The Ballad Of Bob Dylan: A Portrait [Hardcover]

Author Daniel Mark Epstein has set his goals high. How else can you explain the brave desire to assemble a new biography about someone for whom many others have already produced thousands of pages? About an individual who has already published the first volume of his own autobiography? To additionally spend time analyzing many of the tunes and lyrics created during this 50+-year musical career, knowing full well that myriad liberal arts students dissect those same lines and melodies in countless classrooms across this globe every day? What could possibly be said here and now that hasn't already been made public and well known?

Well, Mr. Epstein's got a hook. He's a fan. He has seen Bob Dylan four times in concert, with more than a decade separating each event. By anchoring his approach with those evenings (in 1963, 1974, 1997, & 2009), the author plants himself in that narrow aisle between his iconic subject matter and the rest of us in the audience. Epstein becomes Everyman, and it's easy for us to identify with his experiences and his viewpoints. We've sat in similar theaters and arenas. We know the music. The four gigs serve as the stanzas to the Dylan life ballad. Epstein's text could be sketched as a quadrupled Venn diagram. The concert hours are the overlapping slivers of time; and that which falls into the wide outside spaces represents the lives lived away from the stage, both for the performer and for the listener.

You might think, Great, four concerts. This won't take long. Wrong! The author fills in the gap of those intervening years with the kinds of details we crave from in-depth celebrity portrayals. He catches us up on what Bob Dylan was doing musically at those times and what aspects of his personal life affected his creativity, his lifestyle, and his performances. Epstein comes this close (pressed fingertips) to meeting the man in person. He interviews people close to Dylan at various points in his career. He does not dwell a lot on the topic of substance abuse; but he does document the letdown when Dylan abandoned his previous work for born-again religion at the beginning of the 1980s. We can relate. Somehow we expect our heroes (esp. our musical ones, it seems) to remain the same or to sustain a good level of predictability, even while we grow older and move in and out of relationships with people, ideas, places, etc. It doesn't occur to us that those icons are (mostly) human too, and that the same waves that change us might change them. Here we can tag along to the venues and share in Epstein's struggles to understand the varying musical styles, images and dimensions of one particularly gifted and knowledgeable singer/songwriter/painter/poet.

I saw Bob Dylan in concert in Amherst MA in November 2004. Admittedly, I'm not much of a fan. I don't own any Dylan albums, and I'm familiar only with his most popular and radio-friendly songs. But I am a huge follower of folk and rock music and I am a veteran concertgoer / reviewer. I went to the arena that night because I thought I had to see Dylan at least once in my life. And I can well remember the chills I got when he ended the evening with "Like a Rolling Stone" and came back with the encore of "All Along the Watchtower." I'm quite glad I was able to witness it. I guess journalist Ed Bradley must have been in the house that night too, because he later met Dylan at a local hotel in order to conduct his interview for "60 Minutes." Watching that TV show made the outing, in retrospect, much more memorable and real for me. That was my own little snippet of the circle: one that I kept in my mind as I was reading about Mr. Epstein's own concert memories. The lines blurred, and our encounters mingled. Anyone who has seen Dylan in person will find something to identify with here.

Cresting the 440-page mark, "The Ballad of Bob Dylan" is hardly a superficial treatment. It requires just as much dedication to read and to turn the pages as it must have taken to write them. Readers should know the generalities of the Dylan chronology before venturing into this volume, since it does not follow a typically stale biographical format. This narrative is aimed at an intelligent and thoughtful audience that wants to dive into history, musicianship, composition analysis, and critical performance -- or who just wants to hear a darn good story told well. It makes for an interesting and enlightening read for any Baby Boomer, any avid concertgoer of any ilk, and any student of popular music of the 20th and 21st centuries. And it arrives just as Bob Dylan turns 70 (!) on May 24, 2011. (... while unfortunately, his first muse and "Freewheelin'" album cover mate, Suze Rotolo, recently passed away at the age of 67.)

[This review was based on seeing an uncorrected proof of the publication.]

This is a difficult book for me to review. I first started buying Bob Dylan albums with "John Wesley Harding" and consider his career peak to be from "Bringing It All Back Home" through "Desire" - or basically the twelve years 1965-1976 with some excellent work before and after. But to me as a reviewer - those are the years I was most interested in reading about.

The book is split up into sections which correspond to concerts the author witnessed (I would have enjoyed being at the first two) spread out from 1963 until 2009. The book is in excess of 400 pages and full of information I was not aware of (for example: didn't know much about his wife Sara - now I know more, didn't know about some of the singing issues which intersect with his touring with the Grateful Dead in the late 80s, didn't know much about the recently deceased Suze Rotolo etc. etc.).

I don't like the gimmick around the concerts which is the premise of the book. I believe the years from 67-76, which to me contain some of his greatest work, sorely lacks substance that the preceeding part of the book does not (that part is excellent).

The author made one comment which resonates with me: At some point in the book (in the 80s) Dylan mentions that people will pay to see a legend once, but after that the songs have to deliver and have a life (paraphrasing). I took my eldest daughter to see him within the past ten years and I was VERY disappointed. The songs didn't have life (maybe it was an off night but I don't think so) and there was no desire on our parts to go again.

All in all - this would not be the first book I'd start with. It is GREAT in spots, but gets lost in the middle (in my opinion - and sometimes with the "deep" interpretations the author makes). I'm glad I read it, will keep it in my library - but I don't in anyway view this as a definitive biography. For the devoted fan only.

For Dylan fans, the real question is, what makes the man tick? And we are always grateful for those who help us make sense of the crazy lyrics, the driving madness that seems to flow through his work...

This book didn't do that for me--the few chapters I managed to stagger through at the beginning of the book seemed more to be the musings of a groupie, except the subject seemed more about the author than about Dylan. Unlike Dylan's music, which seems so concise and so clear, this book is more muddle than madness, and hardly worth the time.

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