This slim collection combines black-and-white photos John Cohen made soon after Bob Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village with transcripts of radio interviews with Oscar Brand, Cynthia Gooding, and Studs Terkel. As Cohen writes, "the portraits presented a side of Bob that I didn't recognize when they were originally taken. . . . They preserved something that was invisible when they were made. They were a remembrance of things to come."
Taken together, the photos and interviews hint at the contradiction at Dylan's core, then and ever since. On the one hand, the master of disguise, spinning yarns to make his childhood and youth a vagabondage out of the pages of Jack Kerouac, meant to obscure not only his small-town middle-class origins but also, one suspects, the intensity of his ambition. On the other, the genuine everyman whose life's calling is no better nor worse than that of any other honest handyman. As Dylan tells Terkel: "I go to saw a tree down, I cut myself. If I go to spit tacks, I swallow tacks. It's a tool--that's all I use it as. My life is a street where I walk. This music, my guitar, that's my tool."
The book also features, as a coda, the color photos Cohen made eight years after the first set, as Dylan was preparing the album, Self-Portrait. One of the photos graced the album's back cover.
When Self-Portrait first appeared, I and many others wondered if the title was ironic, since most of the songs on it were cover versions of other people's songs. It turns out that the irony ran even deeper. At the time, I assumed that the bucolic photo in early spring in New York state was taken on his property near Woodstock in the Saugerties. But it wasn't; it was Cohen's place. Other shots, unseen until this book was published, show him wearing Cohen's jacket and hat, feeding Cohen's chickens, talking with Cohen's dog. We didn't know it at the time, but Dylan had left the Woodstock area and returned to Greenwich Village. But, as usual, covering his trail. ( )