Once Upon a Time
The Lives of Bob Dylan
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
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 been fully 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 context: musical, historical, literary, political and personal.
In this acclaimed book, full of new insights into the legendary singer, his songs, his life and his era, the artist who invented himself in order to reinvent America is uncovered. Once Upon a Time is a biographical study of a personality that has splintered and reformed, time after time, in a country forever struggling to understand itself. Dylan has become the puzzle that illuminates. Here, in the first part of a major two-volume work, the puzzle is explained.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biographer Bell (Dreams of Exile) meanders tediously through Dylan's life, from his early days in Hibbing, Minn., up through the early 1970s. Bell piles details about one well-known episode after another the infamous electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965; the reception of his 1969 "country" album, Nashville Skyline; his experiences in Greenwich Village in the early '60s in this bloated and repetitive retelling of the ways that Dylan continued to reinvent himself and his music over the years. Bell asks the obvious question: "What is so special about Dylan?" and answers that "he is a moral artist and a rowdy artist, a spiritual writer and a sexual writer... an improviser and a craftsman.... Dylan is a public artist who keeps himself to himself." Nevertheless, Bell does helpfully point out that Dylan's early music owes as much to Robert Johnson and the blues as it does to Woody Guthrie. Yet, scores of other more eloquently written Dylan biographies lead us fruitfully through the singer's back pages
