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Overview
Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited follows the story of Dylan from his humble beginnings in Minnesota to his arrival in New York in 1961, his subsequent rise in the folk pantheon of Greenwich Village in the early '60s, and his cataclysmic folk-rock metamorphosis at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. In the succeeding eighteen months, Dylan released Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, and embarked on the legendary 1966 World Tour that culminated with an unforgettable concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Heylin details it all, along with the true story of Dylan's motorcycle accident, his remarkable reemergence in the mid-'70s, the only exacting account of his controversial conversion to born-again Christianity, the Neverending Tour, and yet another incredible Dylan resurgence with his 1997 Grammy Album of the Year Award-winning Time Out of Mind.
Deemed by The New Yorker as "the most readable and reliable" of all Dylan biographies, this book will give fans what they have always wanted — a chance to get to know the man behind the shades.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780060525699 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 04/29/2003 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 816 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.12(h) x 1.65(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
1941-55: In My Younger Days
My country is the Minnesota-North Dakota territory / that's where I was born an learned how t walk an / it's where I was raised an went to school...my / youth was spent wildly among the snowy hills an / sky blue lakes, willow fields an abandoned open / pit mines. contrary t rumors, I am very proud of / where I'm from an also of the many blood streams that / run in my roots.
-- Bob Dylan, 1963
You can change your name / but you can't run away from yourself
-- Bob Dylan, 1967
At a 1986 press conference a middle-aged, slightly wizened rock'n'roller insisted, 'I'm only Bob Dylan when I have to be.' Asked who he was the rest of the time, he replied, 'Myself.' His creator, forty-five-year-old Robert Allen Zimmerman, had been a mere nineteen when he had reinvented himself as Bob Dylan: just three years older than the Arthur Rimbaud who wrote to his old teacher, Georges Izambard, in May 1871 and proclaimed, 'Je suis un autre'; barely three years younger than his maternal grandfather, Benjamin David Solemovitz, when, in 1906, he took off from Connor's Point, Wisconsin, to rematerialize three years later working as a clerk for a fellow Jew, Abraham Friedman, in Hibbing, Minnesota, henceforth to be known simply as Ben Stone.
Back in Connor's Point, Stone had had a sister named Ida, a year younger, by all accounts a pretty little thing. That is, until September 24, 1906, when a young Scotsman named John Young shot poor little Ida down, before blowing his own brains out with a .32 revolver. Young had been living in rooms adjoiningthe Solemovitzes' for three years and had become more than friendly with Ida. But Young had refused to recognize the ostracism that would have resulted had Ida chosen to marry outside her faith. According to the Superior Telegram, 'Young was madly infatuated with the girl...a difference of opinion is apparent as to whether the girl reciprocated his love.' Her father, Sam, refused to countenance the possibility that his baby girl might have died for love. Ben, who was close to his sister and devastated by her death, undoubtedly knew better.
Leaving the family behind in Wisconsin, Solemovitz chose to reinvent himself seventy-five miles north, in Hibbing, at the heart of Minnesota's Iron Range, a scabrous landscape shaped by intensive strip-mining that created both the largest man-made pit and the largest slag heap in the world. Founded by the adventurer Frank Hibbing in 1892, after he had cleared a road west from Mountain Iron, Hibbing was erected near to the spot where he had apparently awoken one crisp winter morn and uttered the immortal phrase, 'I believe there is iron under me -- my bones feel rusty.'
By the time Ben Stone had found employment with Abraham Friedman, the boomtown had already acquired eighty-eight hundred citizens, sewers, a municipal lighting plant, a fire department, and the largest grade-school building north of the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul. However, by 1921 the mining companies found that Frank Hibbing had not erected the town near to the best ore but directly on top of it, and the whole town, houses and all, had to be moved on rollers to the suburb of Alice, leaving street signs and tracks from the old Hibbing behind. Living on the edge of such a surreal wasteland was bound to affect anyone, particularly those for whom the Moving of Hibbing was merely local folklore.
Bob Dylan: I ran into a girl [one time]...She said I was a strange person and she told me why. She said, 'You were born in a certain area where the ground is metallic.' [1980]
Ben Stone had been just five in 1888, when his parents, Robert ('Sabse') and Bessie Solemovitz, abandoned the plains of Lithuania for the promise of Superior, Wisconsin. Though Stone left Superior behind in 1906, his heart and the heart of his family remained behind. When he died in May 1945 he chose to be buried in Superior, even though he and his wife, Florence -- who had also lived in Superior when she had first arrived in America from Lithuania -- had lived in Hibbing for nearly four decades. Their four children, and their grandchildren, all still lived in Hibbing save for their eldest daughter, Beatrice, who lived in Duluth with her husband Abraham Zimmerman and their four-year-old son, Robert. Whether 'Beatty' brought her son to the funeral of his maternal grandfather has not been recorded. Whatever the case, Florence Stone, née Edelstein, now found herself a widow at the age of fifty-three.
Florence Edelstein had been the eldest of ten children, the whole clan being presided over by Florence's imposing father, Benjamin Harold Edelstein, a salesman from Kovno who had arrived in Hibbing from Superior, aged thirty-six, with his wife, Lybba, and his then six children in 1906, shortly before young Ben Stone hit town. Once established in Hibbing, 'BH' abandoned selling furniture and stoves and entered the entertainment business, purchasing the first of four Edelstein theaters, the Victory. As vaudeville gave way to the dependable escapism flickering off the movie screen, Edelstein expanded his operations to include the Gopher on Howard, the State, also on Howard, and the Homer on Ist. That a town of just eighteen thousand could support four cinemas in the forties suggests just how central the images conveyed from Hollywood became to postwar middle America.
Beatrice R. Stone was the second of Ben and Florence's four children. Born three years after her brother Vernon, on June 16, 1915, she was a vivacious child and a devoted member of a large, and seemingly ever expanding, family unit. Though Hibbing would always be a curious place to grow up a Jew -- the town was largely given over to Slavic Catholics and Nordic Lutherans -- Beatty's large family cocooned her.
Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited. Copyright © by Clinton Heylin. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.