[bigred]Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews[/bigred]
[lilred]edited by Jonathan Cott of Rolling Stone Magazine[/lilred]
[lilred]May 15, 2007[/lilred]



Bob Dylan has been interviewed probably thousands of times, yet especially because he has a reputation for being a difficult subject, particularly in his rebellious younger years, it is gratifying to discover how substantive and compelling music journalist Cott's 29 selections are. Included are most of the key conversations, from early sessions with sympathetic interlocutors Studs Terkel and Nat Hentoff to recent colloquies marking his majestic comeback albums, Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft. Other interviewers include self-proclaimed "Dylanologist" A. J. Weberman, notorious for rummaging through his subject's trash cans, and playwright Sam Shepard, who later turned his interview into a one-act play. Because the dates of the pieces distribute pretty evenly throughout Dylan's career, they roughly chronicle it. Interestingly, the book has a gap between 1971 and 1978, a period during which Dylan took to the media to defend his short-lived born-again Christianity. Informative and readable, the collection well complements Dylan's unexpectedly sincere memoir, Chronicles, Volume One (2004), which offered details that he shielded in his interviews.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1932958622/?tag=imwan-20

[bigred]Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, The Band And The Basement Tapes[/bigred]
[lilred]by Sid Griffin[/lilred]
[lilred]October 1, 2007[/lilred]



Million Dollar Bash tells the story of the basement tapes, a strange series of recordings made by Bob Dylan when he went on the lam in the summer of 1967. Remarkably, these casual sessions kick-started the entire Americana genre and produced some of the most revered and misunderstood songs in Dylan’s catalog. Author and musician Sid Griffin (Long Ryders, Coal Porters, Fortunate Sons) begins the story in 1966, when Dylan first discovered his interest in electric music. Griffin then examines the tapes in detail — he analyzes the music, discusses how and why it was made, and speculates over who joined Dylan in making it. As he tells the story, Griffin ponders the question that has intrigued Dylan fans for nearly 40 years: why were the tapes so different from the music Dylan had made up to that point? This important book examines a major turning point in music history and inquires into a group of songs that were enormously influential at the time of their creation and that have been prized by musicians and fans ever since.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1906002053/?tag=imwan-20

I'm going to have to get this one.

Amazon has now dropped their price to $13.57 ...

[bigred]Bob Dylan: The Never Ending Star[/bigred]
[lilred]by Lee Marshall[/lilred]
[lilred]October 15, 2007[/lilred]



Reviews
"A landmark new study of the star's career."
Bristol Evening Post

"Finally, a Bob Dylan book that is refreshingly bereft of 1960s nostalgia: Lee Marshall challenges much received wisdom by arguing that Dylan’s touring and performances since the late 1980s are central to his music. This is an important book. It represents a major contribution to studies of stardom and a provocative intervention into debates about the art and identity of Bob Dylan."
Keith Negus, Goldsmiths, University of London

"This is a remarkable book, one of the few truly original ways of looking at Bob Dylan that I've seen in recent years. What Marshall gives you is not so much fresh interpretations of individual Dylan songs, but rather a completely rethought context for understanding the whole of Dylan's career, analysing the social and cultural structures which both constrained and enabled Dylan's creativity. By concentrating on the phenomenon of Dylan as a "star," Marshall opens up many fascinating approaches, not least (in the strongest passages of the book) in his brilliant discussion of the Never Ending Tour. This book will be a critical benchmark for Dylan scholars, as well as a provocative delight for fans of rock's definitive star."
Stephen Scobie, author of Alias Bob Dylan Revisited

Book Description
Bob Dylan's contribution to popular music is immeasurable. Venerated as rock's one true genius, Dylan is considered responsible for introducing a new range of topics and new lyrical complexity into popular music. Without Bob Dylan, rock critic Dave Marsh once claimed, there would be no popular music as we understand it today.

As such an exalted figure, Dylan has been the subject of countless books and intricate scholarship considering various dimensions of both the man and his music. This book places new emphasis on Dylan as a rock star. Whatever else Dylan is, he is a star - iconic, charismatic, legendary, enigmatic. No one else in popular music has maintained such star status for so long a period of time.

Showing how theories of stardom can help us understand both Bob Dylan and the history of rock music, Lee Marshall provides new insight into how Dylan's songs acquire meaning and affects his relationship with his fans, his critics and the recording industry. Marshall discusses Dylan's emergence as a star in the folk revival (the "spokesman for a generation") and the formative role that Dylan plays in creating a new type of music - rock - and a new type of star. Bringing the book right up to date, he also sheds new light on how Dylan's later career has been shaped by his earlier star image and how Dylan repeatedly tried to throw off the limitations and responsibilities of his stardom.

The book concludes by considering the revival of Dylan over the past ten years and how Dylan's stardom has developed in a way that contains, but is not overshadowed by, his achievements in the 1960s.

About the Author
Lee Marshall is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Bristol.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/074563642X/?tag=imwan-20

[bigred]The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (Hardcover Book/CD-ROM Set)[/bigred]
[lilred]by Michael Gray
June 15, 2006[/lilred]



From Publishers Weekly
Fans of Bob Dylan have a multitude of choices when it comes to biographies and retrospectives, but author Michael Gray (Song & Dance Man #3: The Art of Bob Dylan) outdistances them all with this voluminous collection of all things Dylan. Over the course of 823 pages Gray considers everything from railroad imagery in Dylan's songs to his use of nursery rhymes, covering the topics thoughtfully and thoroughly. An entry on Rubin "Hurricane" Carter details the plight of the wrongfully jailed boxer immortalized in Dylan's song "Hurricane," including not only a biography of the fighter, but details of the song's recording and live performance. Even the briefest of encounters merits an entry, such as when Neil Diamond challenged Dylan to top him as he came offstage. Dylan's reply: "Waddaya want me to do-go onstage and fall asleep?" Gray's knowledge of his subject is seemingly boundless, yet he manages to maintain a critical eye and keep Dylan's work in perspective. "Unbelievable," a song off Dylan's Under the Red Sky album, is called "a hopeless piece of rockist sludge picked from the obscurity of the album and issued as a single. Almost any other track would have fared better ." While Gray is certainly a fan, it's this impartiality that fuels the book and gives it weight. Insightful and entertaining, Gray's tome will broaden appreciation of the artist, his influences and his legacy. 100 b&w illustrations.

From Booklist
Rock 'n' roll historian and Bob Dylan authority Gray offers a detailed volume featuring entries related to Dylan's life, artists who influenced him and were influenced by him, musical styles he created, and background stories of specific Dylan songs and recordings. Gray states in his preface that this work was prompted by friends and readers of his books (Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan, 1972, and its 900-page revised edition, 2000) who suggested that he present some of that material in a more "reference-based" way.

Most of the entries are sketches of musicians, although Gray includes actors, authors, and other nonmusicians. These entries provide brief biographies and then explain how the people are connected to Dylan: how they worked with him, influenced or were influenced by him, and which of his songs they performed or recorded. The 3-page entry for Johnny Cash, for example, tells of Cash's defense of Dylan when Columbia Records wanted to drop him, their first meeting at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village, and their duo performances and recordings.

Gray's opinions and editorializing are prevalent throughout. This makes for unique entries, such as Interviews and the myth of their rarity (in which he claims Dylan actually averaged one interview per month over 40 years) and Dylan being "bored" by his acoustic material 1965-66, the myth of. In fact, the entire book is written in a refreshingly relaxed manner, as befits a music critic and fan.

The volume comes with more than 100 black-and-white illustrations and an accompanying CD-ROM with a searchable PDF version of the text. Although there is another published Dylan reference work, Oliver Trager's Keys to the Rain: The Definitive Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (Billboard, 2004), the current volume is a valuable addition to academic and large public library collections, primarily because of Gray's knowledge and reputation as a Dylan expert.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0826469337/?tag=imwan-20

I see today that KLIZ is reporting that Bob Dylan has supposedly begun working on Volume 2 of Chronicles. I'm looking forward to reading what exactly he's going to tackle in this one and what angle he's going to take. I never associate the word dull with Dylan. He always shows a unique side to anything he tackles.

Here's Vol. 1 of the Chronicles series, for anyone who missed it ...

[bigred]Chronicles: Volume One[/bigred]
[lilred]by Bob Dylan[/lilred]
[lilred]September 13, 2005[/lilred]



Amazon.com
One would not anticipate a conventional memoir from Bob Dylan--indeed, one would not have foreseen an autobiography at all from the pen of the notoriously private legend. What Chronicles: Volume 1 delivers is an odd but ultimately illuminating memoir that is as impulsive, eccentric, and inspired as Dylan's greatest music.

Eschewing chronology and skipping over most of the "highlights" that his many biographers have assigned him, Dylan drifts and rambles through his tale, amplifying a series of major and minor epiphanies. If you're interested in a behind-the-scenes look at his encounters with the Beatles, look elsewhere. Dylan describes the sensation of hearing the group's "Do You Want to Know a Secret" on the radio, but devotes far more ink to a Louisiana shopkeeper named Sun Pie, who tells him, "I think all the good in the world might already been done" and sells him a World's Greatest Grandpa bumper sticker. Dylan certainly sticks to his own agenda--a newspaper article about journeymen heavyweights Jerry Quarry and Jimmy Ellis and soul singer Joe Tex's appearance on The Tonight Show inspire heartfelt musings, and yet the 1963 assassination of John Kennedy prompts nary a word from the era's greatest protest singer.

For all the small revelations (it turns out he's been a big fan of Barry Goldwater, Mickey Rourke, and Ice-T), there are eye-opening disclosures, including his confession that a large portion of his recorded output was designed to alienate his audience and free him from the burden of being a "the voice of a generation."

Off the beaten path as it is, Chronicles is nevertheless an astonishing achievement. As revelatory in its own way as Blonde on Blonde or Highway 61 Revisited, it provides ephemeral insights into the mind one of the most significant artistic voices of the 20th century while creating a completely new set of mysteries.

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. After a career of principled coyness, Dylan takes pains to outline the growth of his artistic conscience in this superb memoir. Writing in a language of cosmic hokum and street-smart phrasing, he lingers not on moments of success and celebrity, but on the crises of his intellectual development. He reconstructs, for example, an early moment in New York when he realized "that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn’t have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale...that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorient myself." And he recounts how, in that search for larger reach, he actually went to the public library’s microfilm archives to learn the rhetoric of Civil War newspapers. Skipping the years of his greatest records, or perhaps saving those years for the second volume of his chronicle, Dylan recalls the times when he was sick of his public persona and made more lackluster albums like "Self-Portrait" and "New Morning." He then skips again to his comeback work with producer Daniel Lanois in the late 1980s. Dylan emphasizes that he was "indifferent to wealth and love," and readers looking for private revelations will be disappointed. But others will prize the display of musical integrity and seriousness that is evident in his minutia-filled accounts of his influences in folk and blues. Ultimately, this book will stand as a record of a young man’s self-education, as contagious in its frank excitement as the letters of John Keats and as sincere in its ramble as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, to which Dylan frequently refers. A person of Dylan’s stature could have gotten away with far less; that he has been so thoughtful in the creation of this book is a measure of his talents, and a gift to his fans.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743244583/?tag=imwan-20

[bigred]Bob Dylan: Musician In The Wind[/bigred]
[lilred]by Filiquarian Publishing/Biographiq
March 11, 2008[/lilred]



[title]Bob Dylan - Musician in the Wind[/title] is the biography of Bob Dylan, an American singer-songwriter, author, musician, poet, and, of late, disc jockey who has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. Much of Dylan's most celebrated work dates from the 1960s, when he became an informal chronicler and a reluctant figurehead of American unrest. Dylan's early lyrics incorporated politics, social commentary, philosophy and literary influences, defying existing pop music conventions and appealing widely to the counterculture of the time. Over many years, Dylan has been recognized and honored for his songwriting, performing, and recording. His records have earned Grammy, Golden Globe, and Academy Awards. Bob Dylan - Musician in the Wind is highly recommended for those interested in learning more about this famous musician.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1599860856/?tag=imwan-20

[bigred]Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography And Filmography 1961-2007
Updated Second Edition[/bigred]
[lilred]by John Nogowski
April 28, 2008[/lilred]



Review
"Dylan fans will be most pleased with this volume...very impressive and well worth someone's interest." --Classic Images

Product Description
When Bob Dylan professed in a Rolling Stone interview to be the guy who "owned the Sixties," he was not overstating. Recently, the iconic American musician, author, and poet was named by the same magazine the second greatest artist of all time, outranked only by The Beatles. This six-part, updated examination of Dylan's five-decade career provides a comprehensive analysis of his writing and recording history. It features critical commentary on every song and album, including the many rare bootleg recordings. Parts Four through Six list and discuss Dylan's numerous appearances in film, in literature, on radio, and on television. The expanded introduction further analyzes the historical import of Dylan's prolific creative output, the first four decades of his career, and his amazing twenty-first-century musical comeback.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0786435186/?tag=imwan-20

[bigred]The Songs He Didn't Write: Bob Dylan Under The Influence (Paperback)[/bigred]
[lilred]by Derek Barker[/lilred]
[lilred]March 1, 2009[/lilred]



Product Description
Encyclopedic and exhaustive, this guide to the more than 500 songs Bob Dylan has covered, in concert or on record, details the history of each song and offers an explanation of how he came to perform them. His masterful interpretations range from the more obvious blues, country, folk, and gospel recordings to contemporary writers such as Warren Zevon and John Hiatt. In addition to the listing of these covered songs, this compendium also includes a lengthy section detailing all of the remaining tracks that Dylan has written for others, but which remain unrecorded by the man himself.

About the Author
Derek Barker is the founder and editor of the international Bob Dylan magazine ISIS. He is the author of ISIS: A Bob Dylan Anthology and Bob Dylan Anthology 2: 20 Years of ISIS.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1842404245/?tag=imwan-20

[bigred]Bob Dylan: Alias Anything You Please (Hardcover)
Rex Collections Series[/bigred]
[lilred]by Ty Silkman
April 28, 2008[/lilred]



Product Description
Ranging from his first trips to London in the early 1960s right up to the 2006 Katrina concert and the publicity surrounding the release of the acclaimed Modern Times, this collection of images is an extraordinary record of Bob Dylan's evolving public persona. As changeable as his music, some 200 different views are presented of one the greatest cultural icons of the last 50 years. This major new series of rock photography books is compiled from the unique archives of Rex Features, London’s top picture library for the performing arts.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/190528750X/?tag=imwan-20

[bigred]Positively Main Street: Bob Dylan's Minnesota
Updated Edition[/bigred]
[lilred]by Toby Thompson
April 25, 2008[/lilred]



Review
“That boy . . . this fellow, Toby . . . has got some lessons to learn.” —Bob Dylan, Rolling Stone, November 29, 1969

"Toby Thompson was there first." —Greil Marcus

“A first-rate novelistic account of Thompson’s own psyche as he uncovers the Dylan few people know . . . A new look at young Dylan done with kindness, enthusiasm and superb language.” —William Kennedy, Look Magazine

“Essential reading. Thompson, unprecedentedly, managed to interview not only Echo Helstrom, almost certainly the ‘Girl of the North Country,’ but Dylan’s mother and brother, his uncle, his friends.” —Michael Gray’s Bob Dylan Encyclopedia

“Dylan fans will not want to miss this book.” —Sioux City Journal

“Enough to satisfy any Dylan fan with all the gossip he’ll ever need.” —Huntsville Times

“Well worth the attention of anyone who has fallen under the spell of the boy from the North Country.” —Los Angeles Times

“It’s a must.” —Ft. Worth Press

"Thompson tracked down anybody who knew 'Die-lan' (as the Hibbingites called him), including the guy at the local music store, the guy at the motorcycle shop, his English and music teachers, his uncles, his brother David and even his reluctant but ultimately charmingly chatty mother. Of course, Thompson traveled into a few dead ends. But the stuff with Dylan's mom and his high school girlfriend, Echo Helstrom, is priceless. Positively Main Street is a free-wheelin', fun and quick read that is surprisingly informative." —Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Hundreds of books have been written about Minnesota's most famous songwriter; Bob Dylan's life and music has been analyzed by fans, scholars, and even himself. So, why do we need Toby Thompson's Positively Main Street: Bob Dylan's Minnesota? Because it's a forgotten milestone. Published in 1971, it was the first biography on Dylan. Although it's been out of print since 1977, the book is, with the exception of Dylan's autobiography, perhaps the most readable and necessary volume on the folk icon." —City Pages

"[Thompson] ends up not only interviewing 'the Girl from the North Country,' Echo Haelstrom, and 'Bob’s' mother and brother and teachers etc., but also filling in for Dylan among his old friends and acquaintances, playing Dylan’s songs on the guitar and harmonica and singing them, in a way that may have seemed stratingly revolutionary at the time for a journalist to do, he actually recreates a bit of Dylan’s existence as his own." —Michael Lally, Lally's Alley

Product Description
In the late sixties, Toby Thompson enthusiastically took off for Hibbing, Minnesota, in search of Bob Dylan’s roots. Thompson grooves on the story of Dylan’s beginnings, meeting the locals who knew Bobby Zimmerman the loner, not Bob Dylan the legend. With unprecedented access to Dylan’s English and music teachers, his high school girlfriend Echo Helstrom, and countless neighbors and relatives, Thompson discovers the real person behind the mythology Dylan created.

This updated version includes an interview with the author, previously unpublished photographs, and a new preface by Thompson.

About the Author
Toby Thompson is associate professor of creative writing at Penn State University and the author of Saloon and The ‘60s Report. He has also written for numerous magazines including Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Playboy, and Esquire.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/081665445X/?tag=imwan-20

[bigred]Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series (Hardcover)[/bigred]
[lilred]edited by Ingrid Mossinger and Kerstin Dreschel with contributions by Frank Zollner
August 21, 2008[/lilred]



From Publishers Weekly
This volume, which accompanies an exhibition in Chemnitz, Germany, contains new versions of Bob Dylan's pencil and charcoal sketches originally published in a book called Drawn Blank; here they are reproduced along with color versions, digitally transferred to fine art paper and reworked in watercolor and gouache. In Drawn Blank, Dylan described his drawings as an effort to refocus a restless mind, a statement that captures the atmosphere of the drawings,. They seem to be the work of a man who sees many new cities, hotel rooms and other people's houses. Color, however, brings very little to them, despite the inflated claims for their high artistic value made by the four contributing essayists. Jens Rosteck, a Dylan biographer, places him among a group of multi-talents who range from Goethe to Jean Cocteau, but the comparisons run up against the indifferent quality of most of the 170 color reproductions. While Dylan's interior studies can be intriguing and psychologically fraught, his portraits and nudes seldom come off as more than earnest imitations of the Expressionist works he admires. Such judgments, however, may be beside the point for the Dylanologists, as Rosteck describes them, to whom the book will appeal.

Product Description
The visual arts have always played a significatn role in Bob Dylan's worldview, and drawing and painting served as an outlet for his huge creative energy. Exquisitely reproduced, these intensely colored works are variations of sketches Bob Dylan completed while touring America, Europe and Asia, revealing a new facet of the artist.

Bob Dylan's watercolors and gouachse recreate scenes of everyday life in riotous color: hotel room and apartment interiors; land- and cityscapes; views of sidewalk cafes, train tracks and wandering rivers. this beautiful collection, which reveals yet another dimension of Bob Dylan's poetic vision, will be treasured by all who respond to his extraordinary talent.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/3791339435/?tag=imwan-20