Does the world really need another book about Bob Dylan? Some estimates say that over 2,000 books have been written about him. A curated list of Dylan tomes that appeared on the Goodreads website has 149 entries. If you want to read about Zimmy, well, there is more material out there than a person can choke down.
Sean Egan’s new book Decade of Dissent: How 1960s Bob Dylan Changed the World (Jawbone Press, 272 pp., $24.95) represents the most recent volume in the teetering stack of Dylan books. Is it necessary? Maybe not, but Decade is certainly a worthwhile read for anyone who is remotely interested in how and why things occurred the way they did in the Dylan universe of the 1960s.
Speaking via Zoom, Egan, a British author who has written books about the Rolling Stones, the Small Faces, the Manchester United Football Club and the Planet of the Apes movies, says, “Basically, I just write about anything that interests me.”
Egan is definitely interested in Dylan, and he presents a thorough but concise overview of Dylan’s activities during his most fruitful period. Dylan’s influence certainly loomed large during the ‘60s, but “How Bob Dylan Changed the World” is a bold subtitle. How does Egan support that statement? “Well, people younger than us oldies, they don’t remember this. I’m a relatively young man, so I wasn’t around at the time,” Egan says. “Back in the 1960s, there was a real divide – both musical and sociological – between folk and rock and pop. Folk was intellectual, it was socially conscious, and pop and rock were wonderful and exciting, but they had no real political or sociological content.
“Bob Dylan was the first person to marry the two, which at the time seemed to be an insane idea, because the two demographics were considered to be completely different. But he proved that you could bring social conscience and poetry and real grit, if you like, to pop and rock. And kids who bought Beatles and Stones and even Dave Clark Five records, they proved willing to purchase that kind of recording.
“When you think about it, for, say, a Beatles fan to suddenly be listening to material like “Subterranean Homesick Blues” or “Desolation Row” or “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” – even though that’s an acoustic track – that was introducing them to concepts and ideas and poetry that they had never been exposed to before. And so that spreads out through society, and people were literally changing. And as people followed Bob Dylan’s example, before too long the Stones and the Beatles were writing lyrics pretty much in the same kind of area. And that was a seismic effect upon the populace.”
Egan delves into Dylan’s music making process, providing keen insights regarding his transition from earnest folkie to full-blown rocker. Bringing It All Back Home, released in 1965, was presented in a demarcated fashion, with the first side dedicated to electric recordings and the second reserved for acoustic numbers. The electric side was notable in that it represented a break from Dylan’s previous records, but the songs didn’t necessarily pack a punch. Egan believes that this underwhelming result stemmed from the fact that Dylan was, at that time, not terribly comfortable playing with other musicians in a band context.
“If you listen to it, they’re not really interacting with him, they’re playing behind him. They’re providing a backbeat. There’s no to-and-fro between the singer and the people behind him. They’re just there. He was making a point by having those musicians there, but it wasn’t necessarily improving his work aesthetically,” Egan notes. “That came on the next album, Highway 61 Revisited, which was only a few months later, but suddenly you hear a song like “Queen Jane Approximately,” and there’s a lovely little arpeggio which he leaves a space for, so that the guitarist can play that. And suddenly it’s a sound painting. It’s not just a bunch of musicians playing together.”
Highway 61 kicked off with “Like a Rolling Stone,” and this is where, arguably, things really got interesting. Egan declares that the record was “not just a commercial achievement but a cultural triumph.” The song definitely created a stir upon its release, but Egan believes that it holds a greater significance.
“Here you have a six-minute song at a time when radio programmers were very nervous about anything over three minutes long. It made number one on Cashbox, number two on Billboard,” Egan says. “It’s an incredibly venomous record, and we assume that he’s denouncing an ex-lover, but whoever he’s talking to – and he might be talking to himself, because very often Dylan addresses himself in the second person – it’s quite startling to hear that kind of vitriol on the hit parade, in the context of the time.”
“But his brain works very fast, much faster than you or I, and he suddenly realized that this was the way out of what seemed to be a one-way ticket to death, basically.”
According to Egan, “Like a Rolling Stone” had a powerful effect on Dylan’s contemporaries in the music business. “After that, who’s going to say, ‘Oh, I can’t write about this because it’s not hit single material. Suddenly, all the shackles are off, and people could write about anything.”
Dylan recorded one more great album during the ‘60s, the double record set Blonde on Blonde, which was released in 1966 and included songs such as “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” (aka “Everybody Must Get Stoned”), “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” and “Visions of Johanna.” At the time, Dylan characterized the record as having “that thin wild mercury sound.”
And then Dylan quit — at least for a time — when his candle was burning brightest. In the summer of 1966, following riotous tours of Europe and Australia, Dylan was involved in a motorcycle crash near his home in Woodstock, NY. Reports of serious and incapacitating injuries swirled about, but hard facts were in short supply. In subsequent years, some have theorized that Dylan was, in reality, only banged up a bit but saw an opportunity to jump off the hamster wheel that his life had become.
“It was definitely a motorcycle accident,” Egan says, “and he definitely sustained some injuries. People at the time remember seeing him in a neck brace for a while. But his brain works very fast, much faster than you or I, and he suddenly realized that this was the way out of what seemed to be a one-way ticket to death, basically.”
Dylan went into hibernation for the next 17 months, lying low in Woodstock and participating in some lo-fi recording sessions with The Band that were eventually released as The Basement Tapes. After the tumult surrounding him during the first half of the decade, Dylan took a more easy and measured path through the latter portion of the ‘60s, releasing John Wesley Harding in 1967 and Nashville Skyline in 1969.
These days, Dylan spends quite of bit of time on the road (he will appear at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion on Sunday, July 6, as part of Willie Nelson’s “Outlaw Music Festival”) and still records albums on a fairly regular basis. But a music fan has to sometimes wonder, is Dylan still relevant? Egan (no surprise) answers strongly in the affirmative.
“He’s relevant because he created popular music as we know it today. It’s been two or three generations of kids growing up since his heyday who have no idea that the music they listen to today, the complexity of it in terms of his lyrics – and his music to a large extent – that’s all down to him,” Egan says. “Before him, popular music was fairly banal. And nowadays, the default for popular music is to be pretty candid, pretty honest, socially relevant. That’s all down to Bob Dylan.”
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.
