PanThe Literary ReviewAs a prose stylist, Heylin’s a square, his sentences padded out with cliché and hackneyed metaphor...At its absolute nadir, this work, the first volume in a two-part biography of Dylan, reads like an inexplicably angry sessionography. But he is good for the facts ... light on original interviews and, well, descriptions of the music, even, and based more on trawling the archives and other sources for alternative lyrics, correspondence, film outtakes, bootleg recordings and obscure interviews. As such we get lots of details about what might have been written when, and whose memory might be faulty, but not much description of how the songs sound and how the music feels. Heylin is more about puncturing the myths ... If you think of ‘A Restless, Hungry Feeling’ as being written by a Baron Corvo-esque self-aggrandising maniac obsessively accumulating facts in order to match the creative hysteria that took Bob Dylan to the edge of vision, then it all starts to make some kind of sense. Indeed, it might be worth it alone for him alerting me to the Stuttgart 1991 show, where an eight-minute rendition of ‘New Morning’ contained ‘not a single intelligible line’. Thanks mate!
