The data-spew about Bob Dylan never ends

When it comes to Bob Dylan, Clinton Heylin is The Man Who Knows Too Much. Since publishing his first biography, 1991’s Behind the Shades, he has become the world’s most committed Dylanologist, doggedly untwining the facts from the artist’s self-serving fictions. When he describes Dylan’s wildly unreliable 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One as ‘all a put-on… all a lie’, he has the receipts. As he never tires of pointing out, scholars and diehards are in his debt, but amassing data from sessions, setlists and now 130 boxes of Dylan’s formerly private papers is not the same as telling a good story. For someone innocently hoping to understand one of the cultural giants of the last century, the reading experience might resemble drinking from a firehose.

Heylin’s first volume left the 25-year-old Dylan recovering from his famous motorcycle accident in July 1966, at the height of his celebrity. The former folk prodigy had not just exploded the parameters of rock songwriting but become a reluctant prophet, besieged by questions and demands. He turned paranoid and peevish: harder to know and impossible to understand. ‘I noticed how obsequious people were when they were in Bob’s presence,’ his former mistress Faridi McFree tells Heylin. ‘Therefore, Bob never really trusted anyone.’ Perhaps this is why he seems somehow incomplete as a person. The great book editor Robert Gottlieb found the middle-aged Dylan to be ‘almost childlike – you felt he barely knew how to tie his shoes, let alone write a cheque’. Joni Mitchell suggests one reason why he hasn’t stopped touring since 1988: ‘He’d rather play music probably than do anything else. He doesn’t relate to people.’