The Aaron Copland / Bob Dylan connection

All right, I’m back.

jafant, here are the major books on Dylan:

- No Direction Home by Robert Shelton. Shelton wrote the rave review in The New York Times of a Dylan Greenwich Village live performance in 1961 that got everyone’s attention. A basic biography.

- Behind The Shades by Clinton Heylin. A good examination of Dylan by a British writer, Brits having a special appreciation of Bob for some reason.

- Bob Dylan: A Biography by Anthony Scaduto. Written in the early 70’s by a major Rolling Stone writer, I didn’t like it as much as the above two, but it’s worth reading.

- Chronicles by Dylan himself. Ya gotta read his autobiography, right? It’s hard to know how much of it is literally true---it is Dylan, after all ;-).

- The Old, Weird America: The World Of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes by Greil Marcus. This you HAVE to read. A really deep, well-researched examination of old songs that were important to Dylan, and the re-recording of them (along with new songs of his own) with The Hawks (aka Band) during 1967, in both the basement of Big Pink and in the living room of his nearby Bearsville house. Fascinating!

Dylan was a sponge, instantly absorbing everything he heard. He settled in with The Hawks for a year, giving that Canadian (heh) band a crash course in American music. The Basement Tapes became a primer for the emerging Americana-style music that was the hippest being made in the late 60’s and early 70’s, a counter-Counter Culture movement that rejected the Hippie ethos. It literally rewrote the rules for making music, as did The Band’s debut album the following year, 1968’s Music From Big Pink. Bob was a good teacher, and The Hawks/Band excellent students!

Let me again praise the book in the original post, Bob Dylan In America by Sean Wilentz. Wilentz’s father owned a bookstore in Greenwich Village, one that the Beat writers and Folk singers frequented. The elder Wilentz was himself a poet, and Sean grew up surrounded in immersed in the Beat/Folk world. He has an unusually good knowledge and appreciation of American music, poetry, and writers---Dylan included, not to mention the historical context within which those art forms are created.

When I left off, I had just finished the chapter on the recording of the Blonde On Blonde album (THE best writing on Dylan’s music I have read), and Wilentz jumps from that period to the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue era, mentioning only briefly the intervening years. I assume he’ll come back around to them---the fantastic John Wesley Harding and New Morning albums, the 1974 tour with The Band (his first since the 1965-6 World Tour with The Hawks) and subsequent album recorded with them, the very cool Planet Waves.