Somebody had to do it. And if Clinton Heylin captures one thing in his latest book, Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1974-2006 (compare prices), it's that Bob Dylan is one of those rare perfectionists who will toil with a song until he's satisfied it's ripe for release. Such is the respect Dylan has for his fans, and for his products. Which is not to say that Dylan hits the mark with every crumb of an idea the muses toss his way, but the intention is always pure. And when approaching Dylan, understanding the intention behind his songs is essential in appreciating his ongoing vitality as a contemporary recording artist. Far too many critics are quick to dismiss much of Dylan's post-1974 catalog as irrelevant without thinking about what he was trying to do with a song in the first place.
Not so, Heylin. When he tears into a song for this finely honed encyclopedia of Bob Dylan's music, he rolls up his sleeves and plunges in with the meticulous gusto of an optical surgeon. In Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1957-1973 (2009), Heylin covered the first 300 songs in Dylan's wide-ranging repertoire, from his first teenage songs scratched out in Minnesota, through 1973's album Planet Waves. Released in July, the sequel, Still on the Road, is Heylin's next installment in the two-part series, with this volume covering the latter 300 songs in Dylan's illustrious career as America's premier singer-songwriter.
In volume two, long past are the days of Dylan's 90-degree trajectory of Village fame, when he was plucking major hits from the ether like “Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall” and “Blowin' in the Wind,” and capturing critical acclaim around the globe. Following his career lull in the early '70s, Heylin launches into Still on the Road with Dylan shifting gears as a songwriter, enjoying his first major comeback with his 1974 breakthrough album, Blood on the Tracks. From here through the next three decades, the author pores over Dylan's constantly shifting writing style as he struggled through bouts of “amnesia” and new inspirations, in what now amounts to a five-decade cultural pilgrimage studded with peaks and valleys.
As Heylin explains, “...whereas the first three hundred songs were essentially written in a thirteen-year period, it took the man some thirty-three years to complete this second series.” Winding through Dylan's religious period, onward through the Traveling Wilburys epoch, followed by his 1989 renewal with Oh Mercy and the beginning of the Never Ending Tour, and ending with the 2006 album Modern Times and its mixed critical reception, Heylin gives us Dylan as he passes through his middle and latter years. While the gems spilled from his pen with less frequency than the manic pace of Dylan's artistic zenith in the '60s, what did spill out were products of the same mind, only filtered through a refined and more mature cultural worldview.
Of particular interest is Heylin's treatment of the recent, sometimes bombastic, charges of Dylan—often referred to as a magpie—committing plagiarism with his craft. Heylin dispels this hype by showing that Dylan has been a purveyor of pastiche during several phases of his career, going right back to the beginning of his career and including the early 1980s when he went through his Christian rebirth and duly recorded his first trilogy of themed albums—Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love—which were riddled with passages plucked from the good book. Dylan revisited this songwriting method at the turn of the century with 1997's Time Out of Mind, 2001's “Love and Theft,” and Modern Times (2006), or what Heylin calls “another trilogy of albums dealing with mortality and fear.” Heylin tackles the controversy with aplomb, comparing Dylan to T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and putting his music in the proper context of cultural collage that goes back to the oldest traditions of folk and blues.
A herculean task to say the least, Still on the Road—like its predecessor Revolution in the Air—is essential reading for the serious Bob Dylan fan who wants to appreciate Dylan and his products on their own terms. Steeped in everything and anything Dylan, Heylin has proved again and again that he knows his stuff, and his analysis and insights are as accurate as they are honest. After compiling a two-volume series of this dimension and scope (1,000-plus pages in total), Heylin probably groans at even hearing the name Dylan. But this will pass. The honeymoon is far from over, even as the ink still dries on Heylin's latest effort. Since the 2006 finale of Still on the Road, Dylan has already clocked in two more albums with their residual outtakes, and the vaults still bleed with new discoveries and new information, making Heylin's project a perpetual work in progress.