From: rollason54@gmail.com   
      
   ARCHIVES COME ALIVE: review of: Bob Dylan, Mixing Up the Medicine   
   Written and edited by Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel, 608 pp., New York:   
   Callaway, 2023   
   **   
   This beautifully produced volume, which has been received by many as one of   
   the best books ever on Bob Dylan, is the first publication to emanate from the   
   archive that has been housed since 2022 in the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa,   
   Oklahoma. Co-edited by    
   Mark Davidson, Curator of the Bob Dylan Archive, and fellow archivist Parker   
   Fishel, it might at first sight appear a coffee-table book, or alternatively a   
   study guide to the archive, but in reality it is neither of those things: it   
   could be best    
   described as an illustrated biography, with the particularity that most of its   
   copious graphic material is taken from the archive and has never before seen   
   print publication.   
      
   Biographically, the book offers an account, both lucid and ludic, of Bob    
   Dylan's career, the focus being on the artistic rather than the personal, and   
   within the personal on Dylan in his best-known manifestation as songwriter and   
   musician (recognition    
   also being accorded to his practice of other arts such as painting or cinema).   
   The graphic material includes letters, manuscripts, photos, film stills,   
   record sleeves, memorabilia and much more (one may note anecdotally such gems   
   as a Christmas card from    
   Paul McCartney!) Of particular interest to many will be the scans of draft   
   lyrics as set down in notebooks or scribbled on hotel notepaper. We learn, for   
   instance, that Dylan’s most revised song ever is 'Dignity' and that the   
   archive contains some    
   seventeen drafts of 'Jokerman'. However, one of the things this tome is not is   
   a substitute for in-person research in Tulsa: the draft lyrics are by no means   
   always reproduced in full, while archive location codes are not given anywhere   
   in the book.   
      
   The volume is also of value for the thirty essays, critical or biographical   
   and all specially commissioned, that are interspersed with the life material.   
   The guest authors range from critics including the likes of Greil Marcus (on a   
   super-early tape of    
   1960 from Madison, Wisconsin) and Alex Ross (on the drafts of ‘The Groom’s   
   Still Waiting at the Altar’) to creative writers of the prestige of Peter   
   Carey (on 'Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum') or Michael Ondaatje (who intriguingly   
   compares Dylan as    
   reviser of his own texts to another great rewriter, no less than Honoré de   
   Balzac). The book is worth owning for these essays alone, foregrounding as   
   they do the multiplicity of critical perspectives that exist on Dylan’s life   
   and work.   
      
   In the months since it came out, this volume has been amply received, with   
   overwhelmingly favourable reviews. Translations are already out in French,   
   German and Spanish. For Dylan students this book impressively complements such   
   earlier key material as    
   Michael Gray’s The Bob Dylan Encyclopaedia or Dylan’s own Chronicles   
   Volume One and The Philosophy of Modern Song; it offers something for   
   everybody, whether one's focus be on lyrics, photos or biodata. The editors   
   have gone to enormous lengths to    
   celebrate the riches of the archive, and this the resulting book most   
   certainly merits a prominent place on the shelves of any serious Dylan   
   collection.    
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)