The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: New York, Chronicles Volume One, Rolling Stone (more...)

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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 736 pages
• Publisher: Continuum (June 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826469337
• ISBN-13: 978-0826469335
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.1 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #282,552 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Boston Tar Heel (Cambridge, MA United States) - See all my reviews

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....)

19 of 20 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

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.

12 of 13 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

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.