I feel I’ve been writing this book all my life. In a sense I feel Dylan’s been writing my life—unknowingly—all his. Meanwhile, I expect many readers will come to this book only after or because of seeing the film A Complete Unknown, and I appreciate your continued interest in this great American artist and Nobel laureate songwriter. I welcome as well those with a lifetime familiarity with Bob who I believe will still find some important new ways to think about him and appreciate his work. Some of these may be controversial, but has he ever been noncontroversial? You could think of this book as a kind of follow-up, a how “things have changed” for a still incompletely known Bob Dylan. But don’t expect a chronology of biographical facts. There are books by Michael Gray and Clinton Heylin, among others, who have done that worthy task with super-max diligence.
No, I wanted to do a book that focuses on him as a songwriter and focuses closely on some aspects of his songwriting themes and memes that are likely to be little known yet highly relevant.
Such as, for instance, the exploration of Dylan’s theodicy—a word not synonymous with theology, but a subdiscipline that focuses on evil, on the attempt to reconcile the persistence, often prevalence, of “radical evil” (Hannah Arendt’s initial term before she shifted to “banality”) with a supposedly benevolent God.
A very serious side of Dylan, not his only preoccupation but an important one, implicitly or subtly evoked in more lyrics than you might think, and often key to understanding them more fully.
One of my chapter titles sums it up: “Dylan’s Argument with God.” It may offend some, but I’ve long been an investigative type of writer who, when he discovers something unexamined or poorly examined, something not really given the attention it deserves, feels it would be in bad faith to conceal it for fear of controversy. Theodicy is something I’ve been studying with great Jewish and Christian theologians and philosophers ever since researching my book Explaining Hitler, a book that assesses the different reactions and rationales for that radical evil. If you doubt my belief that it was on Dylan’s mind, consider a long-overlooked quote in Dylan’s long-overlooked early attempt at a novel he called Tarantula. The Dylan quote in that book that struck me like a bolt from the blue was this: “Hitler didn’t change history / Hitler WAS history.” In other words, we live in a creation so pervaded by evil that its entire history is a reflection of Hitler more than a loving God. All this may have had major consequences in his life. His naked anger at the Old Testament God for not lifting a finger to save “His” people from the death camps. A failure even, especially, proudly pious Jews fail to offer a convincing defense of—His inexplicable and to some of us unforgivable absence during the Holocaust, or certainly a failure to intervene with his alleged superpowers.
He was certainly aware of and has intervened (popular belief has it) in deciding Super Bowls. That anger at the Old Testament deity, I believe, is one of the sources of Dylan’s vulnerability to a born-again New Testament sect that hijacked his soul for several years. I say this as someone who spent a week talking with Dylan, often about God and evil, just a few months before this bar mitzvah boy’s shocking conversion into a ranting Christian preacher became known. Yes, there were personal troubles and professional pressures. We talked on Warner Bros. Burbank back lot, where Dylan was attempting to cut and loop the many thousands of feet of film footage into the film he called Renaldo and Clara.
It was in part a Children of Paradise–like memoir/tribute to the world and the people of the Complete Unknown era that launched him into fame and glory, a film interspersed with sizzling, electrifying rock from the Rolling Thunder concert tour and a complex and confusing allegorical plotline that starred Bob, his soon-to-be-divorced “mystical wife,” Sara, and his longtime, part-time love, Joan Baez. What could go wrong? Well, for one thing, he couldn’t seem to cut it down further than four and a half hours, which eventually doomed it commercially. Warners hastily withdrew it from theaters after a few weeks, and Dylan, Inc. seemed to be doing everything to hide it ever after, although by now I believe it should be released at least for its curatorial value as a portrait of the artist as a tormented dreamer. And one mission I always had for this book was to arouse some enthusiasm to give Renaldo another life.
I’ll mention one other discovery I’ve never seen dwelt upon before: a key aspect of Late Dylan songwriting, a metaphysical key I’ve found to unlock the often difficult-to-decipher Late Dylan lyrics. I began trying to understand why, when asked about his past performances, live or recorded, he seemed obsessed with the difference between sincerity and authenticity. And recurrently when asked about past performances or recordings, he insisted, “That wasn’t me,” “I’m not there,” “It ain’t me,” and the like. Following that clue led me to what I believe is the skeleton key to understanding the often apparently unintelligible “discontinuity of selves” of the philosophers, physicists, and even, especially, litterateurs like the Argentine fabulist and metaphysical savant Jorge Luis Borges. Call it a way of construing Late Dylan lyrics that opens the door to all of us getting more pleasure from them.
Ironically, at its heart is a metaphysical thought experiment about a single frame in a filmstrip. The way an actor in a single cell in a strip of film metaphorically can’t know anything about the cell before them or the cell to come. They’re part of a discontinuous series of selves only given animation and a kind of life when the projector is turned on. I won’t try to explain the consequences of this here, but I connect it to the seemingly disconnected utterances of many Late Dylan songs in chapters to come.
Dylan a metaphysician? See for yourself.
There is much more that I’d have to write a book to contain. Oh look, I did. I’ve written a six-hundred-page book on Shakespeare (The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascos, Palace Coups, Random House, 2006) that doesn’t scratch the surface, though I think you’re unlikely to find a better brief study of the variations in the early texts of his plays. And yes, Dylan is not Shakespeare, I feel the need to emphasize, he’s a song writer who sometimes can suggest Shakespearean depths, if not heights.
But I think I owe newcomers as well as old hands a brief introduction to your author.
My Dylan experience began with that Joan Baez LP of Dylan covers and was stirred by his appearance and performance at Martin Luther King Jr.’s DC March. I had my share of crazy Highway 61–type Dylan road trips, ended up teaching his lyrics as poetry in a seminar as part of my Yale Graduate School fellowship, soon fled academia and became default Dylan correspondent at The Village Voice, and I had my life changed by that 1965 Forest Hills concert where Dylan debuted “Desolation Row” and his electric guitar backup band for the first time since the Newport Folk Festival uproar. I covered the opening 1974 “return” concert in Chicago,and later wrote essays (which you can google) on his memoir, Chronicles, a book I loved and admired as writer and former Village resident. Including a long disquisition in praise of “Up to Me,” the wonderful song dropped from the great Blood on the Tracks album, with my speculative conclusion (you can judge for yourself).
I guess I should mention my weeklong interview with Dylan is accorded the longest time he ever gave a journalist, a breed he often mocked (“You know something’s happening, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”). But I found him to be kind or at least tolerant as he chain-smoked his way through two or three hours a day answering my many questions nervously scrawled on yellow legal pads while I took occasional swallows from a pint of tequila I brought to steady my nerves. (These talks took place mostly in a tiny back-lot bungalow I thought of as a private barroom.)
Anyway, I’ve been working on this book for years, and though I could not presume to write something knowledgeable enough to be a full-bore biography, I thought I could give you a book focused on those songs and his songwriting—and the theodicy and metaphysics of the persona they reflected.
Thus, this.
And just as a kind of coded signal to the Dylanologists, Bobolators, Dylanists (my choice cognomen), I was the one who, in that epic interview, got Bob to describe the sound he’d been seeking, which he memorably described to me as “That thin, that wild mercury sound.” What a wonderful phrase—“wild mercury”—soon stamped on bootlegs.
He found it, that sound, and eventually things changed. That’s Dylan for you. Hard to pin down as a drop of mercury. Mercury, the fleet messenger god of Olympus; Shakespeare’s fast-talking wit, Mercutio; Dylan, mercurial to the end.
May he stay forever young.
From BOB DYLAN: THINGS HAVE CHANGED. Used with permission of the publisher, Melville House Publishing. Copyright © 2025 by RON ROSENBAUM.
