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

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.