"Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956–1966." at the Morgan Library & Museum, NYC

In no way was I prepared for the imagination, care, and breadth of the recently re-opened Morgan Library and Museum exhibit “Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956–1966.” My friend is Danny Fingeroth, former executive of Marvel Comics, who, in his spare time one of the most knowledgeable people I know on the careers of Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan. We agreed to meet in the newly constructed Piano entrance to the museum—a word that finds its origins in the same ancient–Greek as the word Muse. What could be more apt for a Dylan exhibit?

Not only did I come away with a new respect for the centrality of Dylan’s achievement, I left the exhibit firmly believing that someone, somewhere needs to collect the living storehouse of manuscripts, contracts, images, musical instruments, original notices, letters, ephemera, film any other documentation in a single Bob Dylan Museum.

What I also came to realize is that Dylan and his work are probably too close to us for appraisal. Yet, such an exhibit goes a long way to define our time in music, the beautiful shout in the street, be it folk, blues, or rock ’n’ roll.

The idea is to circulate the exhibit, which opened on September 29, 2006 , and runs to the Epiphany, in a clockwise pattern upon entering at “6.” Instead, we were free to work backward, counterclockwise, from an abstract-expressionist painting by Dylan to a wall of Hibbing iron ore and his awkward high-school lines to a fellow-student. We journeyed from Dylan to Zimmerman, backward from superstar to struggling adolescent – all this in two hours. This is Dylan’s life to 1966 and a little beyond if not in a stolen moment, and here in an idle New York afternoon.

There are too many highlights to list. One wall is devoted to the motorcycle accident, Dylan’s so-called crack-up, a photograph of his house “somewhere in upstate New York,” the general hysteria of “moving to M-G-M Records,” all tempered by a biographer’s typewritten editorial letter. On the subject of Blonde on Blonde, which might have been Dylan’s swan song, we read the double album was a first in rock history, preceding the Mothers of Invention by several months. It is difficult to imagine universes further apart.

Each of the albums released by Columbia thro 1966 is given its own cubicle. One can access each song on the respective albums, and in some cases another artist’s rendition/cover of the song such as Nina Simone’s enchanting “Just like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” for example, as part of the Highway 61 Revisited selections; Ray Charles in relation to Blonde on Blonde.

For Bringing It All Back Home, there is a mounted photograph by Daniel Kramer opposite the album cover, which is keyed to a center-wall identification of the elements of the photograph. In the only easy omission I found among the exhibits, the Lord Buckley album cover is not identified.

Listening to the concerts of the1966 world tour, released and not, one would almost swear the performances were by a multiple personality if not an artist. The range of the exhibit also gives this sense – from “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” to the “Eat the Document” outtake; from Woody Guthrie and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott to “Leopard-skin Pill-box Hat”; from Robert Zimmerman, at the end of the alphabet, working as his father’s repo man, to early billing (for 90 cents) as Bob Dillon right below Jesse Fuller.

Joan Baez is an unmistakable presence in midst of all this; at “12” in the anti-clock, Citizen Kane pattern we followed she was there. How close Dylan must have come to being a Vanguard artist before the high-octane Bob Dylan appeared; how far he came under the tutelage of John Hammond, Al Grossman, and the great Allen Ginsberg – as well as under the nurturing Baez and Suze Rotolo, who has contributed Bob Dylan’s copies of Rimbaud and Lord Byron.

Another friend, the distinguished writer Oliver Trager, will be taking his son to the Morgan, coincidentally, tomorrow. The boy must be roughly the age I was when I first heard “Like a Rolling Stone” and especially “Positively 4th Street” and “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” all, I should note, on AM radio. They were played alongside the Beatles, Rolling Stones, the Byrds, Petula Clark, Gary Lewis & the Playboys, the Four Tops, the Supremes, the McCoys, the Righteous Brothers, Herman’s Hermits, Freddie & the Dreamers, Barry Mc Guire, and others – all number-one hits from 1965; that is, all except for Dylan’s. As for me, at the time there was a vague awareness that “Positively 4th Street” was sung by the same guy on the cover of my parents’ issue of Saturday Evening Post – weirdly, as the exhibit shows, dated July 30, 1966 : the day after Dylan’s motorcycle crash.

I wonder what today’s bright young man would make of “Bob Dylan’s American Journey”: the handheld Pennebaker camera, the announcements, a portion of Phil Ochs’s FBI file, the letter from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the “Eat the Document” outtake, the solid rock and stone from Hibbing. Although Dylan is, and remains without doubt, a world-wide creative force, one couldn’t get more American. For myself, after the biblical forty years plus two hours at the Arabian crossing, I am still trying to process it all.

Evander Lomke is a regular contributor to Tant Mieux. He works as an Editor & Writer in New York City. Mr. Lomke is a member of the PEN America foundation . He has published numerous great authors (including an ex-president and a Nobel Prize winner) and many notable books, including titles concerning animal rights and women's issues, philosphical matters, as well as the notable Kinsey International Encyclopedia of Sexuality.   He is an Officer of the Genius Club