The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia Book

The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia is one of the most wide-ranging, informed, entertaining, provocative, and compulsively readable books ever written about popular music. It's the culmination of over thirty years of dedicated research and scholarship by Michael Gray.

Inside these pages, you'll find a world of ideas, facts, and opinions. It's a world in which Baudelaire flows on from the Basement Tapes and A.S. Byatt looks out at the Byrds; in which Far from the Madding Crowd follows Ezekiel and Bob Geldof introduces Jean Genet; and in which Hank and William Carlos Williams stand side by side while J.R.R. Tolkien trails the Titanic. Most of all, of course, it's a world in which everyone and everything interconnects, in endlessly fascinating ways, with one of our greatest living artists: Bob Dylan.

Library Journal

If any popular musician merits an 800-plus page encyclopedia, it is Bob Dylan. This massive effort covers many of his songs, albums, and film work, as well as just about every personality associated with the folk singer/rock star. But this is no dry reference tome: Dylan expert Gray (Mother: The Frank Zappa Story; Song and Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan) writes in the brash and opinionated style often associated with the British popular music press (he is, after all, a Briton). For example, writing of Dylan's onetime lover Joan Baez, he notes the "strident gauchery of her rigid delivery." While he praises Robbie Robertson's "intelligent, never-faltering, beguiling guitar work," he chides the "ego and domination" of his takeover of the Band in the post-Dylan years. Entries also cover diverse influences from Bertold Brecht to T.S. Eliot to Blind Willie Johnson. Bottom Line Gray freely quotes from a variety of sources, in addition to relying on his own considerable knowledge, helpfully including source notes at the end of most entries. Overall, this is an amazingly well-researched and surprisingly readable work. Recommended for larger public and all music libraries. [The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland will host an exhibit on Bob Dylan through September; Gray will speak at the museum on August 30. Ed.] Dave Valencia, King Cty. Lib. Syst., WA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.