Dylan's first album to be recorded entirely with a full rock band, the groundbreaking Highway 61 Revisited is also arguable his best and most influential, and one of rock'n'roll's defining moments. This book examines Dylan's surreal genius at this important turning point in his career, as well as in the general history of rock, and discusses what it was like to work with the man who unleashed this masterpiece upon an unsuspecting, folk-loving public.

An exploration of the pervasive influence of jazz on all forms of American music, this work maps the unexpected musical and cultural links between Louis Armstrong, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Herbie Hancock and many others.

Autobiography of bass player Harvey Brooks who has played with everyone from Bob Dylan to Miles Davis to The Doors to Jimi Hendrix and many more. This is a fascinating collection of stories throughout his career. In this book, Harvey Brooks gives a first-hand account of his involvement in the classic albums "Highway 61 Revisited" by Bob Dylan and "Bitches Brew" by Miles Davis, among many others.

On Highway 61 explores the historical context of the significant social dissent that was central to the cultural genesis of the sixties. The book is going to search for the deeper roots of American cultural and musical evolution for the past 150 years by studying what the Western European culture learned from African American culture in a historical progression that reaches from the minstrel era to Bob Dylan. The book begins with America's first great social critic, Henry David Thoreau, and his fundamental source of social philosophy:–––his profound commitment to freedom, to abolitionism and to African–American culture. Continuing with Mark Twain, through whom we can observe the rise of minstrelsy, which he embraced, and his subversive satirical masterpiece Huckleberry Finn. While familiar, the book places them into a newly articulated historical reference that shines new light and reveals a progression that is much greater than the sum of its individual parts. As the first post–Civil War generation of black Americans came of age, they introduced into the national culture a trio of musical forms—ragtime, blues, and jazz— that would, with their derivations, dominate popular music to this day. Ragtime introduced syncopation and become the cutting edge of the modern 20th century with popular dances. The blues would combine with syncopation and improvisation and create jazz. Maturing at the hands of Louis Armstrong, it would soon attract a cluster of young white musicians who came to be known as the Austin High Gang, who fell in love with black music and were inspired to play it themselves. In the process, they developed a liberating respect for the diversity of their city and country, which they did not see as exotic, but rather as art. It was not long before these young white rebels were the masters of American pop music – big band Swing. As Bop succeeded Swing, and Rhythm and Blues followed, each had white followers like the Beat writers and the first young rock and rollers. Even popular white genres like the country music of Jimmy Rodgers and the Carter Family reflected significant black influence. In fact, the theoretical separation of American music by race is not accurate. This biracial fusion achieved an apotheosis in the early work of Bob Dylan, born and raised at the northern end of the same Mississippi River and Highway 61 that had been the birthplace of much of the black music he would study. As the book reveals, the connection that began with Thoreau and continued for over 100 years was a cultural evolution where, at first individuals, and then larger portions of society, absorbed the culture of those at the absolute bottom of the power structure, the slaves and their descendants, and realized that they themselves were not free.

'A must have for Dylan enthusiasts, lovers of London, and anyone with even a passing interest in the history of music. I devoured it in two sittings - and I loved it!' Conor McPherson, playwright, Girl from the North Country This is both a guide and history on the impact of London on Dylan, and the lasting legacy of Bob Dylan on the London music scene. Bob Dylan in London celebrates this journey, and allows readers to experience his London and follow in his footsteps to places such as the King and Queen pub (the first venue that Dylan performed at in London), the Savoy hotel and Camden Town. This book explores the key London places and times that helped to create one of the greatest of all popular musicians, Bob Dylan.

In 1991 Clinton Heylin published what was considered the most definitive biography of Bob Dylan available. In 2001 he completely revised and reworked this hugely acclaimed book, adding new sections, substantially reworking text, and bringing the story up-to-date with Dylan's explosive career in 2000. Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited follows the story of Dylan from his humble beginnings in Minnesota to his arrival in New York in 1961, his subsequent rise in the folk pantheon of Greenwich Village in the early '60s, and his cataclysmic folk-rock metamorphosis at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. In the succeeding eighteen months, Dylan released Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, and embarked on the legendary 1966 World Tour that culminated with an unforgettable concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Heylin details it all, along with the true story of Dylan's motorcycle accident, his remarkable reemergence in the mid-'70s, the only exacting account of his controversial conversion to born-again Christianity, the Neverending Tour, and yet another incredible Dylan resurgence with his 1997 Grammy Album of the Year Award-winning Time Out of Mind. Deemed by The New Yorker as "the most readable and reliable" of all Dylan biographies, this book will give fans what they have always wanted -- a chance to get to know the man behind the shades.

Highway 61 Revisited resonates because of its enduring emotional appeal. Few songwriters before Dylan or since have combined so effectively the intensely personal with the spectacularly universal. In "Like a Rolling Stone," his gleeful excoriation of Miss Lonely (Edie Sedgwick? Joan Baez? a composite "type"?) fuses with the evocation of a hip new zeitgeist to produce a veritable anthem. In "Ballad of a Thin Man," the younger generation's confusion is thrown back in the Establishment's face, even as Dylan vents his disgust with the critics who labored to catalogue him. And in "Desolation Row," he reaches the zenith of his own brand of surrealist paranoia, that here attains the atmospheric intensity of a full-fledged nightmare. Between its many flourishes of gallows humor, this is one of the most immaculately frightful songs ever recorded, with its relentless imagery of communal executions, its parade of fallen giants and triumphant local losers, its epic length and even the mournful sweetness of Bloomfield's flamenco-inspired fills. In this book, Mark Polizzotti examines just what makes the songs on Highway 61 Revisited so affecting, how they work together as a suite, and how lyrics, melody, and arrangements combine to create an unusually potent mix. He blends musical and literary analysis of the songs themselves, biography (where appropriate) and recording information (where helpful). And he focuses on Dylan's mythic presence in the mid-60s, when he emerged from his proletarian incarnation to become the American Rimbaud. The comparison has been made by others, including Dylan, and it illuminates much about his mid-sixties career, for in many respects Highway 61 is rock 'n' roll's answer to A Season in Hell.

A brilliantly written and groundbreaking book about Dylan's music – now the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2016 – and its musical, political and cultural roots in early 20th-century America Growing up in Greenwich Village in the 1960s Sean Wilentz discovered the music of Bob Dylan as a young teenager. Almost half a century later, now a distinguished professor of American history, he revisits Dylan's work with the critical skills of a scholar and the passion of a fan. Drawing partly on his work as the current historian-in-residence on Dylan's official website, Sean Wilentz provides a unique blend of biography, memoir and analysis in a book which, much like its subject, shifts gears and changes shape as the occasion demands.

Mesmerized by the power of Bob Dylan's lyrics and intrigued by the possibilities of translating his enigmatic personality into art, 13 leading graphic artists have banded together to create this illustrated testament to the vision of an American musical genius.

Daniel Kramer's classic Bob Dylan portfolio captures the artist's transformative "big bang" year of 1964-65. Through vast concert halls, intimate recording sessions, and the infamous transition to electric guitar, nearly 200 images offer one of the most mesmerizing photographic series on any recording artist and a stunning document of Dylan and...