Bob Dylan approximately: A portrait of the Jewish poet in search of God : a Midrash

by Stephen Pickering

Fine Hardcover Collectible First Edition Fine Hardcover Fine Dust Jacket Handsome Linen Boards Clean 204 pp. NO Writing. NO signatures. NOT a library copy. NOT price cut. NO signatures. Color photos. Rare in hardcover and fine dust jacket. See our Three Geese in Flight Book Scans of condition and Table of Contents. We started our Celtic Bookshop in Woodstock New York in 1977.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

204 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. If adding books to this author, please use Stephen^^Pickering.

Reviews

[Eric Gilliland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bob Dylan Approximately was a lucky find at a used bookstore. An account of Dylan's 1974 tour with The Band, the author writes of Dylan as a modern Jewish mystic. There's also lots of great photographs of Dylan from this period that I've never seen before. While the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue has received a wide share of attention, this book is an excellent source of the 1974 tour - mostly performed in large arenas. The accompanying live album was Before the Flood. Pickering also includes extensive commentary on Dylan's 1974 LP Planet Waves.

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 2 out of 5]

Review title: Not that wild mercury sound
When I read the subtitle of this book in the library catalog, I was mightily intrigued, because I think Dylan may be the deepest and most accessible theologian of my lifetime. So a midrash or sermon on the spiritual roots and search of Dylan would be of great interest. But when I requested and now just finished it, I was just as sorely disappointed. Pickering writes in such a sycophantic and pseudo stream of consciousness in what he intends, I think, as a tribute to Dylan, that it is at times an unintentional parody of an era and mostly unreadable.

Lets place this in historical context. Dylan was making his first tour in nearly. a decade since napalming Manchester with pure passion and amphetamines, leaving skin on the highway under his motorcycle, releasing a pair of Nashville-tinted albums recorded in a silky smooth singing style, recovering and recording with his old friends The Band in a ragged but rooted set of music that would be rumoured but not released from the basement for years after the tour, living off the grid of celebrity in a move which if intended to reduce interest in his intentions was a failure, then finally releasing a studio album with The Band. It was 1974, the album was Planet Waves, and coming out of his self-imposed seclusion Dylan was about again to tear out his heart right here on the stage--just around the corner were the breakdown of his marriage, the agonizing public confessional of Blood on the Tracks, and his personal spiritual crisis and conversion to Christianity.

Pickering perhaps felt this tension under the surface and filtering it through his own Jewish roots turned his review of the tour and the album into this mishmash of a midrash. I say perhaps because it is hard to discern any meaning and thread of intent out of Pickering's style, so I gave most of the book the precursory scan that it seemed to earn.

Interestingly I am perhaps closer to liking this book than my review and rating might suggest, because I do agree with Pickering that Dylan's songs are about and tinged with deep spiritual meaning, and Dylan was clearly with those events just around the corner going through a period of intense spiritual longing; I read the lyrics of Street Legal as the prayers of a man on his knees before God about to break one way or the other, either toward Him or away from Him, for Him or against Him. So I think Pickering was correct in his awareness, but inarticulate in his analysis, and incorrect in his conclusion.

For a much better treatise in this vein on the topic of Dylan's lyrics, try Dylan's Visions of Sin by Chris Ricks.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a rambling mess.

[Skylar Burris · Rating 1 out of 5]

I expected commentary on Dylan's lyrics from a Jewish perspective; there is certainly plenty to say on the issue. Unfortunately, this book offered only a blow by blow of a Dylan concert tour, interspersed with drawings of Ein Sof and random quotes from the Kabalah, Elie Wiesel, and Walt Whitman of all people. Great if you want to know every detail of a Dylan tour; otherwise not much use.