THE DYLANOLOGISTS: ADVENTURES IN THE LAND OF BOB
Author: David Kinney
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 256 pp
Price: $18.63
Bob Dylan said it best, in a 2012 Rolling Stone interview timed to the release of his Tempest album: "Why is it when people talk about me, they have to go crazy?" More than 50 years after he first started attracting fanatical followers, Dylan was facing a more brutal and dangerous species of devotee than he had seen before. The fans had social media, and the scholars had computers; en masse, they could track every move he made and every word he wrote, said or sang. "Dylanologist," once a derisive term for the self-styled expert who sifted through the Dylan family's garbage cans, was now a word with wide colloquial meaning, if not yet a dictionary definition.
Now the world of Dylan worship has a book to call its own. David Kinney, author of The Dylanologists, is a cultist himself, but the book's opening epigraph promises a reasonable perspective. ("Fan: You don't know who I am, but I know who you are. Bob Dylan: Let's keep it that way.") And he starts with the innocent spectacle of pilgrims visiting Hibbing, Minnesotta, the town Robert Zimmerman, soon to be Bob Dylan, fled in 1959 to reinvent himself as something other than a middle-class Jewish kid whose father had a furniture store. They happen to get there on the day Dylan comes home for his brother's mother-in-law's funeral.
What happens? Not much. But Kinney has a chance to describe several different strata of Dylan admirers, from those who'll eat cherry pie because he did to those who know the first name of his maternal great-grandmother (Lybba, lit up in yellow lights inside a touristy restaurant called Zimmy's). The stories are innocent and not particularly interesting.
Then Kinney makes the case for hero worship by citing instances when Dylan practiced it himself. The Dylanologists says he was seen touring John Lennon's childhood home, Mendips, in Liverpool, England, and asking for directions to Strawberry Fields. He is also said to have kissed the spot on the floor in Sun Studios where Elvis Presley stood while recording That's All Right. So we all have musical idols. Most of us just don't let them determine the shapes of our lives.
But the Dylanologists found in this slender book are the most obsessive ones Kinney could find. And too often, he allows the depth of their devotion to be an end in itself. Dylan was the perfect crutch for anyone less articulate - or scathing, or baffling - than he. Dylanologists love Dylan's ability to give voice to practically any thought. And as his career continued, some began to love the fellowship of the road. They dropped whatever else they were doing - often not much - to race from concert to concert, forging friendships of necessity, finding endless hours of conversation in different concerts.
But Dylan kept touring. And touring. And a new breed of fan and chronicler emerged: the completist, the fan who needed to know every detail about every show. Some of these, most notably Mitch Blank, who is one of the book's most admirable figures, have made immensely valuable contributions to music history. (Because of his exhaustive archives, Blank is credited as "hypnotist collector" on Martin Scorsese's Dylan documentary No Direction Home.) Others have glorified piracy and theft, priding themselves on their ways of smuggling recording equipment into concerts and leaving no show unstolen. Kinney's readers will learn that a camera lens can be neatly hidden in a coffee thermos with a false bottom.
The book's bombshell issue arrives late, with Dylanologists' Internet access. When Dylan's career began, he could have expected scholars to spend centuries ferreting out the obscure references in his work and pondering his reasons for free-associating in the ways that he has. Now, a little typing exposes all manner of mortification. He is a ravenous artist, absorbing material from a huge array of sources just like many great, ravenous artists have done before him.
But who among them had packs of Googling, self-righteous cultists on their trails? Dylan's startlingly beautiful memoir, Chronicles Volume I, has already been ripped to shreds by quotation checkers, to the point where he has had to address the matter of plagiarism head-on. His position: Everything comes from somewhere, and try, just try, recycling any of Henry Timrod's early-19th-century poetry in quite the way he has. Jonathan Lethem has eloquently come to his defense with an essay about creative borrowing that was itself cobbled together almost entirely from other sources.
Lost in the gotcha mania is the paradox that the man who publicly savaged a Time magazine reporter in Dont Look Back apparently needed Time to jog his memory about his first year in New York. And lost in the Dylanolgists' tale is the pervasive sadness of people who'd rather live Bob Dylan's lives than their own.
© 2014 The New York Times
