The Dylanologists Read Online Free Page B

abandon you, and if that happens, God will always believe in your ability to mend your ways.’ ” (It took some digging for Dylanologists to discover that he’d borrowed that from rabbinical commentary on Psalm 27.) Twenty years later, when he returned to the Grammys to sing “Maggie’s Farm,” his voice was a croak, his face an eroded monument, his clothing antique. He gave off a vaudevillian vibe. He could have been teleported from the 1920s.
    Even in person, Dylan left people baffled. He didn’t look like a cultural icon; he looked homeless. One day in 2009, a homeowner in Long Branch, New Jersey, called the police to report that an “eccentric-looking old man” had just wandered onto his property, which had a for-sale sign out front. A twenty-four-year-old beat cop reported to the scene and stopped the man for questioning. It was Dylan, and he told the officer that he was in the area to play a concert that night. But he didn’t look like the photographs she had seen of Dylan in his prime, and he was acting “very suspicious.” He was wearing two raincoats, the hoods up, and his sweatpants were tucked into his rain boots. She wondered if he’d walked out of the hospital. He also didn’t have identification with him, so she put him in the squad car and drove him to the hotel where he said his tour buses were parked. To her great surprise, the buses were there, and his people rustled up a passport and she let Bob Dylan go free.
    Nina and the faithful saw what the world did not. They had placed an epic wager: Their man was not simply a songwriting giant, a performer par excellence and a figure of extraordinary literary merit. He was a man of lasting importance, unique in this epoch, an artist whose songs would be heard and discussed a hundred years from now. Future generations would laud them for their foresight. They got it .
    When the world was bewildered by Dylan’s many costume changes—the angry protest singer (1962), the hung-up, lovesick troubadour (1964), the electrified composer of entire albums of surreal poetic masterpieces (1965–66), the missing rock star (1966–67), the rough-hewn sage from the dark woods (1967), the country singer with the sweet voice on “Lay, Lady, Lay” (1969), the heartbroken man from Blood on the Tracks (1975), the Christian convert (1979–81), the lost soul (1981–91), the traditionalist (1992–93), the man obsessed with the past (1997), the raunchy bluesman from Love and Theft (2001), the memoirist cribbing lines from ancient books, old magazines, and everything else (2004), the elder statesman worthy of an honorary Pulitzer Prize and a Presidential Medal of Freedom (2008–12)— they got it.
    While heathens and fools complained about the voice, that wreck of an instrument “you could scour a skillet with,” as the novelist John Updike put it— they got it .
    All weekend, Zimmy’s was crammed with the people who got it. They paraded up to a stage in the corner to perform songs by Dylan and songs that he inspired them to write somewhere along the line. One was Mark Sutton, a PhD student in from Sydney who wore a scraggly red beard and a T-shirt reading WHAT WOULD AHAB DO? He was on a cross-country trip to research a dissertation zeroing in on Dylan’s latter-day work. Mark had met a lot of Dylan freaks at the Sydney fan club, where they discussed their hero and drank their beer the Australian way—in great volume. Inspired after one outing, he wrote a lampoon of the prototypical Dylan tragic, and as he took the stage at Zimmy’s with a borrowed guitar, he knew his composition was perfect for this crowd and this moment.
    The protagonist in the song goes to hundreds of concerts, has every last bootleg, has memorized all the lyrics and tattooed some of them to his back, has followed Dylan’s supposed spiritual journey by becoming a Jew, then a Christian, and then