Sean Egan basically uses the Bob Dylan bio to put those songs in context in Decade of Dissent. Overall, Egan does a fine job of providing a critical overview of Dylan's songwriting and recordings from his most critical decade. Like any book of this sort, the author's opinions might not sync up with your own, but as he did with his similarly potentially contentious analyses in The Mammoth Book of the Rolling Stones, he supports his conclusions with admirable detail and support, as well as a wealth of poetic, musical, and historical knowledge. While I think he doesn't give enough credit to the raw and tangy support of the Bringing It All Back Home session team, which causes him to rate that album curiously lowly, it's hard not to agree that Dylan's attempt to place himself in the tradition of musicians far less privileged than himself on his eponymous debut is pretty silly, even if that album does have some raggedly visceral performances, or that the admitted classic "The Times They Are A-Changin'" is pretty dated and superficial lyrically.
Every once in a while, Egan's opinions are almost objectively perplexing. His matter-of-fact statement that 1965 was "clearly" a better overall year for music than 1966 is downright dizzy and couldn't be adequately defended unless one has an allergy to astounding progress. The only thing clear here is that Egan resides in a minority of questionable taste that prefers the widely uneven Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) to the masterful Pet Sounds and the water-treading Out of Our Heads to the classics-loaded Aftermath (his preference for Rubber Soul over Revolver is less off-beat, even though The Beatles' 1966 offering easily trounces their 1965 one as far I'm concerned).
I did like the way Egan folded interpretations by artists such as Led Zeppelin, Rod Stewart, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Pete Townshend into the discussion, as well as an extended examination of how Dylan affected the British beat bands and vice versa. However, at times he leaves a lot of lyrical meat on the plate, as when he wraps up his discussions of such rich works as "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "My Back Pages" in one or two brief paragraphs. Though hardly as monumental,"I Threw It All Away" is probably worthy of more than a single sentence.
It's also surprising that the author misses the point of one of Dylan's most quoted lyrics: "To live outside the law you must be honest" does make sense, Sean; living outside the law requires one to be true to one's own desires, regardless of whether or not the conform to society's laws, which kind of sums up where Dylan was at during his most outré period of '65/'66. It's also surprising that the otherwise outrageously informed Egan doesn't seem to know a fairly well-known bit of Dylan trivia: the reason he "has a pop" at Roger McGuinn in his version of "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" is because McGuinn mildly botched Dylan's lyrics in his own version.
What really sets Decade of Dissent apart from most similarly song focused studies, like Tim Riley's Beatles-focused Tell Me Why, are the interviews Egan performed for this book. His talks with people like Al Kooper, Roger McGuinn, Chris Hillman, Donovan, and others enrich the discussion with details about everything from Dylan's personality to what went down at the sessions to photographer Daniel Kramer's rationale behind the much scrutinized cover image of Bringing It All Back Home. When Egan essentially allows studio remembrances to hijack his chapter on Highway 61 Revisited, one is left feeling as though the songs, themselves, do not receive the attention they deserve, but that chapter is loaded with interesting stories of the album's creation so it's not a bad trade off in a book with some noteworthy flaws that still manages to be enlightening, satisfying, and well-argued as a whole.
