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11/03/2004 Christopher Ricks's magisterial new Dylan book: not to be missed
The reviews were mixed. The sniffy article by Sean O'Hagan, in the achingly liberal bourgeois Sunday newspaper, The Observer, was damning: "a mess… misguided… academic obfuscation… tortured… Ricks is in danger throughout of making a complete catharshole of himself" (clever, that last bit - reviewer parodying author parodying subject). So damning that I decided to wait until the book was discounted, rather than risk a whopping £25. Happily (for me, if not the bookshop's owner), London music book retailer Helter Skelter (full details in Tuesday's blog, below) are currently discounting a lot of prime stock, including the new Dylan book at a give-away £10. So Ricks on Bob entered my life rather sooner than anticipated. Was I right to be put off by O'Hagan's demolition? No: absolutely wrong. Christopher Ricks's Dylan's Visions of Sin is a very fine book. Alongside Michael Gray's, it's one of the most important Dylan books yet published (there were over 90 last time I counted). Choosing to avoid discussion of the musical roots of Dylan's art, which would have duplicated Gray's illuminating work, Ricks focuses, instead, on Dylan's words - the work as literature. It's a beautifully written study of 50 or so Dylan compositions - major and minor - analysed as if spoken poetry, running to over 500 closely argued pages. Dipping into the discussions of masterpieces like Positively Fourth Street, Like A Rolling Stone, and, most notably, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll revealed the essays to be richly insightful: read Ricks and you'll never listen to these great songs in the same way again. Dylan's songs are analysed in chapters which deal with: the seven deadly sins (eg Blind Willie McTell in the chapter on Envy); the four cardinal virtues (The Times They Are A'Changin' is dissected in the Prudence chapter); and the three Heavenly graces (the shimmering analysis of Boots of Spanish Leather is in the Faith chapter). Ricks's classification of the songs is a stimulating, if challenging, way of ordering his material. I've yet to find a single page without at least one insight - why this or that line works so well, what's remarkable about a particular use of a particular word, how a song fits into the wider literary canon. Ricks's conclusions will surprise even the most attentive fan. It's as if you've always been impressed by a certain Dylan song/verse/line/phrase/word, but never realised why. And along comes good old Professor Ricks, to carefully explain what you might eventually have half-fumbled towards. Or not, in my case. To argue, as some have, that this book should have been dumbed down for a mythical general reader, defies belief. You might as well ask the Pope to dump Catholicism. This is a serious study of a serious subject, written by a serious thinker for serious people ready to accord it serious concentration. In Dylan's Visions of Sin we have one of the foremost literary scholars of the age - who made his name dissecting master wordsmiths like TS Eliot, Keats and Tennyson - applying his soaring intellect and penetrating expertise to Dylan's art. He can thus be trusted when he knowingly describes Shakespeare as "Dylanesque". And yet. Some whine that Ricks indulges in excessive wordplay - even as he piles insight upon insight in a magisterial study which is worthy of its massive subject. OK, Ricks's style is mildly irritating now and again. But if, while attending a Dylan show, you allowed yourself to be put off by something as utterly and marginally trivial as the sequencing of the colours of the stage lighting, you could reasonably expect most Bob buffs to dismiss your carping. Ricks's style is similarly unimportant. Come, writers and critics: never, ever, ever look a gift horse in the mouth. If you're a Dylan listener who needs to know who was humping whom, who got drunk/loaded how, when, and with what effect, or how many takes were needed to capture the version of Handy Dandy that made the CD - you're wasting your time here. But the Dylanista (f'rinstance me, babe) who gets sustenance from the lyrical legacy of the premier songwriter (writer?) of the twentieth century (post-Shakespeare?), Ricks's book is not to be missed: you could be luxuriating in its wisdom for years. Christopher Ricks, Dylan's Visions of Sin, Viking/Penguin, late 2003, 517pp, £25 hardback, ISBN 0 670 80133 X.
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