America's Pied Piper

...I knew whatever I did had to be something creative, something that was me that did it, something I could do just for me...

...Then, all at once, he was more than a folk singer, more than an entertainer...

...Something had just gone haywire in the country and they were applauding that song...

...Much of what has been written about Dylan, therefore, is junk—fan magazine gossip pretending to uncover "the man behind the legend," intellectualistic posturing on the vagaries of genius...

...He knew how to use people, knew exactly how far he could use them and he did so...

...Jones...

...Scaduto stumbles over the difficult problem of Dylan's incredible ambition, too, never quite deciding if the singer's expressed desire to be "bigger than Presley" was the sole force pushing him forward...

...I was about seventeen, eighteen, and I knew there was nothing I ever wanted, materially, and I just made it from there, from that feeling...

...If Dylan's one goal was an easy fortune, he would have basked contentedly in his triumph when it came, much as Elvis Presley did...

...I know I had no understanding of anything," Dylan said...

...Reviewed by Barry Gewen Contributor, "Commentary" Music is a mysterious art, but at no time in the recent past did it seem quite so mysterious as in the '60s, when an entire generation inexplicably went marching off to the tunes of its own Pied Pipers...

...There is a famous scene in Modern Times in which Charlie Chaplin accidentally waves a red flag and unwittingly collects a crowd of demonstrators behind him...

...Dylan, in contrast, chose to go into folk music at a time when the stars of that field were such little-known names as Dave Van Ronk and Jack Elliot...

...Dylan himself has commented: "Some of it is pretty straight, some of it is very straight, some of it is exactly the way it happened...

...But Bob Dylan couldn't drop his flag, and there was nowhere he could run except into himself...

...I will now, too...

...Then what of: "I won't join a group...

...He subjected the master's lyrics to a multilevel exegesis that would be an embarrassment for the Bible—an example of Talmudism gone mad...

...When you fail in a group you can blame each other...

...And I couldn't understand why they were clapping or why I wrote that song, even...

...I couldn't understand anything...

...Dylan found himself looking down from the top, with no idea of what he was doing there...

...Jones, it seems, wasn't the only one who didn't understand what was happening...

...he was a spokesman for a generation on the march, a leader with power he had never asked for or pursued...

...And I made up my mind not to have anything...

...Bob Dylan, the calculating, opportunistic, self-centered, spiteful little fraud...

...Were all of us who responded to them taken in...

...Scaduto seems unwilling to confront this cynicism head-on, perhaps fearing what he might find...

...It was precisely because his songs derived from an intense sincerity that his success drove him instead into a state which Joan Baez describes in the book as practically psychotic...

...When you fail alone, you yourself fail...

...Were those songs simply tricks and tools for Dylan's climb up the greasy commercial pole...

...In almost excessive detail he traces the rise of the rock superstar and culture hero...

...they sought to seduce the bitch goddess through duplication...

...All of the Presley imitators became rock-and-roll entertainers...

...While Dylan was trying to make it, all right, the question is whether he was only trying to make it—no small matter, since it concerns the artist's sincerity and, at bottom, the validity of his art...

...Though he had made it on his own, and it was his music, he didn't have the least notion of why or how, and was genuinely frightened by his eminence...

...And when he was finished with them, he dropped them...

...For he was the youth culture's spokesman, expressing all its facets: the open, inclusive and optimistic side in the anthem "The Times They Are A-Changin' "; the darker, exclusive, more threatening side in "Ballad of a Thin Man," whose chorus is "and something is happening but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr...

...Scaduto does not shrink from quoting ex-friends who believed as much: "Dylan was the most motivated person you'll ever meet in your life...

...Dylan's effect on Weberman, however, is merely an extreme case of the larger phenomenon...

...Until now, one could best learn about the singer from the interviews he occasionally permitted, although even here a reader entered at his own risk because Dylan has never been shy about contradicting himself or lying...

...Undoubtedly the weirdest investigator has been A. J. Weberman, who today makes his living going through people's garbage and revealing all, but who rose to prominence as the Compleat Dylan Devotee...

...For me, it was just insane...

...Even more damaging are Dylan's own admissions that he leaped into protest songs at the beginning of his career because he knew they would sell...

...I've always learned the hard way...

...Admirers of Dylan's music, on the other hand, will probably find themselves simultaneously fascinated and appalled, recalling, no doubt, their reactions to Dylan's brutal cat-and-mouse treatment of the Time reporter in the film Don't Look Back...

...Now, happily, Anthony Scaduto has sifted through all the available material, separated information from misinformation, and come up with a biography that is both straightforward and reliable...

...when he turns around and discovers that he is actually at the head of a parade, he drops the flag and runs...

...Consequently, those unfamiliar with or hostile to the songs are bound to be repelled by his portrait of the artist as a jealous, arrogant, gratuitously vicious human being...

...Of the three oracles who really counted—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan—the most important historically (if not musically) was unquestionably Dylan...

...Groups are easy to be in...

...And this retreat from the public, more than his enormous power, aroused the greatest interest and curiosity...

...Indeed, his reporting cannot be faulted...

...He talked about being big, playing Carnegie Hall, and going on from there, and he schemed all the time about how to make it...

...Yet Dylan was also rock music's most elusive and enigmatic figure, guarding himself against his admirers by changing personae at every turn...

...No artist and therefore no art...

...But Scaduto, possibly seeing it as the task of a critic and not a journalist, never tries to establish the cultural importance of Bob Dylan's work...

...Dylan, the Presley imitator, pandering to his audience because he had nothing genuine to offer...

...The question threads its way through the book, like some kind of parasitic worm...

...Then what of: "There was nothing I really wanted, you see, like money and things...

...It's lonely where I am," he said at a press conference...

...I didn't want anything like that...