Music: Freaky Fresco of Hell

Back in the middle ’60,. Bob Dylan was the king of popular music, a figure to whom even the Beatles and the Rolling Stones paid due and reverential homage. Many of Dylan’s partisans even suggested that he might be the best young poet in the country. His lyrics combined paranoia, pop art and elusive, often violent imagery into a carefully crafted chaos that sounded a bit like Rimbaud writing rock and roll.

Then Dylan racked himself up on a motorcycle and went into that famous retreat for almost two years. When he reappeared his life was less troubled, his music quieter and more benign. When some friends from the folk music magazine Sing Out! managed to sit him down for a talk in 1968, they asked him, among other things, about a book he was said to have written, called Tarantula. “It wasn’t a book,” Dylan replied,”It was just a nuisance. It didn’t have any structure at all.” The book got to the page-proof stage, and then was abandoned after the accident, presumably because it represented a part of Dylan’s life that he was actively trying to forget.

Dead End. Dylan fans wouldn’t let him. For the past year or so, photocopies of Tarantula’s galleys have been sold throughout the rock underground. Dylan, 29, perhaps reasoning that he might just as well share in some of the profits from his own work, finally allowed the book to be launched officially (Macmillan; $3.95). The result is neither novel nor poem, but a series of free-association images that succeed, at best, in creating a freaky fresco of hell. The book has the feel and sound of such nightmare Dylan lyrics as Desolation Row and Memphis Blues Again. It is peopled by meth freaks, lumberjacks, a man called Simply That, and a vaporous presence named Aretha with “religious thighs” and “no goals” who is described as “one step soft of heaven.” A large supporting cast includes “mrs. Cunk,” who sells “fake blisters at the World’s Fair,” Cardinal Spellman, Sherlock Holmes and Shirley Temple. The pages are liberally sprinkled with obscure metaphors and allusions to E.E. Cummings, Robert Frost, Shakespeare and Rabelais, scraps of song lyrics, even a self-composed epitaph: “here lies bob dylan demolished by Vienna politeness . . . bob dylan —killed by a discarded Oedipus.”

Moments of effective, surrealistic satire (there is a fine description, for instance, of a man whose house is entirely covered by advertising posters) do not keep Tarantula from being a despairing dead end. In perspective, the book—already a bestseller—should stand less as aesthetic achievement than as a record of a painful time in an artist’s life that fortunately has passed. When Bob Dylan wrote Tarantula, he was 23 years old.