Down the Road with DYLAN – Living with the Songs is the name of my newest book, a blend of memoir, recent American history, and a deep dive into 100 of Bob Dylan’s greatest songs and how those creations impacted both me and the wider culture these past 6 + decades. Which songs? Certainly, his best-known creations are here— “Blowin” in the Wind”, “The Times They Are a-Changin’”, “Like a Rolling Stone”, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”, but I’d like to highlight several other, perhaps lesser known, cuts in this post, that are also treated in my book.
From his early acoustic-folk era, give a listen to “WHEN THE SHIP COMES IN”, a 1964 song that posits a day of reckoning for “the masters of war, the forces of oppression, the pharaohs of our world” as Dylan deftly uses alliteration, delightful personification, and an up-tempo melody and vocal to paint a hopeful picture of a new world a-dawning. We needed it in ’64, and we need it even more today.
There are so many classics from Dylan’s mid- ‘60s surrealist electric period to choose from that “STUCK INSIDE OF MOBILE WITH THE MEMPHIS BLUES AGAIN” (1966) can get overlooked. It’s hilarious, instrumentally sumptuous, and philosophically rich as it posits that “It’s simply part of the human condition to find oneself, all too often, in a place, geographic or psychic, where one does not belong.”
How about Country Dylan, where we get a “sincere, honest, direct, sad, self-aware” confession that a particular failed love relationship was nobody’s fault but his in the lovely, pure 1969 song “I THREW IT ALL AWAY”.
If you’re not familiar with “BLIND WILLIE MCTELL” (1991), listen to Dylan’s “brilliant poetic summation of the tragic history of African-Americans over the past four centuries, up to the present day, a history replete with Biblical levels of cruelty and violence, but redeemed, as well, by resilience and creative expression.”
There’s a good reason Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, and I invite you to join me as I reflect on my own life and the life of our nation in the light of these brilliant songs. You can find Down the Road with DYLAN at BookBaby Book Shop in both paperback and eBook formats. Thanks, Steve
