By David Daniel

“This book let me find out for myself why I’ve been obsessed with Dylan since my teens, and I presented what I learned in a way that I hoped others would at least see that I’m not crazy.”

“There are more ‘iconic’ rock stars out there, but no one who is as much a student of the art form as Dylan. His depth of knowledge of songs, history, and literature going back throughout the twentieth century, and far beyond, is unmatched.” So claim Keith Nainby and John M. Radosta in their illuminating study Bob Dylan in Performance: Song, Stage, and Screen (Lexington Books, 316 pp., $51.99).

The pair draw on the lens supplied by performance studies to explore the distinctive ways Dylan creatively invigorates words and music on his recordings, on stage, and on screen. The book’s focus is on placing the man and his work into a wide context, from the historical to the cultural.

Keith Nainby is a professor of communication studies at California State University, Stanislaus. (His new book, a study of the songs of Taylor Swift, will appear this fall.) John M. Radosta teaches English and creative writing at Milton High School in Massachusetts. I spoke with them via Google Meet about the paperback edition of their book.

Arts Fuse: BDIP is a scholarly work focused on “the relationship of Dylan’s recorded performances to the historical bardic role, to the American popular song tradition, and to rock music culture.” That’s an ambitious agenda. How did the book come to be?

Keith Nainby: One of the ways academic presses get their work done is to send editors out to scan academic conference presentations that seem like they might be a good fit. At an MLA conference in 2016 I’d done a presentation on Dylan’s poetics, and an editor from Lexington Books approached me. She felt the ideas, at least orally, on how one might study Dylan — centering on things like how he uses voice to inflect poetry, how his work as performer is inextricable from his lyrics — might make a book. As it happens, that same night I had dinner with a college friend who’d first introduced me to Dylan’s work. I said hey, how do you feel about writing about Dylan together? And he said yes. That’s how the book got off the ground.

John M. Radosta: For my part, I was just excited that someone wanted to hear what I had to say about Dylan. A lot of the things I like about him I’d never really put into context. For example, as a fan of Homer and Beowulf, I’d long thought that Dylan played a similar role in our culture. But who would listen to me about that? I was astounded when I saw him with Mark Knopfler in 2012. For that tour, all of his phrasings were the same four-beat line of a Viking epic. He’d never done that before, and never did again. But what did that mean, why did it matter? This book let me find out for myself why I’ve been obsessed with Dylan since my teens, and I presented what I learned in a way that I hoped others would at least see that I’m not crazy. I assumed that no one would let me do it again, so I tried to include everything I could squeeze in.

Nainby: Language and tone were definitely important considerations for me. I have high hopes that general readers interested in Dylan won’t find the academic focus too opaque. A strategy we used was to ground our observations as much as possible in our personal experiences with Dylan’s art as well as with fellow Bobcats. John’s much greater experience attending Dylan shows, compared to mine, was a huge asset in tracing the artist’s approaches to complicating and diversifying his song performances in concert. I did my best to explore my responses to Dylan through subjective rather than objective lenses — which is a way of sense-making that I learned to privilege from Dylan himself.

AF: And the experience of co-authoring the book?

Radosta: For me, at first, it was intimidating. My chief experience was writing crime fiction. I felt I had to “audition” for Keith and wrote up some Dylan criticism, really just to get into that academic language. We never set up parameters at the start, just let things grow organically. He outlined the book, came up with the proposal, and did all of the professional things. In the writing, Keith did the bulk of the performance analysis, since that’s his area of study. The things he noted about Dylan’s vocal techniques, his recording, choices he makes in how to attack a word — that was all way beyond me. I learned a lot reading those chapters. I jumped into the literary connections. Basically we each just followed our passions, bounced ideas.

Once we got rolling, it was fun. We each took the lead on various chapters, and added to each other’s as we saw fit. It fell out that “our” chapters pretty well alternate through the book, but I couldn’t tell you which sentences are his or mine. Keith was really the ideas man, diving deep into things (he wrote four pages on one line of “Desolation Row”!). I was the English teacher, setting deadlines and such. We never had any dispute or impasse.

Nainby: I prefer writing with collaborators. I experience ideas as stronger and richer when they’re dialogic from the outset. In this case, I found co-authoring especially inspiring because John’s drafting process kept me honest. My habit is to “write in my head,” then produce a single draft when I at last get words down on paper. I rarely revise such drafts unless explicitly invited to do so. John would send me multiple pages and then suggest if any portion looked usable, great — and if not, he was comfortable scrapping anything that didn’t work. In response, I raised my own game to move toward multiple revisions and a more concrete drafting process.

AF: Dylan’s being awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 generated a lot of comment and controversy — from Philip Roth’s wry, “It’s O.K., but next year I hope Peter, Paul and Mary get it,” to Joan Baez’s measured endorsement that “people differ about whether or not he deserved it for his writing, but whatever — I thought he was a great writer of music. It moved me for half a century and millions of people ever since.” Thoughts?

Nainby: Yeah, folks’ responses to the Nobel — Roth’s and Baez’s are good examples — tend to focus on whether his writing is or isn’t “poetry”— as in, does it fit that category? Dylan himself seems to suggest, at multiple points in his career, that he doesn’t think of his work this way. But I’m much more excited about what the Nobel recognition might do to help us understand poetry itself, its form and function in the contemporary culture. Historically, poetry engaged audiences through sound and other sensory ways — the oral/aural mode. Poetry as a book on a shelf, to my mind, is an odd thing. It’s not an odd thing that a commercial musical artist might be considered a poet. Dylan’s Nobel recognition heralds a change that I welcome, away from canonization and poetry-as-artifact and toward the dynamic — poetry-as-performance.

Radosta: There are more “iconic” rock stars out there, but no one who’s as much a student of the art form as Dylan. His depth of knowledge of songs, history, and literature runs back through the 20th century and far beyond. This unmatched, in my view, knowledge and understanding is what makes his work Nobel-worthy. Like Shakespeare, he explores the vast range of human emotions and experiences, and he does it through both traditional and innovative musical forms. Even as his popularity waxes and wanes, his influence grows, and he continues to develop as an artist — he never sings a song the same way twice, even night to night — and he’s still always striving to accomplish more.

AF: Let’s deal with that point. There is a continuum of listeners. On one end, there’s the more tradition-bound, who anticipate and expect the songs to be the way they first heard them, however long ago. On the other, there are those who expect Dylan’s playlist and songs to be different each time. Can these expectations be reconciled?

Radosta: Last November, seeing Dylan for the 50th time, I was sitting next to a couple, and after two songs the guy says, “I don’t recognize any of these songs.” Then a tune came along and he said, “Oh yeah, I kind of know this song. But it’s completely different.” And they left.

Nainby: If you want familiarity, put on the album and listen note by note. To my mind, artists are always changing and growing — you want to hear where they are now. Dylan, in his song “Day of the Locusts” and elsewhere, takes a strong negative stance on the stasis of museums and academic treatises. He contrasts that with how he sees art and culture as living, and subject to change.

AF: Where — in space and time — do you see the “Never Ending Tour” ending?

Radosta: I’ve always thought that Dylan was going to stay on the road until he dropped. I imagined he’d be playing tiny clubs, maybe under a name like “Blind Boy Grunt,” like some old bluesman. When the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour was given a start and end date, it looked like he really was going to retire. But then up he pops with Willie Nelson on his Outlaws Tour this summer. He has a completely new set-list, with almost half of the songs covers of ’50s tunes. I think my original idea may come true.

I once saw Chuck Berry at a big oldies show, along with Roy Orbison, James Brown, and Johnny Rivers. I found out that Berry would drive his own car from gig to gig, take his guitar out of the trunk 10 minutes before show time, and only then did he meet the band the venue had set up for him. He didn’t rehearse with them, just assumed they knew his songs. I can almost picture Dylan doing that. Of course, I’d like to be at that final show, for fear of missing out!

David Daniel’s writing has appeared in Surfer magazine and the Boston Globe. His 2004 mystery novel Goofy Foot uses a surfing backdrop. His most recent book is Beach Town, a collection of stories set on Boston’s South Shore, where he grew up and learned the joy of waves.