Excerpts from Bob Dylan's memoir (Dylan on cover of Newsweek)

Wow! It'll be like the Bonnie "Prince" Billie album.

NY Times review

It’s 1987, and Dylan’s fallen into a black hole, a crisis both musical and spiritual. He couldn’t stand singing his old songs; they’d become dead to him: "It was like carrying a package of heavy rotting meat" trying to bring them to life onstage. Then something happened: He was in San Rafael, where he’d begun rehearsals for a tour with the Grateful Dead. They were asking him to do some songs he’d rarely sung, and he hated it, and he walked out saying he’d left something at his hotel—but really, he says, on the verge of walking out on the whole tour, on live performance altogether.

He wanders out into the San Rafael gloom, goes into a bar and hears a singer whose name he doesn’t even remember (or at least specify) doing Billy Eckstine–type standards, and suddenly he hears something and everything changes. He hears the jazz singer doing something with his voice, has an earthshaking revelation: "Something internal came unhinged." He says he "could feel how [the singer] worked at getting his power … I knew where the power was coming from and it wasn’t his voice … now I knew I could perform any of these songs without them having to be restricted to the world of words. This was revelatory."

Say what? It gets stranger and stranger from there on. He has a series of revelations, including a "new system" for singing and strumming that he’d been taught by a jazz guy named Lonnie Johnson. "Lonnie took me aside one night [in the 60’s] and showed me a style of playing based on an odd- instead of even-number system," on the number 3 rather than 2. After that San Rafael night, Dylan makes what he describes as the momentous shift from 2 to 3. "I don’t know why the number 3 is more metaphysically powerful than the number 2, but it is," he says. And that using the number-3-based system, "You can manufacture faith out of nothing and there are an infinite number of patterns and lines that connect from key to key …. As long as you recognize it, you can turn the dynamic around architecturally in a second."

Um, whatever you say, Bob. And he has plenty more to say: "With a new incantation code to infuse my vocals with manifest presence I could ride high, unconsciously drag endless skeletons from the closet. Thematic triplets making everything hypnotic …. My lyrics, some written as long as twenty years earlier, would now explode musicologically like an ice cloud. Nobody else played this way and I thought of it as a new form of music." He rejoins the Dead at rehearsal and everything is magically renewed for him.

(The only bad thing about the review is that Rosenbaum acts like Lonnie Johnson is some incredibly obscure figure -- which he is to Rosenbaum, apparently -- and refers to him as a "jazz guy.")