Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown

Icons of America

by David Yaffe

An appreciative and incisive look at Bob Dylan's expansive career, published to coincide with the singer's seventieth birthday

Bob Dylan is an iconic figure in American musical and cultural history, lauded by Time magazine as one of the hundred most important people of the twentieth century. For nearly fifty years the singer-songwriter has crafted his unique brand of music, from his 1962 self-titled debut album to 2009's #1 hit Together Through Life, appealing to everyone from baby boomers to the twenty-somethings who storm the stage at his concerts.

In Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown, literary scholar and music critic David Yaffe considers Dylan from four perspectives: his complicated relationship to blackness (including his involvement in the civil rights movement and a secret marriage with a black backup singer), the underrated influence of his singing style, his fascinating image in films, and his controversial songwriting methods that have led to charges of plagiarism. Each chapter travels from the 1960s to the present, offering a historical perspective on the many facets of Dylan's life and career, exploring the mystery that surrounds the enigmatic singer and revealing the complete unknown Dylan.

Genres: Music, Biography, Nonfiction

192 pages, Hardcover

First published May 24, 2011

About the author

David Yaffe is assistant professor of English at Syracuse University and the author of Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing. He is a music critic for the Nation and has written articles for the Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan, the New York Times, Bookforum, New York Magazine, Slate, The New Republic, The Village Voice, and other publications.

Reviews

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

The dust jacket has a great photograph of Dylan in which he appears to be almost invisible. You see a white cowboy hat, a bit of a blue jacket, shoulder and forearm, the upper neck of a guitar and the shadowed fingers of his hands. That’s all, the rest is black. To a certain extent, Dylan has remained invisible to those who have tried, particularly in biography but also in criticism, to make sense of him. In this regard he is not unlike Pablo Picasso. Both were chameleons, both were rife with contradictions, both in word and deed, and were totally, consistently unreliable in interviews—though an aspect of their consistency was a refusal to tolerate any form of definition, which left a bottom line truth in all the obfuscations, contradictions, and, well, lies. Don’t label me. Don’t limit me. Don’t project on to me. Instead of heeding the subterranean, consistent truth, writers have cherry-picked the poisoned fruit of Dylan’s interviews, friendly, combative, or pro forma, as if one might be the real Dylan revealed. Maureen Dowd most recently took a bite from one of those apples to deleterious effect. Picasso and Dylan, too, were sponges, soaking up influences across the full spectrum of their fields, and incorporating these influences into their work in ways that were revolutionary but also timelessly connected to tradition.

David Yaffe’s book is not a biography or a comprehensive look at Dylan’s work. It’s essentially a collection of four essays on Dylan, each with a discrete theme: Dylan’s voice, his connection to film (by or about him or with him in it), his debt and affinity to black music and culture, and his Shakespearean habit of borrowing from the work of others. They are all interesting topics, well-covered and written. The chapter on his voice is mostly focused on how and why it’s changed over time and how well his late voice is suited for the kinds of songs he is singing and writing now. I would have liked some more on Dylan’s influence as a singer, which is under-appreciated since many folks can’t get passed what Philip Larkin called “a cawing, derisive voice” and all that nasality. The second chapter on Dylan and film is interesting, particularly as it talks early on how Dylan was influenced by American movies and film stars—the references are many in his songs, but it’s not on the level of importance as the last two chapters: Dylan and what he owes to black music and culture and the issue of plagiarism. The latter has three defenses: 1) that’s folk music for you (if you stole from somebody, he/she stole from someone first, who probably lifted from someone else); 2) in art, bad artists copy and great artists steal; 3) if what you steal is put together in inspired and new ways it’s not stealing whatever the number of appropriated elements. The connections to black culture are both obvious and surprising—Dylan would have married Mavis Staples in the early 60s had she said yes. Yaffe points out numerous complex references to black women in Dylan’s songs and the fact that his second wife was a gospel singer who toured with him during the late 70s and 80s. But it’s a bigger connection, a larger debt, than that. Dylan is a man in search of a place to be—except for a brief moment around the time of “New Morning” and “Planet Waves” Dylan has never in work or interview acknowledged, let alone celebrated, his actual familial and community roots but instead insisted on an orphan’s or runaway’s identity. He told the interviewer in the Scorsese documentary that he never felt like he belonged where he grew up or felt that he was part of that home or town. He made up stories about his youth and early adulthood for interviewers when he first started out. He’s been on an endless tour for decades. He often seems to live and work in another time and place. Yaffe helps readers see this restlessness in a context of his musical interests and his own search for a personal resting place, a home, a community.

Yaffee is smart, well-versed in Dylan’s music and American literature and culture, bringing it all to bear in lucid prose that only occasionally gets compromised by the penchant that so many writers on Dyaln suffer from for cutesy paraphrases of Dylan’s lyrics. Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown is an engaging, perceptive easy read for fans or for interested folks who want a quick but nuanced introduction to the mystery that is Dylan.

[Steve Redhead · Rating 5 out of 5]

Does the world need yet another Bob Dylan book? Surprisingly in David Yaffe's case the answer is yes. This short book takes four aspects of Dylan's muse - including his widely attributed plagiarism (or not, depending on your point of view) and his smoke raddled ageing vocal chords/range and the world worn new grain of the voice that this decline creates in his later work. Yaffe, a music/literature studies American academic, weaves an essay chapter around each of these ideas (and more) with great verve, imagination and clarity. The best chapter is a daring one, focusing on an issue rarely properly taken on in all the myriad Dylan books for sale over the years - namely Dylan's 'blackness'. The immersion of Bob Dylan in black culture has been much more lasting than his flirtation with Born Again Christianity in the late 1970s. That particular religious interlude was said to be the result of Dylan's religious black girl friend at the time asking him 'do you pray'? Later, in the 1980s, he secretly married at least one black woman (Carolyn Dennis) who had been in the ever changing group of black women back up singers who pervaded his live performances from 1978 to 1986. And Dennis and Dylan had a daughter together. Yaffe goes beyond personal aspects of Dylan's life though and shows how much Dylan's music and performance depends on the thorough going immersion in black culture and musical history. This is more than a white negro syndrome in Dylan's case. His musical heroes (Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Charley Patton, Blind Willie McTell among them) are, now that he is 70 years old, literally the main role models for his never ending tour live performances of over 100 each year. Yaffe could have extended this theme over a whole book his analysis is so sharp, erudite and convincing. Well worth investigating this book, Dylan fan or not.

[Dylan · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting little volume of Bob Dylan analysis. By not attempting any complete biography, Yaffe can zoom in on specific aspects of Bob and tackle them in depth, with varying results. The first 2 essays (about Bob’s voice and Bob’s film appearances) felt a little bit like fluff pieces, but the essays about Bob’s relationship to blackness and Bob’s alleged “plagiarism” were very interesting topics that I think deserve to be explored further.

[sophie]

Preparing for Bob dylan movie

[Michael Pronko · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book tries to do several things on the topic of Dylan, but only manages to do a few of them. This is a book I didn't like so much, but it's also a book I feel like I need to apologize for not liking more. The author knows his stuff, and he has to juggle the demands of the Yale Icon series, which seeks to examine American culture through the focused lens of single people, events or things. Perhaps I've read too much about Dylan or lived with his music for too long, but the book offers too few insights for its length. He criticizes Dylan's pilfering of American tradition, which is fine. He takes Dylan down a notch or two, which is also fine. He positions him among other great singer-songwriters who are his equals, which works well. But, by the end I didn't feel I understood Dylan more deeply than when I started. The author also has an annoying, almost cloying, habit of slipping in quotes from Dylan's work in the middle of his own sentences. That might be fine, poetic even, except that he criticizes Dylan for slipping in quotes from all over the place into his songs, without giving the source, credit or, he seems to suggest, respect due. The playlist in the appendix, always interesting for Dylan listeners to check out, seems to reduce the cultural context of the songs themselves, since most were part of larger song cycles on albums and CDs. That, and the portion of the book spent on his social presence, takes time away from commentary on the music, analysis of the lyrics or figuring out the why of his powerful effect on listeners that has continued for decades. Despite these criticisms, I would not want to have not read this work. He makes a lot of fine points, draws interesting new connections, and covers a lot of territory. I felt in the end, though, that somehow this was not the work he wanted to write on Dylan. Maybe that work will come out later, and Yaffe's earlier work on jazz "Fascinating Rhythm; Reading Jazz in American Writing," remains an excellent, indispensable work on the intersection of jazz and prose.

[Art · Rating 3 out of 5]

Four essays explore Dylan. The one about his voice intrigued me, but the ones about his blackness, songwriting and films did not.

David Yaffe worked on Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell while writing this book. That was a good, solid and well-researched five-star story. So I thought this would be of similar caliber. It falls short. Two stars short. Overwrought.

It is hard to know where to place Dylan, writes Yaffe. He arrived in the sixties as a hybrid, assimilating himself from others. His influences came from everywhere. Dylan belongs among singer-songwriters, a cult of authenticity whose members included Muddy Waters, Odetta, Woody Guthrie and Joni Mitchell.

Dylan’s harsh and strident caw also characterized Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Neil Young, Lou Reed and Patti Smith, writes Yaffe.

In sixty-five we could understand him, now his voice croaks, Yaffe wrote eight years ago.

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

Many Dylan books, most of them bad, and Yaffe didn't escape the curse. In the midst of his Joni Mitchell project, Yaffe stopped to write this "short" bio-critical study of Dylan, four rather digressive essays on his voice, on his treatment in film, on his cultural appropriation of especially blackness, and on his derivativeness, none of these chapters with anything particularly new to say, though I enjoyed thinking through Dylan's shift away from the Rolling Thunder Tour in the aftermath of his first marriage, subject of the chapter, "Not Dark Yet." Like many another literary scholar (this one who played jazz drums), Yaffe's approach is that, writing about poetic language, he'll trope the trope. He'll bring the literary, far preferable to studying it. He's be-riddled by Dylan's own influence here, periphrastically citing Dylan's lyrics & public statements as if each and every reiteration is the most stunning irony. By god it's tiresome.

[Naomi Krokowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yaffe’s slim yet scholarly book is full of respect for the many contradictions that make Dylan so fascinating. Yaffe is an intelligent and balanced author, combining great love as a fan with a professor’s critical summation skills. Understanding Dylan’s mercurial nature and vast body of work is, in my humble yet obsessive opinion as a songwriting admirer, a worthwhile pursuit. Yaffe offers a playlist at the end of the book that in itself is worth the price and our time.

[Daniel Davidson · Rating 5 out of 5]

An engaging.but also annoying analysis

Not as useful as his Joni Mitchell book in that it breaks the narrative into thematic sections and therefore makes it more difficult to follow chronologically. I enjoyed it in spite of that. The listening list is interesting and may be a guide to adding some tunes to my iPod.

[Bob Peru · Rating 4 out of 5]

very interesting short meditations on various aspects of dylan's work lots of good insights.

[Jonny Brick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very good on minstrelsy and plagiarism, with plenty of innovative phrases and plenty of intertextuality. A thinking person's Dylan crit.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit all over the place (more mini-essays than a book), this was published in time for Bob's 70th birthday. There are certainly worse Bob books out there, but there are also many better, fuller ones to be read before you get to this one.

[Reid · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very nice book by David Yaffe, I enjoyed the analysis of Dylan's voice as well as the aspect of his attraction and imitation of black music. A nice addition to the Dylan library.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must read for any Dylan fan. It's a witty, well written synopsis of Bob's life as a homeless road warrior, poet, "song and dance man"...legend.