The past six weeks were the days between. I don’t mean this in the Grateful Dead song sense (for those of you who don’t know the song of that title, it was, for my money, the last great Hunter-Garcia collaboration and talked about the span of life between their youth and the 1990’s – life in general, the days between).
I’m using it in a more limited way, namely the time in the history of On Highway 61 between the time I could do anything and …. uh, about now. I finished the proofreading and the manuscript went off to the printer on July 28th. I’m told that I’ll have a real no-foolin’ copy of the book by Wednesday of this week (September 10)… but in that interval, there was little to do that showed any response.
Doing p.r. in August is generally a thankless task. Folks are taking their well-earned vacations, editors among them, and things just poke along. I of course reached out to my many contacts in the media and worked hard to set up things, but getting hard commitments in August….not so much. I had a great conversation with a senior editor at NPR, for instance, but what that will translate into is yet unclear. So you wait. And wait.
Until this morning, when to my pleasure Alternet ran an excerpt from the book that you can check out – http://www.alternet.org/books. Special thanks to my friend Steven Rosenfeld for being my go-between on it. The chunk is a portion of the Dylan material that covers his early days in New York City – in my opinion, a fairly original way of looking at his roots in terms of African American culture … like the rest of the book, come to think of it.
Enjoy! As the month progresses, there should be lots more happening.