How do you keep up with an artist like Bob Dylan?

So, there was a bit of discussion in the comments of my last post about Bob Dylan, where it was suggested that I didn’t know what I was talking about. After reading those comments, I have only one thing to say: Guilty.

That confession comes with a caveat, however. The people commenting, who all obviously know more about Dylan than I do, surely don’t know as much about Dylan as others. And those others are probably trumped by some uber-fan who has a lock of the singer’s hair encased in a clear Lucite box in a special shrine in their home dubbed “Highway 61 Re-Revisted.”

The point is that with someone like Dylan, it’s almost impossible to be a definitive expert. As such, I wonder if people look at the sheer volume of his work, the twists and turns, the obscure and imponderable, and just say, “forget it.” That’s a long-winded way of asking if an artist like Dylan still picks up new fans.

I first heard Dylan, I’m sure, as a teen, when the local AOR station would play “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.” This would have been the early to mid-1980s, the Empire Burlesque and Knocked Out Loaded era. This was not exactly Dylan’s best foot forward in terms for forging a lasting relationship with an impressionable young music fan. To be honest, I still have yet to hear either album in its entirety, and my main recollection about them is the Rolling Stone review of Knocked Out Loaded from Anthony DeCurtis (though less scathing than I remember): “[I]t suggests Dylan’s utter lack of artistic direction. Less bad than pointless, Knocked Out Loaded will prove most satisfying to those content to expect the very least from it.” Suffice to say, I passed.  (But, I did cut out the review on the back of the page (probably R.E.M. or the Replacements), and thus have seen it more than might seem normal over the years.

The first time I actively sought out Dylan, it was still in a passive way. Out of college a couple of years, but still living in the college town (as I do today), I came across a box of LPs deemed unworthy for resale that were sitting outside my favorite record store. The person who had lugged them up and then been turned away obviously didn’t feel like taking them home. So, I pawed through and came away with copies of Blonde on Blonde, Highway 61 Revisited, Bringing it All Back Home and John Wesley Harding that remain in my collection today. They still sound great; they likely were rejected because there was plenty of stock on hand.

These LPs were a revelation. John Wesley Harding hit the hardest, oddly enough. I was listening to a lot of alt-country (Jayhawks, Uncle Tupelo, et al), and the more hushed, pastoral tone of the album grabbed me. It wasn’t long before the others did, too. It was around this time that Dylan issued Time Out of Mind, his first universally lauded album in years (keeping in mind the guarded optimism that greeted Oh Mercy, as I recall). It wasn’t necessarily what I wanted out of Dylan at the time, but it hit me at the right moment, and I spent a lot of time with the record.

From there, I actively sought out his music, getting older work as I was able, and keeping up with everything new. I started to dabble with bootlegs, but that felt like a fool’s errand because I often didn’t know the original versions of the bootlegged material, so I had no idea why they were different or better.

To be honest, I’m still on that path. I keep up with everything new, and continue to work my way backward as time, access and my budget permit. It’s difficult, to be sure. I’m a huge music fan, someone who listens to 300-400 new albums in one form or another each year. Assuming that I like a portion of those enough for repeat listens, and still listen to favorites from past years, that means my time to spend with something like Empire Burlesque (which I own and like) or Knocked Out Loaded (which I don’t), is limited. It is hard work being a relatively new Dylan fan (if anything going on 15 years can be considered “new”).

I know I’m not alone, and neither is Dylan. Any prolific artist with a long career faces the same problem. Dylan has been aided by the Bootleg Series, which not only offers attractive entry points for new fans, but generates new interest from the media (More has been written about Dylan in the last two months in the lead up to the issue of the ninth collection in the Bootleg Series than about the reunion after a 15-year layoff of my favorite band, Guided by Voices, for example, let alone about the new work from any hip indie band with a 9-plus rating on Pitchfork).

Not that I’m wishing for this to happen anytime soon, but at some point, Dylan will stop making new music, and Columbia/Sony will quit unearthing things to release (though, if the 30-years-gone Elvis is any indication, I might not outlast those efforts), and I can begin to catch up properly. Until then, I’ll continue to muddle along, and as I do, I’ll make  discoveries. Some of these (OK, most of these) will be things discovered long ago by the people who have invested significantly more time in the artist than I have, and some might actually be original enough to be worth sharing. The discussion that rose up over that last post taught me more than I would have learned without it, so I’ll consider myself encouraged to keep it up.