Writer and critic Luc Sante examines the relationship between Bob Dylan and photographer Barry Feinstein, and explores the lost book that brings their work together

In 1966, beginning in February, Bob Dylan played 43 concert dates in locations ranging from Kentucky to Australia to Paris. The best known part of the tour, on which he was backed by the Hawks, was the European leg, particularly the May 17 show at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, recordings of which were long erroneously identified as the “Royal Albert Hall” show. That same month he released Blonde on Blonde. He faced a further 64 scheduled concerts that year, but on July 29 he suffered a motorcycle accident in Woodstock, New York, which sidelined him for a considerable time. Although the initial rumours had it that Dylan was seriously injured, possibly in life-threatening ways, it has since been said that the crash may have actually saved his life, since he was dangerously overworked and exhausted.

Barry Feinstein photographed the 1966 European tour, resulting in indelible images: Dylan playing with children in the streets of Liverpool, strutting onstage in Paris in his houndstooth “rabbit suit” with a giant American flag behind him, wearing dark glasses in the back of a limousine whose windows are filled with the squashed faces of fans peering in. Earlier Feinstein had taken the dramatic angry-young-man portrait for the cover of The Times They Are A-Changin’. He had also done a good deal of magazine work, been still photographer on a number of movies, and the following year would be a cameraman for Monterey Pop.

Sometime in 1964 Dylan wrote a suite of 23 poems inspired by Feinstein’s photographs of Hollywood, a spectacular collection taken over the course of the early Sixties. Although the photographs were made for a variety of assignments and in a number of different contexts, they have a remarkable consistency and a clearly identifiable theme: the passing of old Hollywood. The studio system and all that went with it, the industry that had created the movies as we knew them from the Twenties onwards, had reached its terminus at last. It was a subject that clearly resonated with Dylan. He was a major part of the wave of change that was in the process of overthrowing the old guard, but then again, as he wrote in Chronicles about 1941, the year of his birth, “If you were born around this time or were living and alive, you could feel the old world go and the new one beginning. It was like putting the clock back to when BC became AD. Everybody born around my time was a part of both.”

Times Archive, 1969: Bob Dylan at the Isle of Wight Festival

'He came here to do what he had to do and he's done it, and I'm afraid that's the end'

• Dylan live at the Royal Albert Hall, 1966

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And obviously Dylan carried Hollywood within him, maybe even more so than the average citizen of his generation. He undoubtedly learnt how to pose from them – he was a movie star long before he ever made a movie. He feels like Jayne Mansfield and Humphrey Bogart (as well as Sleepy John Estes and Murph the Surf) in the notes to Bringing It All Back Home. And Jean Harlow memorialised by Louella Parsons lies just under his hand on the cover. And in the 1958 film of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Paul Newman says, “You don’t know what love is. To you it’s just a four-letter word.” And in Don Siegel’s movie The Lineup (also 1958), a character says, “When you live outside the law you have to eliminate dishonesty.” In the European tour pictures of 1966 you can sense Dylan and Feinstein conspiring to make an epic silver-screen performance – if in stills, and only partly premeditated.

So it’s hardly surprising that Dylan knew very well what to make of pictures of Gary Cooper’s funeral, and Marilyn Monroe’s house the day of her death, and Marlon Brando being counterpicketed by racists while he marched on behalf of equal housing – as well as of pictures of casting agents and wardrobe department shelves and homes-of-the-stars map pedlars and the unemployment bureau and the Hal Roach Studios slated for demolition. He could inhabit the landscape from one end to the other.

And indeed the poems are not descriptive, but come from within the photographs, as if the pictures themselves were speaking. Now and then there are echoes of Dylan’s songs: “touch me mama/ it’s all right/ it doesn’t matter/ it’s been too well proven/ that even I, myself/ am not really here.” Or “on lease/ get piece/ sucked in/ on a habit/ gotta have it/ promised by/ the prostitute/ destroyed ruins/ tilt the day” – which could be sung to the tune of Subterranean Homesick Blues. Overall, though, the voice sounds closest to that of “11 Outlined Epitaphs” (the notes to The Times They Are A-Changin’) and “Some other kinds of songs…” (the notes to Another Side of Bob Dylan). Here as there the lines are skinny, the rhythms abrupt, the language sparse and telegraphic and abbreviated, the situations jarring and dreamlike, the comebacks frequent and snappy. There are laments, complaints, musings, skits (a hilarious screen test, for one), parables (converting those wardrobe department shelves into a repository of human lives), nightmare scenarios (the lurching paranoid fantasy that begins “after crashin the sportscar / into the chandelier” and sounds like a hellish rewrite of “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”), and plenty of dry tombstone epigraphs.

The one graphically autobiographical item is the last. Apparently inspired by photographs of William Wyler’s Oscar for Ben Hur (1959), Dylan considers what happened on December 13, 1963, when he was given the Tom Paine Award by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. On the dais without a prepared speech, he had failed to attend the protocol of the liberal worthies in the room, particularly offending them by saying, “… I have to be honest, I just got to be, as I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly where – what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I, too – I saw some of myself in him.” He was booed; some of those present broke off with Dylan.

It makes sense that Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric is not just the collaboration of two great artists, but also the overlay of two crashing trains: the collapsing feudal system of old Hollywood and Dylan’s eventual disillusionment with the world of celebrity. This is not to say that the outlook is sour. Quite to the contrary, Dylan can see the humour and fancy involved as well as the death and dread. But he can appreciate Hollywood from the inside by now, seeing it as a system that requires an elaborate mandarin code of behaviour in exchange for a reward that, like Stephen Crane’s ball of gold in the sky, looks a lot more like clay when viewed up close. Perhaps writing these poems was for Dylan an early step in the long and arduous process of making his peace with fame and realising that he could not ever stop being Bob Dylan.

yes mama i’m an actor
the difference being my contradiction
that i
do not really wish t be remembered
for my smile
nor for my costume
but in complete reversal
as i look around
i realize
that i will be

‘It’s the difference between the words on paper and the song. The song disappears into the air, the paper stays’ Bob Dylan

Poet and academic Billy Collins analyses Dylan’s verse

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