my back pages: an unwritten book

Existing biographies of Bob Dylan are not what they claim to be. Instead, they tell the life story of one Robert Allen Zimmerman, born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1941, and raised in the nearby town of Hibbing. When, twenty years later, Robert Zimmerman moved to New York City and became a professional musician — first a singer, then a writer of songs as well — he started calling himself Bob Dylan, and simultaneously began a second career as a fabulist of himself. (Perhaps one might say that self-mythologizing is his first career, with music a distant second.) For instance, while Zimmerman admitted that he had been born in Duluth, he never admitted to having been raised in Minnesota but insisted instead that he had lived in Gallup, New Mexico, and had, perhaps even before entering his teen years, worked in a carnival. These statements were of course lies, and indeed almost everything that he has ever said about himself, in his own writing and in interviews, has had at best, and rarely, a tenuous connection to the truth.

The biographer of Robert Zimmerman cannot avoid seeking to disentangle the discoverable truth from the demonstrable untruth. Such disentangling is not impossible, but neither is it interesting, or so I believe. I would never write a biography of Robert Zimmerman. What I propose instead is to write a biography of Bob Dylan — that is, this persona that Robert Zimmerman adopted and then continued to develop for the next 60 years — and counting.

While Robert Zimmerman is Jewish (Hebrew name: Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham), Bob Dylan is ethnically ambiguous. We do not know where he was born, but when he was twelve years old, Bob Dylan was forced to marry a prostitute. (The marriage didn’t work out, but “she’s still cute,” he tells us, “and we’re still friends.”) Bob Dylan once lived with a fascinating woman and her then-lover on Montague Street, in a basement down the stairs, but when the friend “started in to dealing with slaves, something inside of him died,” and Bob Dylan “became withdrawn” — the only thing he knew how to do was “to keep on keepin’ on.” As attracted as he may have been to this woman, Bob Dylan’s true love, the lost love he never got over, was a woman whom he refers to only as “the girl from the Red River shore.” Bob Dylan once had a pony named Lucifer. Bob Dylan once dreamed that he was on the Mayflower, under the authority of Captain Arab. Bob Dylan, when he reflected on the martyrdom of St. Augustine — which is not something that happened in the timeline occupied by Robert Zimmerman and us — bowed his head and cried. Bob Dylan once got himself into deep but unspecified trouble somewhere in Central America. (“Can you tell me who to contact here, señor?”)

None of these things happened to Robert Zimmerman, whose life, however eventful, has been significantly less dramatic. I will admit that his work as a painter and sculptor has some value; Bob Dylan, by contrast, has lived too nomadic a life, often on or across the borderline of legality, to apply himself to any such sedentary pursuits.

I will be the first biographer of Bob Dylan.