WrittenInMySoul wrote:
Do we know that this was Bob's decision?
I think it's more like with BS the releases (there was a discussion about how much Bob is involved in those on this forum a couple of weeks ago):
somebody in the Dylan camp brought up the idea, maybe it was presented to Bob and he probably only said "Well, whatever...". Of course he will take the money that is made with this booklet (who wouldn't?), but somehow I can't imagine Bob really caring about business stuff like that.
Personally, I'm not even bothering with the 16 $ release. And I think somebody who is willing to spend 2,500 $ on this is a person with way too much money.
I used to think the same thing with respect to Bob being largely separate from Dylan Inc., but lately my view on the matter has shifted. While Bob certainly affects an aura of not giving a shit, I think the truth is he's at the very least more involved than he lets on.
Consider, for instance, this tidbit from Variety (
http://variety.com/2017/music/features/ ... 202564358/), regarding the "Trouble No More" concert film, which premiered at the New York Film Festival a couple weeks ago and is being released as part of the Gospel Years box set:
Quote:
About three-fourths of the film consists of pro-shot videotape of the gospel material being performed at 1980 tour dates. Between the songs, meanwhile, actor Michael Shannon appears in newly shot scenes playing an evangelical preacher and reading freshly scripted sermons, a curious artistic choice that pays off in thematically contextualizing the vintage concert material.
[...]
A source in the Dylan camp says the idea to add a minister character amid the old footage came from Dylan himself.
As it happens, shortly after coming across that anecdote, I found this story from the great editor Robert Gottlieb, contained within the pages of his 2016 memoir "Avid Reader." Gottlieb was the President of the Knopf publishing house when it put out Dylan's second collection of lyrics in 1985. Here he details the involvement Dylan had with the project:
Quote:
I had agreed with Bob Dylan’s lawyer to publish a collection of his lyrics--to be called, oddly enough, Lyrics--that was to include his entire output of songs from 1961 to 1982. Once the text was organized and tweaked to Dylan’s satisfaction, there was a major bridge to cross: the book’s design. It was to include a number of his drawings, and he was very focused on how they, and it, would look, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me what he had in mind. I asked Knopf’s hippest art director to come up with something and sent his elegant design for Dylan’s approval. His approval didn’t come, so I suggested we get together to talk about it, and since I didn’t want to expose him to the curiosity of the entire office, we decided he would come over to my house at lunchtime. Which he did, in his usual scruffy guise, actually not so different from my own scruffy guise. For twenty minutes or so, we danced around the subject of his visit, but he was tongue-tied--he couldn’t explain what he didn’t like about our design or articulate what direction he thought we should take next. Finally, in desperation, I told him I just had to have a clue, and after more backing and filling he managed to stammer out that maybe we could come up with something a little more … “Midwestern”?
With that clue, I turned to our chief book designer, Betty Anderson, a fragile aging lady from South Carolina who wore white gloves to the office and had lunch every day at the very ladylike Women’s Exchange. Betty had heard of Bob Dylan but had never heard any of his music, so I loaned her my complete collection of Dylan LPs and she bravely took herself off to see Dont [note: no apostrophe] Look Back, the D.A. Pennebaker documentary, which was being revived at some theater near her. She loved the music, she loved the movie, she loved Dylan, and she quickly came up with simple, handsome designs that I messengered to him downtown. Two hours later my private phone rang in my office. “Bob? Bob Dylan here. I got the designs. I love them. Don’t change a thing. Thank the lady.” I didn’t tell him that Betty was Southern, not Midwestern.
I think this gives a good indication of Bob's approach: not an obsessive level of micromanagement, but also by no means hands off.
Dylan's always been a student of history, particularly musical history. While I'm sure he'd recoil from the suggestion that he's overly concerned with his "legacy," I think it's fair to say that many of his actions over the years have been consistent with those of a man who is interested in ensuring that his contribution to the great American story is told in the way he wants it to be. The Dylan Archive in Tulsa, OK being perhaps the best example of this. I watched an interview with the Archive's curator in which he expressed complete amazement at the sheer number of personal artifacts Dylan had hung onto and cataloged over the decades. Nomad that he is, it really is remarkable how much of his stuff Bob was able to hold onto. And it's important to remember, at least in the beginning, this was Dylan who was holding onto this stuff, not his "people"; much of this hoarding long predates the arrival of Jeff Rosen. Just based on the volume of personal material that was turned over to Tulsa, it's evident that, whether he recognized it or not, Bob was planning for this museum for the better part of a half-century.
Add to that the Bootleg Series, No Direction Home, the fact that Dylan basically invented the box set with Biograph, the myriad of lyrics books beginning all the way back with Writings and Drawings...clearly this is a person who is not looking to be forgotten.
As for why he would blow off the pomp and circumstance of the Nobel ceremony, only to turn around a year later and sanction the publication of his lecture in the most ostentatious manner possible, only Bob knows the answer to that question. But if I had to guess, I'd say it's because he's battling the dual impulses of, a) actually caring about his legacy a great deal; and b) not wanting to be seen as caring about it at all.
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