Customer Reviews

Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan's Road from Minnesota to the World

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Excellent reading for the devotee, this set of essays is in the same league as,'You've Been with The Professors', which I'd also commend. The erudition and literary quality is such, that, like the aforementioned, the pertinence to their primary source may occasionally seem stretched. Whatever, these are well meditated pieces that offer a varied slant on the master manouverer, his sources, his influence and his expression. The pace is set by Greil Marcus's exploration of the significance of Hibbing High on the adolescent Bob, with especial attribution to his English teacher, Boniface Rolfzen. I was particularly attracted to Mick Cochrane's essay on Theme time radio, Alex Lubert's musings on,'Disabling', C P Lee's on the infamous '66 UK tour, the Thomas Crow investigation of the Andy Warhol connexions, and David Yaffe's tracing of the mature Bob which whets my appetite for his forthcoming tome, The Many Roads of Bob Dylan.

Excellent and full of details and perspectives not found in other treatises about Dylan. The chapter about Hibbing and the Iron Range is especially poignant as are the fascinating analyses of Dylan's poetry and ever evolving relationship with his times and contemporaries. Highly recommended for those of us who grew up to a Dylan soundtrack.

I read this in the Kindle edition, and with a few exceptions I found it to be over-intellectualized nonsense, making questionable interpretations of Bob Dylan's music and presenting them as authoritative. Some of the writing was literally painful to wade through, and there were some major errors (e.g., in the intro: Woodstock was in 1967?) Moreover, some of the essays - such as Griel Marcus's were mildly informative, but very short and never really made their analytical points satisfactorily. And defending Dylan's recent and flagrant plagiarism is indefensible. The "old folks home in the college" indeed! Post-modernist twaddle. Skip it.