Princeton professor Sean Wilentz is an American historian; his last book before the new Bob Dylan In America was the densely crammed The Age Of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008, so it makes sense that his treatment of Dylan’s career would be full of verifications. Bob Dylan In America isn’t a biography, though. Instead, it’s a reading of Dylan’s work within the wider framework of American culture—a worthy enough topic, and one Wilentz, for the book’s first two-thirds, at least, tackles with some vigor.
He begins with a surprising topic: Aaron Copland, the trailblazing composer whose early leftism (or Communism, though he later denied that) and desire to commingle folk songs and high literature into something distinctly modern and American makes a curious parallel with Dylan’s. A chapter on the Beats follows, with special emphasis on Dylan’s friendship with Allen Ginsberg—Wilentz reads the social implications of the two men’s relationship as it existed at different points at time, with Ginsberg legitimizing Dylan among literati early on, while Dylan lent Ginsberg rock-star aura later. After that, the bulk of the chapters focus on specific recordings and concerts, from Dylan’s 1964 appearance at Philharmonic Hall on Halloween and the November 1975 New Haven appearance of the Dylan-helmed Rolling Thunder Review to the sessions for 1966’s Blonde On Blonde and the 1983 Infidels outtake “Blind Willie McTell.”
The book’s final third can be ponderous. These later chapters, covering Dylan’s post-’80s work, offer illumination, as when he unravels the thicket of sources Dylan has quoted in his ’00s work, most notably on 2001’s Love And Theft, but they’re also a bit tedious. All those sources lead to glazed eyes after a while, while his semi-defense of the badly received 2003 movie Masked And Anonymous has the critics-didn’t-get-his-genius tone of a Dylan fanzine. Wilentz’s many references to the handful of later Dylan shows he’s caught are intrusive, like he’s trying to prove something about his fandom.
Nevertheless, there’s a lot to chew on here. Though the Bootleg Series volumes covering the 1964 show and 1975 tour (volumes six and five, respectively) show the music to be pretty flimsy compared to Dylan’s studio work of the time, Wilentz uses them as lenses for strong chapters on Dylan’s place, respectively, in the folk-music world (which he was about finished with at the time of the Philharmonic show) and as a vaudeville inheritor. (The Rolling Thunder Revue featured a revolving lineup, including Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, performing in round-robin style, though Dylan was clearly the headliner—or ringmaster.) He’s vivid on the factors that helped shape Dylan’s background in the ’40s and ’50s: to-the-ground Communist-cell accounts, Ginsberg and Dylan’s first meeting, the tensions between high art and folk culture that Dylan helped ease. Wilentz is stolid at times, but he isn’t lazy.