Bob Dylan book goes inside the mind of the great troubadour

This forensic examination of Dylan’s adult life is frequently fascinating, but crazily overlong

Bob Dylan in 1968

Why is Bob Dylan the subject of so many more biographies, treatises and exposes than any number of equally famous rock stars? It can’t just be down to the depth and complexity of his work or the far-reaching influence he exerted from the early 1960s onwards.

It must be because there is some kind of vacuum at the heart of Bob Dylan, at least the Bob Dylan that he presents to the world, and a small army of Dylanologists has felt compelled to fill it in for him. Dylan has fashioned magic out of poetic mystery and Dylan obsessives can’t stop picking at it. Nobody is more obsessed, it seems, than Clinton Heylin.

Having written nine books on Dylan already, Heylin published the 528-page The Double Life of Bob Dylan: A Restless, Hungry Feeling in 2021. He went out of his way to trash other writers on the subject, boasted about his exclusive access to the Dylan archive at the Gilcrease museum in Tulsa and, in his tireless mission to show where the singer had turned truth into fiction, not least in the beautifully written if factually unreliable Chronicles, ended up giving the reader the impression that he didn’t like Dylan very much.

The Double Life of Bob Dylan Vol 2 1966-2021: Far Away From Myself

Heylin’s ego threatened to overwhelm his subject. Now he has returned for a further 838 pages, covering the aftermath of Dylan’s 1966 motorcycle crash to the present day. This time Heylin, for the most part, has left behind the petty swipes at other writers (although he can’t resist sticking a few in the footnotes) and the self-aggrandising (he does suggest he was instrumental in Dylan being awarded the Nobel prize) for a frequently fascinating if crazily overlong delve into his subject’s adult life and the reinventions that went with it.

Heylin goes deep into Dylan’s mindset after the motorcycle crash near his home in Woodstock, upstate New York, a period the singer referred to as “the amnesia”. The severity of the crash has been endlessly debated, not least because what happened appeared to change with every telling, but it marked a point at which Dylan was cracking up under the pressure of constant scrutiny, unwanted Voice of a Generation status and excessive drug use.

He also was falling out with his manager, the financially questionable Albert Grossman, and trying to build a normal family life with his wife, Sara. The crash gave him a chance to disappear for a while, lick his wounds and reinvent himself as a denim-clad country rocker, hanging out with the rootsy Canadians the Band and being, as the Band’s leader, Robbie Robertson, remembered, “one of the guys … He just wanted to ground himself’’. That unfortunately proved impossible. “You know how people on acid see a tree come alive? That’s how I see things all the time,” Dylan told a girlfriend in 1976.

This suggests that even if he hadn’t become so famous that people would act differently the moment he walked into a room (“People have one great blessing – obscurity,” he told Playboy magazine in 1966), Dylan’s mind was just too complex to let him kick back and enjoy the simple life. He also seemed to lose the ability to write brilliant songs from the gut, at least for a while, and said in 1978 that after the crash he had to learn “to do consciously what I used to be able to do unconsciously”.

There are some insights into his character along the way, including that Dylan could be just as mundanely money-minded and self-absorbed as the next rock superstar. One night in 1973 at industry magnate David Geffen’s house, he played Joni Mitchell his forthcoming album Planet Waves. Mitchell returned the gesture by putting on her own yet-to-be released pioneering jazz rock masterpiece Court and Spark – and he fell asleep.

When his old friends the Band asked him to do a guest spot alongside pretty much every ’70s superstar going to their November 1976 farewell concert at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco – captured in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz – he was the only person to refuse to be filmed. He relented five minutes before going on stage but allowed Scorsese to film him for only two songs. It wasn’t in the name of artistic purity. It was because he had his own movie in the works and he didn’t want the director of Taxi Driver to steal his thunder.

The most revealing portraits come from other people. In May 1975, with his marriage to Sara on the rocks, Dylan went to France to stay with a painter called David Oppenheim. “We screwed women, we drank, we ate,” Oppenheim remembered of the less than lofty time they spent together, describing his companion as “Pathetic and superb at the same time … Dylan is a bloke who invents everything. He’s the most egotistical person I know. Completely mad … This person who talked of nothing but love was very, very much on his own.”

Dylan’s 1975 masterpiece, Blood on the Tracks, is the focus of the book’s most compelling section. His son Jakob described it as “my parents talking”. It is impossible to hear Idiot Wind, Simple Twist of Fate and Tangled Up in Blue without interpreting them as lamentations on a marriage falling apart in the face of Dylan’s affair with Columbia Records employee Ellen Bernstein, however allegorical the words.

Heylin discovers that You’re a Big Girl Now, interpreted for the most part as an ode to Sara in the wake of the split, was written on tour in 1974 when the couple was still together. That seems to support a complaint Dylan made in 1985 to journalist and filmmaker Cameron Crowe: “I read that [You’re a Big Girl Now] was supposed to be about my wife. I wish somebody would ask me before they go ahead and print stuff like that.”

But Dylan was almost certainly using the emotional fault lines in the marriage for poetic inspiration. “Ever the prophet,” Heylin writes, “by the time he recorded the song eight months later all the fears it expressed had come to pass. Indeed, it is that realisation which inhabits the recorded song and makes it so raw and real.”

If you have the patience, there are also vast blocks of writing given over to Dylan’s late ’70s-early ’80s Christian period, his return to glory after years in the creative wilderness with 1997 album Time Out of Mind, and his apparent mission through the ’80s to sleep with as many backing singers as possible.

Heylin’s mannered prose can be grating, not least because he flits between dispassionate reportage and lofty opinion, dismissing one critic’s praise of Dylan’s 2020 album, Rough and Rowdy Ways as “arrant nonsense”, but the depth of the research is unquestionable.

Ultimately, the research is the point of the book, driven along as it is by the conviction that factual accuracy will unlock the secrets to artistic mystery. I can’t imagine anyone else poking, prodding and taking apart Dylan with as much forensic detail as Heylin has done here. The Dylanologists’ mission to uncover and record every last thing about a man who has spent a lifetime evading scrutiny was identified by Dylan in 1968. “Scholarly minds … take everything apart now, not only music – paintings, movies as well. The aspect of just letting it happen to you, to take you out of your thoughts at the moment, I don’t know what’s happened to that.”