openpolitics.com

What’s clear is that when it comes to the life of the imagination, the hot hand is a matter of historical fact. Novelists, composers, painters, and poets are apt to experience stretches of intense creativity that might derive from any number of factors—surrounding historical events, artistic rivalries, or, most mysteriously, inspiration—but the streak is undeniably there.

.. Dylan was exploding with things to say and sing. As he later acknowledged, it was as if he were taking dictation from somewhere, from somebody.

.. “I couldn’t go on doing what I had been,” he said later. “I was pretty wound up before that accident happened. … I probably would have died if I had kept on going as I had been.”

.. Dylan’s “electric period,” of course, was not contained in that manic, fifteen-month period.

..Depending on your level of fanaticism, “The Cutting Edge,” which covers the 1965-66 period in the studio, comes in a two-CD version, a six-CD version, and an eighteen-CD, three-hundred-and-seventy-nine-track, five-hundred-and-ninety-nine-dollar version that brings the listener every rehearsal, every false start, every giggle and cough, every exchange between Dylan and his musicians and engineers, as well as some in-the-moment interviews conducted in London, Glasgow, and Denver.

.. The idea is to reveal the artistic process—or as much of that process as countless spools of studio tape can provide. Maybe you’ve got to be some kind of Dylan nut to listen to all of it. I am that kind of nut. I’ve got to think that, soon enough, someone’s going to want to listen to everything Kanye West did in the studio for “The College Dropout,” “Late Registration,” and “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.” Wouldn’t you have wanted someone to plant a hidden microphone in Bach’s church as he rehearsed the performers for the next Sunday’s cantata?

.. He told Keith Richards, “I could have written ‘Satisfaction,’ but you couldn’t have written ‘Tambourine Man.’ ” Richards laughed and told Dylan he was right.