The Lives of Bob Dylan

Time Out of Mind

The second and concluding volume of Ian Bell's critically lauded study of the inimitable Bob Dylan

The best biography that rock has had . . . magisterial

Recommended . . . a huge treat for fans, and a superb introduction for anybody else who's ever wondered what all the fuss is about

It is characteristic of Bell’s achievement that he delivers . . . a compelling account of the ways in which the musician, and popular taste, and the world itself have changed

This book pays the best kind of homage.  Never grovelling, never awestruck, always clear-sighted and discerning, and occasionally angry, Bell remains a fan.  An alert, realistic and honest one'

Born, raised and educated in Edinburgh, Ian Bell is a past holder of the George Orwell Prize for political journalism and the award-winning author of Dreams of Exile, a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson. Formerly the Scottish editor of The Observer, he is a columnist with The Herald and the Sunday Herald.

By the middle of the 1970s, Bob Dylan’s position as the pre-eminent artist of his generation was assured. The 1975 album Blood on the Tracks seemed to prove, finally, that an uncertain age had found its poet. 
 
Perverse or driven, Dylan refused the role. By the decade’s end, the counter-culture’s poster child had embraced conservative, evangelical Christianity. Fans and critics alike were confused; many were aghast. Still the hits kept coming. 
 
Then Dylan faltered. His instincts, formerly unerring, deserted him. In the 1980s, what had once appeared unthinkable came to pass: the ‘voice of a generation’ began to sound irrelevant, a tale told to grandchildren. 
 
Yet in the autumn of 1997 something remarkable happened. Having failed to release a single new song in seven long years, Dylan put out the equivalent of two albums in a single package. He called it Time Out of Mind. So began the renaissance, artistic and personal, that culminated in 2012’s acclaimed Tempest. 
 
In the concluding volume of his groundbreaking study, Ian Bell explores the unparalleled second act in a quintessentially American career. It is a tale of redemption, of an act of creative will against the odds, and of a writer who refused to fade away. 
 
Time Out of Mind is the story of the latest, perhaps the last, of the many Bob Dylans. This one might yet turn out to have been the most important of them all.

Ian Bell

Half a century ago a youth appeared from the American hinterland and began a cultural revolution. The world is still coming to terms with what he did. How he did it - and why - has never been fully explored. 
 
In Once Upon a Time, award-winning writer Ian Bell draws together the tangled strands of the many lives of Bob Dylan in all their contradictory brilliance. For the first time, the laureate of modern America is set in his entire context: musical, historical, literary, political and personal. 
 
In this acclaimed book, full of new insights into the legendary singer, his songs, his life and his era, the artist who invented himself in order to reinvent America is uncovered. Once Upon a Time is a biographical study of a personality that has splintered and reformed, time after time, in a country forever struggling to understand itself. Dylan has become the puzzle that illuminates. Here, in the first part of a major two-volume work, the puzzle is explained.

Ian Bell

Once Upon a Time

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