Dylan Daze

For some reason there's been a lot of Bob Dylan around in the past week. One reason is that I completed reading Suze Rotolo's book, Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. Another is the release of Dylan's first Christmas album, Christmas in the Heart, which of course has generated a wildly varying mix of reviews.

Rotolo's memoir did paint an effective portrait of the folk scene from 1961 to 1964 and offered insights into Dylan's work habits, drive to succeed, and how in three years he transformed himself from a Woody Guthrie copycat into a uniquely American songwriter and singer who combined the socially conscious lyrics of folk and blues with rock-n-roll beats.

However, she offers little original information outside of a few quotes from his letters to her and notes from her own diary. If you're looking for hot dish or deep dirt, you're going to have to look elsewhere.

Meanwhile, I'm still listening frequently to Together Through Life, which was released in April 2009. Here's a review by Rolling Stone magazine writer David Fricke.

If you're interested in keeping up with Bob and his doings, you should visit and bookmark Expecting Rain, a global resource for articles by the mainstream press and commentary by various Dylanologists. It is updated daily and has deep archives dating back to 1988.