Show Business: Hellhound on the Loose

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The margin. Bob Dylan kept pushing it back, bending it around, like some rock-struck jet pilot always testing himself, testing his craft, punching the outside of the envelope. Dylan took rock 'n' roll way up high where the air is thin and the head gets giddy. Rock has never come back. Bob Dylan has never come down.

He is 44 now, and he has been wandering, rankling, challenging and extending the musical margin for more than two decades. Don't think twice, anyone: it is 22 years since Blowin' in the Wind appeared on his second album, and a flat 20 since Like a Rolling Stone was released and kicked rock songwriting onto its head. Incredible that there could have been such a radical change in his style in just two years, from the plainspoken beauty of Wind to the diabolical and delirious poetry of Stone. There was hardly a beat for transition, just an amphetamine rush of allusive imagery and electric boogie fused by will and some dark unknowable divining spirit. Bob Dylan not only lived on the margin, he was the margin. Approach at your peril. Precious few have ever got near him, and no one has gone beyond.

Biograph, a handily priced ($30) five-record retrospective of Dylan's career, is a heady reminder of his importance, the sort of overview usually given only to artists entering their eighth decade or ones who have met an untimely end. Dylan, however, released his 29th album, Empire Burlesque, in June, and, on that evidence, is still working at full power. So Columbia Records' release of Biograph puts him into a unique position: he is competing with himself, and is stacked up against his own past besides. No wonder he has professed mixed feelings about the Biograph project and took no part in the song selection.

But he has been doing a fair amount of promotion and sat down for a garrulous, disarming interview with Screen writer-Journalist Cameron Crowe that fills a 36-page booklet and spills over onto both sides of the five record sleeves. He also talked to TIME (see following story), and with Dylan, interviews can be as deft as his musical performances. Biograph contains 53 songs, some of them standards like Mr. Tambourine Man and Lay Lady Lay, others more recent material like Every Grain of Sand and a relatively obscure scorcher, Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar. The songs are arranged by contrast and casual association, not chronologically, and the ordering, even when playful (as in following Tangled Up in Blue with It's All Over Now, Baby Blue), gives even the most familiar tunes a fresh resonance. In many cases, too, the music is stronger, bolder than on the originals, since Compilers Bruce Dickinson, Don DeVito and Jeff Jones worked from the original tapes, which were then mastered digitally.