‘Dylan and Us Without America’ is a grouchy but entertaining book

Retired publisher Wouter van Oorschot has been following Bob Dylan’s work since he wrote the song in December 1964, ‘within a hair’s breadth of 13 years’. All I Really Want to Do heard. Van Oorschot has always remained a fan, but don’t call him a bigot. The fact that he has now recorded his thoughts about Dylan is, as he writes in the introduction, because he has not encountered his ‘view on Dylan’s art’ anywhere else. What that view is is not entirely clear in the ‘treatise and a story in one’, but Dylan and us without America is a very entertaining book with a strange title, which gets off to a slow start.

Van Oorschot then discusses 25 songs, mainly from the period 1962-1966, and explains what they meant to him as a teenager. It is certainly interesting what he brings up about well-known (Like a Rolling Stone) and lesser known (She’s Your Lover Now) numbers. The many QR codes are also useful, which immediately lead you to the correct YouTube fragment. But why first a thirty-page explanation of what and who this book is not for? Unfortunately, you cannot open a book about Dylan without the author railing against colleagues and other ‘Bobcats’. And now Van Oorschot also warns against many writers about his beloved songwriter, such as Greil Marcus and Clinton Heylin. His grumbling makes him exactly the know-it-all Dylan exegete he doesn’t want to be.