October 24, 2004
His Back Pages
By BEN SISARIO
OU'RE invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal,'' Bob Dylan sneered in ''Like a Rolling Stone.'' Dylan may be the least transparent of rock stars, but he is opening himself up a bit -- his ''Chronicles: Volume One'' is surprisingly lucid and reader-friendly. Dylan's own memoir adds to the long shelf of books already written about the former Robert Zimmerman. And here comes a fresh pile of new books about him, as well as some timely reissues.
In A SIMPLE TWIST OF FATE: Bob Dylan and the Making of 'Blood on the Tracks' (Da Capo, $25), Andy Gill and Kevin Odegard give us a meticulous account of the creation of Dylan's remarkable 1975 album, still the cruelest breakup LP ever. The authors pile on the detail -- two gripping pages deal with microphone and tape deck choices -- but, in trying to divine Dylan's thoughts and intentions, rely a little too much on recycled secondary sources like liner notes. The 724-page KEYS TO THE RAIN: The Definitive Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (Billboard, paper, $29.95), by Oliver Trager, has entries on everything from Dylan's rap contribution to a 1986 album by Kurtis Blow to his once-in-a-blue-moon concert versions of Chuck Berry songs, in addition to the usual exegeses of, say, ''The Basement Tapes.'' Here, too, the scholarship hits you like a 15-CD box set, yet Dylan's spirit is somehow missing.
The playwright Sam Shepard's ROLLING THUNDER LOGBOOK (Da Capo, paper, $16.95), on the other hand, is fascinating because it skips the minutiae and offers its own moodily entertaining narrative. First published in 1977, the book was compiled as a loose diary-cum-screenplay for an abandoned film about the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour. Shepard captures Dylan and his motley circle -- Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, T-Bone Burnett -- in biting, impressionistic road vignettes. One typically priceless episode: Ginsberg reading his Oedipal ''Kaddish'' to a group of mah-jongg-playing women at a hotel in Falmouth, Mass. The photographs, by Ken Regan, are nearly as vivid and unruly.
Another vital document is STUDIO A: The Bob Dylan Reader (Norton, $24.95), edited by Benjamin Hedin, a collection of classic essays by everyone from Greil Marcus to Joyce Carol Oates to Barry Hannah. Meanwhile, in the textbook-sized LYRICS: 1962-2001 (Simon & Schuster, $45), we get some 600 pages of stark poetry without a word of commentary.
The strangest manuscript to be unearthed and republished this season is probably TARANTULA (Scribner, paper, $14), Dylan's slim Dadaist novel, first issued in 1971. Written in a style somewhere between Ezra Pound and John Lennon's ''In His Own Write,'' the book has its comic moments -- like the letters that close each segment, signed with goofy valedictions like ''gratefully / truman peyote.'' But three decades later, ''Tarantula'' still leaves you scratching your head. Maybe that's the point.