Bob Dylan's New York

New York's luster as the world's cultural capital, a city of lights brighter than Paris, faded a little as rents climbed out of reach for starving artists and the de-centering of culture proceeded at a dizzying pace along the World Wide Web. You don't need to be anywhere anymore to find at least a modest, supportive online audience for anything you might want to do. Unless you're a stockbroker, why pull up stakes for the Big Apple?

It was a different world when a young Midwesterner named Robert Zimmerman appeared in NYC in 1960 with a new name, Bob Dylan, and a made-up identity as a hobo troubadour in the worn shoes of his hero, Woody Guthrie. The best parts of June Skinner Sawyers' Bob Dylan: New York (Roaring Forties Press) are the chapters where the author brings the Greenwich Village of the '60s to life. Remember, in those years, unless you were Italian, no one in places like Milwaukee knew the meaning of espresso, and Americana was hard to find even in the heart of America.

Greenwich Village still thrums with electricity, but in Dylan's day it was a defiant outpost of the Left Bank on the shores of America, a bastion of cultural and political resistance to stifling conformity. The scene Dylan stepped into was made to order with cheap apartments, plenty of coffee shops and bars crowded with rowdy intellectuals, and many stages on which to play. Much of that cultural resistance focused on the revitalization of American tradition in the form of old folk and blues ballads. Singing those songs seemed to be a rebuke to the shallowness of much of Hollywood and pop music, as well as pop culture in general. Dylan, who never found a good idea he wouldn't borrow or a thought he wouldn't steal, absorbed everything there was to learn from the folk-blues revival. Eventually he grew too big to be contained by it.

"To Dylan, New York was a drug," writes Sawyers, a Chicago Tribune columnist. The city was "an intellectual stimulant that served as an endless stream of inspiration." New York can still awaken the neural system, but lately it's more a museum of what's happened than a roadway toward things to come.