Thanks to all for the e-mails while RWB was absent.

Sue in Australia yesterday sent this link to the Andrew Denton show, where he interviews the Waifs, a combo who opened for Dylan during 2003. They talk about meeting Bob during those gigs. It sounds like they got more face time with him than Merle Haggard did when he had the same gig. I can’t think why.

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About a week ago there was this story in the New York Sun: Why Dylan Is Past His Prime.

In a working paper deposited at the National Bureau of Economic Research, “From ‘White Christmas’ to Sgt. Pepper: The Conceptual Revolution in Popular Music,” [University of Chicago economist David] Galenson argues that Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin were “experimentalists,” who tried to write songs that were clear and easy to understand, were craftsmen rather than artistic geniuses, worked by trial-and-error, and did their best work late in life.

By contrast, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys were “conceptualists,” who made dramatic breakthroughs early, writing music that was personal, introspective, and often technically “messy.” By studying various top-100 lists, Mr. Galenson then concludes that, as his theory would predict, the earlier musicians wrote their best songs in their 30s and 40s, while the artists of the 1960s had their greatest hits in their 20s.

Well, Galenson is getting at something that has some truth in it — which is why his theory is somewhat provocative — but like any theory that seeks to constrain artists with labels, it goes only so far before it breaks down. How Galenson defines “best songs” is one question. I would presume that he does it empirically, by looking at figures associated with popularity. I don’t think that popularity equates with quality, although they can coincide. In addition, while there are many artists of the post-1950s pop world whose music was inherently dependent on an aura of rebelliousness and freshness (an aura with a built-in expiration date), I think that Dylan is one of those artists who clearly continued producing work that reasonable listeners would conclude is great long after he ceased having any dependence on or great influence with the critical mass of adolescent record buyers; i.e. those who are mostly seduced by the aforementioned aura.

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