Ian Bell (1) (1956–2015)

An evening out for Paul Bryant. Ian Bell was in town to open a display of his photography of rock musicians and I was lucky enough to get to talk to him.

Paul, I’m sure you are going to want to start with the bad news.


Me: Have you photographed Leonard Cohen?

Yes, a few times.

Me: And Bob Dylan?

Maybe half a dozen.

Me: What do you think of Dylan’s concerts?

Picture being at a Heston Blumenthal dinner. It’s cost you $500. The table is lovely, the view gorgeous, the menu looks fantastic. And then you get served up cheese sandwiches. Not even special cheese sandwiches. Bob Dylan’s like that. All the elements are there, but you get something else. For a while I kept going to them figuring that I’d go to the right one, but there isn’t a right one. Do you know his radio show?

Me: No

He had this radio show for a long time, it was in themes and it was witty, the guy’s got a great sense of humour. But he isn’t willing to bring any of it to the table when he’s performing. He almost died in a car crash at one point and started acting like maybe presenting his music in a concert wasn’t the worst thing in the world that could happen to him. But it didn’t last for long. Meeting him was no fun either.

Me: So who do you prefer out of Dylan and Leonard Cohen?

I’m Team Leonard. Dylan gives nothing at his concerts. Leonard gives everything. He’s respectful, he’s….

Paul, I will spare you the rave review of Leonard.

You will be pleased to hear that there is good news.

The Ian Bell I talked to was erudicate and entertaining and informative….and…

is considering writing a book one day.

It was THE WRONG IAN BELL.

So you can relax. Maybe Bob’s best after all.… (plus d'informations)

Once Upon A Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan by Ian Bell is a biography of Bob Dylan and the legend of Bob Dylan. Bell is from Edinburgh is a columnist with The Herald and The Sunday Times. He won the George Orwell Prize for political journalism. Bell is also the author of an award winning biography of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Bob Dylan is a person everyone is familiar with, Blowing in the Wind, Rolling Stone, "Everyone must get stoned." I remember listening to Bob Dylan on AM radio, and by the time I was old enough to pay real attention to music in the 1970s he took a backseat to Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Bruce Springsteen. That is not a slight on the man and his music, but more of a statement about the time of my youth and my ignorance of Dylan beyond the pop culture sound bites. He did briefly popped back into prominence for a short period when in my Catholic education I was told Saved was Dylan finding his way, but I liked Slow Train Coming better.

Bob Dylan is a man of legend and that is where the "Once upon a time" comes into play with this biography. Dylan, was born Robert Zimmerman and was raised in a Jewish household in a mining town in Minnesota. He was 19 when he arrived in New York with a new name, new history, and without living parents. He tells how he ran away from several times starting at age 12. The stories continued in interviews of how he listened this singer or guitarist or his experiences with Woody Guthrie. Eventually he was caught on many these stories. His embellishments on the truth were not malicious or attempting to hide, but rather to be more interesting. It is not unusual for public figures. Someone who set the national tone during Dylan youth, Tailgunner Joe McCarthy was not a WWII tailgunner.

Bell puts everything in historical perspective discussing in parallel Dylan's life and national and international events. The Beat Generation, the folk music movement, civil rights, Vietnam, all bring change to America and American's views. Likewise, Dylan's music changes too. From folk, blues, rock, and country Dylan drifted into all forms of American music except for jazz. His personal life is included. Joan Baez, the motorcycle accident, challenges with his music, and other aspects of his life are included. These events are well documented with end note following each charter as well as a bibliography at the end of the book.

Once Upon a Time is a very detailed history of Bob Dylan's from his youth though the release of Blood of the Tracks. This is a comprehensive biography. Biographies of Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, or even punk rock I have read do not have anywhere near this detail. There are over 300 pages of text and this book stops at 1975. I enjoyed reading Once Upon a Time and will admit I learned more than I thought I would, or could about Bob Dylan. An excellent biography of one of America's most well known and long lived musician . Although "not authorized" it does seem to be a fair account of events. A great read.



Patti Smith… (plus d'informations)

More an extended essay about Dylan than a proper biography, Bells book is thoroughly engaging because of his voice. This guy can write. Sometimes in nonfiction, the reader willingly sacrifices turn-of-phrase for the sake of the content. Here, the reader may find himself wishing he could remember more of Bell’s terrific lines and apt characterizations. (I can’t. There are too many. It’s like trying to remember all the jokes in The Importance of Being Earnest.) He tells the story of Dylan’s childhood and ends with the release of Blood on the Tracks, all the while injecting his opinions of the songs, the times, and the man. He’s not slightly apologetic about this—and his refreshing stance as an admirer of Dylan but no sycophant makes the book so engaging. (I read the last 200 pages in a single three-hour sitting at the kitchen table as if they were the climax of an espionage thriller.) The book is as much a biography of “Bob Dylan” as it is of Bob Dylan; if that sentence seems puzzling, it won’t after a few chapters. Bell has read everything about Dylan, heard everything he’s ever recorded, and draws upon what must be a lifetime’s worth of thinking about him to tell a story which he often punctuates with the question, “Who does that?” He debunks the stories of Dylan lambasted as “Judas” for plugging in and does a similar service to the phrase “voice of his generation”—a phrase no one will use again after reading this. He properly dismisses “Rainy Day Women” as a bore and treats “Visions of Johanna” as the masterpiece it is and argues that “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” are less anthems than poses. So what if the reader disagrees? Bell sometimes allows himself to make sweeping generalizations about America and its people. So what, as long as he keeps us turning the pages?

Once Upon a Time is so much better than a straightforward biography because Bell knows that Bob Dylan and “Bob Dylan” have made such a traditional biography moot, or at least impossible without being wholly placed inside ironic quotation marks from start to finish. (Every reader knows that Dylan’s own Chronicles is really named “Chronicles”.) Instead, the reader is given long set pieces on a number of topics and events: Minnesota, Newport, Suze Rotolo, John Hammond, Abe Zimmerman, Woody Guthrie, Albert Grossman, The Beatles, The Band, and a brilliant 75 or so pages on the great trilogy of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. Bell is wonderful when talking about Dylan’s music and his ability to B.S. people: two skills that make his fans often grin as they say, “There’s only one Bob.”

I’m very much looking forward to reading the next volume. Highly recommended.
… (plus d'informations)

This second volume of Ian Bell’s treatment (“biography” is the wrong word) of Dylan is as good as the first. As in Once Upon a Time, Bell’s writing is muscular and energetic: every sentence is written by someone who has spent his life reading about and listening to Dylan—but who never sounds like a fanboy or longing-to-be-hip academic. Also as in the first volume, Bell sometimes editorializes too long about American politics or the electorate, but the writing is good enough that the reader can bear it for a few pages at a time. (He is as wrong about Reagan as he is about the Grateful Dead.) But if Bell is sometimes off-base with politics, he is dead-on with poetics. Beginning with 1975’s Blood on the Tracks and ending with 2013’s Tempest, Bell examines the career of Dylan (or “Dylan”) as American troubadour, artist, and icon. “His life,” Bell states, “had become a mixture of high art and low commerce, of thoughtful statements one the state of man and the modern world interspersed with textbook examples of the kind of behavior that gives stardom its disreputable name.”

Bell spends a hundred pages or so on the inaccurately-named “Gospel trilogy” and Dylan’s conversion—which Bell argues was never really so much a “conversion” as another of Dylan’s identities—that he had since Greenwich Village and which runs throughout his work. To his credit, Bell lets Dylan do the talking here and never tries to explain away or undermine his subject’s faith in Revelations or doubt his sincerity, even when his music suffered. Bell takes Slow Train Comingas seriously as Dylan might wish, and his seriousness is illuminating for the reader, who wonders what Dylan was thinking in the literal, as opposed to the ironic, sense. That Slow Train Coming sold more copies than Blood on the Tracks is another revelation.

The book is also a terrific study of the relationship between art and money. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael states the obvious regarding the difference between paying and being paid: “What will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a moneyed man enter heaven.” One of Bell’s themes is the shocking notion that Dylan likes being paid as much as anyone else. His Victoria’s Secret commercial, the Rolling Thunder Review, the Never-Ending Tour, the Bootleg Series—even the selling of limited edition harmonicas—are all examined in light of Dylan’s urge to capitalism. Bell’s book ends before the Superbowl Chrysler ad, but the effect is the same thing: anyone who groused that Dylan was somehow “betraying” his art in making a car ad seeks to speak from a position of innocence and cast the first stone.

One interesting minor note: neither of the two volumes feature a single photograph, pointed out here to reflect the strength of Bell’s writing. Who needs pictures?

Bell often treats Dylan’s incomprehensible choices—of producers, material, touring bands, and, most of all, songs left off of albums. He (as in the first volume) offers long examinations of songs that strike him as worthy of comment—but not always positive. Thus, the reader gets long analyses of “Blind Willie McTell” and “Jokerman” as emblematic Dylan achievements, and one just as long on “Isis,” in which Bell states that the listener has to “muster a certain tolerance for a laboring melody” and lyrics filled with “New Age bric-a-brac.” Bell examines the plagiarism issue (which, for him, is ridiculous), the reception of Chronicles: Volume One, and Dylan’s voice, which he calls a “magnificent ruin.” Nothing is left unsaid or unexamined: Bell treats each album, each phase, and each incarnation of Dylan with similarly impeccable judgment. For the Dylan fan, this is required reading.
… (plus d'informations)