About the Book
Book 4 provides a deep dive into Bob Dylan's retreat into the woodshed, a period in which he explored his art and largely avoided the public spotlight.
The period between 1967 and 1973 is generally considered Dylan's willful retreat from the public eye, bookended by his motorcycle accident in 1966 and his return to touring in 1974. Faced with the increasing pressures and demands of fame, Dylan, rather than doubling down on his pugilistic stance of 1965 and 1966, simply left and moved his young and rapidly growing family to Woodstock, New York, then back to Greenwich Village and MacDougal Street in the city, before settling down for good in Malibu, California. Instead of delivering an album every six months as was typically expected of pop stars of the day, he made only a handful of albums, a few standalone singles, and sporadic concert appearances, completely on his own terms, setting a precedent for independence that continues to the present day.
Yet even if the world heard less frequently from Bob Dylan, it didn't mean that he was any less active. Dylan was in the woodshed, refining and redefining his art and his relation to it. The time and space afforded by the changes in his new lifestyle opened up avenues for self-expression, and looking across notebooks, manuscripts, sketches and drawings, films, and, of course, songs, one can see Dylan's restless creativity in this period. The era is defined by a prolific output: lyrics, unfinished stories, bits of dialogues, original epigrams, and other more fragmentary work jostle for space alongside sketches and drawings of faces, instruments, and abstract forms. Dylan's writing style changed from dense, frenetic, abstract pages to a deceptively simple style, and his artwork was defined by repetition as a way of exploring forms. The era reflected an experimenting artist moving through mediums, genres, structures, and styles as a way of exploring a seemingly irrepressible well of ideas. Some made it out to the public, as is the case of the lyrics to "Dear Landlord" from the 1968 album John Wesley Harding, or "Wanted Man," written for Johnny Cash, who recorded it in 1969 at San Quentin State Prison. However, most of Dylan's writings and drawings from this era never reached the public eye.
Some of these treasures are shown in this book for the first time.
About the Author :
Parker Fishel is an archivist who served as co-curator of the inaugural exhibitions at the Bob Dylan Center. His company, Americana Music Productions, provides consulting, research, and production work for artists and estates, record labels, and other entities looking to preserve archives and share the important stories found in them. His selected credits include Ann Arbor Blues Festival 1969 (Third Man Records), the Chelsea Hotel-inspired Chelsea Doors box set (Vinyl Me, Please), and several volumes of Bob Dylan's GRAMMY Award-winning Bootleg Series (Sony/Legacy). Fishel is also a board member of the Hot Club Foundation and a co-founder of the nonprofit improvised music archive Crossing Tones.
Mark Davidson is the Curator of the Bob Dylan Archive and Senior Director of Archives and Exhibitions for the Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie Centers in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He holds a PhD in musicology from the University of California-Santa Cruz with an emphasis on folk music collecting, and an MSIS in archiving and library science from the University of Texas at Austin. He has written widely on music and archives, including his dissertation, "Recording the Nation: Folk Music and the Government in Roosevelt's New Deal, 1936-1941," and the essay "Blood in the Stacks: On the Nature of Archives in the Twenty-First Century," published in The World of Bob Dylan (2021).
Gregory Pardlo is the author of Digest, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His first poetry collection, Totem, won the 2007 American Poetry Review Honickman Prize. He is the author of a memoir in essays titled Air Traffic (2018). Other honors include fellowships from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is co-director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University-Camden. He and his family currently live in the UAE, where he serves as a visiting professor of creative writing at NYU Abu Dhabi. His forthcoming poetry collection is Spectral Evidence.
Anne Margaret Daniel teaches at the New School in New York City. Her essays on literature, music, books, and culture have appeared for the past twenty-five years in books, critical editions, magazines, and journals including The New York Times, Hot Press, The Spectator, and The Times Literary Supplement. She is the editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald's last unpublished short stories, I'd Die for You and Other Lost Stories (2017), and the Norton Library Edition of The Great Gatsby. She has published extensively on American Modernism and Modern Irish literature, and in spring 2017 she taught the first course at a New York university on Dylan's combined arts and letters.
