The Conclusion begins by showing that the hobo was a picturesque archetype that was portrayed as being on the verge of extinction from its very inception. When the ‘Golden Age of Tramping’ actually came to an end following the conclusion of World War 2, however, the popular image of transiency shifted to the automobile, which had been providing its own road narratives for several decades but which found its popular spokesperson in the figure of Jack Kerouac, whose writing combined the spiritual literary vagabond tradition of Vachel Lindsay with an idealisation of the picturesque hobo. The Conclusion briefly traces the representation of transiency in the wake of On the Road, including the development of the ‘road movie’ and the way in which numerous singer-songwriters of the 1960s and 1970s adopted the mantle of the countercultural drifter. I outline the growth of homelessness, voluntary ‘lifestyle’ transiency and the development of the relatively privileged ‘digital nomad’ in the neoliberal era, before concluding with a discussion of the use of train-hopping by people fleeing to Europe and the US to escape poverty, violence and climate change.

The book closes by reviewing how the three themes of protest, history and spirituality intersect with each other, and drawing out some of the parallels between Dylan’s and Lennon’s different approaches to protest music, their historicism and their faith. In retrospect, it suggests, their output can only be understood in relation to its economic context – the collapse of the British Empire and the shift from Fordism to multinational capitalism. Notwithstanding their reputation

This chapter introduces Eloise Knapp Hay’s (1984) concept of dual biography and explains why Dylan and Lennon are such appropriate subjects. It examines their known meetings, intertextual references, reciprocal influences and other forms of interaction. As the dual biography unfolds it elicits findings that a study of each performer alone could not disclose. The cultural mythology around their fleeting encounters, such as when Dylan apparently introduced the Beatles to marijuana or when Dylan and Lennon filmed a cinéma vérité scene together, demonstrates the symbiotic nature of their ongoing relationship.

Chapter 1 explains the rationale for the book and the principles underlying its methodology. It introduces the two artists covered, Bob Dylan and John Lennon, and the theorists used to contextualise their work: R. Serge Denisoff, Fredric Jameson, J. Anderson Thomson and Clare Aukofer. It summarises the concepts underlying each chapter – dual biography, protest music, history and spirituality – and explores the connections between these themes.

My essay examines Bob Dylan’s relation to sound recording, still a neglected topic even with the recent explosion of scholarship on the legendary singer-songwriter. Drawing on historical accounts of Dylan and his career, as well as recent histories of studio recording, I trace the artist’s mercurial relation to record making as evidenced in his turbulent encounters with various record producers. My chief focus is on Dylan’s account of his late 1980s creative crisis in his 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume 1, which I argue also provides a condensed account of the songwriter’s philosophy of sound recording.

This chapter looks at the significance of the Vietnam War and its impact on Beat writing. It begins with an analysis of Ginsberg's poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” and then looks at the work of Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, and Bob Dylan, among others.