About the Book
Book 6 reframes a misunderstood period of Bob Dylan's career, including his conversion to Christianity, studio experimentation, and various collaborations.
In late 1979, Dylan began assembling a band for his upcoming concert and album Slow Train Coming. Over fourteen shows in sixteen days, Dylan and his new band debuted his new gospel sound. His backing singers opened the show, setting the tone, and although fans were aware of his new musical direction, it still came as a surprise when Dylan only performed his new gospel songs at each concert. Most controversially, Dylan preached from the stage.
The following year, Dylan composed songs for his next album, Saved, which continued Dylan's exploration of gospel-infused music with lyrics exploring religious themes. "Solid Rock" and the title track "Saved" were gospel rave-ups, whereas "Pressing On" and "What Can I Do for You?" were soulful ballads.
Dylan's 1983 album Infidels occupies a particular place in his discography, seen by many fans and critics as both a return to form and a missed opportunity, with outtakes that are as beloved as the album itself. Critics' reviews were mixed upon its release: Writing for The New York Times, Stephen Holden called Infidels "a disturbing artistic semirecovery by a rock legend who seemed in recent years to have lost his ability to engage the Zeitgeist, '' though he admitted that it "may be the best-sounding album Mr. Dylan has ever made." On the other hand, Christopher Connelly of Rolling Stone said it was the "best album since the searing Blood on the Tracks nine years ago." Coming at the tail end of Dylan's engagement with gospel music, Infidels continued his investigations of morality, albeit through less of a black-and-white lens. Here the focus is not just on the human condition, but on more personal themes of love and loss, as well as external ones, especially politics. On a handwritten draft for the album's credits, Dylan wrote a working title for his new album: "Surviving in a Ruthless World."
The 1980s marked a period of several collaborations between Dylan and other artists like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and the Grateful Dead.
About the Author :
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).
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.
Robert M. Rubin has written about Richard Avedon, Reyner Banham, Pierre Chareau, Buckminster Fuller, Allen Ginsberg, Glenn O'Brien, Jean Prouvé, and Richard Prince. He has contributed to Bookforum, Art in America, Cahiers d'Art, Le Monde, and Libération, as well as museum and gallery publications. His most recent book is Richard Prince Cowboy (2020). He also curated the exhibition Richard Prince: American Prayer at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 2011. His next project is a book on the 1971 film Vanishing Point.
Michael Ondaatje is a poet and novelist. His novels include Coming through Slaughter, In the Skin of a Lion, The English Patient, The Cat's Table, Warlight, and Anil's Ghost. His poetry books include The Cinnamon Peeler and Handwriting. He has also done a book of interviews called The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. His next book, A Year of Last Things, appears early in 2024 with Knopf USA.
Terry Gans has worked as a journalist, grocer, advertising executive, songwriter, corporate controller, and an elected official and mayor of Longboat Key, Florida. Among other things. He began listening to and learning about Bob Dylan in 1962. Since the 1980s he has contributed to Dylan-centric publications such as the Telegraph, Look Back, the Bridge, and ISIS Magazine. His 1970 master's thesis at Miami University (the real one in Ohio) was published in 1983 as What's Real and What Is Not. In 2020, his second book, Surviving in a Ruthless World: Bob Dylan's Voyage to Infidels, was the first published book to make use of the Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa.
Jeff Slate is a New York City-based songwriter and music journalist. His writing can be found in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Wall Street Journal, and Rolling Stone, among others. Jeff has appeared on stage and worked with music legends like Pete Townshend, Roger McGuinn, Jeff Tweedy, Sheryl Crow, and others, and his music has appeared in advertising and films and on television, including in the show Gossip Girl. Jeff is also a regular guest host on SiriusXM's Volume channel, is the co-author of the 2017 book The Authorized Roy Orbison with the late legend's sons, and has written liner notes for albums by Orbison, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Jimi Hendrix, among many others, including Bob Dylan's The Bootleg Series Vol. 14: More Blood, More Tracks.
Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, published in 2007, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. An essay collection, Listen to This, appeared in 2010; his third book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, was published in 2020. In 2008, Ross received a MacArthur Fellowship.
