Bob Dylan Performing Artist 1986 - 1990 & beyond: Mind Out Of Time

By Paul Williams

Book Overview

The drama of Bob Dylan's early years as a songwriter and recording artist is well known. Through his songs and recordings, he rapidly established himself as a major artistic force at a very fertile time in American and world culture. The young artist was so much an embodiment of that politically and socially turbulent time that the next period in his life and work was shaped by the further drama of his struggles with his own myth (his seven-year withdrawal from performing and his dramatic return to the world and the stage, and then the very public self-explorations of his Rolling Thunder Revue. his album Blood on the Tracks, his film Renaldo & Clara, and his "gospel period"). A decade later, in the view of many observers, Dylan's career reached a low point with such albums as Down in the Groove and Dylan & the Dead and his starring role in the unrewarding film Hearts of Fire. Now the long-awaited third volume in Paul Williams's acclaimed Performing Artist series, Bob Dylan - Mind Out of Time, portrays this difficult patch (Dylan later spoke of not being able to remember the meaning of his own songs as he sang them onstage in summer 1987) as a breakthrough moment that led to the extraordinary mature work of Dylan's life as a performer known as "The Never Ending Tour," and culminated in his rediscovery of himself as a songwriter and recording artist in the universally praised 1997 and 2001 albums Time Out of Mind and "Love And Theft." Like the earlier volumes in this series, Bob Dylan - Mind Out of Time provides the basis for a reassessment of Bob Dylan's work as an artist and a deeper understanding of what motivates him and how he views himself and his work...while giving us an in-depth look at his artistic struggles and triumphs during a particular moment in is life and art. Williams here offers us insight into how this man so closely associated with one time in modern cultural history has been able to establish himself as the "mind out of time" he has always aspired to be. Book jacket.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1844492818
• ISBN13: 9781844492817
• Release Date: October 2004
• Publisher: Omnibus Pr & Schirmer Trade Books
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.5" x 6.5"