From the Publisher
So, you want to know more about Bob Dylan? Read Clinton Heylin’s new book. You’ll get all you need.”—Graham Nash
“Whether you’ve read one book on Bob Dylan or one hundred, this is the one you want to read and refer to from this day forward. It leaps a couple light-years ahead with much newly revealed material and deep scholarship. If somebody’s got to tell the tale, we can all thank our holy electric pickups and mystical typewriter keys that it was up to Clinton Heylin.”—Lee Ranaldo, Sonic Youth
“If you really want to know the story of Bob Dylan (and everybody should), this is where you must start.”—Robert Hillburn, author of Johnny Cash
“Impressively researched, this deep look at Dylan’s early career and initial stardom is …an enjoyable ride.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Library Journal
12/01/2020
A leading authority on Bob Dylan—his Dylan Behind the Shades has remained in print for two decades and has been revised twice—Heylin plumbed the depths of the personal archive Dylan recently sold to the George Kaiser Foundation to offer this new look at the Nobel Prize laureate.
Kirkus Reviews
2021-03-17
Bob Dylan (b. 1941) has spent decades augmenting his singular talent by mythologizing, misdirecting, and outright lying about his life. This ambitious biography seeks the truth.
Noted music historian and critic Heylin has already written 10 books about Dylan, including the well-regarded biography Bob Dylan Behind the Shades (1991), as well as portraits of the Velvet Underground, Sex Pistols, Springsteen, and other rock luminaries. Here, the author is armed with material from Dylan’s papers and outtake footage from tour documentaries now housed at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa. Even with those documents, not to mention Dylan’s own autobiography, Chronicles, and hundreds of interviews and press conferences over the years, the story of how Bobby Zimmerman from Minnesota became one of music’s most influential and enduring artists remains murky. To his credit, Heylin leans into the confusion, documenting who said what and how they would know even though it makes some parts, especially the chapters on Dylan’s early years, hard to follow. We still don’t even get a straight story on the origin of the name change. “Even in 1960,” writes the author, “he delighted in spinning yarns, telling close friend Dave Whitaker that it ‘was his mother’s name, and that he had taken it because…he didn’t want to be known by his father’s name.' " The last part of that statement, at least, was true. But since his Jewish mother’s family had come from Russia, it must have seemed to the worldly Whitaker rather unlikely that her family name was Welsh for ‘son of the sea.’ ” Heylin is on stronger footing in his discussions with eyewitnesses and analysis of documentary footage and studio recordings from sessions for such classics as “Like a Rolling Stone” or “Visions of Johanna.” In these passages, the narrative becomes an enlightening, informative delight.
Impressively researched, this deep look at Dylan’s early career and initial stardom is a decidedly uneven but enjoyable ride.
