Song and Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan

by Michael Gray

Book Overview

This third edition provides a definitive retrospective appraisal of almost 40 years of work by one of the 20th centuries most significant artists. The author provides in this new edition fresh... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 052520685X
• ISBN13: 9780525206859
• Release Date: January 1972
• Publisher: E.P. Dutton and Company, Inc.
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.26 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Absolutely incredible

As an avid fan of rock scholarship (oxymoronical as some still consider the term), I've read many a bio and interpretive book through the years, and I have to say that this one, hands down, is the absolute most amazing one I've ever come across. Only Dylan - with his 40+ albums, 4-decade career, half a thousand songs, countless gigs, and sheer depth of material - could be subject to such a gargantuan examination as this, and Gray milks it for all it's worth. At over 900 pages, this book examines every aspect of Dylan's recorded work. The level of scholarship is almost insane. The footnotes alone are massive (some taking up the majority of a page); one chapter alone contains over 220 of them. This is not a book that attempts to "explain" the songs (Gray knows better than that.) What it does, instead, is give detailed background information on them: shedding light, at long last, on their genesis - showing us what songs, poems, books, movies or what have you may have influenced them. One gets a sense in reading this of Dylan's own vast knowledge of music. We learn here how deeply and thorougly he has mined such treasure troves of art as pre-war blues, folk songs, the Bible (though Gray borders on overkill on this particular subject), poetry of all sorts, and, surprisingly, nursery rhyme, fairy tales, and Hollywood movie dialogue. Some might claim that knowing such things takes the fun or novelty out of simply listening to a song, or of self-interpretation, but surely, it gives an extra layer or two of depth to Dylan's work, allowing you to appreciate them that much more. Some passages are surely revelatory. While some of the chapters are admittedly not as interesting as others, many are enlightening and downright ground-breaking. The chapter on his use of pre-war blues lyrics poetry is a cornucopia of exhaustive reasearch (the footnotes alone in this chapter could almost comprise a book.) Undoubtedly revelatory to many are the chapters on Dylan's use of nursery rhyme and movie dialogue in his lyrics (the use of the latter shines an entirely new light on the Empire Burlesque album.) Another element of the book worth noting is that it doesn't skimp over his too-often-unnecessarily-derided 80's and 90's work (a period where it actually became cool to despise Dylan.) Gray offers excellent analyses of such 80's masterpieces as Blind Willie McTell, Caribbean Wind (three versions!), Foot of Pride, Jokerman, Brownsville Girl, and the entire Oh Mercy album. All of these songs (and more) are thoroughly examined, and lend needed credence to truly excellent Dylan compositions that often do not get the credit they deserve. His 90's albums - Under The Red Sky, Good As I Been To You, World Gone Wrong, and Time Out of Mind - all have thorough chapters dedicated to them as well. The latter chapter I particularly enjoyed. I should also take time out to ackwnoledge not only Gray's parlaying of information, but his sheer excellence of writing. His prose is very, very g

Worth every cent. Hardback or softback - Indispensible.

An important and groundbreaking work, treating Dylan's oeuvre for what it is - a performance-based series of songs created by a sometimes-visionary intent on exploring the human condition through his own idiosyncratic blend of musical and literary influences. Other reviewers that have already noted the difference between earlier and later chapters in this massive book - that the earlier chapters are holdovers from previous editions, while the later chapters are newly written. There is a considerable difference in tone between these earlier (now-revised) chapters and the newly written ones. The later chapters on Dylan's blues inclinations, especially as manifest on his two underrated early 90's albums of folk and blues covers, and his 1983 masterpiece "Blind Willie McTell," are a revelation to anyone who would seek to understand the complicated relationship between Dylan's performances and past musics. Taking this argument up to the recent past, Gray's peerless appraisal of Dylan's most recent album, Time Out of Mind, is exciting and in many cases revelatory. His analysis of the song "Highlands" alone is worth the price of the book. Gray's extensive footnotes (which at times occupy the majority of the page they are appended to) function as good footnotes should. They work with the text, as a support for his arguments, and they expand on his statements by referencing the relevant recordings and texts. The nether-trails of recorded music are included here: one could spend an entire lifetime seeking out and listening to the albums listed in the footnotes. Also, Gray's focus on Dylan in the 80's and 90's is refreshing. With this time-period in clear focus, Gray's work is a nice companion to Clinton Heylin's newly-revised Behind The Shades. These two books represent what is hopefully a new trend in Dylan writing. Instead of miring the man and his influence in the 1960's, Gray takes on Dylan's later periods with great enthusiasm and insight. Gray's most interesting work relates to Dylan's songs from the 80's - his analyses of such songs as "Jokerman," "Angelina," and "Carribean Wind" are essential reading for any Dylan fan who thinks that there are no Dylan songs after either 1966 or 1974 that can match the detailed intensity embodied in mid-60's masterpieces such as "Visions of Johanna," "It's Alright Ma," or "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues."Gray's writing is refreshing in that he keeps a critical eye on Dylan, citing examples of Dylan's songwriting and performing laziness when such criticisms are called for. Also, unlike so many `Dylanologists,' Gray does not use Dylan as a cipher onto which he projects his own agenda (religious, political, other). Instead, he makes an admirable effort to locate the essence of the works themselves, their meanings and roots, and to outline their development as much as his research will allow. His prose is eminently readable, and he can be funny as well as very serious, depending on what the material calls for.Sure, at 900

A great, great book!

Song and Dance Man III by Michael Gray is a tremendous book about Bob Dylan and it is bound to become THE essential book on the American singer. It deserves it. Even the front cover is great : no 1965 photo of Dylan there, but a weirdly beautiful one taken in a street of London in July 1993. Look at the face for a few seconds and then you can open the book and delight in the discoveries you'll find in its nearly 1,000 pages. Every chapter is amazingly rich, provocative and a tremendous reading and learning experience. The notes at the bottom of the pages are in themselves another book and the scope and wealth of the information are exceptional. There is, for example, a fantastic chapter about the influence of pre-war blues on Dylan that captivated me. So did the chapters about Dylan's use of the Bible and his interest in nursery rhymes and fairy tales. Michael Gray has two qualities that most of the other writers on Dylan lack : he knows how to write and he knows what he writes about. His style is clear, rich, sharp and funny. Every literary and musical influences of Dylan is revealed. The extraordinary talent and significance of Bob Dylan burst through the pages and make you want to go and listen to all his albums and to all the great music that Dylan has loved and absorbed.

Song & Dance Man 3 - The Art of Bob Dylan

A great book. Erudite AND entertaining. Perhaps its finest quality is its integrity: it makes a compelling case for Dylan's genius, while simultaneously avoiding the hagiography which so bedevils much adoring work on Bob. In other words, it has real critical balance. The latter section on the ageing Bob is almost painfully honest and realistic...but the book is all the better for it. The 100-odd page chapter on Dylan's use of, and homage to, pre war blues lyrics is 'worth the price' on its own. And the terrific use of footnotes in this section makes the work a bit like the acquisition of that first bootleg album - you might think you're just dipping a toe in the water, but before you know it you've plunged right in...and you'll never get out. The section on nursery rhyme is especially intriguing. And the excellent analysis of biblical sources is good enough to make all but the most bigoted fans open their ears [and minds] to this fundamental element of Dylan's inspiration. Given its immense size, there must presumably be the odd error in it, but few show [wasn't it Liam Clancy who Bob described as the best ever ballad singer, and not Tommy Makem, by the way?]. Song & Dance Man 3 seems likely to be as useful ten years on as it is fascinating on the very first read. It will be on [and off] my bookshelves for a very long time.

a delightful labyrinth

This is a great book. It looks more daunting than it should, because of the size and the lenghty footnotes. M. Gray made an interesting choice when he decided to keep the first chapters as they had been published earlier rather than rewrite them, and they are less rewarding than the more recent work. But it is another sense illuminating, since they give us a way of understanding the evolution of Gray's reading of Dylan. It is in many ways a multi-layered book, so it is only fair that we get the first layers as they were written. By the way, the new chapters illuminate not only Dylan's more recent work, but also the 60's and 70's, specially the long and fascinating chapter on the blues. Despite Gray's more severe views on Dylan's recent work, nobody to my knowledge has made a stronger case for Dylan being the greatest songwriter of the age, even if one takes into account ONLY his work of the 80's and 90's (yes, even if you forget "Desolation Row" and "Tangled up in Blue", and all the others). One of the delights of the book is the in-depth analysis of the use of nursery rhymes and fairy tales in the much-maligned and wonderful "Under the Red Sky". This book promises to be a lasting and rewarding reading.There are pages that, in my view, could have been omitted -- some cheap shots against other leading Dylanologists, some too lenghty attacks against the show-biz world. There are, of course, cases where I don't agree with Gray's judgement. More importantly, there is a general messiness about the book. I find it somewhat annoying, but I like it too: it is maybe a kind of mirror image of Dylan's own messiness and lack of perfectionnism, that is inseparable from his genius. This book is erudite and academic on the one hand, and on the other it is lively, fun, and highly personal. It is the first analysis of Dylan's work to do justice to its awesome richness and complexity. This book is a labyrinth, where it is delightful to get lost, and then to find oneself. I can't wait for the next edition, which in all likelihood will be 2500 pages long.