Yea, heavy and a bottle of bread . . .
Weighing in at a formidable nine hundred and eighteen pages of dense type with no pictures and footnotes as long as your leg! Michael Gray s Song & Dance Man 111 The Art Of Bob Dylan is no run of the mill, cut n paste rock book.
Nor is it a heavyweight biography in the style of Robert Shelton s No Direction Home. Instead, taking as his inspiration DH Lawrence s dictum, Never trust the author, trust the tale, Gray s is an attempt to get to the heart of the man through the art of the man, resulting in this massive critical study that substantially rewrites and updates earlier editions of an already acclaimed book.
Whether employing an almost forensic line by line examination of song content or stepping back to view the broader body of the work in the light of other musical and literary influences ranging from the Bible to the blues, from TS Eliot to Chuck Berry Gray s approach is serious, scholarly and rarely less than stimulating.
On the downside, the author s almost neurotic attention to detail means that sometimes the essential integrity of a song or even of an individual line barely survives the intensity of his microscopic investigations. But if the overly academic tone occasionally sits uneasily with the rock n roll shadings of the subject matter, Gray s evident passion for Dylan s work crucially, just as evident in his anger when it lets him down as in his infectious enthusiasm for the good stuff is usually enough to allow the book to recover from its more arid, some might say anoraky longeurs.
For this Dylan fan, the book is worth the price of admission alone for his fascinating new chapter on Blind Willie McTell, the eponymous hero of one of Zimmy s greatest later songs. Dipping in and out in all honesty, I can t imagine even Dylan himself sitting down to read this monster from cover to cover I was also struck by the quality of insight generated by Gray s detailed studies of other comparatively recent epics like Brownsville Girl and Dignity , while his impassioned case for certain tracks from the patchy Time Out Of Mind has sent me back to what I d originally considered a somewhat hyped return to form with new interest and a more open mind.
There aren t many popular music acts whose work would stand up to the kind of critical scrutiny Michael Gray brings to bear in Song & Dance Man 111. Ultimately, it s a tribute to the author and his subject, that both emerge from this new edition with their credibility not only intact but enchanced.
Song & Dance Man 111 The Art Of Bob Dylan by Michael Gray, published by Cassell, is on sale now.