In Dylan Town

For fifty years, the music, words, story, and fans of Bob Dylan have fascinated David Gaines. As a son, a husband, a father, a teacher, and a passionate lover of the literary in all its guises, he has pursued the poetic fusion of knowledge and emotion all his life. More often than not, Dylan’s lyrics and music have expressed that fusion for him, and so he has encouraged others to acknowledge the musician or writer or painter or director or actor or athlete who matters deeply (perhaps a bit mysteriously) to them, and to deploy that enigmatic passion in service of self-knowledge and social connection. After all, one of the central reasons to be a fan is to compare notes, explore mysteries, and riff with fellow fans in a community of exploration. Gaines’s personal journey toward creating such communities of passionate knowledge encompasses his own coming of age and marriages, fatherhood, and teaching. As a devoted fan who is also a professor of American literature, questions about teaching and learning are central to his experience. When asked, “Why Dylan?” he says, “He’s the writer I care about the most. He’s been the way into the best and longest running conversations I have ever had.” Talking with students, exchanging Dylan trivia with fellow fans, or cheering on fan-musicians doing Dylan covers during the Dylan Days festival, Gaines shows that, for many people, being a fan of popular culture couples serious critical and creative engagement with heartfelt commitment. Here, largely unheralded, the ideal of liberal education is realized every day.

Think "Woodstock" and the mind turns to the seminal 1969 festival that crowned a seismic decade of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. But the town of Woodstock, New York, the original planned venue of the concert, is located over 60 miles from the site to which the fabled half a million flocked. Long before the landmark music festival usurped the name, Woodstock-the tiny Catskills town where Bob Dylan holed up after his infamous 1966 motorcycle accident-was already a key location in the '60s rock landscape. In Small Town Talk, Barney Hoskyns re-creates Woodstock's community of brilliant dysfunctional musicians, scheming dealers, and opportunistic hippie capitalists drawn to the area by Dylan and his sidekicks from the Band. Central to the book's narrative is the broodingly powerful presence of Albert Grossman, manager of Dylan, the Band, Janis Joplin, Paul Butterfield, and Todd Rundgren-and the Big Daddy of a personal fiefdom in Bearsville that encompassed studios, restaurants, and his own record label. Intertwined in the story are the Woodstock experiences and associations of artists as diverse as Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Tim Hardin, Karen Dalton, and Bobby Charles (whose immortal song-portrait of Woodstock gives the book its title). Drawing on numerous first-hand interviews with the remaining key players in the scene-and on the period when he lived there himself in the 1990s-Hoskyns has produced an East Coast companion to his bestselling L.A. canyon classic Hotel California. This is a richly absorbing study of a vital music scene in a revolutionary time and place.

Through an analysis of the artist figures in Thomas's early experimental prose, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Adventures in the Skin Trade, and Under Milk Wood, Mayer illustrates that he was continually exploring and re-evaluating his vocation, the nature of his chosen medium, and the world itself. Mayer links Thomas's prose works to his poetry through the blending of lyric and narrative strategies. As well, she examines Thomas's self-conscious concerns about his relationship to his modernist contemporaries. Mayer goes beyond the traditional New Critical approaches that dominate Thomas scholarship and uses contemporary critical theory to offer new insights into the complexity and ambiguity of a major twentieth-century writer.

Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan's life in music is revisited by his foremost interpreter -- weaving individual moods and moments into a brilliant history of their changing times. The book begins in Berkeley in 1968, and ends with a piece on Dylan's show at the University of Minnesota -- his very first appearance at his alma mater -- on election night 2008. In between are moments of euphoric discovery: From Marcus's liner notes for the 1967 Basement Tapes (pop music's most famous bootlegged archives) to his exploration of Dylan's reimagining of the American experience in the 1997 Time Out of Mind. And rejection; Marcus's Rolling Stone piece on Dylan's album Self Portrait -- often called the most famous record review ever written -- began with "What is this shit?" and led to his departure from the magazine for five years. Marcus follows not only recordings but performances, books, movies, and all manner of highways and byways in which Bob Dylan has made himself felt in our culture. Together the dozens of pieces collected here comprise a portrait of how, throughout his career, Bob Dylan has drawn upon and reinvented the landscape of traditional American song, its myths and choruses, heroes and villains. They are the result of a more than forty-year engagement between an unparalleled singer and a uniquely acute listener.

“The girl with Bob Dylan on the cover of Freewheelin’ broke a forty-five-year silence with this affectionate and dignified recalling of a relationship doomed by Dylan’s growing fame.” –UNCUT magazine Suze Rotolo chronicles her coming of age in Greenwich Village during the 1960s and the early days of the folk music explosion, when Bob Dylan was finding his voice and she was his muse. A shy girl from Queens, Suze was the daughter of Italian working-class Communists, growing up at the dawn of the Cold War. It was the age of McCarthy and Suze was an outsider in her neighborhood and at school. She found solace in poetry, art, and music—and in Greenwich Village, where she encountered like-minded and politically active friends. One hot July day in 1961, Suze met Bob Dylan, then a rising musician, at a concert at Riverside Church. She was seventeen, he was twenty; they were both vibrant, curious, and inseparable. During the years they were together, Dylan transformed from an obscure folk singer into an uneasy spokesperson for a generation. A Freewheelin’ Time is a hopeful, intimate memoir of a vital movement at its most creative. It captures the excitement of youth, the heartbreak of young love, and the struggles for a brighter future in a time when everything seemed possible.

The acclaimed biography—now updated and revised. “Many writers have tried to probe [Dylan’s] life, but never has it been done so well, so captivatingly” (The Boston Globe). Howard Sounes’s Down the Highway broke news about Dylan’s fiercely guarded personal life and set the standard as the most comprehensive and riveting biography on Bob Dylan. Now this edition continues to document the iconic songwriter’s life through new interviews and reporting, covering the release of Dylan’s first #1 album since the seventies, recognition from the Pulitzer Prize jury for his influence on popular culture, and the publication of his bestselling memoir, giving full appreciation to his artistic achievements and profound significance. Candid and refreshing, Down the Highway is a sincere tribute to Dylan’s seminal place in postwar American cultural history, and remains an essential book for the millions of people who have enjoyed Dylan’s music over the years. “Irresistible . . . Finally puts Dylan the human being in the rocket’s red glare.” —Detroit Free Press

A must have travel and music guide to Bob Dylan's favourite New York city haunts. Bob Dylan in the Big Apple will take you on a journey that Dylan took through the streets of New York in the early 1960s, looking at the locations, including the less trodden Dylan trails, the characters he befriended as well as revealing stories that formed the backdrop to his life and work. We follow in his early footsteps into the Cafe Wha? as well as, more recently, the Beacon Theatre. Along the way we take in fighting on Elizabeth Street, the 'crummy' hotel, the tavern 'on the corner of Armageddon Street' and the Tuscarora Indian Reservation and more. We also take the Rolling Tyre Walk as well as the Talkin' Washington Park Square picnic. With photographs and a map of the locations and wonderful stories this is a must for any Dylan enthusiast. 'K G Miles has captured the vibrant spirit of Bobby's Big Apple career as well as looking into the nooks and crannies of the people, places and scenes of NYC. As one who was privileged to be there in those halcyon days I could not be more pleased. It's a great read.' John Winn, singer, songwriter and old troubadour 'This is your travel guide through time and space to the favorite haunts of the most celebrated folkie on planet earth. There is something magical about walking in the footsteps of our musical heroes. Whether it's the Beatles in Liverpool, Leonard Cohen in Hydra or Bob Dylan in New York City, these pilgrimages can be vastly more rewarding than any planned vacation. Refreshingly non-academic, this book begins and ends at the Beacon Theatre, where Dylanophiles from around the world converge for a glimpse of the enigma that is Bob Dylan.' Kevin Odegard, musician, 'Blood on The Tracks'

An analysis of Bob Dylan fandom shares insights into the music artist's influential role in American culture, contrasting the activities of particularly devout fans against Dylan's intensely private nature. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Big One.