Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan Book

Down the Highway delves into the life of Bob Dylan, one of popular music's enduring legends. In the course of his 40-year career he has sold more than 56 million records, has performed countless live gigs, has long been regarded as the preeminent songwriter of his time and yet he is still an enigma. Despite dragging his increasingly raddled body through a gigging schedule that would exhaust a musician a third his age, he remains notoriously reclusive. And to be frank, no-one reading Down the Highway will know him that much better by the end. The Bob Dylan rockography business has been a hugely profitable industry over the years and Howard Sounes' book is a worthy addition. It quotes chapter and verse on all the important--and unimportant--details of Dylan's life from his early days as poet/folk troubadour through his switch to electric guitar, to drugs, films and superstardom. The research is exhaustive and much of it is new: Sounes has tried to chat to everyone who was even tangentally involved in Dylan's career and goes into depth about his secret marriage to backing singer Carolyn Dennis in 1986. But what the book amounts to is an extraordinary collection of facts about the singer, but only a vague sense of what makes him tick. Dylan has always been a man who has preferred to let his music and lyrics do the talking; either Dylan refused permission or demanded an exorbitant sum to reprint them, but the absence of any lyrics leaves a noticeable hole in the text for the less knowledgeable or fanatical reader. It will be less of a problem, though, for the diehard Dylan fans, and for them Sounes' biography will be a crucial must-have buy. For the rest of us, it will be a book too far. --John CraceRead More