Tangled Up in Bob

Someday, no doubt, when the keepers of the tower officially allow that Bob was one of the two or three greatest American artists of the second half of the twentieth century, Dylanology will be boiled down to a standard three credits, a dry bonepile of jewels and binoculars to squeeze in between the Yeatsology and Whitmanology. You might even be able to major in Dylanology, hand in papers on the interplay between Deuteronomy and Dock Boggs in Bob's middle period. But for now, even as the Dylan economy grows each day (a mint copy of the rare stereo version of Freewheelin', which contains four extra songs, goes for $20,000), Dylanology, the semi-sub rosa info jungle of writers, fanzine publishers, collectors, web page keepers, DAT tapers, song analyzers, old girlfriend gossips and more, retains a bracing hit of democratic autodidacticism, a deep-fried aroma of overheated neocortices.

"We are fanatical because we are fanatics," says the indefatigable Paul Williams, author of more than twenty-five books, whose Bob Dylan: Performing Artist 1960-1973, Bob Dylan: Performing Artist 1974-1986 and the ongoing Bob Dylan: Performing Artist 1987-2000 will likely approach an aggregate 1,000 pages before he's done. Speaking of his Bob "compulsion," Williams, who is also the former literary executor of Philip K. Dick's estate, says, "If Shakespeare was in your midst, putting on shows at the Globe Theatre, wouldn't you feel the need to be there, to write down what happened in them?"

Williams, who put Dylan on the cover of Crawdaddy magazine, which Williams founded in 1966, is a believer in what he calls "the process." For him, the more than forty conventional, non-bootleg recordings put out by the artist since 1962 are just the blueprint, the starting point, since Dylan, famous for a restless ambivalence toward his own creations, is constantly changing these songs in performance. This means Williams, who solicits donations from Dylan fans so he might continue his work, spends a lot of time comparing and contrasting tapes made at the thousands of shows Bob has given since 1961, which adds up to a lot of alt. versions of "All Along the Watchtower" (1,125 live performances as of January 1st, 2001, according to Glen Dundas' Tangled Up in Tapes, as compared to 1,008 for "Like a Rolling Stone," 175 for "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," 53 for "Visions of Johanna," 22 for "Ring Them Bells," and one each for "Oxford Town" and "Bo Diddley". "Writing a book about Bob Dylan is a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week, 365-day-a-year project," Williams says.