In May 2001 Bob Dylan will be sixty years old. Ten years ago, Clinton Heylin published his groundbreaking biography of the man. Behind the Shades, which The New Yorker recently singled out as "the most readable and reliable" of all Dylan biographies.
This new, updated version has been completely rewritten from the bottom up, is significantly enlarged, and takes into account not only the last tumultuous decade of Dylan's life, but an additional decade of research by the author. The result is the definitive biography of the man many argue is the singular figure in twentieth-century popular culture.
Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited follows Dylan along one of the most extraordinary and daring paths ever taken by a performing artist:
his awkward childhood in Minnesota his arrival in New York and rise as the unwitting leader of a political folk revolution his controversial move toward electric rock the spooky and uniquely American Basement Tapes his forays into country-western music the lost albums of the eighties his paranoia, addiction, and seclusion his reemergence after a near-fatal 1997 heart infection with the triple Grammy Award-winning Time Out of Mind the endless touring life the hundreds of timeless songs that have become a part of American and worldwide consciousnessMost biographies of Bob Dylan are mired in the sixties, but Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited is the only one that gives equal weight to all the extraordinary phases of Dylan's forty-year career.
As ever, Dylan remains an endlessly fascinating, mysterious, and obsessively private man. For years he has managed to keep much of his personal life a secret, and Clinton Heylin, Dylan's most prolific chronicler, remains the first biographer to give the world a true sense of what drives, inspires, influences, and shapes the man behind the music, the man behind the shades.
Clinton Heylin is recognized as the world's leading Bob Dylan scholar, as well as an authority on folk music and popular music in general. He is also known for his acclaimed studies of American punk (From the Velvets to the Voidoids); rock bootlegging (Bootleg!)--Record Collector's book of the year in 1994; and Dylan's studio recordings (Dylan: The Recording Sessions), nominated for the Ralph J. Gleason Award in 1996. He edited The Penguin Book of Rock and Roll Writing and is the general editor of Schirmer's Classic Rock Albums series. A native of Manchester, he now makes his home in Somerset, England.
