Dylan’s generational power

They are acquired vices: I buy all the novels set in the universe of rock and adjacent planets. You know how it usually happens that fictions about rock stars are disappointing: the biographies of the real ones rock stars outperform more imaginative creations, while also displaying the heartbeat of reality. Generally, the most interesting are those that focus on adjacent characters, including that mysterious species that is the fandom.

I would like to mention an unpublished book in Spanish, Eat the Document. The author, Dana Spiotta has translated titles, as Innocents and others (Turner) and Stone Arabia (Blackie Books)where someone develops a career as a cult artist and records dozens of albums… without ever releasing a single one.

Eat the Document is full of Dylanesque overtones. It shares a title with the documentary about the 1966 tour that Dylan himself put together and which was rejected by ABC, the TV network that commissioned it. It has never been legally released, although pirated copies circulate and can be viewed on the Internet.

In recent decades, the fandom Dylan’s performance is measured by athletic feats (how many performances of the Endless Tour you have seen) and investments in relics (you must own all volumes of the Bootleg Seriesincluding the box of The 1966 Live Recordingswith its 33 CDs). Such devotion is admirable and perfectly legitimate, although I can’t help but remember the times when Dylan also changed lives, for better or worse.

Spiotta places us in the late sixties and early seventies, when frustration at the endless Vietnam War led groups of students to form the radical Weathermen, in reference to a verse by Subterranean Homesick Blues: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.” Although Dylan had abandoned his more incendiary music, the so-called Weather Underground invoked his work in statements such as New Morning-Changing Weatherin 1970, which limited the armed struggle to symbolic attacks, avoiding causing casualties.

That motto is followed by the protagonist of Eat the DocumentMary Whittaker. With her boyfriend, she forms a cell to place bombs in the homes of the creators and manufacturers of atrocities such as napalm. In one of their actions, a maid dies in the mansion where she deposits an explosive device. Horrified, the couple separates to better survive in hiding. We follow Mary’s odyssey as she changes names and tries different refuges, under the shadow of the FBI and sexual violence (“the hippies “They always want to do it, right?”). Like Dylan, she must resort to constant reinvention of her public identity.

These chapters alternate with the daily life of Mary, now Louise, seen through her son, Jason. They are in Seattle, in 1998: the police pressure seems to have disappeared. Jason has inherited his mother’s music-loving passion, a Beach Boys devotee, but driven by him to the point of obsession: he listens to the remains of the failed album Smile In a religious way, yes. Until his immersions in the audiovisual detritus of the sixties reveal to him the reasons why his mother hides her years of rock and activism from him. I won’t spoil the ending, but I will warn you that even the other fugitive reappears.