Book 4 provides a deep dive into Bob Dylan’s retreat into the woodshed, a period in which he explored his art and largely avoided the public spotlight.
The period between 1967 and 1973 is generally considered Dylan’s willful retreat from the public eye, bookended by his motorcycle accident in 1966 and his return to touring in 1974. Faced with the increasing pressures and demands of fame, Dylan, rather than doubling down on his pugilistic stance of 1965 and 1966, simply left and moved his young and rapidly growing family to Woodstock, New York, then back to Greenwich Village and MacDougal Street in the city, before settling down for good in Malibu, California. Instead of delivering an album every six months as was typically expected of pop stars of the day, he made only a handful of albums, a few standalone singles, and sporadic concert appearances, completely on his own terms, setting a precedent for independence that continues to the present day.
Yet even if the world heard less frequently from Bob Dylan, it didn’t mean that he was any less active. Dylan was in the woodshed, refining and redefining his art and his relation to it. The time and space afforded by the changes in his new lifestyle opened up avenues for self-expression, and looking across notebooks, manuscripts, sketches and drawings, films, and, of course, songs, one can see Dylan’s restless creativity in this period. The era is defined by a prolific output: lyrics, unfinished stories, bits of dialogues, original epigrams, and other more fragmentary work jostle for space alongside sketches and drawings of faces, instruments, and abstract forms. Dylan’s writing style changed from dense, frenetic, abstract pages to a deceptively simple style, and his artwork was defined by repetition as a way of exploring forms. The era reflected an experimenting artist moving through mediums, genres, structures, and styles as a way of exploring a seemingly irrepressible well of ideas. Some made it out to the public, as is the case of the lyrics to “Dear Landlord” from the 1968 album John Wesley Harding, or “Wanted Man,” written for Johnny Cash, who recorded it in 1969 at San Quentin State Prison. However, most of Dylan’s writings and drawings from this era never reached the public eye.
Some of these treasures are shown in this book for the first time.
