[Daniel Mark Epstein]The Ballad of Bob Dylan A Portrait(epub){Zzzzz}

Drawing on revelatory interviews, a rich analysis oflyrics, and a lifelong study of one of the greatest songwriters of our time,Daniel Mark Epstein delivers a singular, nuanced, and insightful examination ofBob Dylan—the poet, the musician, and the man. Interweaving in-depthconversations with Dylan collaborators and contemporaries, including Eric Andersen,Tom Paxton, Woody Guthrie’s daughter Nora Guthrie, Ramblin’Jack Elliott, Pete Seeger, Maria Muldaur, John P.Hammond, and many others, Epstein crafts a vivid and unforgettable portrait ofthe inimitable poet and performer. Readers of Christopher Ricks’ Dylan’s Visions of Sin, the Dylanautobiography, Chronicles, or Sean Wilentz’s Dylan inAmerica, as well as fans enthralled by expository musician stories, such asKeith Richards’ Life and PattiSmith’s Just Kids, will be captivatedby Epstein’s unprecedented and incisive look at Bob Dylan, music’s mostineffable creator.

Product Description

Review
“What sets Epstein’s book apart is its accessibility. . . . Epstein is refreshingly direct and approachable, and while the author, also a folk musician, makes much of his extensive quotes from Dylan’s lyrics, it is his own clear, emotional enthusiasm that carries the tale.” (Rob Fitzpatrick, Sunday Times (London))

“If you like Keith Richards’ Life, then read The Ballad of Bob Dylan. Just in time for the musician’s 70th birthday, Daniel Mark Epstein’s biography offers a vivid portrait of the visionary artist.” (US Weekly)

“Offers a portrait that explodes the semi-hostile cliché of much unauthorized biography. New interviews and photographs add depth to an account distinguished by a fine sensitivity to all aspects of Dylan’s art, from the personal to the music’s history.” (Tim Martin, Telegraph (London))

“Brilliant—that Daniel Mark Epstein is both a poet and a biographer stands him in good stead in this penetrating, compassionate (but utterly clear-eyed), beautifully written portrait of Bob Dylan as an artist and a man. Among the very best writing about Dylan, ever.” (James Kaplan, author of Frank: The Voice)

“In The Ballad of Bob Dylan, Daniel Mark Epstein does what few have been able to do at all, much less this well: capture that spirit, and in so doing, somehow manage to get closer to the essence of an American icon.” (Dave Moyer, New York Journal of Books)

From the Back Cover

Through the lens of four seminal concerts, acclaimed poet and biographer Daniel Mark Epstein offers an intimate, vivid, and comprehensive portrait of Bob Dylan. Beginning in 1963, Epstein revisits Dylan's early struggles to find artistic direction; his transition from folk icon to rock star; and his secluded family life and divorce. A breathtaking account of Dylan's Never Ending Tour and his contemporary studio sessions brings us full circle, revealing how Dylan revived a flagging career and accepted his role as the éminence grise of rock and roll today.

Drawing on new interviews with those closest to Dylan—including Maria Muldaur, Nora Guthrie, and Ramblin' Jack Elliott—The Ballad of Bob Dylan is a singular take on an artist who has transformed generations and continues to inspire and surprise today.

Publisher: Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (15 May 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0061807338
ISBN-13: 978-0061807336

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

The intertwining trajectories of the music legend and a fan 12 March 2011
By Corinne H. Smith -
Author Daniel Mark Epstein has set his goals high. How else can you explain the brave desire to assemble a new biography about someone for whom many others have already produced thousands of pages? About an individual who has already published the first volume of his own autobiography? To additionally spend time analyzing many of the tunes and lyrics created during this 50+-year musical career, knowing full well that myriad liberal arts students dissect those same lines and melodies in countless classrooms across this globe every day? What could possibly be said here and now that hasn't already been made public and well known?

Well, Mr. Epstein's got a hook. He's a fan. He has seen Bob Dylan four times in concert, with more than a decade separating each event. By anchoring his approach with those evenings (in 1963, 1974, 1997, & 2009), the author plants himself in that narrow aisle between his iconic subject matter and the rest of us in the audience. Epstein becomes Everyman, and it's easy for us to identify with his experiences and his viewpoints. We've sat in similar theaters and arenas. We know the music. The four gigs serve as the stanzas to the Dylan life ballad. Epstein's text could be sketched as a quadrupled Venn diagram. The concert hours are the overlapping slivers of time; and that which falls into the wide outside spaces represents the lives lived away from the stage, both for the performer and for the listener.

You might think, Great, four concerts. This won't take long. Wrong! The author fills in the gap of those intervening years with the kinds of details we crave from in-depth celebrity portrayals. He catches us up on what Bob Dylan was doing musically at those times and what aspects of his personal life affected his creativity, his lifestyle, and his performances. Epstein comes this close (pressed fingertips) to meeting the man in person. He interviews people close to Dylan at various points in his career. He does not dwell a lot on the topic of substance abuse; but he does document the letdown when Dylan abandoned his previous work for born-again religion at the beginning of the 1980s. We can relate. Somehow we expect our heroes (esp. our musical ones, it seems) to remain the same or to sustain a good level of predictability, even while we grow older and move in and out of relationships with people, ideas, places, etc. It doesn't occur to us that those icons are (mostly) human too, and that the same waves that change us might change them. Here we can tag along to the venues and share in Epstein's struggles to understand the varying musical styles, images and dimensions of one particularly gifted and knowledgeable singer/songwriter/painter/poet.

I saw Bob Dylan in concert in Amherst MA in November 2004. Admittedly, I'm not much of a fan. I don't own any Dylan albums, and I'm familiar only with his most popular and radio-friendly songs. But I am a huge follower of folk and rock music and I am a veteran concertgoer / reviewer. I went to the arena that night because I thought I had to see Dylan at least once in my life. And I can well remember the chills I got when he ended the evening with "Like a Rolling Stone" and came back with the encore of "All Along the Watchtower." I'm quite glad I was able to witness it. I guess journalist Ed Bradley must have been in the house that night too, because he later met Dylan at a local hotel in order to conduct his interview for "60 Minutes." Watching that TV show made the outing, in retrospect, much more memorable and real for me. That was my own little snippet of the circle: one that I kept in my mind as I was reading about Mr. Epstein's own concert memories. The lines blurred, and our encounters mingled. Anyone who has seen Dylan in person will find something to identify with here.

Cresting the 440-page mark, "The Ballad of Bob Dylan" is hardly a superficial treatment. It requires just as much dedication to read and to turn the pages as it must have taken to write them. Readers should know the generalities of the Dylan chronology before venturing into this volume, since it does not follow a typically stale biographical format. This narrative is aimed at an intelligent and thoughtful audience that wants to dive into history, musicianship, composition analysis, and critical performance -- or who just wants to hear a darn good story told well. It makes for an interesting and enlightening read for any Baby Boomer, any avid concertgoer of any ilk, and any student of popular music of the 20th and 21st centuries. And it arrives just as Bob Dylan turns 70 (!) on May 24, 2011. (... while unfortunately, his first muse and "Freewheelin'" album cover mate, Suze Rotolo, recently passed away at the age of 67.)

Just a Regular Guy 9 April 2011
By Richard Wells -
No one who thinks about Bob Dylan thinks about him as if he were a normal human being, much less a regular guy. I can't think of one person who's written about Dylan who has cast him as anything approaching normal. If Dylan is a genius - and he is - he must be a tortured genius, otherwise there's no story. So biographers find evidence of torture in relationships gone bad, friendships betrayed, substances abused, lyrics plagiarized, until Dylan seems not only tortured but down right nasty. Interesting, though, that no one has been able to dig up any dirt on Dylan in relationship to his children and grandchildren. Now that's telling because if Dylan were half as nuts as we've been led to believe, surely one of his kids would have written a tell-all by now. I find it hard to believe they're silent under pain of excommunication, or whatever sword Dylan wields.

"The Ballad of Bob Dylan: A Portrait," is a view of Bob Dylan that shows us a hard working entertainer, a brilliant song-writer, a mediocre painter, a crappy film maker - and a decent guy, protective of his family and generous to his friends. Eccentric? Of course. Anyone who's spent over 40 years in the music business, and half his life in the public eye is bound to be eccentric. Alcoholic, drug-crazed, serial womanizer subject to fits of madness? Not so much.

Daniel Mark Epstein is a practiced poet, essayist, and playwright - and a prize winning biographer; he's also a fan, and not un-critical. My god, he's reasonable about his subject matter - not the usual modus operandi for someone writing about Dylan. He takes a look at Dylan's life through the prism of four concerts that seem to delineate four periods in the man's life - his as well as Dylan's. What he's come up with is a good story, well told - entertaining, non-pedantic, easy on the lyric analyses, but strong on the art and craft of Dylan's writing, recording, and performing. Epstein has mined the sources, and opened up some new information through interviews of Dylan's friends and band-mates.

When I finished this book I counted the Dylan tomes on my groaning bookshelf. Forty-three books by or about Bob Dylan. That's ridiculous, but what can I say, I'm up there with Christopher Ricks (I think it was) who feels that being alive while Dylan is writing and performing is akin to having been alive when Shakespeare was working. Anyway, this book 44 has been the most pleasurable read, due in no little part to Epstein's humanizing of the troubadour.