Book review: Time Out of Mind, by Ian Bell
The second instalment of Ian Bell's two-part biography of Bob Dylan, Time Out of Mind, is a compelling, focused examination of the latter half of the singer-songwriter's life and career, starting off with his acclaimed Blood on the Tracks album in 1975 and bringing readers close to the present day.
by Ian Bell
Pegasus Books
The second instalment of Ian Bell's two-part biography of Bob Dylan, Time Out of Mind, is a compelling, focused examination of the latter half of the singer-songwriter's life and career, starting off with his acclaimed Blood on the Tracks album in 1975 and bringing readers close to the present day.
For Dylan's fans, who have been offered a wealth of analyses of the reclusive artist over the years, Bell delivers the goods. Chapters are heavy with engrossing and sometimes surprising details of Dylan's most potent works and cringeworthy missteps during this time, all told in the Scottish journalist's sharp-sighted style.
At its core, Bell's ambitious work is more of an analysis of Dylan's tangle of identities and creative visions than a standard biography of an arena-filling musician. He meticulously documents Dylan's oeuvre since 1975, including a lengthy stretch of artistic decline spanning the 1980s when he was mostly written off as a contrary has-been by his 40s.
"Between the appearance of the hectoring evangelical Christian album Saved in June of 1980 and 1997's Time Out of Mind the test was to find a good word to say about Dylan's works, than to find more than a handful of people likely to give a damn," Bell writes in a typically tough-minded passage.
But since the release of the Grammy-winning Time Out of Mind, Bell convincingly argues a resurgent Dylan has forged a renaissance and "vindicated himself" after a lengthy slump. In Bell's words: "He had defied age, time and, above all, every prowling, mocking ghost that had ever borne the name Bob Dylan."