Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Michael Gray's Dylan encyclopedia is enormously impressive as a piece of research, but this is not simply an academic tome by any means. Gray's amusingly opinionated observations about songs, concerts, band members, etc. permeate each of the entries, making for an interesting read. One of the best parts of the book is that persons who have their own entries are listed in CAPS, so you can read one entry at random, find a reference to another Dylan-related figure or event that catches your eye, and skip right to the corresponding entry. Gray also includes entries for other Dylan biographers/scholars, including relatively obscure folks who've done interesting work and the legendary super-fan/scholar Olof of internet fame.
What really makes the book is that despite Gray's obviously obsessive interest in Dylan, he doesn't treat Dylan as a god or waste time defending in the indefensible among Dylan's enormous output as an artist. If anything, his judgments (such as his putdown of the 1983 album Infidels) strike me as excessively harsh, although he also takes pleasure in calling attention to his appreciation of records that he likes more than most, like Under the Red Sky.
In any case, this is a highly entertaining Dylan book. It'll be of much greater value of course to those who've read at least one of the standard biographies and are familiar with Dylan's career in some detail. But I would rank this book, and also the Cott book of Dylan interviews just out, in the VERY top shelf of Dylan-related books (and God knows there are a lot of those....)
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