Music

THE DOUBLE LIFE OF BOB DYLAN

VOL 1: 1941–1966 A RESTLESS HUNGRY FEELING

CLINTON HEYLIN

Bodley Head, 528pp, £30

Just one of many publications tied to Dylan’s recent 80th birthday, this one garnered the most attention. ‘Heylin’s 13th book on Dylan,’ said Will Hodgkinson in the Times, is an ‘attempt to go further than any Dylanologist has gone before... an archaeological approach to digging up the facts beneath the legend’.

Heylin has always been good on Dylan’s mastery of ‘the art of covering his. Dylan was ‘constantly asking himself “Who am I?” – and deciding that the best way to be himself was to be any number of people squeezed together. Hence the mixture of rock and roll and folk music, with the Beat Poets, and with the art of saying one thing and meaning another. The point is not to make Dylan seem devious; it’s to prove that his gift has always depended on the amazingly deft magpie-assimilation of new ideas. He’s at once highly original and deeply in hock to the past.’