A BOB DYLAN SONGBOOK

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33425, 5 January 1974, Page 8

A BOB DYLAN SONGBOOK

Writings And Drawings. By Bob Dylan. Cape. 315 pp. Illustrated.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah . . .” sang the Beatles. “No, no. no . . replied Bob Dylan in “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” And this probably sums up a lot about Dylan and his audiences in the mid-sixties. In “Bomb Culture,” Jeff Nuttall called him “a sort of bad-tempered pixie”; Dylan himself could afford to admit that he only wrote protest songs because they were the thing round America at the time. That he did not alienate all of his admirers with that statement alone (not to' mention his numerous other changes of style and image) may seem remarkable, until one realises from this massive songbook that Dylan the protester was a most peculiar phenomenon — an iconoclast who was also an icon.

Of course, inverted pretentiousness that parades as unpretentiousness, the ritual masochism of the artist who studiously mutilates his image from time to time, is not particularly uncommon these days. But in Dylan’s case much of his material was topical, sometimes even looking as if it was lifted from yesterday’s newspapers, so that his enormous talents as a lyricwriter were given solid steel reinforcing because they were often invested in material that looked real. Sing a song about a black man and you may be called sentimental or banal; give the man a name that is in the news — or even a name that sounds as if it should be in the news — and the whole situation becomes much deeper. In his last few albums, Dylan has moved towards a more personal mode, as he was predicting at the time of his accident. The result is a sort of Country and Western blues, often pleasant, enough to listen to but not particularly

exciting on the printed page. This, in fact, is the only weak section in this book, which is, as a whole, relatively cheap and practical. Some of Dylan’s songs have a logical structure which directs one’s thoughtful involvement, others give just a succession of images which make one think, nevertheless. As words alone they certainly merit printing, but when one superimposes a sour voice or impish performance they become obsessive. The protest songs in bulk have a totemlike quality: symbols and values do not matter as much as the simple fact of the totem’s presence, and what Dylan himself thinks of his achievement is secondary to the fact that he erected the totems. As such, this book stands as something of a monument to the sixties: not really poetry, not propaganda, and not even a statement —just an expression of something that was there.