For decades, there’s been a running academic debate about the question of “the hot hand”—the notion, in basketball, say, that a player has a statistically better chance of scoring from downtown if he’s been shooting that night with unusual accuracy. Put it this way: Stephen Curry, the point guard genius for the Golden State Warriors, who normally hits forty-four per cent of his threes, will raise his odds to fifty per cent or better if he’s already on a tear. He’s got a “hot hand.” If you watch enough N.B.A. ball, it appears to happen all the time. But does it? Thirty years ago, Thomas Gilovich, Amos Tversky, and Robert Vallone seemed to squelch the hot-hand theory with a stats-laden paper in the journal Cognitive Psychology, but, just last year, along came Joshua Miller and Adam Sanjurjo, marshalling no less evidence, to insist that an “atypical clustering of successes” in three-point shooting was not a “widespread cognitive illusion” at all, but rather that it “occurs regularly.”
Steph Curry fans, who have been loyal witnesses to his improbable streaks from beyond the arc, surely agree with Professors Miller and Sanjurjo. But let’s assume that the debate, in basketball or at the blackjack table, remains open. What’s clear is that when it comes to the life of the imagination, the hot hand is a matter of historical fact. Novelists, composers, painters, and poets are apt to experience stretches of intense creativity that might derive from any number of factors—surrounding historical events, artistic rivalries, or, most mysteriously, inspiration—but the streak is undeniably there.
James Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar at Columbia University, has written studies of two distinct periods in his subject’s life—one called “1599,” when Shakespeare wrote “Henry V,” “Julius Caesar,” “As You Like It,” and “Hamlet”; and a remarkable new volume, “The Year of Lear,” centering on 1606, a moment of religious fracture, horrific plague, and the political wake of the Gunpowder Plot, and the year in which Shakespeare wrote not only “Lear” but “Macbeth” and “Antony and Cleopatra.” Shapiro’s research shows that the political and social reasons for Shakespeare’s bursts of creativity were as essential to his art as was the community and structure of his life at the Globe. It’s the less concrete factors, the inner reasons—what’s called genius—that led to conspiracy theories and multiple-author hypotheses. Who could imagine that an artist could have a hot hand so frequently?
But such golden periods, which usually take place just once, if at ever, in the life of an artist, are undeniable. Take popular music. From 1965 to 1969, the Beatles, after a long apprenticeship in Germany and England and a series of records that leaned heavily on Chuck Berry and Little Richard, peeled off a string of albums that changed everything in popular music. From 1972 to 1976, Stevie Wonder, leaving his career as “Little Stevie” in the past, produced the albums that remain the center of his joyful achievement: “Music of My Mind,” “Talking Book,” “Innervisions,” “Fulfillingness’ First Finale,” and “Songs in the Key of Life.”
For Dylan, the greatest and most abundant songwriter who has ever lived, the most intense period of wild inspiration and creativity ran from the beginning of 1965 to the summer of 1966. (Yes, I get how categorical that statement is. If you’d like to make an argument for Nas, Lennon & McCartney, Smokey Robinson, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Jacques Brel, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern ... or fill-in-the-blank, write to .) Before that fifteen-month period, Bob Dylan, who was twenty-three, had already transformed folk music, building on Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams. Now he was scribbling lyrics on pads and envelopes all night and listening to the Stones and the Beatles and feverishly reading the Surrealists and the Beats. In short order, he recorded the music for “Bringing It All Back Home” (the crossover to rock that ranges from “Mr. Tambourine Man” to “Subterranean Homesick Blues”); “Highway 61 Revisited” (the best rock album ever made; again, send your rebuttal to ); and “Blonde on Blonde” (a double album recorded in New York and Nashville that includes “Visions of Johanna” and “Just Like a Woman”).
In that same compacted period, Dylan travelled the U.K. as a solo act, a tour which is memorialized in D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary film “Dont Look Back”; scandalized Pete Seeger and much of the crowd at the Newport Folk Festival, on the night of July 25, 1965, by “going electric” and performing raucous versions of “Maggie’s Farm,” “Phantom Engineer” (later known as “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry”), and “Like a Rolling Stone” with members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band; and toured North America and the U.K. with the Hawks, a rootsy Canadian-American combo that soon became The Band. (The record of the U.K. tour, “Bob Dylan Live 1966: The ‘Royal Albert Hall’ Concert,” is, as a live album, in a rarefied class with James Brown’s “Live at the Apollo” and B. B. King’s “Live at the Regal.”)
Dylan was exploding with things to say and sing. As he later acknowledged, it was as if he were taking dictation from somewhere, from somebody. And, at the same time, he seemed on the brink of self-annihilation. Amped up on nicotine and speed and who knows what else, racing from place to place, thought to thought, song to song, and embittered by the jeering and booing he encountered from the folk-loyal fans from Newport to Manchester, Dylan was headed for a crash. One day, while riding his motorcycle near his house, in Woodstock, he was, according to one account, blinded by the sun, hit a slick in the road, and was smashed to the ground. The bike ended up on top of him. Having suffered a concussion and some broken vertebrae, Dylan “retired” to spend time in Woodstock out of the public eye with his wife, Sara Lownds, and their children.
“I couldn’t go on doing what I had been,” he said later. “I was pretty wound up before that accident happened. ... I probably would have died if I had kept on going as I had been.”
Dylan’s “electric period,” of course, was not contained in that manic, fifteen-month period. It’s a half-century long by now. In the coming days, Dylan and his band will be in Hamburg, Basel, Bregenz ... blink, and they’ll be in your neighborhood soon. And the funny thing is how, these days, with a set list that barely changes for months at a time, Dylan usually includes only one song from that 1965-66 period: “She Belongs to Me.” That might have been the breakthrough period—the moment, as Dylan has said, that he captured that elusive “wild mercury sound”—but the catalogue is rich in the way that Picasso’s was rich. There’s no end to it.
The shelves of Dylan books and bootlegs groan, but this week, if you care, our knowledge of the songs recorded in that golden period just got deeper. Elijah Wald, who has written fine books on Robert Johnson and Josh White, has published “Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties,” which provides a deeply researched and entertaining chronicle of the culture clash that Dylan sparked from the Newport stage, and his transition from work shirts to leather, from a Gibson Nick Lucas Special to a Fender Stratocaster.
But even more interesting, Dylan’s own people, led by his meticulous and devoted manager Jeff Rosen, have put out the twelfth in a series of “bootlegs” on Columbia: “The Cutting Edge.” Depending on your level of fanaticism, “The Cutting Edge,” which covers the 1965-66 period in the studio, comes in a two-CD version, a six-CD version, and an eighteen-CD, three-hundred-and-seventy-nine-track, five-hundred-and-ninety-nine-dollar version that brings the listener every rehearsal, every false start, every giggle and cough, every exchange between Dylan and his musicians and engineers, as well as some in-the-moment interviews conducted in London, Glasgow, and Denver.
The idea is to reveal the artistic process—or as much of that process as countless spools of studio tape can provide. Maybe you’ve got to be some kind of Dylan nut to listen to all of it. I am that kind of nut. I’ve got to think that, soon enough, someone’s going to want to listen to everything Kanye West did in the studio for “The College Dropout,” “Late Registration,” and “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.” Wouldn’t you have wanted someone to plant a hidden microphone in Bach’s church as he rehearsed the performers for the next Sunday’s cantata?
Sometimes, to know too much about something has its own rewards. And what you hear in “The Cutting Edge” is a great artist figuring things out. Day after day, Dylan brings to the studio, and to his producers Tom Wilson and Bob Johnston, a sheaf of handwritten lyrics, sometimes just a bunch of phrases, fragments, maybe a chord progression, and, often enough, just the vaguest notion of how things should go. You hear attempts at beauties like “I’ll Keep It with Mine” and “If You Gotta Go, Go Now”—and then, in his impatience, he shelves them. You hear his desire to get things down right away and move on. You hear his frustration: “The drums are driving me mad!” he says on a plodding take of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” You hear Dylan, who wrote endlessly in the studio while his session musicians napped and played cards, hint at the colossal length of “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” the eleven-minute ballad to his wife, when he tells them, finally, “It’s two verses and a chorus—five times.”
He’s inventing all the time in the studio, improvising lyrics, dropping lyrics, making up bogus titles. “Medicine Sunday” becomes “Temporary Like Achilles.” “Freeze Out” becomes “Visions of Johanna.” “Just a Little Glass of Water” becomes “She’s Your Lover Now.” You hear him discarding his Okie folk voice and working out the right timbre of his rock-and-roll voice. You hear “Like a Rolling Stone,” his bitter anthem and, possibly, his most important song (at least Greil Marcus thinks so), shift from a piano waltz to a 4/4 six-minute, full-band breakthrough with Mike Bloomfield’s crafty figures on the guitar and Al Kooper’s swirly turn on the organ.
Dylan wasn’t so much rejecting folk music and moving to rock as he was returning to his roots. Early rock—Bobby Vee, Johnnie Ray, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis—was what he listened to at night on the radio as a kid in Hibbing, Minnesota, and what he first attempted to play. At a high-school talent show, in 1956, the principal pulled the curtain closed as Bobby played a Little Richard tune, and in his yearbook Dylan declared that his ambition was “to join Little Richard.” As a proto-folkie in New York—and on “Bob Dylan,” “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” and “Another Side of Bob Dylan”—he embraced the world of Woody Guthrie, Odetta, and Robert Johnson, largely, as he put it later, because rock songs didn’t yet “reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.”
What you hear Dylan doing on “The Cutting Edge” is fulfilling rock’s deeper ambitions. And, as he did so, he certainly had an adequate sense of his own range and accomplishment. He told Keith Richards, “I could have written ‘Satisfaction,’ but you couldn’t have written ‘Tambourine Man.’ ” Richards laughed and told Dylan he was right.
When he was young and in the midst of that golden-era frenzy, Dylan was apt to dodge earnest questions about what led him to the music he made in the mid-sixties. “Mistake or not, what made you decide to go the rock-and-roll route?” Nat Hentoff asked him in a Playboy interview published in February, 1966.
But as Dylan grew older, as the immense catalogue of his songs came to embrace everything—folk, rock, gospel, blues, Tin Pan Alley—he looked back on the golden period of 1965-66, the moment of the hot hand, when the songs came two and three a day, as if from heaven, and he seemed as filled with wonder as the rest of us.
“Those early songs were almost magically written,” Dylan told Ed Bradley, of CBS. “Try to sit down and write something like that. There’s a magic to that, and it’s not Siegfried and Roy kind of magic, you know? It’s a different kind of a penetrating magic. And, you know, I did it. I did it at one time. … You can’t do something forever. I did it once, and I can do other things now. But I can’t do that.”
