Author Description

"Though it was blues and folk songs that first led Bob Dylan to politics, it was politics that unlocked his astonishing songwriting ability, evidenced by dazzling responses in the early 1960s to the civil rights movement and the threat of nuclear war. Chimes of Freedom reasserts the timeliness of such political songs as A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, revealing that although Dylan actually penned the song prior to the event widely-thought to have inspired it - the Cuban Missile Crisis - he was able to do so precisely because he was fundamentally a political artist with an astute sense of the prevailing anxieties." "Marqusee then traces the young songwriter's subsequent reluctance to be pigeoholed, his rejection of "protest," and his turn to electric rock at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. He shows the way folk tradition, modernism, and commercial popular culture are sublimely fused in Dylan's masterworks of the mid-1960s, notably on the albums Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, and discusses the artist's quest for American identity - amid the continuing carnage in Vietnam and growing chaos at home - in The Basement Tapes and John Wesley Harding."--Jacket.