Writing about BOB DYLAN: Prophet, Mystic, Poet, Morley Walker of the Winnipeg Free Press said, “This tome, about the influence Dylan’s Jewish roots play in his songs, joins Christopher Ricks’s Visions of Sin as a must-read for pointy-headed Dylanologists. No matter how obscure the Old Testament reference, rest assured that Rogovoy has unearthed it. “
“a must-read for pointy-headed Dylanologists” – Winnipeg Free Press
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010New review written by an Italian poet from the 21st century: ‘That song and poetic free a jew named Bob Dylan’
Monday, May 31st, 2010A new review of Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet appears in an edition of Mosaico, apparently a Jewish journal in Italy. The review is in Italian, but you can get the gist of it — or ask Google to translate it for you, which gives you the funny title above.
Apparently the review calls the writer a “scholar” (studioso) whose “attentive analysis” shows how the Talmud, Torah and Kabbalah are for Dylan inexhaustable sources of inspiration and wisdom that he uses with diverse approaches during his entire career. I’ll take it.
“In light of Dylan’s lifetime of spiritual and religious seeking, there might be a second level of meaning in the blood on these tracks” – PopMatters
Thursday, April 29th, 2010“The question of Dylan’s religious affiliation has been brought back to the forefront because of Seth Rogovoy’s book, Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet. In light of Dylan’s lifetime of spiritual and religious seeking, there might be a second level of meaning in the blood on these tracks; perhaps he is also alluding to the blood of sacrifice, known to him in the sacrificial system of the Hebrew Scriptures.” – Jim Mello, “Bargaining for Salvation,” PopMatters
CONCERT REVIEW: Jakob Dylan, Albany, N.Y., 4.17.10
Monday, April 19th, 2010
Cut to the chase: he played only one hit song by his “other” band, the Wallflowers: “Three Marlenas,” which fit in swimmingly with the rest of his set list, drawn entirely from Jakob Dylan’s two recent solo albums, 2008’s Seeing Things and this year’s Women + Country.
And no, for those who still expect it, he did not play any songs by nor acknowledge his relationship to his father. Duh. Why should he?
Then again, he doesn’t need to, because as Dylan matures – he turned 40 last December – he looks remarkably more like his father every day (check out the photos accompanying this review).
But what Jakob Dylan did offer was an intense, if somewhat monochromatic, 90-minute run-through of his more recent roots-rock. He played the entire Women + Country program and most of Seeing Things, and made it all sound of a piece, backed by the ensemble named Three Legs for this tour, but typically working as singer Neko Case’s backup band.
Case, along with Kelly Hogan, were on hand to lend backup vocals, harmonies, and occasional duets, and those were some of the highlights of Dylan’s show.
If not voluble, Dylan is certainly a more genial frontman than his enigmatic father, but he’s learned some lessons well, including how to stand motionless at a microphone to intone his haunting ballads and mid-tempo country-rockers about, well, women and country for the most part.
“those who labor in the vineyards of Dylanology … owe Rogovoy a great debt” – Ron Rosenbaum
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010In “Bob Dylan: Messiah or Escape Artist?,” his review of BOB DYLAN: Prophet Mystic Poet, in the premiere issue of the new Jewish Review of Books, critic Ron Rosenbaum - a columnist for Slate and the author of Explaining Hitler and The Shakespeare Wars, who is working on a book on Bob Dylan for Yale University Press – hails Seth Rogovoy’s “exemplary research” and says that “...those who labor in the vineyards of Dylanology … owe Rogovoy a great debt for persuasively tracking so many Dylan words, lines, and allusions to Biblical sources we might not have noticed.”
Rosenbaum goes on to say that “Rogovoy’s source-hunting is so relentless, one can only bow to his ingenuity as he pins just about every Dylan line you can think of, like a dead butterfly, to its biblical source box. I was particularly impressed by the wealth of allusions to the Davidic stories he finds.”
He hails the book’s “…deepening of the detailed picture now emerging of Dylan’s Jewish upbringing. Rogovoy shows that the Zimmermans were at ‘the center of Jewish life in Hibbing,’ and that young Robert’s bar mitzvah broke attendance records at the local hotel.”
Read the text of the full review here.
…those who labor in the vineyards of Dylanology … owe Rogovoy a great debt for persuasively tracking so many Dylan words, lines, and allusions to Biblical sources we might not have noticed.
