The Double Life of Bob Dylan Volume 2 Part 1 1966-1981: The Man In Me

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Here at last is the culmination of Clinton Heylin’s monumental, two-volume complete revamp of his acclaimed Dylan biography, BEHIND THE SHADES, in print since 1991. Published on the 62nd anniversary of Dylan’s first Columbia recording session, the 300,000-word, 850-page biography will be made available – on Kindle and print – in two parts, and is devoted entirely to the post-accident Bob Dylan , by the most widely known Dylan authority in the world. The two-part book is the first such volume to really trawl the manuscripts in the official Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa. It is, as such, a very different book from A Restless, Hungry Feeling, published in 2021 by Little-Brown, and in many ways a more revelatory one. If the pre-accident Bob’s wiles and whereabouts have been well documented – one might even say ad nauseam – the post-accident Dylan, and especially the post-conversion Dylan, has remained almost a tabula rasa. No more. This book blows the lid off the person who scraped himself off the tarmac on a backwoods back road in the Catskills and reinvented himself anew, taking the reader on a rollercoaster ride from Dylan’s 1966 motorcycle accident to the present day. We meet a man who is determined to always confound expectations; yet whatever he does only seems to confirm his iconic status to fans and critics alike. There are peaks and troughs. Long periods of writer’s block are followed by sudden bursts of creativity that produce some of the best work of his career, including perhaps his most celebrated album, 1975’s Blood On The Tracks. Throughout we encounter a man prone to perversity, often including on his albums the worst takes and leaving off the best songs altogether. Even before he embarks on the Never Ending Tour in 1988, here is an artist who draws on a century of American pop culture but who refuses to be shackled to his own past.Today his voice is almost unrecognisable from his 1960s peak, and the man whose songs had been devoted to dissecting his romantic relationships has become more focused on his own mortality, solitude and getting old. Yet his albums continue to top the charts, 2020’s Rough And Rowdy Ways being his fourth number one album of the 21st century. There is no other living artist whose creative output has remained so consistently intriguing, sometimes infuriatingly so, across six decades. Clinton Heylin’s definitive, scrupulously researched and revelatory life, based on unprecedented access to the official Tulsa archive and other new sources, paints the fullest and brightest portrait yet of an iconic figure that has defined contemporary culture.The Double Life of Bob Dylan Volume 2 Part 1: The Man In Me covers 1966-1981The Double Life of Bob Dylan Volume 2 Part 2: Far Away From Myself covers 1982-2021