Our book-of-the-month for July 2024 is Listening to Bob Dylan: Experiencing and Re-Experiencing Dylan's Music by Larry Starr, a book that presents a new perspective to the Book Club and a perspective that is rare among Dylan books in that it weaves together lyrics, music, and performance (like Bob Dylan himself, of course! And see more thoughts on this below). Starr is Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Washington and has written books and papers on popular music and especially the music of Ives, Gershwin, and Copland. He taught for 4 decades at the University and, judging from the internet, his students were thrilled to be in his classes and to experience his love of the music. Professor Starr has written 8 other books, including, with co-author Christopher Waterman, American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3. (6th edition, 2021), a book for the public that has also been widely used as a college textbook.
Many readers have said that Starr’s book influenced how they listen to Dylan. Our fellow Book Club member, Christopher Vanni, in nominating the book, called it “a small but mighty book”. Christopher also cited the book’s preface: “I simply want to invite you, metaphorically, to sit down with me and listen to many remarkable songs, while I attempt to point out – without pretension and without the employment of musical jargon – both what is readily to be heard and what might be particularly worthy of your notice”. We may even listen to some snippets of music during our meeting on July 7th!

In the Dylan Review, the book’s reviewer David Shumway wrote:
“What is original about Starr’s book is not that he deals with Dylan’s records rather than his lyrics, but rather that he applies a formal analysis to Dylan’s oeuvre. … What distinguishes Starr from Marcus and most others who have written about Dylan is that their analysis has been primarily concerned with the question of the records’ meaning, while his is concerned with how they work” and “Listening to Bob Dylan is an important addition to the critical literature about this great artist. Not the least of the book’s value is that it can make listening to Dylan even more pleasurable.”
Larry Starr answering 20 questions about his career and Q&A with Larry Starr about Listening to Bob Dylan.

A refresher on the awarding of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”:
The Award annoucement on October 13, 2016; Mr. Dylan performing the very same night in Las Vegas, and plays a guitar on stage for the first time since 2012 (and makes no acknowledgement of the Nobel Prize); Dylan’s Nobel Banquet speech read by America’s (Obama’s) Ambassador to Sweden, Azita Raji, on December 10th, 2016, and in which he writes “I was out on the road when I received this surprising news and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it”; Patti Smith performing a Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall at the Nobel Prize banquet. For a video of the full award ceremony go HERE.

That Dylan is acutely aware that his art combines lyrics, music, and performance and that this combination is the fundamental, defining, characteristic of what he does. Let’s just take these statements (52 years apart!):
From the Dylan press conference at KQED Studios, San Francisco, December 3rd, 1965:
Q: Do you think of yourself primarily as a singer or a poet?
A: “Oh, I think of myself more as a song and dance man, y’know.”
Q: Why?
A: “Oh, I don’t think we have enough time to really go into that.”
Fast forward 52 years to the last lines of Dylan’s 4,000-word Nobel Prize Lecture, recorded June 4, and delivered June 5, 2017 (the prize was awarded to him on October 13, 2016, but he had a June 10, 2017, deadline to deliver the Nobel Lecture that would complete the acceptance of the award). Dylan may not have had time (or the inclination) to explain back in 1965, but the Nobel Prize gave him the opportunity and incentive to share his thoughts on a theme has always been at the very heart of what he does. In a way, that a “song and dance man” was given the Nobel Prize in Literature opened up the topic on a very public stage—and there were many commentators, pro and con, about the award being given to Dylan.
Bob cared about the larger issues too because he thinks deeply about his art. At the top of his list for the Nobel Lecture was the consideration of the union of words, music, and performance in his life’s work:
“Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who says, “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.”
For Bob, the living nature of the songs is not only that they combine lyrics, music, and performance in a particular instance (that is, a recorded track or a performed song), but also that there are frequently prequels of the recorded version in the form of outtakes and drafts of lyrics and there are often postscripts in the form of new lyrics, new tempos, even new melodies or arrangements.
Why is this important to Dylan? MAYBE: he continues to make the meaning take shape; he gets restless or even bored and wants to inject new perspectives and get back “in touch” with the songs with new inroads; he wants to allow for multiple interpretations; he is a man of contradictions, many moods, and contains multitudes; he “learns by going where he has to go” (to quote Rilke)…you should add to this list—email the Bob Dylan Book Club with your thoughts!
Laura Tenschert of Definitely Dylan has brought our attention to the 2020 song My Own Version of You (Rough and Rowdy Ways): Dylan has written a song about putting pieces together and breathing life into his creation. What fun to have that central Dylan theme contained in the gothic context of the Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein story. Singing is breathing life into a song in more ways than one!
Bob Dylan’s 2022 book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, is devoted to the same perspective: the magic of songs as a combination of lyrics, music, and performance.  

And a final thought: In the 1965 KQED interview, Dylan was asked what his purpose was and he said “to stay here as long as I can”. He didn’t elaborate on what “here” meant, but one interpretation is that he wanted to stay doing what he was doing—to sell enough records, to write enough songs, to have enough ticket buyers, to create enough interest that he would be back on the interview stage again, to make a life of his art. And this too is echoed all those years later in the Nobel Banquet speech: “If I was really dreaming big maybe I could imagine getting to make a record and then hearing my songs on the radio. That was really the big prize in my mind…” [because it] “meant that you were reaching a big audience and that you might get to keep doing what you set out to do. Well, I’ve been doing what I set out to do for a long time, now. I’ve made dozens of records and played thousands of concerts all around the world. But it’s my songs that are at the vital center of almost everything I do. They seemed to have found a place in the lives of many people throughout many different cultures and I’m grateful for that.”

Peter White, June 2024