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Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan

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I'm 53 years old with three kids, a job, and a life-long obsession with Bob Dylan that isn't going away. To this day, his best songs make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. But who is this guy? And where does such extraordinary music come from? Perhaps recognizing that there are never really answers to questions like these, Howard Sounes largely sidesteps them in this excellent new biography, which doesn't pretend to reveal very much about Dylan's mind or the creative wellspring for his work. What the book does succeed at giving us is a thoroughly professional, well-researched and clearly written account of the man's life. Characteristically, Dylan refused to be interviewed, as did, apparently, his immediate family members. However, Mr. Sounes obtained a wealth of material from an array of other people, including childhood and adult friends, lovers, band members, business associates, observers, hangers-on, and the many famous and non-so-famous musicians and singers who have known and worked with Dylan over the course of four decades. Sounes even took in perspectives from individuals referenced in Dylan's songs, like William Zantzinger - the real-life and still-living villain from The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll - and Carla Rotolo, the stigmatized "parasite sister" from Ballad in Plain D. Because he's made a career of fleeing the constraints of identity, Dylan is a resistant subject for biography. Born into a nurturing middle-class Jewish family in small-town Minnesota, Dylan (then Bob Zimmerman), came of age and, following a short time at college, took to the road, and to disguise his embarrassingly conventional roots, invented outlandish myths about himself as a singing orphan hobo. Personally shy, but far less innocent than he appeared, he in fact had an overpowering ambition and confidence in his talent. Heading straight for New York City - the right place at the right time - he quickly "made it" as the angst-ridden folk and social-protest singer we know from his early recordings. He had no sooner achieved fame in this persona than he shed it like a snakeskin, reinventing himself as the seemingly nihilistic rock-and-roll poet who was to help establish the foundation for the emerging 60's counter-culture. However, this too was largely an act, and by the time the world was catching up with him, he had moved on again. At the very peak of the late 1960's cultural revolution in America, when rebellious post-adolescents were reaching out to him as a kind of Messiah, Dylan turned his back again and went conventional, retreating to a reclusive, short-haired, family-oriented lifestyle with his wife Sara and the beginnings of a family that would eventually include five remarkably well-cared-for children. Sounes suggests that this was the least contrived period of Dylan's life and the happiest. However, it wasn't to endure either, and his loving, private relationship with Sara finally broke down in bitterness and divorce. Just as the 60's lost steam and the hippies were cutting their hair and getting jobs, Dylan - forever out of cycle - resumed his scruffy, intense, hip-hillbilly style and hit the road again. His conversion to a kind of fundamentalist Christianity in the late 1970's was the most startling of his metamorphoses, and one which befuddled fans will look to this book in vain for Sounes to shed much light on. The author doesn't disparage it, but doesn't appear to get it either, any more than the fans did. Moreover, he seems to lose touch with his subject to some degree from this point on in the book. But then one gets the sense that Dylan was losing touch with himself too, putting out a series of lackluster albums and abandoning himself to endless and apparently aimless roadtouring and womanizing, not really renouncing his religion so much as back-burning it because it was hurting his career. The biography tries to end on a high note by discussing Time Out of Mind, Dylan's latest release at the time of publication. Receiving critical aclaim, the album indeed displays revived sparks of his old genius, but anyone who has experienced the stark, death-haunted tone that pervades it can't be very cheered by this paradoxical show of vitality. One feels that Sounes is whistling beside the graveyard at the end of his book. I for one believe that the hype that has surrounded Dylan for most his career is justified, and that he will probably be remembered as one of the great artists of the late-twentieth century, whether his work cheers us up or not at this stage of life. While Sounes' book fails to reveal his elusive subject, it is by far the best biographical material about Bob Dylan that has appeared to date, and I recommend it.

This one is definitely worth buying for anyone with a serious interest in Dylan's life and music. Sounes is clearly an admirer of Dylan's art, but as other reviewers have noted, not an obsessed Dylanologist. I have read all of the Dylan bios, and this one is far and away the best for those who want to know the man and his music, but aren't obsessed with picking apart every line of his songs (or his garbage).

Sounes talked to everyone who would talk (and he must either be the world's nicest guy or the most persistent, because almost everyone talked except Dylan himself and his former wife Sara). He also used documentary evidence to pin down things like marriages, real estate transactions, etc. The portrait of Dylan that emerges is less shrouded in mystery, but no less amazing. We get very clear-headed assessments of controversies like the motorcycle accident and also a good deal of info about how Dylan's music was recorded. Sounes also does a good job of placing the various characters in Dylan's life in perspective, from the members of the Band to the Beat poets to his NYC cronies from the folk scene.

Very nicely done, all of it. I wondered how Sounes would handle Dylan's later years, which have consisted of comebacks and long fallow periods. Basically, he handles it like a real biographer -- he tells the whole tale, up to now. The portrait of Dylan that emerges is not unlike that of many other fanatically driven artists -- eccentric, sometimes quite nasty to friends, family and fellow musicians, but above all dedicated to his art.

Exactly when and where did Bob first drop ...? What did Bob think of Sgt. Pepper when he first heard it? What did Jerry Lee Lewis say to Bob when Bob tried to record a track with him? What was Bob's reaction to John Lennon's murder? When & where did Bob marry his 2nd wife, after she bore him his 6th kid? Did Bob really try to join the Dead as a full-time member after being depressed about his career? Is the cost of Bob's second divorce in the early 90s the real reason for the Never-Ending-Tour? What was the main criteria for the flea-bag motels Bob stayed in during the Never-Ending-Tour? Much, much more in this great new book out by Howard Sounes, who apparently spent years getting people to talk. Sure, if you're a Dylan freak (the kind that used to break into his house in Woodstock in the late 60s... you've read it all before. But this book should appeal to everyone, and I guarantee there are things in here you've never heard before. And it's current through the end of 2000, including the death & funeral of Bob's mother. Check it out.

There are many biographies of Bob Dylan as well as a number of analyses of his music. None really do a complete job of capturing the man, not even Dylan's own memoir "Chronicles-Volume One." Some people are full-fledged members of the cult of Dylan. They attach extreme significance to every word uttered from his mouth. Every action he takes is fraught with meaning. I don't feel this way but I do appreciate the greatness of his music and his incredible importance to the development of rock music as we know it today.

Down the Highway is an interesting book filled with vital information. I learned many things I did not know before, things Dylan simply will not talk about. Indeed, he did not speak to the author of this book. The book is chock full of information on Dylan's formative years, his early girl friends from Minnesota, Echo Halstrom and Bonnie Beecher, his relationship with his parents and brother and his relationships throughout life. I also learned a good deal about Dylan's recent years. One thing that is fairly neglected, considering who he is, is the music. The book concentrates on his life and not on his songs. This is understandable since the book is lengthy as it is. There are other sources to examine the songs in detail.

But all the seminal events are here, the dramatic break with the folk community in 1965, the mysterious motorcycle relationship in 1967, the retreat to Woodstock and recording with the Band, the reclaiming of greatness with "Blood on the Tracks", the breakup of his marriage to Sara, the "born again" phase and on and on. The book does not whitewash his considerable flaws including his tendency to treat people around him like dirt. His treatment of Joan Baez, throughout, is particularly shabby. His womanizing ways are also paramount. It is unfortunate that Dylan himself, and a number of the people closest to him, did not cooperate and give interviews for this book. Nevertheless, hundreds of men and women, many who knew Dylan well and many who were present at the seminal events depicted, did cooperate. This makes for an interesting and engaging book and there are surely some facts revealed, such as Dylan's secret second marriage and the adult lives of his children that many will not be aware of. Therefore, I recommend it. For those interested specifically in Dylan's music, there are other sources.

Don't read this book if you want to think Dylan's perfect.

It's a great book, engrossing and thorough, but if you want to read about the perfect mythical Bob, it's not the one you want, babe, it's not the one you need. Check out Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home" documentary. Or buy any one of the other books by people who were too star-struck or lazy to look behind Dylan's enigmatic masks.

There's certainly enough in Dylan's career, particularly his early years, to justify mindlessly glowing accolades. Musicians usually reach their peak younger than most people, but Dylan's rise was so rapid that even the word "meteoric" doesn't quite do it justice. Like some harmonica-playing Alexander the Great, he had conquered the known world by the age of 25, redefining what was possible, expanding the horizons of all who traveled with him. To his great credit, though, it wasn't all downhill from there; rather, his career richocheted off in a variety of unpredictable directions.

Dylan had a unique talent for zigging when everyone else zagged, and Sounes deftly follows his path through all those twists and turns. When music was ruled by bubble-gum pop, Dylan dared to write about social justice and nuclear holocaust. Folkies then rode his coattails to super-stardom, but by the time they got there, Dylan had moved on again, to introspective and personal songwriting. In the late 60s, when hippies flocked to his neck of the Woodstock for three days of peace and free love, he was a rifle-toting property-owner. In the late 70s, when the music industry found itself awash in cocaine, easy money, and easier women, Dylan became a born-again Christian.

Perhaps the book's greatest strength is that it makes these various perplexing metamorphoses sound not capricious but almost inevitable. Rather than sticking to the relatively straightforward upward trajectory he followed in the early-to-mid Sixties, Sounes takes an honest look at Dylan's dozen (or so) dark highways--the late-Sixties withdrawal from the public eye, the messy relationships, the messy divorces, the conversion to Christianity, the mellowing of that Christianity over time, the long struggle with alcoholism.

Unfortunately, Bob Dylan didn't co-operate with Sounes. I say unfortunately not because I wonder what information might be missing--I say it because the book sometimes takes a breathless, tabloid-ish, you-are-reading-this-for-the-first-time-right-here, me-against-Bob tone. Sounes is evidently proud of his investigative skills, but he's sometimes so busy patting himself on the back that he gets in the way of his own narrative. Dylan's epic battle with manager Albert Grossman, for instance, could have been a compelling, interesting, and surprising turn of events, but like Reuben Carter on a bad day, Sounes telegraphs his punches, vastly diminishing their impact by letting the reader know what's coming.

Still, the book is worth reading, and if you don't mind finding out Bob Dylan has a dark side, you'll be intrigued by Sounes' chronicle of it here. There are better tell-all biographies of Sixties rock icons--James McDonough's Neil Young book "Shakey" was, for my money, more illuminating--but I don't know if there's a better one about Dylan.

Well, it seems to me this guy has done something special. First off the bat, you've gotta remember how much has been written about Dylan over the years - I mean a stack of books, countless articles, TV profiles, the whole deal. So to come up with something new would be real tough. Yet this book is full of new info - I mean every chapter, every paragraph almost. I've heard the author (a limey) criticized because some of this new info is of a personal nature - about Dylan's girlfriends, secret wife and all - but having read the thing I don't get any feeling of sleaziness or tabloid-writing. The fact is this is just great new stuff, stuff that tells us about what the man is like off the stage. To me there are two Dylans - two sides to every artist, right - the guy up on stage performing and the guy off stage. Well, we haven't known a whole lot about the off-stage guy because he is so famously enigmatic, such a mystery man. That's why he's interesting surely, and that's why I felt intrigued to know more. I like a biography that goes behind the scenes - that tells me how the musician/ writer/ painter/ movie actor lives off camera. The "Life," that's what a want. Not just "the work." Because everybody's biography is comprised of the work and the life. How could you expect to understand Picasso, for instance, without knowing about the women he used for inspiration. I mean, these things go hand in glove. There's nothin worse than reading a bio that just goes from album to album to show to album, dum de dar de dar. This bio of Dylan gives you all the stuff about the work, sure, all the albums and all, but then you go behind and find out what sort of father he is to his kids (great), what sort of boyfriend he is to his gal-pals (that's a whole story), how much dough he's stacked up. And a lot of it goes to the heart of the man - not just the love life stuff, which as I say is never sensational, just factual, but also the business stuff - the details of the agreements with Albert Grossman, the legal battle with Victor Maimudes, the wrangles with CBS over the years. This is all fascinating stuff and you come away feeling you understand the guy much more than you did. Gee, you can't ask for more than that.

As to the writing of this book, this author was a reporter as I understand it, and I've read his book about Bukowski. To me, both read much the same - they are written in this terse, fact-based style, short-sentences, not much comment. Some folks might not like that. Some folks seem to like a lot of flowery language, comment and opinion - nothing wrong with that if that's your taste. I must say, it's not mine. I already know pretty much what I think about the songs - I don't need some guy telling me what he thinks. I expect a biographer to have gone out and discovered stuff I didn't know - facts I didn't know. I can discover comment about Dylan by walking down to the corner bar at 10.:30 and buying the first guy I see a beer. I mean, opinion comes pretty cheap in this world. Switch on CNN and see what I mean. This book, though fairly hefty, is not a huge lump of opinion. It is economic, pared down, terse, sharp. You can see that he cut everything out that was not essential. Even the way it's arranged - just ten chapters. The first five up to the motorcycle smash and the next five from then to now, shows how he has kept things neat and tidy. I read another Dylan book where there seemed to be like 40 or more chapters. I mean, it was a mess. This is orderly. And the writing is fine, in that terse, reporter's style. Only at times does he let himself go a bit and give you a flight of description, and when he does that's a good change of pace. For example, those pages about the 2000 tour, or whenever it was, the last bit in the book, is terrific. So is the opening chapter with the 30th Anniversary show. Real descriptive and fun. Funny, too, by the way - which Bob is himself - and a lot of folks forget. I chuckled a lot reading this. Some nice dry limey humor in here. I mean, the thing is real entertaining, and gives you a feel for what it is like to see the great man on stage.

There's been a heap of books about Dylan and I'm sure there will be many more. I don't know what the best of them is. Words like definitive and exhaustive are just for dumbo reviewers. There ain't nothing definitive until we are all dead and gone. Everybody with a brain knows that, surely. But this has to be one of the best and one of the most unusual - an important book, fresh, sharply written, and coming from an outsider who was never one of the well-known Dylanologist crowd. Just a journalist/ author doing a job. And a fine job it is, by my way of thinking. Something special indeed.

I enjoyed reading "Down the Highway" not because it is a well-written book (it isn't) and not because Howard Sounes has any insights into the music of Bob Dylan (he doesn't). I enjoyed the book because this is the first biography of the man that gives the reader a feel for what it's like being Bob Dylan on a day-to-day, year-to-year basis. The three years of research that went into the biography focused more on "digging the dirt" on Dylan rather than Clinton Heylin's (much better executed) book "Behind the Shades." That book focuses on Bob Dylan's performance art (in the studio or live) in a very thorough yet opinionated manner.

There's a lot of new information in Sounes's book, like Dylan's second marriage and love child, his illness, his finances, court cases, his various residences, relationships, family, etc. This is all very fascinating stuff to learn about and appeals to the side of me that leafs through the tabloids when I'm in line at the grocery store. On the other hand, the book is written in a stilted, un-engaging style that has me guessing that English is not Howard Sounes's first language. He has an annoying way of analyzing Dylan's songs by paraphrasing them. Here's an example concerning the song "Meet Me in the Morning" from "Blood on the Tracks": "Bob sang of the sun `sinking like a ship' and his voice brimmed with emotion as he wailed that this was just like his heart when he kissed his lover's lips." (p. 283). Contrast that with Clinton Heylin's peremptory but outstanding musical commentary from his various books and it comes up pretty lame, indeed.

The enigmatic, mysterious Bob Dylan: who can really know this guy? Sounes does an excellent job of fleshing out the man behind the music, probably about as good a job as anyone could have done. He balances the personal life of Bob (at least what can be known of his personal life) with his artistic life, and presents a full-bodied, complete picture of the man and the legend. Dylan is a man of contradictions (a born-again Christian who remained sexually promiscuous, a person who would treat people insensitively and then feel badly about it but not enough to apologize, a protest singer who was reluctant to get involved in causes), but that's what makes him Dylan. Although familiar with Dylan's music over the years, plus reading many articles and interviews with him, this is the first book-length biography I have read about him, so I may not have the perspective that others do who have compared this bio to others and have found it lacking, but speaking for myself, I found it fascinating.

Some hundred years from now someone will sit down and make a life out of a 20 volume biography of Dylan. Not that he really deserves 20 volumes, but given his timing, talent & able manipulation of the culture, it's inevitable. If he deserves it, it's because his audience was always willing to be manipulated by his talent. If he doesn't deserve it, it's because he deserves an audience more willing to live up to his lifestyle: live what you are.

Want to praise the Lord? Go to church. Want to read a great book? Pick up Moby Dick, Ulysses, whatever flips your folio. Want to get some interesting info on the Life & Times of RAZ? This is a human place to start: clear, crisp, as unceremoniously kempt as Bobby was unwashed in the early days. Cherry picked, maybe, & not particularly pretty -- but you should have known that. This picks out the details. Not a Great Lot Of Turgid Prose & Big Heavy Ideas, just the players, the stage & how it all went down to the best of their rememberies. It's history in dusty boots of Spanish vinyl. Face it, some part of Bobby boy is humbug & isn't trying to figure out which part a lot of the fun?

Sounes goes some way to outlining the Private Bob, & does so with no apparent bones to pick (unless you believe Great Artists are Immaculate & their detractors doomed to perdition). Read some of the others too, while waiting for the full, authorized 20 volume edition. But this one should be on your short list. Maybe it's damning with faint praise, but there're no major disasters here & it has a fairly light touch with what could easily have been overwrought.

o/~ "Well, I'll be damned, Here comes your ghost again. But that's not unusual. It's just that the moon is full and you happened to call. ... Hearing a voice I'd known a couple of light years ago, heading straight for a fall ... Eyes bluer than robins' eggs ... Where are you calling from? A booth in the Midwest. ... I bought you some cufflinks. ... Well, you burst on the scene already a legend, the unwashed phenomenon, the original vagabond. ... Smiling out the window of that crummy hotel over Washington Square. ...You were so good with words and keeping things vague. " o/~ Joan Baez/Diamonds & Rust

If you didn't "get" any of Joan's references in her song about her relationship with Dylan, or if any of the following is "news to you" then I think you will enjoy "Down the Highway." The information in Sounes' book is very interesting, the writing style is concise and does not get in the way of the tale.

"Bob had been asked to contribute a song to [the movie!] "Midnight Cowboy." He wrote "Lay Lady Lay" but did not deliver it in time and director John Schlesinger instead used Fred Neil's song "Everybody's Talkin'." However, "Lay Lady Lay" became the standout track on Bob's next album, "Nashville Skyline," which was recorded in Nashville in February 1969. The distinctive sound of "Lay Lady Lay" was created partly by chance after drummer Kenny Buttrey asked Bob what he heard in his head for the drum part. "Bongos," Bob replied, with a faraway look in his eye. Buttrey asked producer Bob Johnson, and received the equally strange suggestion that he play cow bell. Determined to prove how nonsensical the suggestions were, Buttrey found a beat-up cow bell and pair of bongos that looked like a souvenir from Tijuana, the skin attached with thumbtacks. (He had to run a cigarette lighter under the skin to tighten it and get a tone.) The young Kris Kristofferson was working as a janitor at the studio and Buttrey asked Kristofferson to hold the !bongos and cow bell next to his drum kit during the take. Without having worked out any drum part, the drummer got the signal they were going to record and he improvised a distinctive tick-tock introduction on bongo and cow bell that blended perfectly with the shimmer of organ and Pete Drake's steel guitar. Bob stepped up to the microphone and delivered the seductive lyric in one take." (p.237-238)

"Urban" is not an accurate description of Northern Mn., from whence Bob Dylan spang. "Rural Legend" up here is that local product Bobby Zimmerman wrote "Positively 4th Street" about his return to a Hibbing High School Reunion. Not so, according to Sounes' well researched and presented book. Who *is* it about? Read it and see! If you are interested but not immersed in Bob Dylan, the man and the "unwashed phenomenon," this is a good read.