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Once Upon a Time
Half a century ago a youth appeared from the American hinterland and began a cultural revolution. The world is still coming to terms with what he did. How he did it—and why—has never fully been explored. In Once Upon a Time, award-winning writer Ian Bell draws together the tangled strands of the many lives of Bob Dylan in all their contradictory brilliance. For the first time, the laureate of modern America is set in his entire musical, historical, literary, political, and personal.Full of new insights into the legendary singer, his songs, his life and his era, this new biography reveals the artist who invented himself in order to reinvent America. Once Upon a Time is a study of a personality that has splintered and reformed, time after time, in a country forever struggling to understand itself. Dylan has become the mystery that illuminates. Here, in the first part of a major two-volume work, the mystery is explained.
782 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 1, 1997
53 people are currently reading
637 people want to read
About the author
Ian Bell
23 books10 followersIan Bell was a Scottish journalist who was born and raised in Edinburgh and educated at Edinburgh University. He was an advocate of Scottish independence.
He was the literary editor of The Scotsman before becoming Scottish editor of The Observer. He also wrote for The Herald, The Sunday Herald, The Scotsman, the Daily Record, the Irish Times, and The Times Literary Supplement. He won the Orwell Prize for political journalism in 1997 and was named columnist of the year at the Scottish Press Awards 2012.
Bell wrote two volumes of a biography of Bob Dylan and one of Robert Louis Stevenson, Dreams of Exile, which the Saltire Society awarded Best First Book in 1994.
He was the literary editor of The Scotsman before becoming Scottish editor of The Observer. He also wrote for The Herald, The Sunday Herald, The Scotsman, the Daily Record, the Irish Times, and The Times Literary Supplement. He won the Orwell Prize for political journalism in 1997 and was named columnist of the year at the Scottish Press Awards 2012.
Bell wrote two volumes of a biography of Bob Dylan and one of Robert Louis Stevenson, Dreams of Exile, which the Saltire Society awarded Best First Book in 1994.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 47 reviews
February 26, 2017
The big Bob biographies just keep on a-comin’ – Scaduto 1971, Shelton 1986, Spitz 1989, Heylin 1991, Sounes 2001, McDougal 2014. Ian Bell’s is bigger than all the others because it’s a two-parter, this volume which goes up to 1974 plus Time Out of Mind which goes up to 2013. So that’s 590 pages plus 576 pages = 1166 pages!
But Ian Bell is different. He’s not really written a biography at all, his 1166 pages are a long leisurely commentary on Bob’s life. He assumes you know the details and you’ve turned up to see if any sense can be made of all these twists and turns. So you need to read the best of the just-the-facts books (Clinton Heylin’s great Behind the Shades is my pick) first and then join Ian Bell in the debriefing session. Here we get 25 pages on whether Self Portrait is the first Americana album, why Dylan got writer’s block in 1968, why people said he was a Woody Guthrie copyist in 1961 even though he sounded nothing like Woody, how Dylan tried so hard not to get dragged in to political sloganeering, why Blowin’ in the Wind is a bad song and so forth.
Once Upon a Time – yeah, it’s the first line of “Like a Rolling Stone”, but what a terrible title. Also, out of the billion available photos of Dylan someone has chosen a real bad one for the cover. The young Bob looks like he just threw your pet Chihuahua off the balcony. Never mind. This book is recommended for all graduate-level Bobologists.
But Ian Bell is different. He’s not really written a biography at all, his 1166 pages are a long leisurely commentary on Bob’s life. He assumes you know the details and you’ve turned up to see if any sense can be made of all these twists and turns. So you need to read the best of the just-the-facts books (Clinton Heylin’s great Behind the Shades is my pick) first and then join Ian Bell in the debriefing session. Here we get 25 pages on whether Self Portrait is the first Americana album, why Dylan got writer’s block in 1968, why people said he was a Woody Guthrie copyist in 1961 even though he sounded nothing like Woody, how Dylan tried so hard not to get dragged in to political sloganeering, why Blowin’ in the Wind is a bad song and so forth.
Once Upon a Time – yeah, it’s the first line of “Like a Rolling Stone”, but what a terrible title. Also, out of the billion available photos of Dylan someone has chosen a real bad one for the cover. The young Bob looks like he just threw your pet Chihuahua off the balcony. Never mind. This book is recommended for all graduate-level Bobologists.
January 9, 2015
~
~
Who is this? What do we make of this person? What kind of a man chooses the public stage as a means of radical self-obliteration, disappearance, disguise? Who hides himself by committing his life to public performance? What do we make of this person?
The first volume of Ian Bell’s outstanding biography of Dylan succeeds largely because it focuses on the confounding riddle of Dylan’s identity, his identities… that ineffable puzzle, haze of definition surrounding us, emerging out of us all… for out of a late-January blizzard in 1961 in New York City materialized a riddle, a shapeshifter, a seeming embodiment of that most troubled of postmodern questions, Identity. James Joyce would consider it the first riddle of the universe, When is a man not a man?... which of course can be inverted to ask: what makes a person a Self, to ourselves and to others?
Hear it from Dylan himself and he’ll say Bob Dylan existed before him, that Bob Dylan chose Robert Allen Zimmerman and not vice versa. He’ll say he felt like he was born to the wrong parents, in the wrong place, that he’s always felt his life is a journey back to a home he’s never known, an Odyssey without an Ithaca. He’ll say that sometimes, at least. Other times, the story changes, depending on when and to whom it is told. Something one learns early on when looking into Bob Dylan’s lives is to be on guard when the word is coming down from Bob Dylan. Has he ever given anything to inquisitive ears other than misdirection? On the last night of October in 1963 he may have come as close as he ever will to telling an audience the straight story. “It’s Halloween, I’ve got my Bob Dylan mask on…”
It helps to know the standard myths before entering Bell’s book. Bell is often playing the iconoclast, sometimes contrarian or provocateur, (to the extent of prompting one GR reviewer to write “I must say though that I don't think that the author really even likes Bob Dylan”-which causes me to ask “Why must one like a person to write a book about them?” but let’s not get off on a digression...) poking holes of daylight through the mists and obscurities surrounding this strange persona, the myths as often as not concocted by Dylan himself, as by his lunatic obsessive fans and horde of countless self-proclaimed aficionados (one look through the bibliography of this book alone is evidence enough). But to say that Bell is attempting to get at the “truth” of this being who took the name Bob Dylan would not only be inaccurate, it would do a disservice to the richness and complexity of what is going on in this book. Bell weaves his book around the weaving of Dylan’s lives, so that we get a kind of layering of false bottoms, trap doors. He understands that there is often more value in a question than an answer. Bell deconstructs the legends but offers far more interrogatives than declarations. Bell is smart. He knows that when one chooses to take up the role of Biographer one is also only going to succeed in building more wings onto the house of mirrors, furthering fictions. So Once Upon A Time might be seen as a book cataloging what’s been seen through a shattered microscope, telescope, or camera lens- take your pick- the lenses that so many people fascinated with this person known as Bob Dylan have been attempting to squint through for some fifty years now, still going… they’ve mostly made out muddled, mistaken simulacra.
They’re all paraded across the stage at some point here in Bell’s book. The brash youth telling tall tales of circus life and riding the rails, the Guthrie hobo-bard myth; the folk hero composing prophecies at the heart of Cold War America; the ruthlessly ambitious rock star, mean as hell, shedding friends as he climbs the ladders and labyrinths of fame; the drug-battered genius harried by the demands of Fame and Time; the punk, assaulting and being assaulted by his audience for committing some ill-defined heresy, “going electric” (that an artist might need to seek out a new form to accommodate their developing art never seems to have settled with these folks); the recluse; the family man wandering some lost American pastoral of the mind; the ghost of Bob Dylan, re-emerging now and then offering weird parables inflected with the language of the King James Bible; but mostly, for awhile, Dylan just not being there, he’s gone; then suddenly the lightning-focused genius of Blood On The Tracks, out of nowhere in 1975 to reassert that yes, Bob Dylan, in whatever iteration this Bob Dylan happens to embody, is very much still here, very much still capable of painting his masterpiece.
Throughout all the manifestations Dylan has taken on, through all of his personae and liquid identities, there has been this consistency: With each new Dylan, the songs, the writing, changes too. The man and his art are indeed one and the same. The uneasy thing about this is that one is never sure if the Man is creating the Art or if the Art is creating the Man; and this is another intriguing paradox about Bob Dylan. There is a true artistic unity to his multiform body of work. What is this, what is Dylan’s genius? “These ‘breath units’; that ‘elastic line with a fixed base’; the connectives omitted for the sake of juxtaposition; the ‘speech-rhythm prosody’ reclaimed from Whitman…” He “fits everything available-words, melody, his voice, his band, implicit and explicit meaning- around the idea of the poem.” The astounding absorption of his influences. “The many strands of the American experience, and hence of American writing, are stitched together- there are dropped stitches, too- in Dylan’s songs.” His imagination’s response to that great land mass called America and the music that has flowed out of it...
What do we make of this person? Who is this? Bob Dylan is his songs. All the rest is noise. The industry around the person of Bob Dylan says a lot more about us, his audience, than it can ever say about him. He has given us all he has, and cares to give us. He’s given us the songs.
Now on to volume two, Time Out of Mind.
~
Who is this? What do we make of this person? What kind of a man chooses the public stage as a means of radical self-obliteration, disappearance, disguise? Who hides himself by committing his life to public performance? What do we make of this person?
The first volume of Ian Bell’s outstanding biography of Dylan succeeds largely because it focuses on the confounding riddle of Dylan’s identity, his identities… that ineffable puzzle, haze of definition surrounding us, emerging out of us all… for out of a late-January blizzard in 1961 in New York City materialized a riddle, a shapeshifter, a seeming embodiment of that most troubled of postmodern questions, Identity. James Joyce would consider it the first riddle of the universe, When is a man not a man?... which of course can be inverted to ask: what makes a person a Self, to ourselves and to others?
Hear it from Dylan himself and he’ll say Bob Dylan existed before him, that Bob Dylan chose Robert Allen Zimmerman and not vice versa. He’ll say he felt like he was born to the wrong parents, in the wrong place, that he’s always felt his life is a journey back to a home he’s never known, an Odyssey without an Ithaca. He’ll say that sometimes, at least. Other times, the story changes, depending on when and to whom it is told. Something one learns early on when looking into Bob Dylan’s lives is to be on guard when the word is coming down from Bob Dylan. Has he ever given anything to inquisitive ears other than misdirection? On the last night of October in 1963 he may have come as close as he ever will to telling an audience the straight story. “It’s Halloween, I’ve got my Bob Dylan mask on…”
It helps to know the standard myths before entering Bell’s book. Bell is often playing the iconoclast, sometimes contrarian or provocateur, (to the extent of prompting one GR reviewer to write “I must say though that I don't think that the author really even likes Bob Dylan”-which causes me to ask “Why must one like a person to write a book about them?” but let’s not get off on a digression...) poking holes of daylight through the mists and obscurities surrounding this strange persona, the myths as often as not concocted by Dylan himself, as by his lunatic obsessive fans and horde of countless self-proclaimed aficionados (one look through the bibliography of this book alone is evidence enough). But to say that Bell is attempting to get at the “truth” of this being who took the name Bob Dylan would not only be inaccurate, it would do a disservice to the richness and complexity of what is going on in this book. Bell weaves his book around the weaving of Dylan’s lives, so that we get a kind of layering of false bottoms, trap doors. He understands that there is often more value in a question than an answer. Bell deconstructs the legends but offers far more interrogatives than declarations. Bell is smart. He knows that when one chooses to take up the role of Biographer one is also only going to succeed in building more wings onto the house of mirrors, furthering fictions. So Once Upon A Time might be seen as a book cataloging what’s been seen through a shattered microscope, telescope, or camera lens- take your pick- the lenses that so many people fascinated with this person known as Bob Dylan have been attempting to squint through for some fifty years now, still going… they’ve mostly made out muddled, mistaken simulacra.
They’re all paraded across the stage at some point here in Bell’s book. The brash youth telling tall tales of circus life and riding the rails, the Guthrie hobo-bard myth; the folk hero composing prophecies at the heart of Cold War America; the ruthlessly ambitious rock star, mean as hell, shedding friends as he climbs the ladders and labyrinths of fame; the drug-battered genius harried by the demands of Fame and Time; the punk, assaulting and being assaulted by his audience for committing some ill-defined heresy, “going electric” (that an artist might need to seek out a new form to accommodate their developing art never seems to have settled with these folks); the recluse; the family man wandering some lost American pastoral of the mind; the ghost of Bob Dylan, re-emerging now and then offering weird parables inflected with the language of the King James Bible; but mostly, for awhile, Dylan just not being there, he’s gone; then suddenly the lightning-focused genius of Blood On The Tracks, out of nowhere in 1975 to reassert that yes, Bob Dylan, in whatever iteration this Bob Dylan happens to embody, is very much still here, very much still capable of painting his masterpiece.
Throughout all the manifestations Dylan has taken on, through all of his personae and liquid identities, there has been this consistency: With each new Dylan, the songs, the writing, changes too. The man and his art are indeed one and the same. The uneasy thing about this is that one is never sure if the Man is creating the Art or if the Art is creating the Man; and this is another intriguing paradox about Bob Dylan. There is a true artistic unity to his multiform body of work. What is this, what is Dylan’s genius? “These ‘breath units’; that ‘elastic line with a fixed base’; the connectives omitted for the sake of juxtaposition; the ‘speech-rhythm prosody’ reclaimed from Whitman…” He “fits everything available-words, melody, his voice, his band, implicit and explicit meaning- around the idea of the poem.” The astounding absorption of his influences. “The many strands of the American experience, and hence of American writing, are stitched together- there are dropped stitches, too- in Dylan’s songs.” His imagination’s response to that great land mass called America and the music that has flowed out of it...
What do we make of this person? Who is this? Bob Dylan is his songs. All the rest is noise. The industry around the person of Bob Dylan says a lot more about us, his audience, than it can ever say about him. He has given us all he has, and cares to give us. He’s given us the songs.
Now on to volume two, Time Out of Mind.
February 5, 2014
More an extended essay about Dylan than a proper biography, Bells book is thoroughly engaging because of his voice. This guy can write. Sometimes in nonfiction, the reader willingly sacrifices turn-of-phrase for the sake of the content. Here, the reader may find himself wishing he could remember more of Bell’s terrific lines and apt characterizations. (I can’t. There are too many. It’s like trying to remember all the jokes in The Importance of Being Earnest.) He tells the story of Dylan’s childhood and ends with the release of Blood on the Tracks, all the while injecting his opinions of the songs, the times, and the man. He’s not slightly apologetic about this—and his refreshing stance as an admirer of Dylan but no sycophant makes the book so engaging. (I read the last 200 pages in a single three-hour sitting at the kitchen table as if they were the climax of an espionage thriller.) The book is as much a biography of “Bob Dylan” as it is of Bob Dylan; if that sentence seems puzzling, it won’t after a few chapters. Bell has read everything about Dylan, heard everything he’s ever recorded, and draws upon what must be a lifetime’s worth of thinking about him to tell a story which he often punctuates with the question, “Who does that?” He debunks the stories of Dylan lambasted as “Judas” for plugging in and does a similar service to the phrase “voice of his generation”—a phrase no one will use again after reading this. He properly dismisses “Rainy Day Women” as a bore and treats “Visions of Johanna” as the masterpiece it is and argues that “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” are less anthems than poses. So what if the reader disagrees? Bell sometimes allows himself to make sweeping generalizations about America and its people. So what, as long as he keeps us turning the pages?
Once Upon a Time is so much better than a straightforward biography because Bell knows that Bob Dylan and “Bob Dylan” have made such a traditional biography moot, or at least impossible without being wholly placed inside ironic quotation marks from start to finish. (Every reader knows that Dylan’s own Chronicles is really named “Chronicles”.) Instead, the reader is given long set pieces on a number of topics and events: Minnesota, Newport, Suze Rotolo, John Hammond, Abe Zimmerman, Woody Guthrie, Albert Grossman, The Beatles, The Band, and a brilliant 75 or so pages on the great trilogy of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. Bell is wonderful when talking about Dylan’s music and his ability to B.S. people: two skills that make his fans often grin as they say, “There’s only one Bob.”
I’m very much looking forward to reading the next volume. Highly recommended.
Once Upon a Time is so much better than a straightforward biography because Bell knows that Bob Dylan and “Bob Dylan” have made such a traditional biography moot, or at least impossible without being wholly placed inside ironic quotation marks from start to finish. (Every reader knows that Dylan’s own Chronicles is really named “Chronicles”.) Instead, the reader is given long set pieces on a number of topics and events: Minnesota, Newport, Suze Rotolo, John Hammond, Abe Zimmerman, Woody Guthrie, Albert Grossman, The Beatles, The Band, and a brilliant 75 or so pages on the great trilogy of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. Bell is wonderful when talking about Dylan’s music and his ability to B.S. people: two skills that make his fans often grin as they say, “There’s only one Bob.”
I’m very much looking forward to reading the next volume. Highly recommended.
Read
April 4, 2018An evening out for Paul Bryant. Ian Bell was in town to open a display of his photography of rock musicians and I was lucky enough to get to talk to him.
Paul, I’m sure you are going to want to start with the bad news.
Me: Have you photographed Leonard Cohen?
Yes, a few times.
Me: And Bob Dylan?
Maybe half a dozen.
Me: What do you think of Dylan’s concerts?
Picture being at a Heston Blumenthal dinner. It’s cost you $500. The table is lovely, the view gorgeous, the menu looks fantastic. And then you get served up cheese sandwiches. Not even special cheese sandwiches. Bob Dylan’s like that. All the elements are there, but you get something else. For a while I kept going to them figuring that I’d go to the right one, but there isn’t a right one. Do you know his radio show?
Me: No
He had this radio show for a long time, it was in themes and it was witty, the guy’s got a great sense of humour. But he isn’t willing to bring any of it to the table when he’s performing. He almost died in a car crash at one point and started acting like maybe presenting his music in a concert wasn’t the worst thing in the world that could happen to him. But it didn’t last for long. Meeting him was no fun either.
Me: So who do you prefer out of Dylan and Leonard Cohen?
I’m Team Leonard. Dylan gives nothing at his concerts. Leonard gives everything. He’s respectful, he’s….
Paul, I will spare you the rave review of Leonard.
You will be pleased to hear that there is good news.
The Ian Bell I talked to was erudicate and entertaining and informative….and…
is considering writing a book one day.
It was THE WRONG IAN BELL.
So you can relax. Maybe Bob’s best after all.
Paul, I’m sure you are going to want to start with the bad news.
Me: Have you photographed Leonard Cohen?
Yes, a few times.
Me: And Bob Dylan?
Maybe half a dozen.
Me: What do you think of Dylan’s concerts?
Picture being at a Heston Blumenthal dinner. It’s cost you $500. The table is lovely, the view gorgeous, the menu looks fantastic. And then you get served up cheese sandwiches. Not even special cheese sandwiches. Bob Dylan’s like that. All the elements are there, but you get something else. For a while I kept going to them figuring that I’d go to the right one, but there isn’t a right one. Do you know his radio show?
Me: No
He had this radio show for a long time, it was in themes and it was witty, the guy’s got a great sense of humour. But he isn’t willing to bring any of it to the table when he’s performing. He almost died in a car crash at one point and started acting like maybe presenting his music in a concert wasn’t the worst thing in the world that could happen to him. But it didn’t last for long. Meeting him was no fun either.
Me: So who do you prefer out of Dylan and Leonard Cohen?
I’m Team Leonard. Dylan gives nothing at his concerts. Leonard gives everything. He’s respectful, he’s….
Paul, I will spare you the rave review of Leonard.
You will be pleased to hear that there is good news.
The Ian Bell I talked to was erudicate and entertaining and informative….and…
is considering writing a book one day.
It was THE WRONG IAN BELL.
So you can relax. Maybe Bob’s best after all.
January 13, 2015
Wow, did I have a problem with this volume. On one hand, I congratulate Bell for truly burrowing into the details of his topic, especially with research that is exhaustive and quite admirable. On the other hand, if he could write a paragraph on a topic, his default mode was to write five, in a tediously verbose manner. Let me provide a comparison: a year ago, I read the Lewisohn vol. I history of the Beatles, which is 1000 pp plus, and never did my attention flag, never did Lewisohn shirk the research on his topic, and never did he overdo analysis of any particular matter. In contrast, Bell's vol. I on Dylan is about half the length of Lewisohn's vol. I, and as my previous remarks suggest, this was a slog, and at some moments, I screamed "enough!" and wanted to hurl the book against the wall. In any event, I learned how to spot Bell's *longueurs*, and to skim accordingly, which made the experience much more satisfying. Yet, I do plan to read his vol. II, just knowing that the going may not be as smooth as I would like.
August 8, 2024
Probably the best Rock bio I have ever read (and that includes Keef's excellent book). That said, Rock bios are usually dreadful, often written by fan-boys or just writers who are not good at capturing the creative process of rockers. The difference here is that Bell (a superb) writer has written both a bio and a cultural history of Dylan's times. In addition, it's not exactly linear as Bell circles back to events, albums, and songs, looking at them from different angles. The book itself, with Dylan's various reinventions of himself, is very close to the 2007 Dylan move "I'm Not There" (and that's a good thing.) Bell reminds me a lot of Greil Marcus, but a more lucid one. Oh, there are plenty of necessary moments of poetic speculation (because Dylan ain't talking, at least not much), but it's usually anchored by fact and Bell's masterful grasp of everything Dylan. Dylan, a master of misdirection, rarely fools Bell, who has first Bob Bullshit detector. Note that this is the first volume of two volume set (which I have ordered). The great shame in this is that Bell would die less that year before Dylan won the Nobel. I would have to have read his updated edition.
September 16, 2020
Shame he dies in the end.
October 26, 2016
The entirety of this book (and part two, its counter-half) is summed up on page 492. It's a quote from a review of 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' (1962): "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." That goes extremely well with the title of this book, "Once Upon A Time" because Bob Dylan, I believe more now than ever, is a fairy tale.
I picked up this book at Greenlight Books in Brooklyn contemplating reading a whole bio of Dylan. I've read Elijah Wald's 'Dylan Goes Electric' and loved it--I loved the philosophy of Dylan it brought out: to be who you want to be, do what you want to do, and who cares what anyone else thinks? What sold me on Ian Bell's 563 page (keep in mind, part 2, which begins in 1975, is about the same length) bio was the opening scene: the Judas! scene from 1966 when Dylan went to England and someone yelled it out at him. The beauty of his prose and fact checking in this scene (and all the others) is astounding. It's as if Bell was there.
This book is a huge scape about American culture, Minnesota culture, NYC culture, and Dylan's culture of his own. Bell covers the background of each place Dylan "existed" (MN. and NYC) before diving into what was really going on with him while he was there. I didn't know that Dylan disowned his faith (he was bat mitzvah-ed at 13), said his parents were dead (the same year he paid their way to NYC to see him perform at Carnegie Hall), and legally changed his name. Bell discusses the anti-semitism of Minnesota during Dylan's younger years (and his parents') and the support-by-ignoring-the Jews-of MN. culture there at the time. Bell also discusses, at length, American politics across the decades. (Also important to note that the entire book is footnoted extensively.)
Bell's writing as a prose writer and as a journalist (Bell was a Winner of the George Orwell Prize for journalism) is admirable and wildly underrated. (I'm not sure why this book isn't everywhere.) I underlined nearly the entire book because I couldn't stop myself.
There is some favoritism among Dylan's records but that is also due to their popularity. The time spent on 'Dylan going electric' and his trio of albums 'Bringin' It All Back Home', 'Highway 61 Revisited', and 'Blonde on Blonde' outweighs the fact that 'Nashville Skyline' is completely glossed over. More time is later spent on 'John Wesley Harding' and 'Blood On The Tracks', the latter an album I have yet to dive into (although, of course, I know the hits). I felt there was too much discussion of 'The Basement Tapes' and Dylan's bootlegs releases (through his labels over the years) period. But then again, what they meant and what we are supposed to decipher from Dylan from them is just as important to the fantasy Dylan built that Bell explores throughout the text.
Also, I picked up this book two weeks before going on vacation thinking it would be a perfect vacation/travel read. Then while I was away, Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and my Dylan Education took on a whole new meaning. Interesting to note how much time Bell spends on discussing Dylan's relationships to poets like Ginsberg and Berryman (whom he studied under, albeit briefly, at the University of MN.). The Nobel Prize is mentioned, the questioning of whether Dylan's work IS in fact poetry, and what other people have to say (nay or yay) on that matter is discussed at length for the last several pages of the book. Bell passed away a year after both of the volumes were released. I'm sure he would want to provide an updated afterword for these texts now that Dylan has in fact won the Prize and (to this day) has ignored it.
Say what you will about his lyrics translating poorly to the page. That you don't like his voice. That Dylan is not a writer, and that Tarantula (Dylan's only book of poetry that is widely panned as awful and "word vomit") is a blip. After reading this volume not only have I realized that I KNOW I will read the second volume, I have a much more interesting relationship with Dylan as a fan. I didn't know "Visions of Joanna" was about his heroin addiction and I didn't know that he even had one. I had no idea how large the character of BOB DYLAN was such a real character to Dylan himself.
I could spend time typing up quotes from this book but I'll let you make up you're own mind. Some people want to read 1,000 pages on Robert Moses (s/o to my partner) and I'll try. But I'd rather read 1k pages on Bob Dylan, perhaps the greatest Performance-Art-As-Life this world will ever know.
I picked up this book at Greenlight Books in Brooklyn contemplating reading a whole bio of Dylan. I've read Elijah Wald's 'Dylan Goes Electric' and loved it--I loved the philosophy of Dylan it brought out: to be who you want to be, do what you want to do, and who cares what anyone else thinks? What sold me on Ian Bell's 563 page (keep in mind, part 2, which begins in 1975, is about the same length) bio was the opening scene: the Judas! scene from 1966 when Dylan went to England and someone yelled it out at him. The beauty of his prose and fact checking in this scene (and all the others) is astounding. It's as if Bell was there.
This book is a huge scape about American culture, Minnesota culture, NYC culture, and Dylan's culture of his own. Bell covers the background of each place Dylan "existed" (MN. and NYC) before diving into what was really going on with him while he was there. I didn't know that Dylan disowned his faith (he was bat mitzvah-ed at 13), said his parents were dead (the same year he paid their way to NYC to see him perform at Carnegie Hall), and legally changed his name. Bell discusses the anti-semitism of Minnesota during Dylan's younger years (and his parents') and the support-by-ignoring-the Jews-of MN. culture there at the time. Bell also discusses, at length, American politics across the decades. (Also important to note that the entire book is footnoted extensively.)
Bell's writing as a prose writer and as a journalist (Bell was a Winner of the George Orwell Prize for journalism) is admirable and wildly underrated. (I'm not sure why this book isn't everywhere.) I underlined nearly the entire book because I couldn't stop myself.
There is some favoritism among Dylan's records but that is also due to their popularity. The time spent on 'Dylan going electric' and his trio of albums 'Bringin' It All Back Home', 'Highway 61 Revisited', and 'Blonde on Blonde' outweighs the fact that 'Nashville Skyline' is completely glossed over. More time is later spent on 'John Wesley Harding' and 'Blood On The Tracks', the latter an album I have yet to dive into (although, of course, I know the hits). I felt there was too much discussion of 'The Basement Tapes' and Dylan's bootlegs releases (through his labels over the years) period. But then again, what they meant and what we are supposed to decipher from Dylan from them is just as important to the fantasy Dylan built that Bell explores throughout the text.
Also, I picked up this book two weeks before going on vacation thinking it would be a perfect vacation/travel read. Then while I was away, Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and my Dylan Education took on a whole new meaning. Interesting to note how much time Bell spends on discussing Dylan's relationships to poets like Ginsberg and Berryman (whom he studied under, albeit briefly, at the University of MN.). The Nobel Prize is mentioned, the questioning of whether Dylan's work IS in fact poetry, and what other people have to say (nay or yay) on that matter is discussed at length for the last several pages of the book. Bell passed away a year after both of the volumes were released. I'm sure he would want to provide an updated afterword for these texts now that Dylan has in fact won the Prize and (to this day) has ignored it.
Say what you will about his lyrics translating poorly to the page. That you don't like his voice. That Dylan is not a writer, and that Tarantula (Dylan's only book of poetry that is widely panned as awful and "word vomit") is a blip. After reading this volume not only have I realized that I KNOW I will read the second volume, I have a much more interesting relationship with Dylan as a fan. I didn't know "Visions of Joanna" was about his heroin addiction and I didn't know that he even had one. I had no idea how large the character of BOB DYLAN was such a real character to Dylan himself.
I could spend time typing up quotes from this book but I'll let you make up you're own mind. Some people want to read 1,000 pages on Robert Moses (s/o to my partner) and I'll try. But I'd rather read 1k pages on Bob Dylan, perhaps the greatest Performance-Art-As-Life this world will ever know.
April 15, 2020
It took me a while to get used to Bell's writing. HIGHLY stylized and idiosyncratic, his prose reads more like poetry or conversation at times; you realize quickly that you're not reading a traditional stodgy biography.
The other element of Bell's writing one must get used to is his recursiveness. This book is NOT linear or chronological in any way. If hard pressed, I'm certain I cold try and plot out the chapters and how they correspond to forwards and backwards in Dylan's life. But that would be to lose so much of the fun. We begin in 64/65 talking about Dylan going electric and all I know is that 300 pages later I till seem to be reading about the BUILD-UP to 65 even though I read about the writing of "Like A Rolling Stone" and the actual Royal Albert Hall concert for over 100 pages previous. It's a mess. But obviously so is the mythology that Dylan has constructed. The structure and style of Bell's writing eloquently mirrors Dylan's early fumbling around with identity creation, his "love and theft" of things past and future, and the storybook lunacy Dylan asked us to believe once upon a time; the beauty is that we DID believe it and continue to because we need to and because Dylan's story is our story more than it's his.
The other element of Bell's writing one must get used to is his recursiveness. This book is NOT linear or chronological in any way. If hard pressed, I'm certain I cold try and plot out the chapters and how they correspond to forwards and backwards in Dylan's life. But that would be to lose so much of the fun. We begin in 64/65 talking about Dylan going electric and all I know is that 300 pages later I till seem to be reading about the BUILD-UP to 65 even though I read about the writing of "Like A Rolling Stone" and the actual Royal Albert Hall concert for over 100 pages previous. It's a mess. But obviously so is the mythology that Dylan has constructed. The structure and style of Bell's writing eloquently mirrors Dylan's early fumbling around with identity creation, his "love and theft" of things past and future, and the storybook lunacy Dylan asked us to believe once upon a time; the beauty is that we DID believe it and continue to because we need to and because Dylan's story is our story more than it's his.
September 13, 2016
Man this book started out very good but my interest waned at the mid section on out. I think if I was a Bob Dylan fan that was more familiar with his songs, perhaps it would have rocked my world of experience. I did like how the author wrapped Dylan's story with the history and the sociological aspects of the time. I must say though that I don't think that the author really even likes Bob Dylan, he constantly referred to him as basically being a liar. I never felt I got any closer to understanding anything about Dylan after reading the book, he is still a mystery to me. I ended up wondering why did he even write a book about a man that he doesn't like? In my reasoning, I would want to write about someone that I am interested in, even at least a little bit. That being said, I must say that I ended up bored and ready for the book to end.
October 21, 2016
Plenty of interest and if he could have edited 600 pages into 180 he would have had a decent book. It rambles, it repeats, it puts forward a thesis here and a thesis there and wears its intellectualism proudly; if misguidedly. I'm not sure which Ian Bell wrote this. He's obviously a fan and obviously well read in Dylanology. But it all seems like an overblown student dissertation to me. Not helped by the fact that I've listened to it on audio book with an actor who obviously doesn't know much about Dylan and whose impression is awkward and comical. I've been interested in it at times. I've been bored by it. I haven't always agreed with the book but it hasn't involved me enough to care much either way. I'm glad I listened to it all the way through and even more glad that I don't have to listen to any more of it.
April 19, 2021
Did the world need another biography of a man so notoriously private and prone to fabrication that it's difficult to know anything for certain about him? Bell goes looking for the truth in the existing accounts of Dylan's life, which are often so hopelessly divergent he doesn't get far. So he also tries to explain Dylan by examining the social forces that produced him. This is more fruitful. But this volume gets a bit lost toward the end in some speculative music/literary criticism. And after doing a pretty good job explaining why most of the questions journalists tend to ask about Dylan don't matter, Bell finishes this book with an extended discussion of the question that matters least of all: does Dylan's songwriting count as poetry?
October 6, 2019
I'm a fan of Bob Dylan, I've always enjoyed his work. I thought this book would be an interesting account of the things that put him together. After less than 100 pages, though, the feeling that comes to mind is: tedious. I guess I don't care as much as I thought I did.
Count this one as a DNF for me.
Count this one as a DNF for me.
November 1, 2023
This was a long and rather slow ponderous read. A lot of detail about Dylan, his roots, inspiration and thought process. Enjoyed this but very winded and drawn out. I think it was over written and just needed to get to the point.
Very interesting at parts and goes in to fascinating details about his songs and quotes throughout the years, yet sometimes a topic he'd be talking about for example his name change, just went on and on.
There's a volume 2 to read, as this book stops at Blood On The Tracks (1975). Will probably read it, but not in any great rush.
🎶🎙😐
Very interesting at parts and goes in to fascinating details about his songs and quotes throughout the years, yet sometimes a topic he'd be talking about for example his name change, just went on and on.
There's a volume 2 to read, as this book stops at Blood On The Tracks (1975). Will probably read it, but not in any great rush.
🎶🎙😐
February 13, 2017
In medicine, there are often meta-trials conducted, which involve a collation of the result from other people's trials to reach a different set of conclusions or at least apply a different rationale. In Dylanology, this book by the late Scottish journalist Ian Bell is a classic case of meta-biography, offering no new interviews or specific research, but instead using the whole mountain of Dylanology (a term, apparently coined by the garbologist A. J. Weberman, which Bell actually dislikes) and the source works themselves to build his own highly-opinionated thesis on the life and works of Bob Dylan, aka Robert Allen Zimmerman, at the time of writing this review the newly crowned Nobel Laureate in Literature. While that may not sound promising, this intricately-observed (and sometimes amusing) book is actually the best of the Dylan biographies I have read so far.
The defining feature among Dylanologists seems to be that they have come into it for the words. They are typically well-read and rather pugnacious. (They are usually men, of course, although not exclusively.) They almost all see the peak of Dylan within a wildly undulating landscape to be the 1965-66 trilogy. And they tend to fight amongst one another as if Dylan was "theirs". This is particularly the case with Clinton Heylin, who is quoted generously in this work. Ian Bell, a widely-respected columnist, in this two-volume opus which was originally begun as a case for Dylan receiving the Nobel Prize, a result Bell sadly never lived to see, brings a command of rhythm and detail and a very broad general knowledge to bear. His grounding as a political commentator lets him wade into some of the controversies of the time and extricate the necessary nuances, often lost within the binary march of ideology. And with Dylan this is important, because he very clearly became disillusioned with that binary march, while never repudiating the main issues that drove him early on (racism, oligarchy, injustice). Instead his contradictions were multiplied and his religiosity slowly grew into a core for his various selves to orbit symbiotically. Bell captures this evolution neatly, allowing Dylan the leeway many did not in some of his more perspicacious choices, but also being suitably harsh on some of the ideas espoused by this great declaimer when it suited him.
This first book ranges from Dylan's childhood to Blood on the Tracks, his startling 1975 comeback album. We get to see Dylan dealing with burnout after the crippling amphetamine rush of 1965-66 and the motorcycle crash, and then dealing with his desire to encompass the musical styles of his childhood, become more of a country singer, the misstep of Self Portrait, and the long silence following New Morning, before the false dawn that was Planet Waves and the disappointing 1974 tour with The Band, before heartbreak brought him back to a workable (or at least highly effective) muse.
And through all of those lean years, Dylan managed to remain a giant in the musical world and beyond precisely because he had managed to infiltrate a poetic gift into the Tower of Song that forever changed the way popular music could be perceived. Ian Bell is best when questioning Dylan, sometimes finding six of a genius and half a dozen of a chancer, because clearly these two roles are very much an integral part of Mr Zimmerman. My take on him, getting reinforced many times over by these mushrooming biographies, is that he is someone who clearly recreated himself to play the part he felt calling him, then obviously disdained the demands that this character placed upon him. Indeed, much of his subsequent life has involved his sources being subjected to unprecedented scrutiny. That is, Dylan fired up the interest of some pretty obsessive fans, who then got pretty obsessive on his ass, even (or particularly) when the pickings grew thinner. Then when he managed a comeback, there they were in the wings, laying further claim to him. And what he is indeed is instinctive, wilful, a little childish, decidedly perverse, impish, extremely well-read, a bower bird, a quoter and shaker, a brave bellower but anti-leader, self-interested and contradictory while being highly lucid and perceptive and a man who seems to have lost the moorings of original self, with all that that can entail. I may in fact be overreaching the same way those obsessives sometimes do, but the truth is that there are so many odd decisions and responses that really only seem to make sense in someone who has fictionalised himself beyond return. I would dearly love to see some testimony from a friend or acquaintance of his who could corroborate that Dylan is rather closer to himself than he seems.
Dylan's is a journey, still unfinished, to somehow fuse the American musical forms (and some of their cousins) with the strands of literature. It's not unheard of - the French chanson tradition, the Catalan cançó tradition etc etc - but it has never been played out on this kind of global scale. And the concession of the Nobel Prize in 2016 now gives this quest all the more gravitas. His albums are now thin on the ground, but the reach of this extraordinary career that can already be seen from many conflicting angles while it's still going (indeed has been recontextualising itself now for 26 years of a 56 year career) is positively breathtaking. As are his missteps and his enigmas. And that's why so many books are written about him, of which this one is as good as any.
The defining feature among Dylanologists seems to be that they have come into it for the words. They are typically well-read and rather pugnacious. (They are usually men, of course, although not exclusively.) They almost all see the peak of Dylan within a wildly undulating landscape to be the 1965-66 trilogy. And they tend to fight amongst one another as if Dylan was "theirs". This is particularly the case with Clinton Heylin, who is quoted generously in this work. Ian Bell, a widely-respected columnist, in this two-volume opus which was originally begun as a case for Dylan receiving the Nobel Prize, a result Bell sadly never lived to see, brings a command of rhythm and detail and a very broad general knowledge to bear. His grounding as a political commentator lets him wade into some of the controversies of the time and extricate the necessary nuances, often lost within the binary march of ideology. And with Dylan this is important, because he very clearly became disillusioned with that binary march, while never repudiating the main issues that drove him early on (racism, oligarchy, injustice). Instead his contradictions were multiplied and his religiosity slowly grew into a core for his various selves to orbit symbiotically. Bell captures this evolution neatly, allowing Dylan the leeway many did not in some of his more perspicacious choices, but also being suitably harsh on some of the ideas espoused by this great declaimer when it suited him.
This first book ranges from Dylan's childhood to Blood on the Tracks, his startling 1975 comeback album. We get to see Dylan dealing with burnout after the crippling amphetamine rush of 1965-66 and the motorcycle crash, and then dealing with his desire to encompass the musical styles of his childhood, become more of a country singer, the misstep of Self Portrait, and the long silence following New Morning, before the false dawn that was Planet Waves and the disappointing 1974 tour with The Band, before heartbreak brought him back to a workable (or at least highly effective) muse.
And through all of those lean years, Dylan managed to remain a giant in the musical world and beyond precisely because he had managed to infiltrate a poetic gift into the Tower of Song that forever changed the way popular music could be perceived. Ian Bell is best when questioning Dylan, sometimes finding six of a genius and half a dozen of a chancer, because clearly these two roles are very much an integral part of Mr Zimmerman. My take on him, getting reinforced many times over by these mushrooming biographies, is that he is someone who clearly recreated himself to play the part he felt calling him, then obviously disdained the demands that this character placed upon him. Indeed, much of his subsequent life has involved his sources being subjected to unprecedented scrutiny. That is, Dylan fired up the interest of some pretty obsessive fans, who then got pretty obsessive on his ass, even (or particularly) when the pickings grew thinner. Then when he managed a comeback, there they were in the wings, laying further claim to him. And what he is indeed is instinctive, wilful, a little childish, decidedly perverse, impish, extremely well-read, a bower bird, a quoter and shaker, a brave bellower but anti-leader, self-interested and contradictory while being highly lucid and perceptive and a man who seems to have lost the moorings of original self, with all that that can entail. I may in fact be overreaching the same way those obsessives sometimes do, but the truth is that there are so many odd decisions and responses that really only seem to make sense in someone who has fictionalised himself beyond return. I would dearly love to see some testimony from a friend or acquaintance of his who could corroborate that Dylan is rather closer to himself than he seems.
Dylan's is a journey, still unfinished, to somehow fuse the American musical forms (and some of their cousins) with the strands of literature. It's not unheard of - the French chanson tradition, the Catalan cançó tradition etc etc - but it has never been played out on this kind of global scale. And the concession of the Nobel Prize in 2016 now gives this quest all the more gravitas. His albums are now thin on the ground, but the reach of this extraordinary career that can already be seen from many conflicting angles while it's still going (indeed has been recontextualising itself now for 26 years of a 56 year career) is positively breathtaking. As are his missteps and his enigmas. And that's why so many books are written about him, of which this one is as good as any.
February 19, 2025
Not just for Dylan fans! I wouldn't classify myself as a Dylan fan, I like his son Jakob Dylan's music more but I enjoyed this read. It goes into the many versions of the legend that he became as well as how he was a product of his times, as we all are. If you watch A Complete Unknown this book will help put it all into perspective.
April 26, 2025
You better know your basic Dylanology to attempt this one. Also a bit of knowledge about the Beats, Brecht and Chekhov doesn’t hurt. Dense, knowing and leisurely, although you’ll also find he speeds right thru works like Planet Waves.
August 14, 2024
Interesting and well researched book that takes you from Robert Zimmerman of Hibbings, Minnesota up to "Blood on the Tracks".
May 29, 2025
Bjnbhh
October 8, 2020
Once Upon A Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan by Ian Bell is a biography of Bob Dylan and the legend of Bob Dylan. Bell is from Edinburgh is a columnist with The Herald and The Sunday Times. He won the George Orwell Prize for political journalism. Bell is also the author of an award winning biography of Robert Louis Stevenson.
Bob Dylan is a person everyone is familiar with, Blowing in the Wind, Rolling Stone, "Everyone must get stoned." I remember listening to Bob Dylan on AM radio, and by the time I was old enough to pay real attention to music in the 1970s he took a backseat to Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Bruce Springsteen. That is not a slight on the man and his music, but more of a statement about the time of my youth and my ignorance of Dylan beyond the pop culture sound bites. He did briefly popped back into prominence for a short period when in my Catholic education I was told Saved was Dylan finding his way, but I liked Slow Train Coming better.
Bob Dylan is a man of legend and that is where the "Once upon a time" comes into play with this biography. Dylan, was born Robert Zimmerman and was raised in a Jewish household in a mining town in Minnesota. He was 19 when he arrived in New York with a new name, new history, and without living parents. He tells how he ran away from several times starting at age 12. The stories continued in interviews of how he listened this singer or guitarist or his experiences with Woody Guthrie. Eventually he was caught on many these stories. His embellishments on the truth were not malicious or attempting to hide, but rather to be more interesting. It is not unusual for public figures. Someone who set the national tone during Dylan youth, Tailgunner Joe McCarthy was not a WWII tailgunner.
Bell puts everything in historical perspective discussing in parallel Dylan's life and national and international events. The Beat Generation, the folk music movement, civil rights, Vietnam, all bring change to America and American's views. Likewise, Dylan's music changes too. From folk, blues, rock, and country Dylan drifted into all forms of American music except for jazz. His personal life is included. Joan Baez, the motorcycle accident, challenges with his music, and other aspects of his life are included. These events are well documented with end note following each charter as well as a bibliography at the end of the book.
Once Upon a Time is a very detailed history of Bob Dylan's from his youth though the release of Blood of the Tracks. This is a comprehensive biography. Biographies of Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, or even punk rock I have read do not have anywhere near this detail. There are over 300 pages of text and this book stops at 1975. I enjoyed reading Once Upon a Time and will admit I learned more than I thought I would, or could about Bob Dylan. An excellent biography of one of America's most well known and long lived musician . Although "not authorized" it does seem to be a fair account of events. A great read.
Patti Smith
Bob Dylan is a person everyone is familiar with, Blowing in the Wind, Rolling Stone, "Everyone must get stoned." I remember listening to Bob Dylan on AM radio, and by the time I was old enough to pay real attention to music in the 1970s he took a backseat to Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Bruce Springsteen. That is not a slight on the man and his music, but more of a statement about the time of my youth and my ignorance of Dylan beyond the pop culture sound bites. He did briefly popped back into prominence for a short period when in my Catholic education I was told Saved was Dylan finding his way, but I liked Slow Train Coming better.
Bob Dylan is a man of legend and that is where the "Once upon a time" comes into play with this biography. Dylan, was born Robert Zimmerman and was raised in a Jewish household in a mining town in Minnesota. He was 19 when he arrived in New York with a new name, new history, and without living parents. He tells how he ran away from several times starting at age 12. The stories continued in interviews of how he listened this singer or guitarist or his experiences with Woody Guthrie. Eventually he was caught on many these stories. His embellishments on the truth were not malicious or attempting to hide, but rather to be more interesting. It is not unusual for public figures. Someone who set the national tone during Dylan youth, Tailgunner Joe McCarthy was not a WWII tailgunner.
Bell puts everything in historical perspective discussing in parallel Dylan's life and national and international events. The Beat Generation, the folk music movement, civil rights, Vietnam, all bring change to America and American's views. Likewise, Dylan's music changes too. From folk, blues, rock, and country Dylan drifted into all forms of American music except for jazz. His personal life is included. Joan Baez, the motorcycle accident, challenges with his music, and other aspects of his life are included. These events are well documented with end note following each charter as well as a bibliography at the end of the book.
Once Upon a Time is a very detailed history of Bob Dylan's from his youth though the release of Blood of the Tracks. This is a comprehensive biography. Biographies of Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, or even punk rock I have read do not have anywhere near this detail. There are over 300 pages of text and this book stops at 1975. I enjoyed reading Once Upon a Time and will admit I learned more than I thought I would, or could about Bob Dylan. An excellent biography of one of America's most well known and long lived musician . Although "not authorized" it does seem to be a fair account of events. A great read.
Patti Smith
August 20, 2019
Beginning with Dylan’s typical teen dreams of stardom in a little Minnesota town to his exaltation as poet/singer/songwriter of a generation, this book traces Dylan’s albums and tours alongside political, personal, cultural, and artistic happenings of the day, ending with “Blood on The Tracks” released in 1975.
Some influences stuck out to me, like La Strada by Federico Fellini possibly influencing Mr. Tambourine Man as this song along with others have a filmic quality. Something I hadn’t thought of before, but is fascinating to think of how Dylan’s songwriting blew past expectations of what songwriting could be at the time and expanded its possibilities. Later, the author, Ian Bell, says Dylan also expanded what poetry could and can be.
It seems like you can’t talk about Bob Dylan without eventually getting to Joan Baez and this book does get there and to the other women who taught Bob Dylan his political and social consciousness. Bell really has nothing nice to say about Baez, noting her bad memoir with multiple grammar mistakes and her stupidity and cattiness for falling for a serial philanderer. I don’t really get what he has against her? But, that is just me.
You can’t glide past the influence the women in his life had on him -- not least of all the first one after arriving in NYC, Suze Rotolo. She gave him the sociopolitical education that inspired his early songs, and catapulted him to lefty hero, folk singer. This early Dylan was different than later Dylans as the title explains, but to me it seems like that is more because Dylan is an evolving, and observant artist who also happens to an introvert. And introverts are marked by having a private and public self. I disagree somewhat with the theory the author offers that Robert Zimmerman crafted Bob Dylan to maximize his profits and folk hero standing by extracting the political hot topics of the day from Rotolo and putting them into songs. I mean people change and evolve, and who among us has not learned from their lovers and been influenced by them?
Bell does not take Dylan’s word for anything, sometimes this seems useful, sometimes it just comes off as smug and elitist. Sometimes Dylan is not so forthcoming about his influences and Bell digs to find them, which is interesting. Bell also vacillates between being reasonable about human contradictions and evolution and that Dylan is a liar that is pushing a character he created to the public and fooling us all. But, maybe there is truth in both and that’s what he seeks to explore.
This book is useful in the context it provides Dylan’s artistic evolution, but assumes you know a fair deal about Dylan before coming to the book. My advice would be to watch/read a few items in the bibliography before attempting to read i.e. No Direction Home (the documentary and book), Don’t Look Back etc.
Some influences stuck out to me, like La Strada by Federico Fellini possibly influencing Mr. Tambourine Man as this song along with others have a filmic quality. Something I hadn’t thought of before, but is fascinating to think of how Dylan’s songwriting blew past expectations of what songwriting could be at the time and expanded its possibilities. Later, the author, Ian Bell, says Dylan also expanded what poetry could and can be.
It seems like you can’t talk about Bob Dylan without eventually getting to Joan Baez and this book does get there and to the other women who taught Bob Dylan his political and social consciousness. Bell really has nothing nice to say about Baez, noting her bad memoir with multiple grammar mistakes and her stupidity and cattiness for falling for a serial philanderer. I don’t really get what he has against her? But, that is just me.
You can’t glide past the influence the women in his life had on him -- not least of all the first one after arriving in NYC, Suze Rotolo. She gave him the sociopolitical education that inspired his early songs, and catapulted him to lefty hero, folk singer. This early Dylan was different than later Dylans as the title explains, but to me it seems like that is more because Dylan is an evolving, and observant artist who also happens to an introvert. And introverts are marked by having a private and public self. I disagree somewhat with the theory the author offers that Robert Zimmerman crafted Bob Dylan to maximize his profits and folk hero standing by extracting the political hot topics of the day from Rotolo and putting them into songs. I mean people change and evolve, and who among us has not learned from their lovers and been influenced by them?
Bell does not take Dylan’s word for anything, sometimes this seems useful, sometimes it just comes off as smug and elitist. Sometimes Dylan is not so forthcoming about his influences and Bell digs to find them, which is interesting. Bell also vacillates between being reasonable about human contradictions and evolution and that Dylan is a liar that is pushing a character he created to the public and fooling us all. But, maybe there is truth in both and that’s what he seeks to explore.
This book is useful in the context it provides Dylan’s artistic evolution, but assumes you know a fair deal about Dylan before coming to the book. My advice would be to watch/read a few items in the bibliography before attempting to read i.e. No Direction Home (the documentary and book), Don’t Look Back etc.
September 3, 2014
I have read a lot of Dylan biographies, rock journalism and other literature devoted to the man over the years. This very fine and impressively researched book delivers a fresh and wholly objective examination of the case evidence for the man's lyrical and poetic genius, as well as a candid examination of his tendency towards self mythology and chameleon personality.
Bell's forensic and perceptive critiques of Dylan's commercially released albums and bootlegs from the 1960s/early 70s period are also pretty much on the mark, and he excels at distinguishing the mid 60s folk and electric rock material - which truly deserves the epithet "ground breaking genius" - from the less highly rated country rock meanderings that Dylan also produced later on.
The book is a welcome change from the usual format of rock biographies, all too often dominated by chronologies of minor events in the subject's personal life and padded out with anecdotes from first hand interviews. It adheres to a chronological structure only in so far as it focuses on the key phases of Dylan's evolution from beat poet folkie to electric rock superstar to country and western crooner to introspective reclusive artist on the threshold of middle age.
For me the kernel of the book is the series of chapters dealing with the triptych of electric albums in 1965/66 "Bringing It All Back Home", "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Blonde on Blonde". Bell is excellent at capturing the frenetic pace of Dylan's artistic output over these two years, including the tours that left him at the end of his rope at times, and how both the widespread popular acclaim and backlash from those worthy old folkies affected his cynicism towards the music industry and his own place in the wider counter culture and political backdrop of the period. Bell gets underneath all that to explore why Dylan decided that he simply did not want to be "spokesman for a generation" and why he saw right through the plasticity and triviality of late 60s hippiedom.
In short, the book sets new standards in Dylanology that are unlikely to be matched for the foreseeable future. I very much look forward to reading volume two "Time Out of Mind".
Bell's forensic and perceptive critiques of Dylan's commercially released albums and bootlegs from the 1960s/early 70s period are also pretty much on the mark, and he excels at distinguishing the mid 60s folk and electric rock material - which truly deserves the epithet "ground breaking genius" - from the less highly rated country rock meanderings that Dylan also produced later on.
The book is a welcome change from the usual format of rock biographies, all too often dominated by chronologies of minor events in the subject's personal life and padded out with anecdotes from first hand interviews. It adheres to a chronological structure only in so far as it focuses on the key phases of Dylan's evolution from beat poet folkie to electric rock superstar to country and western crooner to introspective reclusive artist on the threshold of middle age.
For me the kernel of the book is the series of chapters dealing with the triptych of electric albums in 1965/66 "Bringing It All Back Home", "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Blonde on Blonde". Bell is excellent at capturing the frenetic pace of Dylan's artistic output over these two years, including the tours that left him at the end of his rope at times, and how both the widespread popular acclaim and backlash from those worthy old folkies affected his cynicism towards the music industry and his own place in the wider counter culture and political backdrop of the period. Bell gets underneath all that to explore why Dylan decided that he simply did not want to be "spokesman for a generation" and why he saw right through the plasticity and triviality of late 60s hippiedom.
In short, the book sets new standards in Dylanology that are unlikely to be matched for the foreseeable future. I very much look forward to reading volume two "Time Out of Mind".
October 5, 2013
This volume, along with its companion edition Time Out Of Mind, is one of the best Dylan biographies to emerge in recent years. The books (Once Upon A Time covers Dylan's early life and career up to the release of Blood On The Tracks) combine biography and critical analysis in equal parts, and provide social and historical context not unlike the recent Beatles biography Can't Buy Me Love by Jonathan Gould (2008, Three Rivers Press). Bell does an excellent job on all three of these aspects adding color and insight into the subject's life and work, in addition to bringing fresh interpretations into well known events of Dylan's life. He clearly has great respect for Dylan as an artist and songwriter, but does not shy away from pointing out weak offerings in his oeuvre as well as his personal character flaws. He also brings new and positive commentary and points of view on frequently disparaged works such as Tarantula, Self-Portrait and the film Renaldo and Clara) that put those efforts in a new light. (The books were published prior to the recent release of Another Self-Portrait in the Official Bootleg Series--a release which has given rise to a re-evaluation of the original Self-Portrait).
The two volume self are indispensable contributions to the critical and biographical library on Bob Dylan, and should find an audience even among the less obsessed Dylan fan who is interested in enhancing his appreciation of the artist's work.
The books have only recently become published in the U.S. having previously been available in the UK.
The two volume self are indispensable contributions to the critical and biographical library on Bob Dylan, and should find an audience even among the less obsessed Dylan fan who is interested in enhancing his appreciation of the artist's work.
The books have only recently become published in the U.S. having previously been available in the UK.
September 18, 2016
I have been trying to find a definitive book about Bob Dylan for years, and it looks like the search will continue. It took 2 months to get through this book and my knowledge of Bob Dylan and his life is at the same level it was before I picked it up. This book focused on the time period surrounding Dylan's life,and very little about Dylan himself . It read like a research paper,and was very dry. One paragraph stood out to me that sums up how I feel about Dylan and his music...
"What makes a Bob Dylan song poetry? In the usual explanation, that's not so complicated:it's the way he sings, Dylan's enunciation, his habit of slurring and stressing, his propensity to speak rather than sing a word or line, his pauses, his pitch and timbre, even the snarls-these,with and against the flow of the music, it's support and implicit comment, create the poetry". Not recommended!
"What makes a Bob Dylan song poetry? In the usual explanation, that's not so complicated:it's the way he sings, Dylan's enunciation, his habit of slurring and stressing, his propensity to speak rather than sing a word or line, his pauses, his pitch and timbre, even the snarls-these,with and against the flow of the music, it's support and implicit comment, create the poetry". Not recommended!
October 14, 2023
Part one of this lengthy critical biography takes us through Blood On The Tracks. Before starting, I wondered if I really needed another Bob bio. Silly me. I found this a very enjoyable read, and learned much. Of the big Bob bios-- Shelton, Scadutto, Spitz, Sounes, Heylin--Bell is probably the best in terms of the tale of Bob, the facts, and salient analysis (athough I've yet to read Vol. 2 of the recent giant Heylin bio). He tries, with a great degree of success, to untangle some of the myths (many created by Dylan himself) surrounding the artist. Bell can be snarky and somewhat negative, but provides a necessary service in his detective work. I'm not sure why this tome is not mentioned/admired as much as some of the other Dylan biographies.
September 20, 2017
Less of a biography of Dylan, and more of a deconstruction of the mythology surrounding him to better reveal the artist and his achievements, Bell's book is outstanding. The first of two parts, this leaves Dylan at an artistic peak (Blood On The Tracks) and a personal low (facing up to the collapse of his marriage to Sara).
Written also with a knowledge of the many prior books about Dylan these are also subject to scrutiny as well. As such, this is a book best appreciated by those decently familiar with some of these works.
Bell's writing style goes a long way to making this such an enjoyable read. He displays a dry wit which often raised a chuckle.
A major contribution to critical Dylan literature, this has me looking forward to reading the second volume.
Written also with a knowledge of the many prior books about Dylan these are also subject to scrutiny as well. As such, this is a book best appreciated by those decently familiar with some of these works.
Bell's writing style goes a long way to making this such an enjoyable read. He displays a dry wit which often raised a chuckle.
A major contribution to critical Dylan literature, this has me looking forward to reading the second volume.
June 5, 2015
It turns out, the world DID need another Dylan bio. The best bio of anyone I've read. Bell's writing is beautiful, amazing. He does write 5 paragraphs when 1 would do, but they're all beautiful. I've never seen such a vocabulary (keep a dictionary or the Internet at hand--I don't know if I like him using "puissance," for example, instead of the sturdy Anglo-Saxon equivalent, but it's impressive [or his facility with a thesaurus is impressive])or widespread knowledge of related (and not so related) events. A Scot, yet he captures the U.S. of the times better than most accomplished American writers.
June 20, 2019
This is the second time I have read this book and I was slightly less satisfied than the first time. It is one of the best Dylan books - for those who have a good knowledge of Dylan - I would imagine it would be difficult for someone coming to this book with no knowledge of Dylan's life or work. I found some of the writing a bit repetitive and some parts a bit haphazard. He also slips into the common mode of knowing far better than Dylan what songs should have been released and when - something Dylan commentators cannot help doing but is somewhat arrogant..
April 1, 2022
This is Vol. 1 of a multi-volume biography on my favorite musician/artist/poet. I really enjoyed the detail & thoughtful reflections of author Bell on Dylan's life & music as it exploded on the scene in Greenwich Village in NYC in the early 1960s. No one really saw it coming when the young 19 year old "vagabond" showed up in the Big Apple. Soon, though, they couldn't deny the power & creative force of the little Midwesterner from nowhere, which, of course, the vagabond creatively sought to minimize through his wild & elaborate stories of his years on the road with some of the greats.
January 11, 2015
Mindent átfogó könyv. Bob Dylan kora gyerekkorától kezdődően minden lehetséges forrást felhasználva próbál miértekre választ találni Bobbal kapcsolatban. Ezzel párhuzamosan hivatkozik a társadalom, a politikai és zenei élet aktuális eseményeire, mutat rá összefüggésekre, közben pedig értékeli is Bob Dylan munkáit. Mindezt sok oldalról megközelítve (talán egyesek ízlésének néhol túlságosan is), sajátos stílusban, érdekes gondolatokkal és elképzelésekkel együtt tálalja.
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