About the Book
Book 8 showcases Bob Dylan's expansive artistic vision in the twenty-first century, including his albums, memoir, radio show, and films.
Dylan followed up his award-winning Time Out of Mind with "Love and Theft," a further exploration of America's musical roots, from Tin Pan Alley and Western swing to stomping blues and rockabilly. According to Dylan, the album explored "business, politics and war, and maybe love interest on the side." Lyrically, he drew upon work as varied as the classical Roman poet Virgil, Japanese Yakuza gangster stories, and the Delta bluesman Charley Patton.
In 2003, Dylan returned to the silver screen in the role of mysterious musician Jack Fate in Masked and Anonymous, a film he also co-wrote with writer, director, and producer Larry Charles, of Seinfeld and Borat fame.
Dylan's first long-form literary work since the 1971 publication of Tarantula was his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One. Over the course of five chapters and more than three hundred pages, Dylan focuses on three major episodes: his earliest years in New York City leading up to the recording of his debut album; his aborted collaboration with Archibald MacLeish and the development of New Morning; and the circumstances around the writing and recording of Oh Mercy. Released on October 5, 2004, Chronicles: Volume One spent nineteen weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in the category of Biography/Autobiography.
Martin Scorsese's landmark documentary No Direction Home: Bob Dylan was the first authorized documentary about the life and early career of a musician who had been famously reluctant to delve into the past. The film centers mainly on the story of Dylan's meteoric rise to fame between his 1961 arrival in New York City and his motorcycle accident on July 29, 1966; it also evocatively captures Dylan's early years in Minnesota.
Bob Dylan's music has been appreciated by several presidents of the United States. In addition to performing at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in January 1993, Dylan enjoyed a warm relationship with Jimmy Carter, whom he first met when Carter was governor of Georgia in 1974. Dylan's only performance at the White House occurred during President Barack Obama's time in office at the February 9, 2010, concert, "In Performance at the White House: Songs of the Civil Rights Movement." For his part of the program, Dylan offered a stately acoustic version of "The Times They Are A-Changin'," accompanied by his longtime bassist Tony Garnier and pianist Patrick Warren. On May 29, 2012, President Obama awarded Bob Dylan the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the East Room of the White House.
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).
Ed Ruscha oscillates between sign and substance, locating the sublime in landscapes both natural and artificial. Working in diverse media with humor and wit, he has brought words--as symbol, form, and material--to the forefront of painting. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1937, Ruscha spent his formative years in Oklahoma City. In 1956, he moved to Los Angeles, to attend the Chouinard Art Institute. After graduation he began to work for ad agencies, honing his skills in schematic design and considering questions of scale, abstraction, and viewpoint, which became critical to his painting and photography. He has created more than a dozen artist's books, including the twenty-five-foot long, accordion-folded Every Building on Sunset Strip (1966). His paintings of the 1960s explore the noise and fluidity of language. Since his first exhibition with Gagosian in 1993, Ruscha has had twenty-one solo exhibitions with the gallery. The first retrospective of his drawings was held in 2004 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Ruscha represented the United States at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005). Ruscha continues to influence contemporary artists worldwide, his formal experimentations and clever use of the American vernacular evolving in form and meaning as technology and internet platforms alter the essence of human communication.
Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh, Australia, and now lives in New York. He has been short-listed for the Booker Prize four times and has won it twice (for Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang). His most recent novel is A Long Way from Home (Knopf, 2018).
