A MINI BOOK REVIEW by Paul Ho
Let us first talk about the industry that Bob Dylan has become. Mr. Dylan has written at least seven books himself and produced eight high-priced art portfolios featuring his paintings; some as limited editions. There are 20 biographies of Dylan available on Amazon and 69 books about his life that aren’t categorized as biographies (whatever that means.) About 45 of them have been translated into Spanish He donated his archive of 100,000 items to the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma which opens in May 2022. These items include his private notebooks, recording contracts, rare photographs, concert posters, and even the leather jacket he wore the night he first went electric at Newport in 1965. His famous face, 30 feet tall, will be plastered on the wall, outside the building.
Talk about wretched excess: his signature on a piece of blank paper sold for $2276 at auction, a used harmonica (without the iconic neck brace) went for $4886, and the original handwritten lyrics to Blowin’ in the Wind sold for $108,254 (I wonder what the extra $254 was for, don’t you?)
He has sold an astounding 125,000,000 copies of his 39 studio albums, 15 live albums, and 29 compilation albums, which I think refers to recycled material.
In his spare time, he collected the Presidential Medal of Freedom from former President Obama, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, and countless other awards. Whew!
Now let’s talk about the book. Being a long-time Dylan fan, I couldn’t resist the latest biography (of eight) by Clinton Heylin called The Double Life of Bob Dylan, a Restless, Hungry Feeling, (1941 to 1966.) I’ve read several books about Bobby D. in the past, and seen some of the documentaries like No Direction Home and Don’t Look Back, so I have already been somewhat overexposed to his life story. The fun for me in Heylin’s new book was found in the details.
This particular tome covers the earliest of years, including his humble beginnings in Duluth as a lonely schoolboy longing to be somebody; and ending with him as a world-renowned singer, much tortured by fame and overly zealous fans. Although the book was riddled with wonky footnotes and mind-numbing minutiae, I was still able to savor the flavor of the Village scene in the early 60s and relive the precarious journey of a young wannabe as he morphs into an international superstar.
It made for a couple weeks of good bedtime reading with my trusty iPad by my side so I could listen to certain songs mentioned when I wanted to remember their long-forgotten lyrics.
One puzzle in this reading was the reference to a “double life” in the title. I don’t remember any mention of a double life subsequently, and it was hard to see what the author was referring to. Perhaps it meant that he was a human being and also the separate entity that became Bob Dylan, the image.
Anyway, for hard-core Dylan fans, this 500-page book will be easily digestible. For lower-level fans, however, I’m not too sure. They might find themselves overwhelmed by the endless detail and the profusion of unfamiliar names. Or they might not. I don’t know
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