by Jess Walter

A book club pick which I didn’t like. It was violent and ugly. One of a genre that I call the “Isn’t Everything Terrible” genre.

by Robert Polito

This was a truly good book about the less-discussed second half of Dylan’s career, each chapter focusing on a different album, show, or event. The book manages to be dense without being boring or unreadable. It reveals enough about the author to avoid feeling cryptic and impersonal; but it is not SO much about the author that you feel he’s lost the thread of what the real topic is supposed to be.

by Elizabeth Winder

Four women are mentioned in the subtitle of this book — Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg, Marsha Hunt, & Bianca Jagger.

But it’s mostly Marianna & Anita. And I knew most of the stuff about them already. A lot of this was covered in Keith’s memoir.

I was looking forward to learning about Marsha Hunt, whose name was not familiar to me. She was a girlfriend of Mick’s during this era and had his first child. And was treated abominably by him.

And I was looking forward to learning about Bianca, whose name I certainly knew. There’s very little about her here. But it seems she is a fighter for righteous causes, heavily feminist, and worth saluting.

Marianne had a good revival and left us only recently. Bianca and Marsha still walk the earth. Anita lived long (to 2017) but did not defeat her drug problems and did not end well.

by Daryl Sanders

A really in-depth look at BLONDE ON BLONDE. BoB and H61 were my first two Dylan albums; and BoB in particular really drew me in. Who was this guy? Was he being funny, sneering, pretentious, all of the above? And that’s an awful lot of harmonica there.

But enough about me. The Band is awesome, and the Band with Bob are awesome; but Bob says in this book that he left them behind (well, except for Robertson) and fled to Nashville because they just weren’t right, not for the sound he was aiming for – he could tell they weren’t right, but he didn’t want to admit it. The Band and Bob were kind of tumbled together by accident, and maybe they weren’t really meant to be a Thing.

I love the description of the Nashville cats recording “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” at 3 or 4 am and just not being able to believe how damn long the thing was. They kept thinking every chorus was going to be the last, and building up for a big finish… and then there’d be another verse. And they were all praying they wouldn’t mess up because they didn’t want to do it again.

But enough funny bits. As a read, it’s pretty good. Not high literature, but engaging. I agree with the other comments I’ve seen – he seems off-base when it comes to explaining lyrics (but who can really be totally on-base with Dylan lyrics?)… and this book would be an excellent accompaniment to THE CUTTING EDGE ‘Bootleg’ series.