Rating: 
Summary: First Read
Review: After having been a fan of Dylan for a long time, I finally sat down to read about him when a friend gave me this book. I found the book easy to read, and left me hungry for more biographical stuff.
Rating:
Summary: First Read
Review: After having been a fan of Dylan for a long time, I finally sat down to read about him when a friend gave me this book. I found the book easy to read, and left me hungry for more biographical stuff.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but more a back road than a highway
Review: Another Dylan bio, and not an unusual one in that it once more dwells on the man's many personal faults. I have no problem with that. It doesn't surprise me that the man has used people as stepladders throughout his life, befriending them when it benefits his ambitions and discarding them once they no longer serve his selfish ends. And the man treats people so shabbily that as he knocked on heaven's door with a near fatal heart ailment in 1997, only one of his band-members bothered to contact him and wish him well.What we don't get is the exhaustive, knowledgable background on his music that Clinton Heylin provides in "Behind the Shades: Revisited" which hit bookstores at the same time. That volume bursts with background info on the recordings and still found time to dish up heaping piles of dirt. Sounes offers some surprising news about a post-Sara marriage that Dylan remarkably managed to conceal, and the revelation (true?) that at the lowest point in his career, he asked to join the Grateful Dead (and was turned down)! For Dylan fans, at least those who don't object to learning that their hero's music may be the only truly admirable thing about him, Sounes book is a worthwhile read, but it's more of a back road than a highway.
Rating: 
Summary: Enjoyable
Review: Anybody looking for an intelligent, non-partisan account of Bob Dylan's life and times will find this very worthwhile. It is clear from the notes that the biography was carefully rsearched and, while Dylan doesn't always appear in the best possible light, the over-all treatment is even-handed and convincing. Recommended as an enjoyable read.
Rating:
Summary: The human life of a man who is a modern myth
Review: Bob Dylan is as much a cultural icon as one person can be in our times, but he is a secretive and lonely person. It is difficult for a biographer to weave together an honest look at such a person without their cooperation. Yet Howard Sounes does a great job of looking past the image and providing his readers with a glimpse of the person behind the legend. Without being able to interview the man himself, he uses Dylan's words from past interviews, legal records, and interviews with friends and associates to piece together a picture of the life behind the legend. Telling the story of Dylan from birth to the year 2000, this book focuses on the details of a life devoted to a musical career. I found particularly interesting the section on Dylan's musical roots in Hibbing, Duluth, and Minneapolis. Also, interviews with some of the few people Dylan befriended over the years give us a wonderful peak at his human side. Finally, producers and musicians tell fascinating stories about recording sessions that add to our understanding of the music on his CDs. The author has interviewed many people who had contact with Dylan through the years so we get much detail, but ultimately are still only on the outside looking in. Usually Sounes takes the high road and refrains from telling salacious details. The book will appeal to devoted fans who love Dylan's music and want to know about the person behind it. If you are new to Bob Dylan and want to understand his cultural impact, this is not the book for you. It is also a very revealing study of the isolating effect that fame can have on people.
Rating:
Summary: Ballad of an unpleasant thin man.
Review: Dylan comes across as an utterly unpleasant person in this rather good biography. As I am not the greatest fan of his music (for reasons I will come to later) this did not bother me too much, but I am sure some of other reviewers would have punished Mr Sounes for this when rating the book. Dylan is portrayed as thoroughly self-centred, somebody with enormous sensitivity in terms of his own feelings (which he conveys with great intensity via his music), but absolutely no sensitivity in terms of others' feelings. This includes wives, girlfriends and musical associates, all of whom are discarded with disdain when no longer required. This leaves Dylan a deservedly lonely and disillusioned person towards the end of the book. In fact, when he falls seriously ill, only one of his many former band members write him, a fate which is not unexpected to the reader given how he had treated them. It is hard for the reader of this book to have any sympathy with Dylan, and I think the author does a good job of paiting a picture if Dylan without being judgemental- praising the music, but not the man. In terms of music I find Dylan very variable in quality- all of his earlier recordings contain some great songs, but the weaker songs are always too weak for my liking, and not as good as, say, the weaker songs on a Simon and Garfunkel recording. And some of his songs are incredibly naive in terms of lyrical content, like Sunshine on the Union on Infidels. The author describes Dylan's musical decline well, including his return to live performance form in the middle 90's. I just shudder to think how bad exactly his live performances must have been in the early 90's, because I saw him live in 1996 in London and he was still bad enough. The book has some weaknesses admittedly. The writing is not always of the highest standard and I sometimes got the impression that the author was quoting people simply because he had spoken to them, and not because they had said anything worth quoting. But all in all he has produced a fine biography of Dylan, clearly the fruit of much labour.
Rating:
Summary: Ballad of an unpleasant thin man.
Review: Dylan comes across as an utterly unpleasant person in this rather good biography. As I am not the greatest fan of his music (for reasons I will come to later) this did not bother me too much, but I am sure some of other reviewers would have punished Mr Sounes for this when rating the book. Dylan is portrayed as thoroughly self-centred, somebody with enormous sensitivity in terms of his own feelings (which he conveys with great intensity via his music), but absolutely no sensitivity in terms of others' feelings. This includes wives, girlfriends and musical associates, all of whom are discarded with disdain when no longer required. This leaves Dylan a deservedly lonely and disillusioned person towards the end of the book. In fact, when he falls seriously ill, only one of his many former band members write him, a fate which is not unexpected to the reader given how he had treated them. It is hard for the reader of this book to have any sympathy with Dylan, and I think the author does a good job of paiting a picture if Dylan without being judgemental- praising the music, but not the man. In terms of music I find Dylan very variable in quality- all of his earlier recordings contain some great songs, but the weaker songs are always too weak for my liking, and not as good as, say, the weaker songs on a Simon and Garfunkel recording. And some of his songs are incredibly naive in terms of lyrical content, like Sunshine on the Union on Infidels. The author describes Dylan's musical decline well, including his return to live performance form in the middle 90's. I just shudder to think how bad exactly his live performances must have been in the early 90's, because I saw him live in 1996 in London and he was still bad enough. The book has some weaknesses admittedly. The writing is not always of the highest standard and I sometimes got the impression that the author was quoting people simply because he had spoken to them, and not because they had said anything worth quoting. But all in all he has produced a fine biography of Dylan, clearly the fruit of much labour.
Rating:
Summary: A deeply moving story of an eccentric artist
Review: I have been completely wrapped up in this book for three days and the deep mood of Dylan's troubled genius stays with me. I have always appreciated his music. My opinion of the man is both better and worse as a result of reading this story. Many details of his very hidden life were illustrated here and who he is in relationship with the people around him. He would not have been an easy friend, but perhaps neither would Van Gough. The author does a delicate dance of informing the reader based on interviews, research, and personal experience. He crosses the line in a few obvious places with opinion and theory, but keeps it to a minimum. This is an amazing illustration of a superstar who has tried to keep his personal life to himself, and continue to do his job as a poet and musical performer. I was delighted to find that the story ended with Dylan on the road to the only concert I have ever seen of his, and the concert was brilliant.
Rating: 
Summary: by-the-numbers bio manages to make Dylan boring
Review: I haven't read a book about Dylan since Anthony Scaduto's 1971 "Bob Dylan," which I enjoyed tremendously at the time-- it was hero worship, for Scaduto and me both. That sort of thing doesn't seem to be done anymore. Our culture today prefers to tear people down, as in the book series "Kill Your Idols." My life was changed by Dylan's music of the '60s, though, and I couldn't resist reading the new books during the year of his 60th birthday. "Down the Highway" is a bland, by-the-numbers bio. It manages to take someone as fascinating as Dylan and make him boring. I don't read biographies, as a rule, and Sounes' book reminds me why. It may have some revealing detail not available elsewhere about Dylan's second marriage and financial dealings, but that's not what I'm interested in. If you want to read a really interesting book with much more detail (it's nearly 300 pages longer), check out Heylin's "Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited." It's not a conventional bio -- he leaves long direct quotes intact throughout the entire text instead of reducing them to the mush of the omniscient narrator. AND, Heylin has been inspired by the IDEAS in Dylan's music, as have I, and pursues the meaning at the intersection of the man's life and his art. That is still a worthwhile quest, even though it is not possible to read either of these books and maintain an idealistic view of the Hero...
Rating:
Summary: Portrait of an Impossible Subject
Review: I'm 53 years old with three kids, a job on Wall Street, and a life-long obsession with Bob Dylan that isn't going away. To this day, his best songs make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. But who is this guy? And where does such extraordinary music come from? Perhaps recognizing that there are never really answers to questions like these, Howard Sounes largely sidesteps them in this excellent new biography, which doesn't pretend to reveal very much about Dylan's mind or the creative wellspring for his work. What the book does succeed at giving us is a is a thoroughly professional, well-researched and clearly written account of the man's life. Characteristically, Dylan refused to be interviewed, as did, apparently, his immediate family members. However, Mr. Sounes obtained a wealth of material from an array of other people, including childhood and adult friends, lovers, band members, business associates, observers, hangers-on, and the many famous and non-so-famous musicians and singers who have known and worked with Dylan over the course of four decades. Sounes even took in perspectives from individuals referenced in Dylan's songs, like William Zantzinger - the real-life and still-living villain from The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll - and Carla Rotolo, the stigmatized "parasite sister" from Ballad in Plain D. Because he's made a career of fleeing the constraints of identity, Dylan is a resistant subject for biography. Born into a nurturing middle-class Jewish family in small-town Minnesota, Dylan (then Bob Zimmerman), came of age and, following a short time at college, took to the road, and to disguise his embarrassingly conventional roots, invented outlandish myths about himself as a singing orphan hobo. Personally shy, but far less innocent than he appeared, he in fact had an overpowering ambition and confidence in his talent. Heading straight for New York City - the right place at the right time - he quickly "made it" as the angst-ridden folk and social-protest singer we know from his early recordings. He had no sooner achieved fame in this persona than he shed it like a snakeskin, reinventing himself as the seemingly nihilistic rock-and-roll poet who was to help establish the foundation for the emerging 60's counter-culture. However, this too was largely an act, and by the time the world was catching up with him, he had moved on again. At the very peak of the late 1960's cultural revolution in America, when rebellious post-adolescents were reaching out to him as a kind of Messiah, Dylan turned his back again and went conventional, retreating to a reclusive, short-haired, family-oriented lifestyle with his wife Sara and the beginnings of a family that would eventually include five remarkably well-cared-for children. Sounes suggests that this was the least contrived period of Dylan's life and the happiest. However, it wasn't to endure either, and his loving, private relationship with Sara finally broke down in bitterness and divorce. Just as the 60's lost steam and the hippies were cutting their hair and getting jobs, Dylan - forever out of cycle - resumed his scruffy, intense, hip-hillbilly style and hit the road again. His conversion to a kind of fundamentalist Christianity in the late 1970's was the most startling of his metamorphoses, and one which befuddled fans will look to this book in vain for Sounes to shed much light on. The author doesn't disparage it, but doesn't appear to get it either, any more than the fans did. Moreover, he seems to lose touch with his subject to some degree from this point on in the book. But then one gets the sense that Dylan was losing touch with himself too, putting out a series of lackluster albums and abandoning himself to endless and apparently aimless roadtouring and womanizing, not really renouncing his religion so much as back-burning it because it was hurting his career. The biography tries to end on a high note by discussing Time Out of Mind, Dylan's latest release at the time of publication. Receiving critical aclaim, the album indeed displays revived sparks of his old genius, but anyone who has experienced the stark, death-haunted tone that pervades it can't be very cheered by this paradoxical show of vitality. One feels that Sounes is whistling beside the graveyard at the end of his book. I for one believe that the hype that has surrounded Dylan for most his career is justified, and that he will probably be remembered as one of the great artists of the late-twentieth century, whether his work cheers us up or not at this stage of life. While Sounes' book fails to reveal his elusive subject, it is probably the best biographical material about Bob Dylan that has appeared to date, and I highly recommend it.
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