A Foreign Sound to Your Ear: Bob Dylan Performs “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” 1964–2009

[1] Bob Dylan is no stranger to academia, but he has yet to gain the full attention of music scholars.(1) There are likely many reasons for this neglect, one of which is the tendency to elevate the literary Dylan above the musical one; another is the surprisingly durable tradition in music theory and (to a lesser extent) musicology of valuing complexity in harmony, melody, rhythm, and form-areas in which Dylan's music is often (though not always accurately) perceived as simple.(2) But music scholars should not concede Dylan so quickly to their colleagues in Comparative Literature and American Studies. He is, after all, one of the iconic figures of Western music in the last half century; that iconic status cannot be attributed solely to his words or his countercultural cachet. Furthermore, as Dylan's writings and interviews attest, he considers himself first and foremost a musician, deeply concerned with musical sound and effect.(3) Dylan scholars thus await musicology's contribution. One of them, Lee Marshall, wonders: "Where are the works from musicology, from performance studies, or from drama that could help us develop a critical vocabulary appropriate for [Dylan's music and performances]?" (2009, 108; see also Marshall 2007, 25). Bemoaning the academic focus on Dylan's art solely as literary text, Marshall calls for studies that explore the ways in which his performances "generate their affects aesthetically, through music, performance, and voice, and not just words" (2009, 109).[2] Marshall's call is invigorating, but several challenges await the music scholar wishing to answer it. The first is simple, but not to be underestimated: Dylan's musical output is staggeringly vast. As of late-2013, his official catalog numbers seventy-two records, thirty-five of them original studio albums and the remainder live sets, archival releases, and anthologies, many of which include original material unavailable elsewhere.(4) As large as this corpus already is, the archive of unofficial recordings is several orders of magnitude greater: Dylan is the most bootlegged artist in modern popular music, surpassing even the Grateful Dead.(5) Most of his three thousand-plus concerts have been recorded and are accessible through online trading sites. How can a music scholar come to terms with this massive-indeed unprecedented-body of recorded work? One could perhaps adopt strategic blinders. After all, Dylan's fame rests primarily on a handful of records from the 1960s-especially the celebrated trio of albums Bringing It All Back Home (1965a), Highway 61 Revisited (1965b), and Blonde on Blonde (1966)-and a small body of songs, "Blowin' in the Wind" and "Like a Rolling Stone" most prominent among them. Indeed, a common critical strategy is to lavish attention on Dylan's 1960s work-up until the motorcycle crash of 1966(6)-and then to address the music from the next four-and-a-half decades in more or less piecemeal fashion, typically touching on 1975's Blood on the Tracks and perhaps the series of critically acclaimed records beginning with 1997's Time out of Mind, while neglecting or scorning the rest.(7) But this is hardly a defensible scholarly strategy. If we wish to take the measure of Dylan as a musician we cannot ignore several decades of his work, especially given the centrality of protean change to his aesthetic. Dylan's songs have undergone drastic transformations over the decades, across hundreds of performances with dozens of ensembles, and each new album is an occasion for further metamorphosis. Our picture of Dylan as a musician is woefully incomplete if we neglect his often-extravagant reinventions of himself and his catalog.[3] Scholars wishing to explore the sonic particulars of Dylan's music face additional questions of method. These relate in part to what philosopher Theodore Gracyk (2006, 177, borrowing from Gioia 1998) aptly calls Dylan's "aesthetic of imperfection. …