Bob Dylan: Mixing Up The Medicine - Treasures From the Bob Dylan Center

Bob Dylan: Mixing Up The Medicine
Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel
608 pages
ISBN: # 978-1734537796
Callaway Arts & Entertainment
2023

There have been more than a few books written about Bob Dylan during the course of his sixty-plus years in the public spotlight, but perhaps none is so dense as Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel's Mixing Up the Medicine. Granted, the Nobel Laureate's own tome, The Philosophy of Modern Song (Simon & Shuster, 2022) contains its share of stirring prose, but it doesn't feature hardly as much graphic imagery the likes of which abound within these six hundred-plus pages.

Taken from a treasure trove of some 6,000 original Bob Dylan manuscripts including draft lyrics, notebooks, and diverse ephemera—along with countless still and moving images and thousands of hours of riveting studio and live recordings—this content is part of a collection that now resides at The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

As an official publication of the archive, this hardcover provides a remote look at this multifaceted vault located just steps away from the archival home of Dylan's early hero, Woody Guthrie. This imposing format supplies a cross-section of the materials within the edifice and vividly reflects the nature of the materials therein: unique, previously unavailable, and, in many cases, even previously unknown, they may mystify as much as enlighten, but that's in keeping with their subject.

Not overly large in terms of its approximate physical dimensions of 10" X 11," this is nonetheless a weighty item indeed, as suggested by its 2.25" thickness. But that's altogether proper befitting an artist who's reinvented himself at least a half-dozen times during the course of his career, all those iterations (and more if further parsed within its respective stages) sourced in Robert Zimmerman's creation of the character the world knows as 'Bob Dylan."

As often as not, the inclusions of content are deeply personal, thereby illuminating the timeline of a remarkable career where it matters most. For instance, there is a photo of the leather jacket Dylan wore at the legendary 1965 electric set at Newport Folk as well as a replication of his prose poetry piece "Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie," recited at the conclusion of a New York Town Hall concert two years prior.

The most familiar images here, like the cover painting of The Band's Music From Big Pink (Capitol, 1968), will serve to entice casual readers to peruse this hefty tome more carefully. There are also those photos of significant personages that may not bring near instant recognition, such as those of long-time ('65 to '70) Dylan record producer Bob Johnston and Izzy Young, founder and operator the Folklore Center in New York, an early advocate of the fledgling artist (he produced Dylan's first major concert, at Carnegie Hall in 1961).

Its chronological sequence of chapters aside, it may only be Dylan obsessives who read Mixing Up The Medicine from cover to cover. And it's questionable whether they benefit from that chosen exercise: well-known names such as presidential historian Douglas Brinkley's or lesser-known ones such as Sonic Youth co-founder Lee Renaldo's, may or may not present epiphanies large or small, no matter what process gets applied to processing the innards of this publication. In fact, a random scan may reveal how truly remarkable is the creative arc of the Minnesota native.

But then, whether examined by devotees or dilettantes, the method of perusal matters less than the processing itself. Bob Dylan is a man who's usually been loath to explain himself and to have the man himself participate, albeit indirectly, in such a broad- based opportunity to savor the various stages of his mercurial evolution, from various perspectives, in more than a little detail, is more than a little welcome. And much of the content speaks volumes in and of itself: the photo from Newport Folk 1964 captures a confident young man far removed from the waif carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders just a year prior at the annual event.

Well-intentioned is the idea to include the essays of choice by Clinton Heylin, Terry Gans and Greil Marcus, it is equally so to make room for the efforts of Joy Harjo, Lucy Sante and Tom Piazza. The comparably informal nature of the latters' writing contrasts the solemn work of the aforementioned Dylan scholars and as such, mirrors the widely-varied tone and the plethora of styles in the original songs comprising their subject's songbook.

To that end, the very design of Mixing Up The Medicine may be its greatest virtue. Conceived and executed by a team including Nicolas Callaway, Toshiya Masuda and Jerry Kelly, the varied contents of print and image make the most of every available space on a given page, even including the inside of both front and back covers.

The mixes thereof effectively alternate with full-pages of both media. On pages two hundred sixty-eight through two seventy for instance, large closeup portraits of Dylan amplify an end effect that mirrors the pacing intrinsic to great recordings and live performances (and not just the Nobel Laureate's). Never cluttered or overly busy, this level of nuance bespeaks the roughly six years of work that went into this project and it deserves more prominent notation than the acknowledgement relegated to the very last page.

The potent blend of substance in this book can't quite match up to the best of the Bard's music—the often ineffable effects of which are exclusive to that greatest of all art forms—but the contiguous placement(s) conjure a variety of provocative effects. In that respect, this book manifests one of the fundamental goals of Bob Dylan's work over these decades, that is, to offer thought-provoking ideas for further contemplation, usually in some measure of depth. Still, that only renders more incisive the abiding common sense radiating from many of the man's own quotes: see his observations on "When I Paint My Masterpiece."

As is so often the case with biographies and other historical works, the latter chapters are comparatively light on analytical overtones. But then it takes time to gauge the depth of import to assign certain subjects, like the thirty-ninth studio album Rough And Rowdy Ways (Columbia, 2020). That said, with so much hindsight available on the 1976 television special Hard Rain (Columbia, 1976), it's a mystery why there's not even a passing mention of the initial filmed performance with which Dylan dispensed (available in its entirety on YouTube at one point).

Nor is there even fleeting reference to the controversies concerning plagiarism especially in recent years (though the young songwriter's 1964 reworking of a traditional song into "Chimes of Freedom" represents some left-handed commentary on such uproars). It's hardly surprising there's no pretense of objectivity in play here and even though that stance doesn't render some of the hyperbolic praise much less off-putting—see Raymond Foye's 'Reflections on "Dirge"—it does render all the more enlightening that juxtaposition of comparative reactions to Self Portrait (Columbia, 1970) and New Morning (Columbia, 1970) preserved for posterity.

Intentional or not, such arrangement only heightens the fascination with those titles and even more so the iconic cultural figure who fostered them, a man who at eighty-one years of age continues to record and perform regularly. So, as much as this entry into the lengthy Bob Dylan bibliography may stand as a tacit invitation to in person attendance at the source of the collected material, it is no doubt hardly a substitute for visiting.

Nevertheless, this amalgamation of information and insight stands full and complete on its own terms, so, it's hardly demeaning to view its release for the holiday gift-giving season as anything less logical than solicitation for the purchase of an audio compilation, issued coincidentally, by the very same title (and dutifully pictured inside its companion piece with the rest of the discography).

For those who end up owning Mixing Up The Medicine, the rediscovery of Bob Dylan's music in much more general terms than a single anthology may be inevitable. In the end, there might not be any greater compliment to be paid to this herculean effort.

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