Why do people think Bob Dylan lives in a cave, anyway?

What do people think he’s doing when he goes on walks in strange neighborhoods with his hoodie up, getting arrested for his trouble — ignoring everything? Or when he lyrically eyeballed Alicia Keys in 2006? (Here’s her response.) There was that time he told Rolling Stone in 2012, “Somebody was telling me that Justin Bieber couldn’t sing any of these songs. I said I couldn’t sing any of his songs either.” Or how about the fourth episode of his Sirius XM show, Theme Time Radio Hour, from May 2006, he introduced a song from the Broadway cast of Damn Yankees, in the most clipped, look-you-dead-in-the-eye-and-dare-you-to-call-my-bluff manner imaginable: “And I don’t mean that band Ted Nugent’s in with those guys from Styx.” That’s when the scales permanently fell from my own idea of Dylan-as-cave-dweller, anyway. As Dylan himself put it in the same Rolling Stone interview: “Am I supposed to be some misunderstood artist living in an attic?”

He couldn’t make himself better understood than in some of the more lucid passages of The Philosophy of Modern Song, his new book — a mere 18 years after his last one, Chronicles Volume One. (As noted above, he’s been busy.) Essentially annotations for a 66-song playlist (naturally, someone on Spotify has made it), the book is a series of riffs, full of biographical and historical detail as well as his singularly flinty take on the songs’ topics. It’s also fully art-directed, full of historical photos that may or may not directly interact with the material to hand — as when the Osborne Brothers’ “Ruby, Are You Mad?” is accompanied by Jack Ruby’s mug shot. (Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassin makes an appearance in Dylan’s write-up, as well.)

The Philosophy of Modern Song is a confounding object — something to not only dig into for years to come but to argue with for just as long. It’s a series of arguments, bullheaded and learned, sly and ridiculous. The lines his sentences trace go crooked so often that when he throws in something seemingly banal, it can throw you more off-balance than the bent stuff, a trick he’s been utilizing consistently since Love and Theft in 2001, if not John Wesley Harding in 1967. (Oh, and he’s an unrepentant misogynist, just in case he hadn’t made that plain before.)

At a San Francisco press conference in 1965, a journalist asked Dylan: “In a lot of your songs you are hard on people — in ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ you’re hard on the girls and in ‘Positively 4th Street’ you’re hard on a friend. Do you do this because you want to change their lives, or do you want to point out to them the error of their ways?” His response: “I want to needle them.” That’s what Dylan is like as a writer. His prose crowds you — it’s always pushing, never settling back from his argument but always pushing it forward, sometimes sideways, never quite predictable, the path always changing, never a stop for breath. What’s that over there? What’d you have for lunch? Who is your hero and why? Like that. He needles you.

Even as a non-Dylanologist, it’s hard not to read something personal into this envoi to his consideration of Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” from the man who’s been on the Never Ending Tour going on 40 years: “The thing about being on the road is that you’re not bogged down by anything. Not even bad news. You give pleasure to other people and you keep your grief to yourself.” Or to some background on the Nashville clothing designer Nudie Cohen, who dressed country music’s finest: “Like many men who reinvent themselves, the details get a little dodgy in places.”

And it’s funny — rock musicians hate rock critics, talk endless smack about them — and then, whenever a rock musician sits down to write about rock music, they wind up sounding like rock critics. Even Bob Dylan, at least some of the time. Just like people heard a lot of Woody Guthrie in the young folk singer, Dylan the critic reads a lot like Greil Marcus. That’s a compliment! (Dylan on his songs to Rolling Stone, 2012: “They’re historical. But they’re also biographical and geographical. They represent a particular state of mind. A particular territory.” Perhaps . . . an Invisible Republic?)

But only sometimes, because nobody thinks like Dylan; his insights are ritually piercing. On Elvis Costello: “When you are writing songs with Burt Bacharach, you obviously don’t give a f**k what people think.” “The thing about Jesse James is that his best friend became his worst enemy.” On “Pancho and Lefty”: “Neither of these guys thought about how to make a successful exit.”

His twin pieces on Elvis Presley’s version of “Money Honey” — the first a poetic explication of the situation depicted in the recording (not just in the song as written), the second an essay on the nature of money itself — are maybe the book’s zenith. The former ends: “You want to do things well. You know you can do things, but it’s hard to do them well. You don’t know what your problem is. The best things in life are free, but you prefer the worst. Maybe that’s your problem.” The latter begins: “Art is a disagreement. Money is an agreement.” And near the end: “I remember when this record came out. I knew people who thought the Drifters did it better. Other folks thought Elvis did it better. They could argue all night about it. One thing they couldn’t argue about was how much the record cost. That’s another difference between money and art.”     

Dylan clearly has a deep appreciation for both. Again and again, he awards concision, neat rhyme schemes, pith — all the things he famously flouted in his own songwriting; it’s like Prince introducing the swear jar. He’s positively rapturous over the Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion.” Dylan adjudges songwriters Barrett Strong and Norman Whitfield’s masterwork: “Usually songwriters write a few bad songs. But these guys don’t seem to have ever written one. … This song is like an old radio show, where you could just imagine what you’re listening to. And it made for a stronger experience. There’s no way you could televise this song, it just wouldn’t fit on a screen.” He ends with this sentence-as-graf: “Plus, Stevie Wonder plays harmonica here.” I’ll be damned — I hadn’t even known. Bob Dylan — a record geek like the rest of us.      

The dividing line comes on page 117. The topic is “Cheaper to Keep Her,” the southern soul singer Johnnie Taylor’s top 15 hit from 1973. It gives Dylan occasion for a genuinely bizarre rant about divorce lawyers: “They destroy families. How many of them are at least tangentially responsible for teen suicides and serial killers?” He then proposes: “Mixed marriages, gay marriages — proponents have rightly lobbied to make all of these legal but no one has fought for the only one that really counts, the polygamist marriage. It’s nobody’s business how many wives a man has.” Dylan also rails against “women’s rights crusaders and women’s lib lobbyists take turns putting man back on his heels until he is pinned behind the eight ball [sic] dodging the shrapnel from the smashed glass ceiling.” (He invites women to marry multiple men, as well — how chivalrous.)

Oh, that’s why people think Bob Dylan lives in a cave — because he thinks like a caveman.