On the Heels of Rimbaud

Bob Dylan, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, performed several times with the Grateful Dead. When Dylan and the Grateful Dead were most often in touch, in the mid-1980s, Dylan’s career was stumbling, while the Grateful Dead was becoming more popular than ever. Chapter 4 reads the Grateful Dead’s transformative influence on Dylan and Dylan’s foundational influence on the Grateful Dead simultaneously, attending not only to the Dylan songs the band performed and the Grateful Dead songs Dylan performed, but also to the remarks both have offered about their approaches to performance and touring. The poetry of Arthur Rimbaud anchors the discussion, as both Dylan and the Grateful Dead acknowledged his importance, and several Grateful Dead songs are considered in light of Rimbaud’s remarks on the salutary effect of disorientation. The shared appreciation illuminates much about the degree to which both performing entities adopted Rimbaud-inflected approaches to composition.