From the world's leading authority on Bob Dylan comes the definitive
biography that promises to transform our understanding of the man and
musician--thanks to early access to Dylan's never-before-studied
archives.
In 2016 Bob Dylan sold his personal archive to the George Kaiser
Foundation in Tulsa, Oklahoma, reportedly for $22 million. As the boxes
started to arrive, the Foundation asked Clinton Heylin--author of the
acclaimed Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades and 'perhaps the world's
authority on all things Dylan' (Rolling Stone)--to assess the material
they had been given. What he found in Tulsa--as well as what he gleaned
from other papers he had recently been given access to by Sony and the
Dylan office--so changed his understanding of the artist, especially of
his creative process, that he became convinced that a whole new
biography was needed. It turns out that much of what previous
biographers--Dylan himself included--have said is wrong.
With fresh and revealing information on every page A Restless, Hungry
Feeling tells the story of Dylan's meteoric rise to fame: his arrival
in early 1961 in New York, where he is embraced by the folk scene; his
elevation to spokesman of a generation whose protest songs provide the
soundtrack for the burgeoning Civil Rights movement; his alleged
betrayal when he 'goes electric' at Newport in 1965; his subsequent
controversial world tour with a rock 'n' roll band; and the recording of
his three undisputed electric masterpieces: Bringing it All Back Home,
Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. At the peak of his fame
in July 1966 he reportedly crashes his motorbike in Woodstock, upstate
New York, and disappears from public view. When he re-emerges, he looks
different, his voice sounds different, his songs are different.
Clinton Heylin's meticulously researched, all-encompassing and
consistently revelatory account of these fascinating early years is the
closest we will ever get to a definitive life of an artist who has been
the lodestar of popular culture for six decades.
