Bob Dylan and Barry Feinstein’s Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: the Lost Manuscript

When Bob Dylan launched one of rock n' roll’s most legendary tours in 1966, he brought photographer Barry Feinstein along with him. Feinstein had captured the image of a grim-faced Dylan that graced the cover of the celebrated The Times They Are A Changin’ album in 1963, and the pictures he took on the '66 tour are some of the most recognizable Bob Dylan images of all time. The tumultuous European tour was cut short when Dylan was injured in a motorcycle accident while at home in Woodstock in July of that year. The crash marked a momentous change in Dylan’s artistic trajectory, and it was nearly eight years before he and The Band went back on tour. When they did, Feinstein was again along for the ride, snapping more classic images.

Feinstein is the quintessential rock photographer and photojournalist, having worked with Janis Joplin, George Harrison, Miles Davis, and many others. His photographs are featured on more than 500 album covers, yet he seems to have had an especially close relationship with Bob Dylan. Legend tells of a road trip the two took together, returning Dylan manager Albert Grossman's car from Denver to New York. It is the sort of classic cross-country American tale one might expect to hear narrated in the lyrics of a Dylan song, and a friendship, as well as a stimulating collaborative relationship, seems to have been forged.

Primarily known as a songwriter, Dylan has tried his hand at poetry and prose writing on more than one occasion. His album jackets in the 1960s generally contained short poems and forewords, his long poem “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie” was performed in concert in 1963, his experimental novel Tarantula (written in 1965-66) was reluctantly released in 1971, and his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume 1, was a 2004 bestseller that received rave reviews. It should not be a surprise, then, to learn that in 1964 Dylan wrote several poems inspired by a collection of Feinstein photographs chronicling life in Hollywood. What is surprising, particularly given fans’ vivacious cravings for all things Dylan, is the fact that the pictures and poems went unreleased for over 40 years!

Finally published this year as the stunning coffee-table book Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: the Lost Manuscript, Dylan’s poems and Feinstein’s photographs combine to create a nostalgic experience twice removed from the present. The reader is transported back to the artistically fruitful mid-1960s landscape in which the collaboration took place, then further backwards in time as the images and poems depict a City of Angels steadily decaying and overrun by the demons of its own decadent past.

The 23 poems were written during a time of change for Dylan. He’d already begun to reject the mantle of left-wing political idol and voice of a generation – most vocally at the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee award ceremony in which his acceptance speech berated those in attendance. The intense politics of The Times They Are a Changin’ were all but absent from the 1964 follow-up Another Side of Bob Dylan. The songs that did touch on the political, “Chimes of Freedom” for example, featured hints of the surreal and metaphorical word-play that would become the singer’s staple for his next three albums.

The poetry in Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric, then, is just what one might expect from Dylan’s writing during this period. It is not as experimental or complex as what would follow over the next few years on albums like Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, nor as straightforward as what he produced during the political period in which he spoke “lies that life is black and white,” as he puts it in “My Back Pages” – a song that Mike Marquese describes as “one of the most lyrical expressions of political apostasy ever penned.” Obviously influenced by the beat writers of the previous decade, Dylan’s poetry is written in short, taut lines piled atop one another, creating a fast-paced, urgent and loose feel. It reads very much like poetry from the young man who was about to write “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

The accompanying photos were taken while Feinstein was working for a Hollywood studio in the early ‘60s. They portray an un-glamorized backstage peek at an industry going through a monumental change of its own. Faced with competition from television and the imminent collapse of the studio system, the photos reveal an industry collapsing in on itself, much like the disheveled Hollywood sign on the book’s dust jacket, steadily deteriorating while desperately searching for the promised “land” removed a decade earlier. Feinstein even includes a picture from the premiere of Cleopatra, a film whose failure is often cited as essentially marking the end of the studio era.

Throughout the book, celebrities of yesteryear (Bette Davis, Judy Garland, Jayne Mansfield) make appearances looking worn and old. A Rolls Royce is photographed parked in front of an unemployment office; desperate-looking actors audition for bored-looking casting agents; discarded sets lie in rubble; a once elegant stairway, now broken and in ruin, leads nowhere; and a woman smokes a cigarette while waiting for her turn to be photographed topless as a figure model. It is a grubby and desperate world where the only signs of beauty are Brigitte Bardot (clutching her own breasts, scrumptious and sexy) and Clarke Gable (appearing debonair as ever) – revealed on closer inspection to be statues at the Hollywood wax museum. Nothing is what it appears, or, perhaps more aptly, nothing is as one might remember it.

The new generation of Hollywood celebrities featured in the book are clearly experiencing challenges of their own. Marlon Brando and a black man march together in a Congress of Racial Equality rally, next to picketing racists holding signs that read “Marlon Brando is a Nigger-Lovin’ Creep.” Marilyn Monroe’s swimming pool is captured the day she died. Like Dylan grappling with his earlier political idealism, Feinstein seems in search of a Hollywood that has been lost to time.

The classic world of the first half of the 20th century gives way to the radical change of the 1960s in the pages of this collaborative effort. Feinstein’s photos and Dylan’s poetry captured the swirling and ever-changing complexity of the American milieu at a time when culture was moving so quickly that their words and images were themselves passed over and forgotten almost immediately after they came into being. Dylan is famous for constantly forging ahead and never looking back, but readers who take the time to read Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric will find pleasure in the book’s double nostalgia. It is a nostalgia that evokes the 1960s but also a lost age of Hollywood glamour that may, in fact, never have existed at all.

An Interview with Joshua Cicerone, creator of Bob Hates Andy - In which the creator of a webcomic featuring Bob Dylan is interrogated.

Half a Dozen of the Other - In which the Dylan bio-pic I'm Not There is analyzed.

Bob Dylan Double Bill: Bring Your Own Tissue - In which Dylan and pornography are conflated.

Real Guitars are for Old People: Music in the Age of Continuous Partial Attention - In which the authors ponders, "Where are the Bob Dylan's of today?"

Bob Dylan Goes Digital! - In which digital theft is defended and much Dylan worship ensues.

The Heath Ledger Roundtable Discussion - In which the late Heath Ledger, star of I'm Not There, is eulogized.

Five Songs Worth Remembering From 2008 - In which a Dylan song is listed as one of the great songs from last year.

Heating Up: The Battle for the Jewish voice and the Jewish soul - In which "your zionist friends, and Bob Dylan too" are told the times they are a changin'.

Radiohead & the Fall of the Recording Industry - In which major labels are described has having been tastemakers in the past, finding and signing artists such as Bob Dylan.