Areluctant spokesman, in his own words

Review Pop culture

Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews

Edited by Jonathan Cott

The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia

Michael Gray

Continuum / 832 pages / $40

Bob Dylan turned 65 on Wednesday, which probably prompted an entire generation of baby boomers to ruefully hum "Forever Young" while mourning their own passage to the far end of middle age.

This much is certain: Dylan would hate hearing about it. "It's horrible," he told Playboy 40 years ago, on one of the numerous occasions when he was asked whether being a folk hero was a position of great responsibility. "I'll bet Tony Bennett doesn't have to go through this kind of thing. I wonder what Billy the Kid would have answered to such a question."

Billy the Kid didn't engage in a book's worth of verbal showdowns with the press. But Dylan has, and now those interviews have been invaluably collected. In an irresistible anthology edited by Jonathan Cott, one of the original editors of Rolling Stone and arguably the most simpatico writer to converse with Dylan, the interview format remains eminently readable through more than 400 pages. And it yields far more than an extended conversation.

The mosaic of discussions found here (first question: "Bob Dylan, you must be 20 years old now") is many things: biography, oral history, cultural time capsule, music lesson and psychodrama. It expands upon the mesmerizing portrait of Dylan that both his memoir, Chronicles, Volume 1, and Martin Scorsese's documentary No Direction Home have lately provided.

Arranged chronologically, these interviews vary wildly. That accounts for much of their cumulative appeal. A lot depends upon who was asking the questions and how combative or cooperative Dylan happened to be feeling. "What do you think of people who analyze your songs?" he was asked at his only televised, full-length news conference, in 1965. "I welcome them - with open arms," he replied, in much the same unwelcoming spirit on display in Don't Look Back, the 1967 documentary he subsequently renounced.

Sarcasm is an understandable response, given what he found himself up against. Here's another sampling of the same session: Does he prefer songs with messages, like "Eve of Destruction"? A. "Do I prefer that to what?" Q. "I don't know, but your songs are supposed to have a subtle message." A. "Subtle message???" Q. "Well, they're supposed to." A. "Where'd you hear that?" Q. "In a movie magazine." A. "Oh - Oh, God!"