Dylan biography review center

Daniel Lanois' autobiography Soul Mining is a great read, and features a whole section about the creation of Time Out of Mind.
Anthony Scaduto (1932-2017) published his groundbreaking Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography on January 1, 1971.
Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs is certainly not a biography of Bob Dylan.

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By Daniel Gewertz

At points Greil Marcus’s digressive style can seem like nervy brilliance, at others, idle whimsy. What ennobles the book is the critic’s love for his underlying subject: the soulful search for a truer America.

Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs, by Greil Marcus. Yale University Press, 288 pages.

Of Greil Marcus’s 19 books, four now focus on Bob Dylan. About the esteemed critic’s new one, there is much to say. But let us begin with what this book is not about. Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs is certainly not a biography of Bob Dylan. A couple of the chapters treat Dylan as a mere bystander in the author’s free-form thought-journeys; moreover, the discussions of the songs are virtually never tied to events in the artist’s life. Nor are the songs themselves consistently paramount. In the chapter called “Jim Jones,” it takes 36 pages before Marcus even mentions the traditional folk song of that title. The chapter on “Desolation Row” barely mentions the 1965 maste

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REVIEW OF THE DOUBLE LIFE OF BOB DYLAN: A RESTLESS, HUNGRY FEELING (1941-1966)

Clinton Heylin. The Double Life of Bob Dylan: A Restless, Hungry Feeling (1941-1966). Little, Brown and Company, 528 pp. Paperback. 978-0-316-53521-2.

REVIEW by Thomas M. Kitts, St. John’s University, NY.

In 2016, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa announced the acquisition of the Bob Dylan Archive, a vast collection of over 100,000 items spanning Dylan’s career. With recordings of studio sessions, live performances, private and professional films, outtakes, letters, drafts of songs, and more, the archive has already advanced Dylan studies and challenged previous conclusions. Clinton Heylin, “the world’s foremost Dylan scholar” according to Rolling Stone (Greene), buried himself in the archive for ten weeks as he researched The Double Life of Bob Dylan: A Restless, Hungry Feeling (1941-1966), an exhaustive, extraordinarily detailed, and energetic text that illuminates the early Dylan. The book ends just prior to July 29, 1966, the date of Dylan’s motorcy

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There’s also the matter of Dylan’s personal archives—a massive data dump of notebooks, contracts, manuscripts, films, tapes, and correspondence—being sold off to the University of Tulsa in 2017. Heylin’s new research draws heavily from this collection. More than a conventional, or conventionally readable, biography, A Restless, Hungry Feeling feels more like a hefty appendix to extant Dylan bios, or an advanced research seminar in Dylanology. Heylin lays out his own project a little ghoulishly, declaring it “a new kind of biography written in the same milieu as its subject but with the kind of access to the working process usually possible only after an artist’s death.” In his music and presentation of himself, Dylan has always been mercurial, recalcitrant, unknowable: a wiggly mess of creative impulses that Heylin hopes to pin down, playing the Dylanologist as lepidopterist.

At the risk of dismissing the whole venture out of hand, I can’t help but wonder how useful this is. First of all, there’s a simple matter of credibility. Heylin, like anyone who cares even a little bit