A Unified Field Theory of Bob Dylan

In a famous paper, ‘Death and the midlife crisis’, first published in 1965, Elliot Jacques argued that between the ages of 35 and 65 the work of creative artists changes, from a ‘hot’ and intense creativity to a more ‘sculpted’ one. This, he believed, showed that they’d worked through some of the emotional conflicts that had raged in their earlier

In one hundred or two hundred or five hundred years, the idea of “rock music” being represented by a two-pronged combination of Elvis and Dylan would be equitable and oddly accurate.

You can’t say apart from “Sympathy” or “Street Fighting Man” that there’s rock and roll on Beggars Banquet at all. “Stray Cat” is a bit of funk, but the rest of them are folk songs. We were incapable of writing to order, to say, we need a rock-and-roll track.