Rock and Roll Book Club: 'Dylan by Schatzberg' captures Bob at his most iconic
by Jay Gabler
April 03, 2019
What's the most iconic Bob Dylan look? It might just be the look rocked by Cate Blanchett, playing Dylan in the 2007 pseudo-biopic I'm Not There: full head of curls, Wayfarers, black suit, light shirt, burning cigarette in hand, flat expression. The new book Dylan by Schatzberg concludes with that image of the actor, one page after its inspiration: a shot by Schatzberg from the mid-1960s.
This is the wildly confident Dylan, the Dylan at the peak of his influence and popularity, the Dylan who knew he was running so far ahead of the pack, no one else was really even playing the same game. It was a self-consciously literary Dylan, but one whose music was so powerful, it was impossible to dismiss him as simply a powerful lyricist.
It was the Dylan of Don't Look Back, it was the Dylan of Blonde on Blonde. Jerry Schatzberg shot every image in that gatefold cover, including the famously blurry cover image. The photo wasn't about drugs, though: "It was f---ing cold." Still, he knew it was so unconventional, he would never have suggested it as an album cover. By that point in Dylan's career, though, Dylan was in charge, and that was the shot Dylan wanted.
Schatzberg, now 91, is well-known both as a photographer and as a film director; Morgan Freeman's first Oscar nomination came for his performance in Schatzman's 1987 movie Street Smart. How glamorous has Schatzman's life been? He was once engaged to Faye Dunaway, until she left him for Marcello Mastroianni. It happens.
(His most famous rock shot, outside of his Dylan sessions, is a 1966 photo of the Rolling Stones dressed in frumpy women's clothes, for the cover of their single "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?" Frank Zappa later called on Schatzberg to shoot the cover of his 1968 album We're Only In It For the Money, with Zappa and the Mothers of Invention posing in drag in front of a bass drum, thus simultaneously parodying the Stones and the Beatles.)
Appropriately, Dylan by Schatzberg is very nearly the size of an LP. That makes for a heavy book at 262 pages, but it means you can appreciate these images — both the full-page shots and the contact-sheet collages — at large scale.
The book opens with a 1965 column by rock writer Al Aronowitz, capturing the Dylan we recognize from Don't Look Back: dryly absurd, distantly condescending, wickedly funny, lionized by stars and sycophants who are never quite sure exactly what to do with him. The photographer's strategy, he says, was to just let Dylan be Dylan: put him in front of a camera and see what happens.
Strung throughout the book are questions and answers from a conversation between Schatzberg and novelist Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude). Schatzberg is pretty no-nonsense, but Lethem has plenty to say. Here's one typical exchange:
Lethem: It seems to me that up to the point of your Dylan sessions, pictures of musicians had either conformed to a "pop" ideal — Beatles dressed up by their manager, hamming for the camera — or were grittily authentic images of folk or jazz musicians in the studio or captured after-hours or on walking the street, like "real" artists. (Pictures of Dylan had conformed to the latter standard, before 1965.) What you did with him corresponded to the new collisions in Dylan's art, occurring at that same moment: self-conscious pop poses and gritty authenticity were about to get beautifully mixed up, and become something bigger than either one had been apart. Dylan's transformations and provocations, and the invigorating demands they made on our culture, came at such a rapid clip in those months. And at the same time, his professed goal in his art is to "stop time." And that's exactly what you managed to do.
Schatzberg: In that case I was successful because I believe that's really what a camera is supposed to do.
In most of these photos, Dylan is alone — yet, of course, not fully alone, because the photographer is always present. Schatzberg liked to give Dylan props, and in the contact sheets we see the singer-songwriter's playful side. Seen alone, a photo of Dylan holding a cross, a giant cigarette lighter, a set of keys, or a vintage picture of a matronly woman might seem symbolic. Here, though, we learn that Schatzberg would just hand random props to Dylan and let him goof around with them.
Lethem notes that such images inevitably call Dylan lyrics to mind, and indeed selected lyrics are counterposed with several images in the book, but any associations are more a product of coincidence than design.
During his two-and-a-half years with Dylan (ending with the career-altering 1967 motorcycle accident that interrupted Dylan's meteoric rise), Schatzberg also got into the recording studio and onto the stage. Picture Dylan standing before a mic playing guitar and wearing sunglasses...you're probably picturing a Schatzberg photo. The book also has a few great photos of Dylan, freshly electric, rocking out with a very young and very well-coiffed Robbie Robertson.
The cosmopolitan Schatzberg was also part owner of a New York club called Ondine, frequented by Dylan as well as by Andy Warhol's Factory crew. (The book contains a poignantly joyous image of Edie Sedgwick, with whom Dylan's rumored to have had a fling.) Some of the book's most fascinating images capture Dylan at the club: stuffed into a booth, leaning over to hear something shouted in his ear, looking diffident as two men try to converse with him at close range.
Schatzberg opens the book with a handwritten note to Dylan: "I hope you don't think I 'got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend.'" He says that with the proliferation of Dylaniana, his work is often used without credit or payment; although he wasn't named on the Blonde on Blonde sleeve, he did get a unique sort of credit.
The outer sleeve of the album, replicated in a foldout here, is Schatzberg's vertical color portrait of Dylan in scarf and coat. The inner sleeve contained several Schatzberg photos hand-picked by Dylan. There are photos of Dylan sitting on a couch, playing guitar, riding in a car, holding that mysterious framed photo of the unknown woman.
One eerie shot has Dylan, facing us, in close conference with the looming hulk of his infamous manager Albert Grossman. The album's first run also included a photo of actor Claudia Cardinale, which was taken by some fans to be Dylan in drag. Columbia Records neglected to ask Cardinale's permission, though, and the image was removed at her representatives' request from later pressings. (Schatzberg thinks the Italian actor, who was not fluent in English, would have given approval if she'd understood "what a compliment Dylan was offering.")
Another subject was happy, though, to give permission for his likeness to be included: the photographer himself, represented with a self-portrait. "Dylan saw it hanging," remembers Schatzberg, "and said he wanted it inside the album. He and I never discussed it, even till today I figured it was his way of saying 'thank you.'"