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James Sutcliffe

Keys to the Rain by Oliver Trager

You're lounging in the driver's seat as your car makes lazy left turns and the radio blares Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush" at full volume.  You sing along as best you can, rattling the steering wheel with your hands, hoping other motorists are too involved in their ditsy cell-phone conversations and emotional baggage to notice you alone in your car screaming your head off.  As the song comes to a close, you pray to the Gods of radio programming that the next song will not be utter trash, as it is invariably bound to be.  After his falsetto vocals fade, you find yourself being subjected to the redneck-rock of Thin Lizzy.  Your hand quickly and efficiently finds the radio dial, and you turn it three clicks to the left, to that OTHER classic rock station, praying you won't find ZZ Top or Bob Seger (okay, so secretly you wouldn't mind if it were Bob Seger as long as it's not Turn the Page).  And then… BOOJSHE!  There it is.  The sweet strumming of Bob Dylan, with that honey-sandpaper voice.  And you’ve never heard it before.  Your nipples begin to tingle.  It's all you can do to keep the car on its course.  You need carnal knowledge of this song.  You need its birth certificate and the long history of its scars and triumphs.  You need to kill its father and fuck its mother.  Okay, so maybe that doesn’t even make sense, but the point is, you want to know about it.  And now you have someplace to turn for preliminary answers, much like a background check for preschool teachers.  And cue Book Review…

The epigraph to Oliver Trager’s new book, Keys to the Rain: The Definitive Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, comes from the rockabilly-styled first track of The Basement Tapes, Dylan’s lighthearted 1967 collaboration with the Band.  The line “Odds and ends, odds and ends / Lost time is not found again” from the song Odds and Ends sums up the encyclopedia: it is a book full of odds and ends – the compiling of which must have been much lost time for Trager.  The loose and relaxed style of Odds and Ends typifies Trager’s writing because he never takes his task too seriously but is equally determined to provide relevant and fascinating information about the songs.  Trager, the author of The American Book of the Dead: The Definitive Dead Encyclopedia and Dig Infinity! The Life and Art of Lord Buckley, allows his own personality to infiltrate his entries, and in so doing, avoids making his encyclopedia, well… too much like an encyclopedia.  At first, the book might come off as slightly superficial, but given time, it is apparent that a stupendous amount of research has gone into this volume (granted, far less than that which went into Michael Gray’s Song and Dance Man III).

The encyclopedia (the title of which refers to the line “Harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain” in one of Dylan’s song Visions of Johanna) provides interesting information that is thorough enough, considering its brevity.  The text is succinct, and Trager provides personal touches of opinion, judgment, and metaphor, although at times his remarks beguile more than they explicate.  At one point, he makes the synesthetic remark that “If Akira Kurosawa directed a film based on a Franz Kafka novel and cast Clint Eastwood in the starring role it might look the way ‘Drifter’s Escape’ sounds.”  At times, I wonder about the source of Trager’s inspiration, but on the whole his comments are fair.  Trager usually offers the right mix of historical background, lyrical interpretation, commentary on live-performances of the song in question, and Dylan’s personal quotes to make every entry burn like a fire in the sun.  Some of the most interesting and humorous entries concern songs that even the well-versed Dylan fanatic may not have heard, like covers that Dylan played only once or a handful of times.  For example, Woody Guthrie’s V.D. Blues: “The only Recording of Dylan performing Woody’s impossible-to-find pre-AIDS song cycle is from December 1961, and it sounds as if Dylan might be singing from personal experience.”  Other highlights include some gems from Dylan himself, who has always been enigmatic and mischievous in interviews.

Despite its strengths, Keys to the Rain has some startling omissions. For example, there are no entries on The Band or Joan Baez, both of whom were enormously influential to Dylan’s career, music, and life.  They are accounted for in the introduction, where Trager states that these artists, and others who have been involved with Dylan’s career, have been omitted to save space.  This troublesome admission belies the volume’s subtitle because it creates a decidedly un-definitive encyclopedia by ignoring some of the most influential aspects of his muses and collaborative work.  It is also surprising to find that the book’s last entry is Warren Zevon, an artist who never had more than slight connections to Dylan.  Why include Zevon, or even Johnny Cash, on whom there exists four pages (although Cash did sing with Dylan on Nashville Skyline), but not Joan Baez or The Band?  An excuse in the introduction just doesn’t cut it: Billboard Books has cut some important corners.

The volume’s format is also somewhat irksome – clearly not to be read cover to cover, sitting down with the book for a long stretch and reading for pleasure or interest proves about as difficult as getting a dog in a bathtub.  It is, however, a great browsing book to peek into from time to time, and functions equally well as a reference.  Next to each entry is a small letter, representing its category, be it song, album, person, film, book, video or CD-Rom.  If I heard an unfamiliar Dylan song on the radio and wondered about its origins, meanings, alternate versions and live performances, I would immediately know where to turn for timely answers.  No exact answer can ever be given about many of the songs or the mystique that surrounds Dylan, but that is why the book is attractive.  As Trager admits in his introduction, “Keys to the Rain is a reference book with a madness to its method – an entrée into the Secret Museum [of Bob Dylan] but not necessarily a ticket out.”  Perhaps one of the best features of Trager’s tome is a listing under each song of every artist who has recorded it, when, and on what albums it appears.  Opening at random to page 278, I here see that a band by the name of Lemmings Travel to the Sea covered Dylan’s Idiot Wind in 2001.  This reference tool can come in handy for those who “just can’t get past Dylan’s voice,” but would like to hear other artists cover his songs, for those who love a particular song and would like to find more versions, and for those who long to know about the origins of an obscure song Dylan has covered.  I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to hear Ap Daalmeijer’s 1983 version of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”. 

The book comes replete with 100 black and white photographs, primarily of people related to the songs.  The pictures enliven the book a bit, but some seem ill-chosen, perhaps to appeal to a wider audience.  Under the entry for Dylan’s 1985 album Empire Burlesque, there appears a half-page picture of Humphrey Bogart, because a Dylanologist has made an argument that “ten lines from various songs on the album” have been “lifted from films,” including Bogart’s The Maltese Falcon.  The analysis might be worth noting, but the picture seems a bit unnecessary, a ploy to sell more books to fiends for eclectic pop-culture – that is to say, Americans. 

Keys to the Rain is a great reference book for any Dylan enthusiast, but isn’t as in-depth or comprehensive as a bevy of other Dylan books out there.  However, its alphabetical format does afford easier access than other volumes.  Ultimately, Keys to the Rain is an indispensable reference for the casual Dylan fan, and true fanatics would probably also find it a handy, if incomplete, tool, but could probably forego it without too much anxiety.  Trager’s “keys” are well-crafted, if small and slightly over-marketed, and do well to illuminate the rain partially, if not wholly distill it.