Who will get to write the last word on Bob Dylan? A number of men compete for the honour of world authority – Michael Gray, Howard Sounes, Greil Marcus, Robert Shelton, Clinton Heylin – and relations aren’t always good. In his introduction to volume one of this humungous book (published in 2021), Heylin said that Sounes wrote depressingly well-trundled semi-literate strolls. Sounes pointed out how overlong and baggy Heylin’s Dylan books are (he’s written 13): “All he knows is how to tell me what Visions of Johanna means in his mind.”
Rock completism, as dry, competitive and cerebral as it appears to be, is driven by a fierce, possessive love. Heylin has loved Dylan since he was 12 years old: he is now 63. In a mysterious dedication he pays tribute to a Peter Heylyn, born in 1599: a church historian “who was unfriended” by his contemporary Thomas Fuller “for Telling It Right Like It Is”. The first volume of The Double Life… stretched from Dylan’s youth – famously fictionalised by the artist himself, with those months in the carnival – to the transformative 1966 motorcycle crash. The second volume covers the rest: Nashville Skyline, the wild Rolling Thunder tour, the religious albums, the Traveling Wilburys, the low points, the comebacks, the Christmas album, the Nobel prize.
