Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades : a Biography

Chronicles the life and thirty-year music career of Bob Dylan, from his early protest songs through his near-fatal motorcycle accident, his divorce, and his religious conversion, to his recent rock comeback

From longtime Dylan scholar Heylin, a meticulously detailed and engrossing account of the musician's work and life from 1961 to the present. Bob Dylan is the singer-songwriter nonpareil of the last 30 years, but little has been written about his life after the notorious 1966 motorcycle accident. During this period, he has recorded 20 albums (and at least an equal amount of unreleased material), embarked on tours up to three years long, and worked on several movies. Here, Heylin fills in the record with a close- up narrative refreshingly free of either uncritical worship or parochial judgments. Heylin keeps his focus on the songs but examines closely the events in Dylan's life that shaped them: the motorcycle accident; his divorce from Sara and messy custody battle for their five children; his alleged hotel-room visitation from heaven, and his born-again evangelism. In numerous quotes, Dylan speaks for himself, while interviews with the important people in Dylan's life give his story considerable depth and complexity. Comments by Mike Bloomfield, Al Kooper, Robbie Robertson, Emmylou Harris, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, and studio musicians who have recorded and toured with Dylan provide a unique and fascinating view of the nuts and bolts of Dylan's working methods. Exhaustively researched and eminently readable: an indispensable book for those interested in Dylan, popular music, or the fate of American icons. (Twenty-four pages of b&w photographs--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Heylin has put together the first complete biography of this most knotty of rock 'n' roll icons since Anthony Scaduto's Bob Dylan ( LJ 4/15/72). Other recent biographies, such as Robert Shelton's No Direction Home ( LJ 9/1/86) and Bob Spitz's Dylan: A Biography ( LJ 11/15/88), focus on Dylan's career until his motorcycle accident in 1966. These gloss over the subsequent years of his career, a period that includes some of his best work. Heylin attempts to rectify their omission with this impressive chronological look at Dylan's life from his beginnings in Hibbing, Minnesota through his many roles. Heylin's thesis is that Dylan is constantly reinventing himself, not necessarily to good effect (e.g., his poor albums of the early 1980s). The source material is mostly second-hand interviews, though Heylin conducted some of them himself for the British magazine Telegraph . This biography is neither fannish adulation nor axe-grinding screed, but a fair and sharp analysis of one of the 20th century's most important musicians. It also includes an impressive sessionography, a lengthy bibliography, and a list of people quoted and their relationships to Dylan. Highly recommended.
- Keith R.A. DeCandido, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.