Dylan on Dylan

March 1, 2018
A portrait of the artist through his interviewsThe Dylan contained in this anthology is the ideal interview subject: insightful, playful, at times self-reflective, and rarely boring. This will come as no surprise to those who have followed Dylan closely or read the interviews previously collected in Jonathan Cott's Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews (2017). What may come as a surprise is how fresh this volume reads. Burger--who has contributed to the publisher's Musicians in Their Own Words series with portraits of John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, and Leonard Cohen--mostly fills in around Cott's book (the two overlap in only a handful of cases). The author draws smartly from the scores of Dylan interviews to present the full arc of his subject's career from before his debut album to his 2016 Nobel Prize speech. With his notes and insightful introductions, Burger provides the necessary connective tissue and creates the narrative's ultimate effect as an autobiographical oral history told in close to real time. It works, then, as an introductory text covering the iconic moments of an iconic life but also as something more intimate. Reading Dylan--even his absurdist performance-art press conferences of the mid-1960s--readers may feel more receptive to his ideas than when watching footage of the same scene. At the heart of Dylan's artistry is his abiding love for music. In 2015, he told Robert Love about lying in bed as a boy in Hibbing, Minnesota, and listening to the Staple Singers on the radio: "It was the most mysterious thing I'd ever heard....And that singer is pulling things out of my soul that I never knew were there." It is the same thing Dylan's own music has done for so many of his listeners, which is what makes Burger's arrangement rewarding.A valuable contribution to the record of Dylan's legacy.

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March 15, 2018

Never an easy interview, Bob Dylan has made himself available to newspapers, magazines, and radio stations, usually on his own terms, for the past 57 years. This title collects 34 interviews and press conferences, plus the text of the speech he did not deliver at the Nobel Prize banquet in 2016. Arranged chronologically, starting with 1961, this volume includes most of the better-known interviews: with Nora Ephron (1965); Nat Hentoff's Playboy piece (1966); several from WBAI radio in New York; with Ed Bradley on 60 Minutes (2004); two conversations with Rolling Stone in 2006 and 2009. Missing are the classic radio interview with Studs Terkel from 1963 and earlier Rolling Stone pieces by Jann Wenner and Kurt Loder. The value of this collection is the publication of 23 additional interviews for a variety of smaller media outlets (e.g., Minnesota Daily, the Fort Lauderdale SunSentinel, Los Angeles Free Press, etc.). None of these gems appear in the motherlode, Bob Dylan: the Essential Interviews, and they nicely fill in some gaps in that compilation. VERDICT Will appeal chiefly to die-hard Dylan fans, who always want more material on their hero.--Thomas Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, PA

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 1, 2018
It has been said numerous times that Bob Dylan rarely gives interviews. Tell that to Burger, who has collected an impressive number of rare interviews given by the enigmatic Mr. Dylan over the decades. Chronologically arranged, beginning with conversations from 1961 and 1962 preserved by Izzy Young, owner of the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village, an early hangout for Dylan, and ending with Dylan's Nobel speech in December 2016, this volume gathers interviews, speeches, radio interviews, and press conferences. Highlights include Nat Hentoff's fall 1965 Playboy interview; the 1965 San Francisco KQED-TV moment when Dylan, tongue firmly in cheek, refers to himself as a song-and-dance man; a 1978 interview with a reporter for the student-run newspaper at Dylan's alma mater, the University of Minnesota; the 2004 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley; and many more. Readers can dip into the collection at any page and be royally entertained as Burger also includes brief comments by Dylan, such as, on growing up in Minnesota in the 1950s, I don't recall anything bad ever happening, and on why he doesn't talk much in concert, The songs themselves do the talking. A must for all Dylan fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)