Here is a book to examine the man many consider a genius, especially considering his impact on the maturing boomer generation.
There are many biographies on Bob Dylan, but this is a much broader social and cultural account of Dylan and his world.
Bob Dylan blazed out on to the American folk circuit in 1961 and changed his name from Robert Zimmerman. He changed his back story as well. No longer the middle class Jew from Hibbing in Minnesota, he reinvented himself as a freewheeling itinerant. His former lover Joan Baez mocked that he had 'burst onto the scene already a legend, the unwashed phenomenon, the original vagabond'. Indeed, as Freedman explains, the original myths that Dylan cultivated may have stemmed from embarrassment at his own strongly Jewish origins. This is quite unlike Leonard Cohen, the subject of one of Freedman's previous books.
Woody Guthrie was Dylan's hero and after meeting him in New York in 1961, Dylan's career took off. All this against a background of exceptional cultural creativity. Kerouac's On The Road set the pace. Dylan declared that this book had been like a Bible to him. The beat poets gave the era an hallucinogenic, quasi-mystical character. There was Allen Ginsberg and Jasper Johns, but it was through music that the greatest changes came about. As he himself wrote in a lyric: 'The times they are a-changin'' and he was at the heart of it.
Harry Freedman was in New York during the 60s, and as he says in his preface to this book: 'I was there'.
