Bob Dylan Encyclopedia [Hardcover]

Michael Gray (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 15, 2006

The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia is one of the most wide-ranging, informed, entertaining, provocative, and compulsively readable books ever written about popular music. It's the culmination of over thirty years of dedicated research and scholarship by Michael Gray.

Inside these pages, you'll find a world of ideas, facts, and opinions. It's a world in which Baudelaire flows on from the Basement Tapes and A.S. Byatt looks out at the Byrds; in which Far from the Madding Crowd follows Ezekiel and Bob Geldof introduces Jean Genet; and in which Hank and William Carlos Williams stand side by side while J.R.R. Tolkien trails the Titanic. Most of all, of course, it's a world in which everyone and everything interconnects, in endlessly fascinating ways, with one of our greatest living artists: Bob Dylan.

Click here to read an interview with Michael Gray:

http://www.continuumbooks.com/news/details.aspx?NewsID=202&ImprintID=2&CountryID=2&ReturnType=2

"Michael Gray... probably Dylan's single most assiduous critic." — New York Review of Books

"Fans of Bob Dylan have a multitude of choices when it comes to biographies and retrospectives, but author Michael Gray outdistances them all with this voluminous collection of all things Dylan. ... Insightful and
entertaining, Gray's tome will broaden appreciation of the artist, his influences and his legacy."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"...has all you need to know, and more"--Richard Corliss, Time

"This is no mere catalog of facts, but a work of oceanic immersion. It has wit, opinion, style, and asks to be read, not just consulted." --Village Voice

"Deeply impressive...destined to be the most important Dylan book, bar none."--Gerry Smith, The Dylan Daily

"Utterly idiosyncratic." --Janet Maslin, New York Times

"Amazingly well-researched and surprisingly readable work." --Library Journal (starred review)

"Door-stopping detail."--Toronto Star

"Magnificent...won't just astonish readers with its detail about Dylan's work...contains so many insights and refutes so many myths about the rock 'n' roll era in general that it's invaluable as both a reference guide and a personality study."
--Nashville City Paper

"Comprehensive and up-to-date."
--Slate

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Fans of Bob Dylan have a multitude of choices when it comes to biographies and retrospectives, but author Michael Gray (Song & Dance Man #3: The Art of Bob Dylan) outdistances them all with this voluminous collection of all things Dylan. Over the course of 823 pages Gray considers everything from railroad imagery in Dylan's songs to his use of nursery rhymes, covering the topics thoughtfully and thoroughly. An entry on Rubin "Hurricane" Carter details the plight of the wrongfully jailed boxer immortalized in Dylan's song "Hurricane," including not only a biography of the fighter, but details of the song's recording and live performance. Even the briefest of encounters merits an entry, such as when Neil Diamond challenged Dylan to top him as he came offstage. Dylan's reply: "Waddaya want me to do-go onstage and fall asleep?" Gray's knowledge of his subject is seemingly boundless, yet he manages to maintain a critical eye and keep Dylan's work in perspective. "Unbelievable," a song off Dylan's Under the Red Sky album, is called "a hopeless piece of rockist sludge picked from the obscurity of the album and issued as a single. Almost any other track would have fared better ." While Gray is certainly a fan, it's this impartiality that fuels the book and gives it weight. Insightful and entertaining, Gray's tome will broaden appreciation of the artist, his influences and his legacy. 100 b&w illustrations.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Rock 'n' roll historian and Bob Dylan authority Gray offers a detailed volume featuring entries related to Dylan's life, artists who influenced him and were influenced by him, musical styles he created, and background stories of specific Dylan songs and recordings. Gray states in his preface that this work was prompted by friends and readers of his books (Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan, 1972, and its 900-page revised edition, 2000) who suggested that he present some of that material in a more "reference-based" way.

Most of the entries are sketches of musicians, although Gray includes actors, authors, and other nonmusicians. These entries provide brief biographies and then explain how the people are connected to Dylan: how they worked with him, influenced or were influenced by him, and which of his songs they performed or recorded. The 3-page entry for Johnny Cash, for example, tells of Cash's defense of Dylan when Columbia Records wanted to drop him, their first meeting at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village, and their duo performances and recordings.

Gray's opinions and editorializing are prevalent throughout. This makes for unique entries, such as Interviews and the myth of their rarity (in which he claims Dylan actually averaged one interview per month over 40 years) and Dylan being "bored" by his acoustic material 1965-66, the myth of. In fact, the entire book is written in a refreshingly relaxed manner, as befits a music critic and fan.

The volume comes with more than 100 black-and-white illustrations and an accompanying CD-ROM with a searchable PDF version of the text. Although there is another published Dylan reference work, Oliver Trager's Keys to the Rain: The Definitive Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (Billboard, 2004), the current volume is a valuable addition to academic and large public library collections, primarily because of Gray's knowledge and reputation as a Dylan expert. Steven York
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 800 pages
• Publisher: Continuum (June 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826469337
• ISBN-13: 978-0826469335
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 7.1 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #87,420 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #9 in Books > Education & Reference > Encyclopedias > Music

More About the Author

MICHAEL GRAY IS A WRITER, critic & broadcaster recognised as a world authority on the work of Bob Dylan and as an expert on rock'n'roll and blues history but also writes about travel and history and gives A-V-illustrated talks at arts festivals, theaters, colleges, museums and major libraries.

IN 2006 HIS BOOK "THE Bob Dylan Encyclopedia", a 750,000 word hardback, was published in New York and London. In 2007 came "Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell", published in hardback by Bloomsbury in the UK.

THE FORMER WON THE C.B. Oldman Prize for an outstanding work of scholarship and research, and the latter was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography. Both were published in paperback in the UK in 2008.

"HAND ME MY TRAVELIN' SHOES" is now published in hardback in North America by Chicago Review Press (September 2009).

HIS CAREER BEGAN AT YORK University (UK), where he studied under the brilliant, controversial critic F. R. Leavis, and as a student journalist interviewed the distinguished historian A. J. P. Taylor and the now-legendary American guitarist Jimi Hendrix.

HIS PIONEERING STUDY OF BOB Dylan's work, "Song & Dance Man", first published in the early 1970s in Britain, America and Japan, was the first critical study of this crucial contemporary cultural figure, and is now recognised as a classic in its field.

"THE ART OF BOB DYLAN" was published in the UK & USA in 1981-2, and a selection of pieces on Dylan, "All Across The Telegraph", co-edited by Gray and including work by Christopher Ricks, Aidan Day and David Pichaske, was published in 1987. In 1993 an early version of "Song & Dance Man III"'s major study of Bob Dylan's use of the blues was published in Germany and extracted in Berlin newspaper die Tageszeitung.

IN 1996 HE CO-AUTHORED "The Elvis Atlas: A Journey Through Elvis Presley's America", published in hardback in New York by Henry Holt.

THE MASSIVE THIRD EDITION OF his Bob Dylan study, "Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan" was published by Cassell Academic in London in 1999 and in the US by Continuum in March 2000. A reprint appeared in the US in April 2001, when Gray delivered talks at a number of US universities, and a fourth reprint was published in New York and London in 2002. A fifth reprint was issued in 2004, a sixth in 2006 and a seventh in 2008. It is still in print.

MICHAEL GRAY HAS also lectured for the Institute for Folklore Studies in Great Britain & Canada, the Northern Ireland Arts Council, at York & Exeter Universities and Goldsmiths College, London, and at conventions in Austria, Manchester & Leicester. In 2006 he was the closing speaker at the Dylan Congress at the Institut fur Sozialforschung, Goethe University, Frankfurt. Also in 2006 he spoke by invitation at the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland Ohio, gave a packed address at the New School in NYC and attracted the largest audience for any outside speaker in over two years when he spoke at the University of Texas at Austin. In March 2007 he gave the closing address at the University of Minnesota's three-day academic symposium on Dylan's work, at which other speakers included Christopher Ricks and Greil Marcus. In early 2009 he toured in the UK, Ireland, Canada and the USA, and in October 2009 is giving audio-visually illustrated talks and book signings as follows:

THURS OCT 8, 11am: Farmingdale College (SUNY), Long Island NY
THURS OCT 15, 7pm: Douglass Theatre, Macon GA
THURS OCT 22, 7pm: Georgia Southern University, Statesboro GA
FRI OCT 23, 7pm: Averitt Center For The Arts, Statesboro GA

WHEN NOT TRAVELING MICHAEL GRAY lives in France with his wife (food-writer Sarah Beattie).


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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The most amusing enyclopedia ever, June 26, 2006

By 

Masked and Anonymous (USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (Hardcover)

Michael Gray's Dylan encyclopedia is enormously impressive as a piece of research, but this is not simply an academic tome by any means. Gray's amusingly opinionated observations about songs, concerts, band members, etc. permeate each of the entries, making for an interesting read. One of the best parts of the book is that persons who have their own entries are listed in CAPS, so you can read one entry at random, find a reference to another Dylan-related figure or event that catches your eye, and skip right to the corresponding entry. Gray also includes entries for other Dylan biographers/scholars, including relatively obscure folks who've done interesting work and the legendary super-fan/scholar Olof of internet fame.

What really makes the book is that despite Gray's obviously obsessive interest in Dylan, he doesn't treat Dylan as a god or waste time defending in the indefensible among Dylan's enormous output as an artist. If anything, his judgments (such as his putdown of the 1983 album Infidels) strike me as excessively harsh, although he also takes pleasure in calling attention to his appreciation of records that he likes more than most, like Under the Red Sky.

In any case, this is a highly entertaining Dylan book. It'll be of much greater value of course to those who've read at least one of the standard biographies and are familiar with Dylan's career in some detail. But I would rank this book, and also the Cott book of Dylan interviews just out, in the VERY top shelf of Dylan-related books (and God knows there are a lot of those....)

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One Of The Very Best Bob Dylan Books, July 5, 2006

By 

Bornintime (The East Coast) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

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This review is from: Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (Hardcover)

There are very few people who could (or should) create something of this scope on Bob Dylan. Michael Gray has an obsessive knowledge of Dylan. Not only is the information here well researched, but you can tell that Gray has lived and breathed this stuff for the last 30 odd years. Gray ably walks the line between other Dylan fanatics like Paul Williams (who gushes about everything) and Clinton Heylin (an amazing writer who may complain too much). Michael Gray obviously has a love for Dylan's work but it doesn't stop him from criticizing when necessary. He has a writing style that is often humorous. What's great about this book is that it is user friendly. You can read a quick couple paragraphs on a particular Dylan album or musician who worked with Bob, or, if you're looking for something a little deeper, a 4 page essay perhaps on Dylan's use of nursery rhymes or the Blues. There's so much in here you'll be reading for months at least.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Opinionated and great fun, September 6, 2006

By 

Phil the Hypothetical "musiclover44" (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (Hardcover)

A little surprised to be given this for my birthday a few weeks ago (I'm not the world's most devoted Dylan fan, although I do find him fascinating), it took me several days before I even opened the book. Fully expecting it to be a dry compendium of facts and short biographies. It turns out this is, instead, a great mix of opinion, information, and critical judgment - not all of it polite, but always nicely written. The author, Michael Gray, takes on all-comers, and is often amusingly "politically incorrect" in his views on figures like Bono, Pete Seeger, Eric Clapton, and Dave Stewart. Gray is also generous in his praise for many, many others including Elvis, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, and dozens of old blues singers - so the book ends up painting a vivid picture of decades of American music and culture in general. My only complaint (so far) would be that the entries on Dylan songs and albums are uneven - but if you can cope with that, and with an author who has strong opinions, you'll find a great deal to love (and probably something to hate!) in this genuinely unusual and thoughtful book.