Book review: Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, Vol 1: 1957 - 1973

IT'S hard to analyse Bob Dylan's works in detail when they're still a-changin', writes Chitra Ramaswamy

Clinton Heylin

Constable, £20

THERE are a hell of a lot of books about Bob Dylan in the world. Type the man born Robert Zimmerman into Amazon and you get a paralysing 758 results. Nevertheless, it is always possible to find new ways of Dylanologising. This is a point rather laboriously proved by Clinton Heylin's 400-plus-page doorstopper, which anatomises Dylan's first 300 songs in the order in which he wrote rather than released them. What of the next 300, you ask? Never fear, they're coming in Volume 2.

It is true that this hasn't been done before, though there is a doff of the Huck Finn hat to Revolution In The Head, Ian Macdonald's acclaimed blow-by-blow account of every Beatles record. That it hasn't been done with Dylan's words seems strange considering he is, above all else, a great – and many say the greatest – songwriter of the last century.

Heylin, the foremost Dylanologist whose biography Behind The Shades – Take Two is considered to be definitive, says in his introduction: "No one has quite met the challenge of documenting every one of his songs with the aim of providing an authoritative history of the most multifaceted canon in twentieth century popular song". A sentence to stick to your ribs, and there are many more to swallow. The question, though, is whether this huge undertaking is a challenge worth meeting. Heylin himself goes on to warn that it might not be the greatest story ever told.

Revolution In The Air certainly comes at an opportune moment. Dylan is about to release his 46th album, Together Through Life, and there are UK dates coming up, including one in Edinburgh next month. Last week alone we got Dylan on the Rolling Stones, Barack Obama and Nazism.

But Dylan's voice covers too much rough terrain for me, his views on women are questionable and I find his born-again period unfathomable. Still, I do love his poetry.

That's why it was disappointing that the stories surrounding the songs' genesis in the main fall short. Yes, we are thrown some titbits from Joan Baez's response to Dylan's songs written in the wake of breaking up with Suze Rotolo to 'Blowin' In The Wind', starting out with just two verses, the first and third. The middle one was added later when, notes Heylin, Dylan's inspiration had deserted him, "devising a trio of platitudes regarding the number of times one must look up in order to see the sky, the number of ears required to 'hear people cry', and finally how many deaths it takes to get a rhyme for cry and sky." It's refreshing that Heylin doesn't go in for bootlicking, and he often dryly notes Dylan's own mythologising about how and where he wrote his songs.

There are some cute anecdotes, too, such as when Dylan debuted the majestic seven-minute-long 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall' at Carnegie Hall in September 1962. Pete Seeger recalls telling the group of folk singers they would be limited to three songs each because they only had 10 minutes apiece. "Bob raised his hand and said, 'What am I supposed to do? One of my songs is 10 minutes long.'"

Heylin's knowledge of Dylan is extraordinary, but he wears it too heavily. It's hard to get excited about whether lyrics were written on notepaper from London's Mayfair Hotel or on Dylan's portable typewriter. Some of the discussion around particular lines evolving – such as the words "the rain beat out its tales" in 'Chimes Of Freedom' becoming "the rain unravelled tales" – is heavy going indeed and misses the point that all Dylan's songs remain essentially unfinished because he continues to return to them.

Herein lies the problem with Heylin's pursuit. Analysing Dylan's songs is just not a very satisfactory process, which is why Dylan has spent more than four decades ducking such questions. Knowing that 'The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll' – about a black waitress and mother of 10 children murdered by a wealthy owner of a tobacco farm in Maryland – doesn't get the facts of the case straight adds nothing to the incredible power of the song. In fact, in some ways it diminishes it.