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The Double Life of Bob Dylan: A Restless, Hungry Feeling, 1941-1966
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About This Book
From the world's leading authority on Bob Dylan comes the definitive biography that promises to transform our understanding of the man and musician—thanks to early access to Dylan's never-before-studied archives. In 2016 Bob Dylan sold his personal archive to the George Kaiser Foundation in Tulsa, Oklahoma, reportedly for $22 million. As the boxes started to arrive, the Foundation asked Clinton Heylin—author of the acclaimed Bob Behind the Shades and 'perhaps the world's authority on all things Dylan' ( Rolling Stone )—to assess the material they had been given. What he found in Tulsa—as well as what he gleaned from other papers he had recently been given access to by Sony and the Dylan office—so changed his understanding of the artist, especially of his creative process, that he became convinced that a whole new biography was needed. It turns out that much of what previous biographers—Dylan himself included—have said is wrong. With fresh and revealing information on every page A Restless, Hungry Feeling tells the story of Dylan's meteoric rise to his arrival in early 1961 in New York, where he is embraced by the folk scene; his elevation to spokesman of a generation whose protest songs provide the soundtrack for the burgeoning Civil Rights movement; his alleged betrayal when he 'goes electric' at Newport in 1965; his subsequent controversial world tour with a rock 'n' roll band; and the recording of his three undisputed electric Bringing it All Back Home , Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde . At the peak of his fame in July 1966 he reportedly crashes his motorbike in Woodstock, upstate New York, and disappears from public view. When he re-emerges, he looks different, his voice sounds different, his songs are different. Clinton Heylin's meticulously researched, all-encompassing and consistently revelatory account of these fascinating early years is the closest we will ever get to a definitive life of an artist who has been the lodestar of popular culture for six decades.
Reviews
"Impressively researched, this deep look at Dylan's early career and initial stardom is a decidedly uneven but enjoyable ride."
"If anyone is entitled to write this exhaustive biography, it's the man who was described by Rolling Stone in 2016 as 'perhaps the world's authority on all things Dylan.' And if he is as jaw-droppingly good at his job as his subject is at music, Heylin can also be just as prickly."
"Dylan remains an enigmatic figure."
"A pervading sense of mean-spiritedness is never far from these pages."
"The tone jumps from lofty to faux hip: people are forever penning this and opining that, while Dylan himself is described as a 'young tyke' twice in the space of two pages."
"But even after countless Dylan biographies—two of the best of them by Heylin himself—in A Restless, Hungry Feeling, the journey through Dylan's back pages to these familiar moments reads like a story untold."
"Full of dizzying amounts of detail and plentiful anecdotes, the result is an exhaustively meticulous but thoroughly entertaining account of the early to middle years of the elusive Mr."
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