Interviews With Writers

Author Interviews from Writers Around the World

  • Home
  • Advertising
  • Contact Us
  • Interview Submission
  • Privacy Policy
  • Sites in the BookGoodies Network
You are here: Home / Buyer's Guides / Decoding Dylan by Jim Curtis

Decoding Dylan by Jim Curtis

By Interviews With Writers Leave a Comment

Decoding Dylan by Jim Curtis

In Decoding Dylan, Jim Curtis takes readers behind Dylan‘s image as the quintessential rebel of the 1960s to reveal a new Dylan—Dylan the careful craftsman, a student of the art of songwriting. Curtis is the first Dylan scholar to draw on the revelations in his memoir Chronicles as well as a variety of sources about New York culture in the 1960s. He uses this material to arrive at a radically new interpretation of Dylan’s amazing songs, which revolutionized American music and which won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. Curtis shows that these songs are actually collages in which he ingeniously combined themes and images from American popular culture with themes and images from European high culture.
Readers of Decoding Dylan will come away with a new understanding, not just of Dylan, but also of his place in the history of American popular culture as a whole. .


Targeted Age Group:: 13+
Heat/Violence Level: Heat Level 1 – G Rated Clean Read

What Inspired You to Write Your Book?
It started with Elvis. I grew up in Elvis' hometown of Tupelo, Mississippi, and saw Elvis perform live there in 1956. It was an unforgettable experience, and it gave me a lifelong connection to rock and roll. Elvis opened me up to Dylan, so to speak, and I have lived with his songs in my heart and mind for over fifty years now. Sol it used to upset me when I kept hearing simplisic autobiographical interpretations of his work, such as "Who was he thinking about when he wrote 'Girl from the North Country'?" I believed then, and I believe now, that Dylan deserves better.
Amd yes. Dylan is a genius, but he's not the only one in the history of Western civilization. A lot of smart people have studied high achievers in the arts, and in the first part of "Decoding Dylan" I show how their findings deepen out understanding of Dylan.
Unlike most of his fans, Dylan doesn't distinguish between high culture and popular culture, between T.S. Eliot and the late Little Richard. for example. So I bring high culture and popular culture together to show how he creates a synthesis of the two, and does so in order to express what is ultimately a mystical vision of the world.

How Did You Come up With Your Characters?
nonfiction


Book Sample
Beginning of Preface:

In 2016, the Nobel Prize Committee awarded the prize to Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” The awareness that Dylan innovated within tradition, and specifically within the great American song tradition, was long in coming. In the sixties, Dylan’s songs seemed startlingly, shockingly new. No one had ever sung such dense lyrics to the strident chords of an electric guitar before.
Corresponding to the dialectic between innovation and tradition in Dylan’s work is the dialectic between high culture and popular culture in his work. Dylan is an artist caught between extremes. This may explain his preference for luminal, transitional, spaces in songs such as “The Chimes of Freedom” and “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” It may also explain why he stands in a doorway on the cover of his album Street Legal.
Apart from the obvious reasons why anyone who loves popular music would be attracted to Dylan’s work, this dialectic between high culture and popular culture has a modest equivalent in my own life. I grew up in Elvis Presley’s hometown of Tupelo, Mississippi, and I saw him perform live there in 1956. That experience gave me a lifelong fascination with rock and roll and popular music in general. But I also went north to school, and got a PhD in Russian literature from Columbia University. Odd as it may seem, I find Russian novels and rock and roll songs equally fascinating.
While I was working on this book, from time to time I did informal surveys with friends and family, asking them how many Dylan songs they could name. Most could name only two: “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Lay Lady Lay.” These two songs form bookends, as it were, for the great songs of the middle period such as “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Visions of Johanna.” These songs are too long and too demanding for people who are accustomed to listen to songs written in couplets about the agony and ecstasy of young love. For many people, it’s as though Dylan wrote these songs in code, so they give up on them.
I call this book Decoding Dylan because in it I follow the standard procedure of codebreakers and emphasize pattern recognition as a way of finding meaning in what was previously puzzling.. I show that it helps to make sense of Dylan by relating him to his cultural environment, namely New York in the sixties. It was in the sixties, that tumultuous decade, that Dylan revolutionized popular music, writing and performing the songs on which his reputation is based. That is why this book deals only with his songs of the sixtie.
Decoding Dylan follows chronological order by identifying some breakthrough moments during his early years in Hibbing, Minnesota, and then in Minneapolis, when he was enrolled at the University there. But his second, real life, began when he went to New York, where Bobby Zimmerman turned into Bob Dylan, and where hitherto unknown opportunities flooded his receptive sensibility, stimulating him to become a legendary singer-songwriter.
From this brief description it is obvious that Decoding Dylan is not a biography that describes his life in detail. Rather than isolating the subject, as American biographies tend to do, I treat the facts of Dylan’s biography and of his career in a broad cultural context. Although Dylan is a genius, and each genius is surely unique, it is nevertheless true that certain patterns such as birth order and ethnicity recur in the lives of high achievers in the arts. It enriches our understanding of Dylan if we match these specific features of his life to analogous features in the lives of the small group of his peers.


Links to Purchase Print Book version – Click links for book samples, reviews and to purchase
Buy Decoding Dylan Print Edition at Amazon

Links to Purchase eBook version – Click links for book samples, reviews and to purchase
Buy this eBook On Amazon


About the Author

Follow the author on Amazon

All information was provided by the author and not edited by us. This is so you get to know the author better.

Filed Under: Buyer's Guides, Heat Level 1 - G Rated Clean Read, Non-fiction Tagged With: Bob Dylan, classic rock, creativity, Jewish studies, Jim Curtis, music history, rock music

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

ten + two =

CAPTCHA
Refresh

*

Follow Us!

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Search our Site

Featured Books

Featured Book: Mountain Daddy's Fate by K.C. Crowne

About Featured Book: Mountain Daddy's Fate by K.C. Crowne "A secret this BIG is what broke us in the first place." Three things I know about Eli: 1. I broke his heart over a decade ago. 2. The reason I left him was unspeakable. A secret I've kept hidden all these years. 3. Even though […]

Featured Book: Enduring Times by Betty Godfrey

About Featured Book: Enduring Times by Betty Godfrey The story begins in Pittsburgh’s in the early 1900s, where we meet Jennifer, her husband Bill, and their children. Bill works for Jennifer’s father’s bank. Jennifer’s mother raised her and her sister on a tight lease allowing them very little freedom Jennifer defied her mother when she […]

Featured Book: How To Boost Your Credit Score by 100 Points in 30 Days even if you have 0 Credit History by Robbie Seng

About Featured Book: How To Boost Your Credit Score by 100 Points in 30 Days even if you have 0 Credit History. by Robbie Seng If You Want To Get Loans Without The Painful Rejections & Heart aches YourCredit Score determines whether you will struggle through life or whether you could finance your dreams to […]

Featured Book: Harness the Power of the Invincible Mind: Spatial Strategy to Success and Happiness by Alex Neumann

About Featured Book: Harness the Power of the Invincible Mind: Spatial Strategy to Success and Happiness by Alex Neumann “Harness the Power of the Invincible Mind is one of those rare books with the power to radically change the reader’s lives for the better.” Alex Neumann makes wonderful guiding principles for anyone attempting to create […]

Featured Book: Scottish Player: A Hero Club Novel by Karen Frances

About Featured Book: Scottish Player: A Hero Club Novel by Karen Frances Can what happens in Vegas stay in Vegas? Taking a well-earned break with her best friend, Sam Walker would never have expected to be faced with her brother, or his teammates enjoying a pre-season stag party. Sam knows the single footballer mentality and […]

Categories

  • Action & Adventure
  • Activity Books
  • Audiobooks
  • Autobiographies
  • Bargain Books Under $3
  • Biblical Studies
  • Biographical Fiction
  • Biographies & Memoirs
  • Birds
  • Body/Mind/Spirit
  • Business Books
  • Buyer's Guides
  • Children and Young Adult Books
  • Children's Books
  • Christian Autobiography
  • Christian Fiction
  • Christian Non-Fiction
  • Coloring Books for Kids
  • Comedy
  • Cowboy Romance
  • Cozy
  • Cozy Mystery
  • Devotionals
  • Dogs
  • Drama
  • Educational/How-to
  • Erotic
  • Erotic Science Fiction
  • Erotica
  • Fairy Tale
  • Fantasy
  • Featured Books
  • Fiction
    • Romance
  • Fiction Audio Books
  • Fitness
  • Giveaways
  • Health & Fitness
  • Heat Level 1 – G Rated Clean Read
  • Heat Level 2 – PG
  • Heat Level 3 – PG-13
  • Heat Level 4 – R Rated
  • Heat Level 5 – NC-17
  • Historical
  • Historical Fiction
  • Historical Romance
  • Holiday Christmas
  • Horror
  • Humor
  • Humor (Fiction)
  • Interviews
  • Journal
  • Kindle Unlimited eBooks
  • Love and Marriage
  • Memoir
  • Military Science Fiction
  • Music
  • Mystery
  • Mystery/Suspense
  • Mystery/Thriller
  • New Age
  • News
  • Non-fiction
  • Nonfiction Audio Books
  • Nonfiction Audiobooks
  • Paranormal
  • Paranormal Romance
  • Permafree
  • PermaFree Books
  • Personal Growth
  • Pet and Animal
  • Poetry
  • Print
  • Print Books
  • Prophecy
  • Regency Romance
  • Romance – Erotica
  • Romantic Mystery
  • Science Fiction
  • Spiritual Growth
  • Thriller
  • Time Travel
  • Travel
  • Urban Fantasy
  • Women's Fiction
  • YA – Fantasy
  • Young Adult

Podcasts with Writers

Interview with Author – Martini Fisher

Interview with Author – Ajit Singh

Interview with Author – Stu Lloyd

Interview with Author – Burbuqe Raufi

Rock’n’Roll Twilight by Steve Jenner

More Posts from this Category

Featured Books

Featured Book: Forgotten Valor: A Novel of the Korean War by Richard Thomas Lane

Featured Book: Vikings’ Bride by Jessica Knight

Featured Book: Devil’s Realm by Julie Jones

Featured Book: Broken Hero by London James

Featured Book: Boss Vibes: Self-Esteem, Success, and the Art of Etiquette by Nita Patel

More Posts from this Category

Around the Site

  • Home
  • Advertising
  • Contact Us
  • Interview Submission
  • Privacy Policy
  • Sites in the BookGoodies Network

Copyright © 2021 · A BookGoodies Partner Site · Powered by WordPress and Genesis