A real portrait of Dylan’s genius
Print Edition
THE second installment of Ian Bell’s two-part biography of Bob Dylan, “Time Out of Mind,” is a compelling, focused examination of the latter half of the elusive singer-songwriter’s life and career, starting with his acclaimed “Blood on the Tracks” album in 1975 and bringing readers close to the present day.
For Dylan’s many obsessive fans, who have been offered a wealth of analyses of this singular artist over the years, Bell delivers the goods. Chapters are heavy with engrossing and sometimes surprising details of Dylan’s most potent works and cringe-worthy missteps during this time, all told in the Scottish journalist’s sharp-sighted, biting style.
At its core, Bell’s ambitious work is more of an analysis of Dylan’s tangle of identities and creative visions than a standard biography of an arena-filling musician. He meticulously documents Dylan’s oeuvre since 1975, including a lengthy stretch of artistic decline spanning the 1980s when the singer-songwriter acclaimed as a dazzling, once-in-a-lifetime genius for much of his youth was mostly being written off as a contrary has-been by his 40s.
“Between the appearance of the hectoring evangelical Christian album ‘Saved’ in June of 1980 and 1997’s ‘Time Out of Mind’ the test was to find a good word to say about Dylan’s works, then to find more than a handful of people likely to give a damn,” he writes in a typically tough-minded passage.
But since the release of the Grammy-winning “Time Out of Mind,” Bell convincingly argues a resurgent Dylan has forged an unprecedented renaissance and “vindicated himself” after a lengthy slump. In Bell’s words: “He had defied age, time and, above all, every prowling, mocking ghost that had ever borne the name Bob Dylan.”
Since 1997, with albums like “Modern Times” in 2006 and “Tempest” in 2012, Bell claims that Dylan has created a body of work late in his life that could even match the dizzying achievements of the 1960s, his most revolutionary stretch. And Dylan pulled it off while contending with advancing age and a deteriorating voice that is a “magnificent ruin, a thing of wonder and dismay.”
To his credit, Bell, just as he did in his first Dylan volume, “Once Upon a Time,” appears to take pleasure in tearing down myths that have attached themselves to the man over the years. Like others before him, Bell sometimes portrays the artist as a jerk.
Bell makes a strong case that Dylan is a deeply spiritual writer whose songwriting was infused with religious imagery from the beginning.
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