To the left is a poorly-cropped paragraph from Patti Smith’s review of Bob
Dylan’s 1974 album
Planet Waves, printed
in the April 1974 issue of Creem. (Which has an absolutely awesome cover featuring the world's forgotten boy searching & destroying a whole bunch of vinyl.) This isn’t even the best part of that review – that comes either when Smith
describes how The Band’s music makes her nervous “like a bumblebee in the face”
or when she sums up Dylan’s sex appeal thusly: “Positive energy behind a
negative mask is very sexy. Like a full basket under straining pants.”
What’s interesting about this particular paragraph is the
choice of words in sentence two: “…hero is bleeding is tracked through the
snow…”. Could it be that Dylan, recognizing a particularly evocative turn-of-phrase
from the pen of a fellow poet, purloined the title of his
very famous, very classic next album from the not-yet-famous, soon-to-make-a-classic-album-of-her-own
Patti Smith?
Which begs further questions. Did Bob Dylan read Creem regularly? Or did he just read his own reviews?
