Contents
Preface
I  You’ve Been With the Professors
Analysing Dylan Songs
 The Object
 The harmony
 Analysing an Idea
‘Beauty may Only Turn to Rust’
 The Beautiful world of Bob Dylan
 Beauty and the Beast
 Proportion and expression
 Expression and style
‘Going Through All These Things Twice’
 The External Similarites: Ceremony
 The Rolling Thunder Revue
 The Gospel Years
 The Voice of a Generation
 Secular Ritual
 Functions and means
 Dylan and ritual revisited
 Postscript
The Momentum of Standstill
 Dylan and the Blues
 In the Evening
 I Pity The Poor Immigrant
 Standing (Still) in the Doorway
 Ring Them Bells
 Highlands
II  Harmony and Understanding
‘What I learned from Lonnie’
 Secrets in the back room
 Melodies out of triplets – Axioms and numbers
 Rhythm: The Link Wray ‘Rumble’ connection
 Numbers: Dylan the Pythagorean
 Melody: Three times 2, and 7 and 4
 Formulaicism: Inventive Redundancy
 A translation
Three Tambourine Men
 Preamble: The Song – A carneval in sound
 First Man: Drammenshallen, 1981
 Second Man: Cascais, 1993
 The Third Man: Vienna, 1999
Just Like A Woman Revisited
The propelling harmony of ‘Dear Landlord’
 Level 1 – the Dry Description
 Level 2 – the Harmonic Analysis
 Level 3 – the interpretation
In the Garden
III  Albums and Songs
The Uneven Heart
 Sponge Bob (1960–65)
 Perfection and Break (1965–66)
 The Long Lost Weekend (1967–74)
 Bloody Tracks and Rolling Thunder (1974–75)
 Battling the Boundaries – Fighting the Form (1978)
 Are You Ready? (1979)
 The Never-Ending Tour (1988– )
 ‘Mathematical music’
 The Pre/post-modern Dylan
 The Uneven Heart
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963)
It Wasn’t Bruce
A Musical Whodunnit (Don’t Think Twice (1962)
Hattie Carroll
Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964)
Chimes of Freedom
John Wesley Harding (1967)
Self Portrait (1970)
New morning (1970)
Wedding song
Blood On The Tracks (1975)
Tangled up in Tangled up in Blue
Down in the Groove (1988)
Did Dylan steal ‘Dignity’?
‘A day above ground is a good day’
 Dylan and Christianity, Woman, and Love
 Analysing Dylan lyrics
 The Apocalypse
 The River
 Love
 The Music
IV  Modern Times and Plagiarism
It’s Modern to Steal
The many ways of stealing
 Academic borrowing
 Poetic language
 The proof of the pudding
 Doubts and Benefits: Allusion or theft?
Dylan: the Postmodernist?
 Bricks and Images
 Death of the Author
 The Author Resurrected
 Ethics and Aesthetics
 Dylan’s deeds
 Dylan’s Message/“Message”/Message?/Message?!
 Flowers and failings
V  I’ll See Him In Anything
About Guitars and Kissing
 Oslo
 Copenhagen
Genius, Guitars, and Goodbyes