Your Daily Dose of Dylan, Part 13

I finished the Dylan book this weekend. I really enjoyed it. It was so enjoyable that I could have read it all in one sitting, but I decided to savor it and only read a few pages at a time. That way I could fully appreciate the random acts of wackiness that Bob throws at you. I was a bit surprised that Dylan could write prose as well as he did. He can really set a scene and some of his descriptions of the people and places in his past are eloquent and vivid. At the same time I just didn’t expect some of the references that Dylan drops sometimes right in the middle of one of those eloquent passages. For instance:

I left the ice cream parlor, went back out on the sidewalk. A wet wind hit me in the face. Moonlight illuminated the glistening leaves and my footsteps disturbed a courtyard of cats. A dog snarled menacingly from behind a wrought-iron fence. A black sedan went by, a couple of winos in it--windows rolled down, Paula Abdul song blasting out of the speakers.

This passage describes a time during the recording of “Oh Mercy” which would have been in 1988 or maybe early 1989. Dylan is incredibly thorough when describing everything that had to do with this album. (I would have loved to read about more of his albums from him in this manner, unfortunately this is the only one he talks about at any significant length.) The thing that gets me is that it’s been a long time since the late eighties and I just didn’t expect this much detail. As it is Dylan also goes into great detail about times much further past than 1988. Did he have a diary that he referred to? Does he have a photographic memory? Did he just make it up? Did Paula Abdul music really make that big of an impression on him? Come on, Bob, straight up now tell me.

I’ll be clearing out some more of my favorite passages over the next few days. I hope everyone has enjoyed the excerpts as much as I have.