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11. Bob Dylan’s Lives of the Poets: Theme Time Radio Hour as Buried Autobiography
- University of Minnesota Press
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In 1777, Samuel Johnson was approached by a committee of booksellers to write biographical prefaces to the works of forty-seven poets whose writing they hoped to present to readers in a new popular edition.1 At the time, by the acknowledgment of his contemporaries, Johnson, in his sixties, possessed an unmatched command of English literature. The author of the Dictionary of the English Language and editor of Shakespeare, according to Adam Smith, Johnson “knew more books than any man alive.” His erudition was monumental, legendary, and memorably mythologized by his biographer James Boswell, who tells how young Sam Johnson, as a boy searching for apples his brother may have hidden in their father’s bookshop, discovered on a high shelf not apples but a folio volume of Petrarch, a book he then and there read “a great part of” with “avidity,” thus embarking on a lifetime’s ravenous reading .2 Such was the power of Johnson’s reputation at the time that the booksellers permitted Johnson to name his own terms—and were relieved when he requested a very modest two hundred guineas.3 What Johnson wrote was a labor of love: rather than the short prefaces the booksellers would have been content with—what they wanted most was Johnson’s name on the project—he, with a congenial subject and in a relaxed mood, gave them 370,000 words, the equivalent, it has been pointed out, of about five modern novels: anecdote, critical commentary, appreciation, literary theory, observations on life, and, in particular, the life of writing—the distilled wisdom of a lifetime. Many of the poets Johnson wrote about are obscure, of little interest today—how many people still read William Garth or William Shenstone or Mark Akenside or Edmund Smith? What remains of enduring fascination is what Paul Fussell calls “buried autobiography,” glimpses of Johnson’s mind at work and of the man himself.4 In 2006, Bob Dylan, likewise in his sixties, was approached by XM Satellite Radio about the possibility of hosting a weekly program. One imagines that what XM may have initially most desired was Dylan’s name, a worthy competitor to Howard Stern, 133 11. Bob Dylan’s Lives of the Poets: Theme Time Radio Hour as Buried Autobiography Mick Cochrane who had recently signed on with Sirius Satellite Radio; one also imagines Dylan requested more than two hundred guineas. If Johnson was, as the novelist Tobias Smollett called him, the “great cham” of English literature in the eighteenth century, Dylan is the great cham of twentieth-century music. His encyclopedic knowledge of American song has been frequently noted, described, and admired. Martin Scorsese —Dylan’s Boswell—gives us the mythic anecdote of Dylan’s finding in his father’s house not a book of poetry but a record player and the 78 recording of “Drifting Too Far from Shore,” a song, Dylan says, that made him feel like someone else. Theme Time Radio Hour stands in nearly the same relation to Dylan’s career as the Lives of the Poets does to Johnson’s. We hear Dylan late in his life, for the moment no longer combative, in a generous mood and working within a capacious form, the one-man repository of a great tradition now playing the role of gregarious old codger, speaking to a popular audience in an accessible format, willing now to share his astonishing knowledge and record collection with the next generation. He reveals his Johnsonian love of biographical detail, his sometimes dark sense of humor, his love of corny jokes, and his desire to rescue from oblivion art he clearly loves and treasures. Some may have expected Dylan’s radio program to be a straightforward autobiographical exercise of some kind: he would play a song—something from Woody Guthrie, say, or from old pals like George Harrison or Johnny Cash—and then reminisce. Such expectations were quickly disappointed: you could read the complaints on the Internet. Again and again, Dylan does play and mention musicians whose careers have intersected his own—Mike Bloomfield, Augie Myers, T-Bone Burnett, among others—though for the most part, he steers clear of direct personal commentary. (There are some memorable exceptions: on the “Cars” program, Dylan claimed he once rode in a Lincoln with Joni Mitchell and noted she “was a good driver,” who made him “feel safe.”5 On the Texas episode, Dylan remarked that Willie Nelson, his former touring partner, runs his bus on cooking oil: “Sometimes late...