About the Book
Book 7 looks at Bob Dylan's return to his musical roots as a catalyst to a decade of creative rebirth.
Live performance had gotten stale for Dylan, and he had strongly considered retiring altogether while on an eighteen-month tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. "My own songs had become strangers to me, I didn't have the skill to touch their raw nerves, couldn't penetrate the surfaces," Dylan recalled in Chronicles. "There was a hollow singing in my heart and I couldn't wait to retire and fold the tent." In Chronicles, Dylan revealed that "it all fell apart" during an outdoor concert in 1987 at the Piazza Grande Locarno in Locarno, Switzerland.
However, Dylan emerged from this creative crisis a few months later rejuvenated. He assembled a new band with G. E. Smith on guitar, Kenny Aaronson on bass, and Christopher Parker on drums for his Interstate 88 Tour, which they kicked off on June 7, 1988, in Concord, California. With the exception of 2020, the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Dylan has toured annually to the present day. Although fans have referred to Dylan's schedule since 1988 as the Never Ending Tour, Dylan himself has rejected the sobriquet. Not only have some of his tours been individually named, they have involved a revolving cast of musicians throughout the years.
Among the albums from this period is Down in the Groove, in collaboration with Eric Clapton, guitarist Steve Jones of The Sex Pistols, and bassist Paul Simonon of The Clash. Oh Mercy was released on September 12, 1989, and widely hailed as a return to form. Dylan also joined The Traveling Wilburys alongside George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne.
In 1991, Dylan and Columbia Records issued The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991, an authorized career-spanning retrospective that merely scratched the surface of the immense trove of unissued music that Dylan had amassed in his thirty years as a recording artist. The Bootleg Series has continued to date, delighting fans and winning critical acclaim with sets devoted to pivotal moments in Dylan's career, including individual albums, tours, and musical periods.
Released on September 30, 1997, Time Out of Mind, Dylan's thirtieth studio album, changed the trajectory of his long career. The critical and popular reappraisal of Dylan's music underscored Dylan's vitality as an artist, especially at a time when few of his contemporaries were making albums that could stand alongside their past triumphs. The album won Dylan his first-ever GRAMMY Award for Album of the Year, and presaged a mid-career resurgence that continues to this day. Yet the success of the album hadn't come from out of the blue; rather, Dylan's touring regimen, the solidification of his backing band, and his re-immersion in his musical roots all set the stage for the work contained on Time Out of Mind.
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).
Larry "Ratso" Sloman is a Renaissance Jew. He is best known for his work with Howard Stern on Stern's two groundbreaking books Private Parts (Simon & Schuster, 1993) and Miss America (HarperCollins, 1995). Ratso has had seven New York Times bestsellers, including two books with Mike Tyson. Bob Dylan has publicly acclaimed him as "our favorite reporter," and Ratso's first book, On the Road with Bob Dylan (Bantam, 1978), an account of Dylan's 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue, prompted Bob to blurb "the War and Peace of rock and roll." In 2020, Sloman released his first album, Stubborn Heart, at the ripe age of 70. Sloman also has a budding career as a thespian, appearing in several movies, including a memorable cameo with Adam Sandler in Josh and Benny Safdie's Uncut Gems (2019), along with a featured role in Martin Scorsese's Dylan documentary about the aforementioned Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (2019). Ratso also has a major role in the 2022 award-winning documentary about Leonard Cohen and his worldwide hit song "Hallelujah" called Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song.
Greg Tate was a writer, cultural producer, and musician who had lived in Harlem since 1984. He was a staff writer at The Village Voice from 1987 to 2004. His books include Flyboy in the Buttermilk (2015, Touchstone), Everything but the Burden--What White People Are Taking from Black Culture (2003, Crown), Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience (2003, Chicago Review Press), and Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader (2013, Duke University Press). In 1985, he helped co-found the Black Rock Coalition with guitarist Vernon Reid. Beginning in 1999, he led the improv ensemble Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, who released 16 albums on their own Avant Groidd imprint. Tate passed away on December 7, 2021, at the age of 64.
Allison Moorer is a singer/songwriter, producer, and author who has released ten critically acclaimed albums. Her first memoir, Blood, was released in October 2019 to high praise and received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist. Her second, I Dream He Talks to Me, was published in October 2021 and received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and elsewhere. Allison has been nominated for an Academy Award (in 1999 for Best Original Song) and also GRAMMY, Americana Music Association, and Academy of Country Music Awards. Allison holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School; her work has been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, American Songwriter, Guernica, No Depression, Literary Hub, and The Bitter Southerner. She received the Hall-Waters Prize for Excellence in Southern Writing in 2020 and the Alabama Library Association's Authors Award in 2022. She lives in Nashville.
