Visitors to the new Bob Dylan Center here will soon get, at the tap of a finger, what generations of the most avid Dylanologists have only dreamed of: a step-by-step, word-by-word map of how Dylan wrote a song
A gallery space at the Bob Dylan Center holds ephemera, objects, artworks and instruments, in Tulsa, Okla., April 30, 2022. A new space to display Dylan’s vast archive, celebrates one of the world’s most elusive creators, and gives visitors a close-up look at notebooks and fan mail. (Joseph Rushmore/The New York Times)
TULSA, Okla. — Visitors to the new Bob Dylan Center here will soon get, at the tap of a finger, what generations of the most avid Dylanologists have only dreamed of: a step-by-step, word-by-word map of how Dylan wrote a song.
In a room filled with artifacts like Dylan’s leather jacket from the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and a photograph of a 16-year-old Bobby Zimmerman posing with a guitar at a Jewish summer camp in Wisconsin, a digital display lets visitors sift through 10 of the 17 known drafts of Dylan’s cryptic 1983 song “Jokerman.” The screen highlights typed and handwritten changes Dylan made throughout the manuscripts, showing, for example, how the line “You a son of the angels/You a man of the clouds” in the song’s earliest iteration was tweaked, little by little, to end up as “You’re a man of the mountains, you can walk on the clouds.”
The “Jokerman” exhibit is one instance of how the organizers of the $10 million Dylan Center — which opens Tuesday, after a long weekend of inaugural events featuring Elvis Costello, Patti Smith and Mavis Staples — have tried to bring Dylan’s paper-heavy archives to life and entice newcomers and experts alike.
Mark Davidson, the curator of the Dylan Archive, holds an original notebook containing handwritten Bob Dylan lyrics, at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Okla., April 30, 2022. A new space to display Dylan’s vast archive, celebrates one of the world’s most elusive creators, and gives visitors a close-up look at notebooks and fan mail. (Joseph Rushmore/The New York Times)
It also points to the center’s larger aim of using Dylan’s vast archive, with documents and artifacts from nearly his entire career, to illuminate the creative process itself. In addition to exhibits focused on Dylan’s work, the two-floor, 29,000-square-foot facility will have a rotating gallery featuring the work of other creators. First up is Jerry Schatzberg, the filmmaker and photographer who shot the cover of Dylan’s 1966 album “Blonde on Blonde.”
©2019 New York Times News Service