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List Price: $14.95 | | Publisher: Wenner
Salesrank: 170141
Released: May 15, 2007 |
| Our Price: $7.43 |
| Used Price: $7.44 |
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| Media: Paperback |
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Editorial Review:
Now in paperback -- the definitive collection of Bob Dylan’s essential interviews from 1962 to the present
Dylan expert and longtime Rolling Stone contributor Jonathan Cott has compiled thirty-one interviews that, taken together, present the public transformation of a brilliant young man evading fame and its attendant invasion of privacy into a seasoned professional who has learned how to impart truth to those questioning him without giving away too much of his private self.
Included in Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews are all six major interviews Rolling Stone conducted with Dylan, by Jann S. Wenner, Mikal Gilmore, Kurt Loder, and Cott himself. Other highlights include Nat Hentoff’s legendary 1966 Playboy interview with the singer; Studs Terkel’s 1963 radio interview on Chicago’s WFMT; the interview Dylan gave to screenwriter Jay Cocks when Cocks was a Kenyon College student in 1964; a 1965 interview with director Nora Ephron; and an interview that Sam Shepard turned into a one-act play for Esquire in 1987. Each piece portrays Bob Dylan as an interview subject who, as Cott writes in his introduction, is "at once obviously reluctant, self-protecting, and self-concealing but equally often a stunningly direct, heartfelt, epiphanic, poetic, and, most important, playful expositor of his munificent and inspiring thought-dreams."
Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews Reviews:
Essential 
2009-08-15 - This book is absolutely essential for Dylan fans and everyone who intend to understand Dylan.
bob 
2009-06-01 - It's good stuff. It's life experiences. It's a wealth of info that they would not teach you of in college...
Watching Dylan Grow
2008-01-17 - Provides a fascinating portrait of a man attempting to deal cleverly with the exigencies of fame, while retaining his soul.
Particularly interesting for the early interviews, as we see Dylan developing the playful, Dadaesque indirection that he would use with interviewers, and for the interviews with those that accompanied him in his early years--folksters with whom he would drop the guise, and speak clearly and directly about his craft.
Great reading.
" A hero is a man who can talk to his drummer"
2007-02-26 - Thirty interviews over a forty year span are included in this volume. Dylan fans will thus have a lot of fun here. Dylan can be very funny and he also can be just plain kookie. One of his best gigs is his responses to questions that would make him a kind of Savior , political or otherwise of mankind. Here he is usually self- effacing and ironic.
One of the touching bits for me was his telling how as a nineteen year old youngster he took a Greyhound bus each day from Midtown Manhattan to visit Woody Guthrie who was dying of 'Huntington's Chorea'. Guthrie could barely speak . All he could do was give a name of his own song. Dylan says he knew them all and whatever Woody asked he played him.
Dylan really knows and loves popular music and talks in an interview with Sam Shepherd as well as in others of tens of groups I myself and I suspect most people never heard of. In another interesting piece someone asks him about contemporary songwriters and surprisingly he names Shel Silverstein as a real favorite. Also Randy Newman. And he mentions a couple of Paul Simon songs like 'A Bridge over Troubled Water' but then says that Simon has written a lot of flack. But who hasn't?"
I in general believe the Interviews are very interesting when Dylan talks about what he really loves , the Music, and how he makes it and plays it. In one interview he says that he has to play a certain time each day, but that he cannot do twelve- hour practice sessions like a Segovia 'There is a bit about the born- again Dylan which I found a bit distrubing , but I did not find him talking about his alleged reconversion to Judaism. Supposedly one topic he has pretty much avoided is his parents and parental home in Hibbing.
Dylan talks about his songwriting, about how he often throws out the most inspiring lines. It is interesting that the person who along with the Beatles has written the 'lyrics ' most song- listeners of the latter part of the twentieth century 'know' , begins his songs also with the music, the melody. The words come later.
I have no doubt that fans of Dylan will love this collection of interviews and learn much from it.
This is no light overview as many Dylan titles offer
2007-02-06 - Jonathan Cott has written sixteen books including others on Dylan and both rock and classical musicians: his depth and experience is perfect for BOB DYLAN: THE ESSENTIAL INTERVIEWS, a compilation of interviews following Dylan from the early sixties to today. There are over thirty such interviews gathered here which when taken as a unit provide a smooth historical and psychological progression you won't find in the many Dylan biographies on the market. Also included are all six major interviews Rolling Stone Magazine conducted with Dylan, including Cott's own interview. This is no light overview as many Dylan titles offer, but an in-depth account of his life, perspective and art which is a recommended 'must' for any authoritative Dylan collection - even those already stuffed with books.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
