Sam Shepard’s Rolling Thunder Logbook – A Book That Is Alive
Sam Shepard’s Rolling Thunder Logbook – A Book That Is Alive

Summary/Abstract: According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a logbook is “a full record of a flight by and aircraft,” “a full nautical record of a ship’s voyage,” respectively “a record of performance, events, or day-to-day activities.” Undermining readers’ expectations, Sam Shepard’s The Rolling Thunder Logbook is anything but “an official record of events,” and neither is it a “full” account of Bob Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour. It subverts the conventions of journal writing as well. As Shepard phrases it in the “Introduction:” “This book has taken on such a fractured form not for the sake of ‘art’ or experimentation but rather because the form is a direct outcome of a fractured memory” (2004, 1). In this paper, I argue that, though it might have been unintentional on Shepard’s part, the Logbook – through its very form – becomes capable of truly transmitting the atmosphere of the Rolling Thunder Revue and that this proves to be the adequate style and mode to draw Dylan’s portrait.

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