Out of the Vinyl Deeps

“Many people hate Bob Dylan because they hate being fooled,” Ellen Willis wrote in 1967, launching her career as a groundbreaking music critic ”“ not to mention a passionate Dylan fan. Willis, who died in 2006, was the in-house rock & roller at The New Yorker from 1968 to 1975, also writing for publications like The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. Here, her witty, cerebral essays finally get the compilation they deserve. She grapples with the voices who inspired her ”“ populists like John Lennon and John Fogerty, rebels like Patti Smith and the New York Dolls ”“ and relates feminism to music in revelatory ways, explaining why “a diatribe like ”˜Under My Thumb’ is not nearly so sexist in its implications as, for example, Cat Stevens’ gentle, sympathetic ”˜Wild World.’” Yet she’s a fan at heart, and she returns to Dylan over and over, calling John Wesley Harding “the first Seventies album, released at a time when it hadn’t even crossed my mind that the Sixties were going to end.” Willis shifted her focus in the early 1980s from writing about music to political journalism. But Vinyl Deeps is the testament of a crucial voice. At a time when rock clichés were still being invented, Willis was already leaving them behind.