Restless Hello

It is, in short, almost exactly opposite in tone from Chronicles: The book is an impressionistic guide to a forming sensibility; the exhibit is concerned with nailing down concrete dates. What guides both is Dylan's sudden generosity with his own past—as if the artistic success of Time Out of Mind and "Love and Theft" has allowed him to talk about the old stuff in depth without feeling like he's trading in on it at the expense of the new. And for a guy with a reputation as a grouch (see Don't Look Back and roughly two-thirds of the aforementioned Collected Interviews), he's been amazingly frisky of late. In the short film about his appearances at Newport that screens at the exhibit, the footage of a young Dylan performing "Bob Dylan's Dream" in full-on deadpan-comic mode comes closest to the wryness of the recent footage.

In fact, there's something familiar to me about that wryness, and not just because he's an icon or is the subject of a museum retrospective or has written one of the music books of the year. It's personal, and it's regional. I spent my first 24 years in Minneapolis, and when Dylan talks, it's instantly familiar: He sounds like other old guys I know from Minnesota, who left upstate for the city, who worked at losing their regionalisms only to have them reassert themselves with age and self-comfort.

Bob Dylan in the early '60s.

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There's a clip in EMP's short film about Dylan's legacy, taken from Eat the Document, that stays with me. He's onstage, seated at a piano, performing "Ballad of a Thin Man." On Highway 61 Revisited, the song always sounded a little narrow, too proud of itself; here, it's like death wearing a clown mask. He's stoned, probably, but where it proves an irritant on Live 1964, here it hardly matters, because Dylan is all the way in the zone—kinking his delivery, slurring and elongating his vowels in a way that suggests Dylan imitator but communicates as the man himself at his most absolutely powerful, completely in command of his instrument, bending and shaping his art at will. There are a lot of differences between that clip and Chronicles: Volume One—age, intent, method. But in net effect, they're not so far away from each other.

"Bob Dylan's American Journey, 1956–1966" opens at Experience Music Project Sat., Nov. 20.