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The Dylan Tapes: Friends, Players, and Lovers Talking Early Bob Dylan by Anthony Scaduto (review)

2024; Music Library Association; Volume: 80; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2024.a919053

1534-150X

Alessandro Bratus,

Music History and Culture

Reviewed by: The Dylan Tapes: Friends, Players, and Lovers Talking Early Bob Dylan by Anthony Scaduto Alessandro Bratus The Dylan Tapes: Friends, Players, and Lovers Talking Early Bob Dylan. By Anthony Scaduto. Edited by Stephanie Trudeau. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. [xi, 407 p., ISBN 9781517908157 (hardcover), $29.95; ISBN 9781452961965 (ebook), price varies.] As a sort of behind-the-scenes account of an early attempt to capture Bob Dylan's art and cultural relevance immediately after the 1960s, The Dylan Tapes is a document about the merging of two authorial perspectives. On the one hand, there is the rock-music enthusiast and author of a Beatles biography (Anthony Scaduto, The Beatles: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow [New York: New American Library, 1968]) who, when asked by a future publisher about the subject of his next book, said that "the only subject worth considering was Bob Dylan" (p. x). On the other hand, there is the investigative journalist who decided to write the first "unauthorized" biography of the singer–songwriter (Anthony Scaduto, Bob Dylan [New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1971]), adopting "the same approach he did for the feature stories he wrote for the New York Post: extensive research and comprehensive interviews" (p. x). Stephanie Trudeau, his wife, decided to transcribe Scaduto's recently found "basement tapes" as a tribute to the man and the relentless interviewer who first attempted to move Dylan away from his own self-appointed myth and set him firmly against the historical background of the 1960s. The twenty-three interviews, including two final conversations with Joan Baez and Dylan, are arranged in eleven chapters, whose titles are selected from Dylan's songs or albums (as in Scaduto's biography) according to the chronological, geographical, or cultural context in which the interviewees first met and interacted with [End Page 536] the young singer–songwriter. Examples range from the chapter "Freewheelin' Dinkytown" (a reference to the Minneapolis years), which includes the conversations with Gretel Hoffman, David Whitaker, and Spider John Koerner (pp. 41–73); to "Mr. Tambourine Man," where colleagues such as the Clancy Brothers, Phil Ochs, and Ramblin' Jack Elliott take center stage (pp. 127–67); to "Boots of Spanish Leather," which is dedicated to sisters Carla and Suze Rotolo and their friend Pete Karman, who was responsible for the first encounter between Dylan and the woman who was to become universally known for appearing on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan in 1963 (pp. 171–208). What probably best exemplifies Scaduto's independent approach, how -ever, is his own presentation of one of the most widely chronicled episodes of Dylan's career: the 25 July 1965 Newport electric set. Setting his narrative far away from the rhetoric of selling out and the ideological debate about different ideas of "folk," the journalist presents a different reconstruction of that night, where the motivation for the protesting crowd is traced directly back to the poor quality of the sound coming from the stage rather than to any considerations as to the appropriateness of what the musicians were doing. In fact, according to Rick Von Schmidt (to whom Scaduto first gave credit in his previous book [Bob Dylan, 212–15]), it was the fundamental imbalance between the volume of Dylan's voice—almost impossible to hear, drowned out as it was by the loud Paul Butterfield Blues Band—that provoked the negative reaction of the audience. In the grand scheme of things, it thus resulted that one of the most contested moves in the singer–songwriter's career was not actually a move at all: it was just a case of Butterfield taking advantage of a situation in the worst possible manner, where his band could gain unprecedented visibility, aided and abetted by the technical failure of the man behind the PA mixing board. As we now know from reading the full transcript of the interview with von Schmidt, this was none other than Albert Grossman, who was acting as manager for both Dylan and Butterfield at the time, a detail Scaduto chose to omit in his report of the Newport incident published in the 1971 biography, and which, in fact, he intentionally never divulged. By then, the harsh...