Among the Bobcats

Mark Ford

• The Dylan Companion edited by Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman
  Macmillan, 338 pp, £10.99, April 1991, ISBN 0 333 49826 7
• Bob Dylan: Performing Artist. Vol. I: 1960-73 by Paul Williams
  Xanadu, 310 pp, £14.99, February 1991, ISBN 1 85480 089 2
• Dylan: Behind the Shades by Clinton Heylin
  Viking, 528 pp, £16.99, May 1991, ISBN 0 670 83602 8
• The Bootleg Series: Vols I-III (rare and unreleased) 1961-1991 by Bob Dylan
  Columbia, £24.95, April 1991, ISBN 0 00 000097 3

May the 24th is Bob Dylan’s 50th birthday. To anyone involved with Dylan in the mid-Sixties, say during his medicine-fuelled blaze with the Band through Australia and Europe in 1966, the fact that he is not only alive but still performing twenty-five years later must in itself seem utterly extraordinary. One of the key aspects of the Dylan myth during those roller-coaster years was that he wouldn’t be around much longer. He was popping quantities of pills; he hardly ever slept; he seemed to provoke showdowns with any authority he could find. ‘He was Christ revisited,’ remarked an Australian actress he briefly took up with. On occasion Dylan himself explicitly tried on the martyr’s role: ‘I have a death-thing, I know ...’ he told his official biographer Robert Shelton in one of his more revealing interviews, as if confiding to an apostle.