Bob Dylan (Robert Zimmerman)
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<p>Dylan was born in 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota, the eldest son of comfortably-off second-generation Russian-Jewish immigrants. Like many restless and disaffected members of his generation, he first began rummaging through the country’s immense trove of traditional folk songs in the late 1950s…These folk songs…as Dylan writes in his endearingly blunt and disheveled memoir, <em>Chronicles</em> (2004), were about
debauched bootleggers, mothers that drowned their own children, Cadillacs that only got five miles to the gallon, floods, union hall fires, darkness and cadavers at the bottom of rivers…. They weren’t friendly or ripe with mellowness. They didn’t come gently to the shore…. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, <strong>some different republic, some liberated republic.</strong>
Bob Dylan, according to Sean Wilentz’s passionate and informative (if at times lurchingly uneven) new book, “has dug inside America as deeply as any artist ever has.” This is well put, for it suggests the way in which Dylan’s songs (there are now more than five hundred of them) <strong>seem</strong> to unearth a strange, alternate, subterranean America, an antic <strong>shadow country </strong>of dirt roads and frontier towns, abandoned mines and teeming plantations, <strong>a land inhabited by outlaws, vagabonds, crapshooters, confidence men, vigilantes, and religious fanatics,</strong> to name only its most conspicuous citizens.</p>
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