, arranger, and solo musician. (Don’t miss his Sorrows & Promises: Greenwich Village in the 1960s, a 2016 collection of covers with such guests as Dion and John Sebastian.) Also in the group were guitarist and vocalist James Mastro, who has worked with Patti Smith, Television’s Richard Lloyd, and Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter; bassist Rob Norris, who has backed David Johansen and the Band’s Garth Hudson; and powerhouse drummer Frank Giannini.
Accompanied by percussionist Steve Scales, who played with the B-52s and with Talking Heads on their Stop Making Sense tour, the Bongos recorded this 1985 live album for RCA at Tradewinds, a club on the Jersey Shore. However, the label never issued it, and the group broke up a few years later. (Eight of its tracks did finally show up on a digital release in 2023; the other seven have never previously appeared in any official format.)
Maybe the split wouldn’t have happened if this frenetic hour-long recording had been made available 40 years ago. Now, at any rate, it has been restored, remastered, and mixed from the original 24-track analog tape, revealing gloriously raucous power pop that draws on new wave, psychedelia, and British invasion rock. Its performances exude energy and enthusiasm, and, despite their age, they never sound dated.
Among the many highlights are “In the Congo,” which Rolling Stone writer David Fricke describes in his liner notes as “like the Velvet Underground coming over the jungle in 1969”; a cover of Marc Bolan’s “Mambo Sun,” with guitar and percussion that evoke Cream; the popular title cut from the Bongos’ 1983 major label debut, Numbers with Wings; and the fast-paced “Apache Mambo.”
Crank up the volume and prepare to party.
Robert Forster, Strawberries. Like its most recent predecessor, 2023’s The Candle and the Flame, this ninth solo album from Australian singer, songwriter, and guitarist Robert Forster showcases vignettes that seem drawn from real life. He injects a bit more lightness this time around, however. The first single from the previous album, “She’s a Fighter,” reflected the news that his wife, Karin Baumler, had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. By contrast, the title track on the new CD finds Forster dueting with Baumler on a song inspired by a time when he couldn’t resist eating a whole bowl of fruit that had been meant to be shared with her.
Forster, who first garnered attention in the 1970s and 1980s with the alt-rock group the Go-Betweens, fills his tunes with cleverly worded and evocative detail. In “Breakfast on the Train,” for instance, he slowly unfolds the tale of a couple who meet in a bar after a rugby game, recognize each other from school days, make love in a hotel, then leave town together the next morning. “They have breakfast on the train,” Forster sings. “The previous night they can’t explain.”
Recorded mostly live in the studio, the album features a complementary backup band that includes producer Peter Moren on guitar, Jonas Thorell on bass, Magnus Olsson on drums, Lina Langendorf on woodwind instruments and tenor sax, and Anna Ahman on keyboards. Some of the material is more varied and less understated than what you might expect from Forster. He rocks out on a love song called “All of the Time,” for example, and on the album-closing “Diamonds,” which delivers another love lyric, he ventures even further from his usual turf to include a bit of falsetto as well as music influenced by freeform jazz.
The post Book & Music Reviews: ‘Decade of Dissent: How 1960s Bob Dylan Changed the World,’ plus the Bongos & Robert Forster appeared first on Blogcritics.