Book Report of Bob Dylan's Life Story

This is my e-book report on ONCE UPON A TIME: THE MANY LIVES OF BOB DYLAN By Ian Bell. 

First of all let me give myself credit for reading such a huge book digitally. I think it was equal to being over 500 material pages.  And many of the paragraphs were huge without a breaking or pause point.  With my short- attention span very long paragraphs are a challenge.  Also as I get older other than my attention span gets shorter, but so does my retention vat.  I should have taken notes, I find it easier to remember if I write down notes… or used to, anyway.  But also as I get older my notes become illegible scrawls that I can’t read anyway.  

Now that I have got past the "Its all about m" part:

 Bob Dylan was born Jewish,  with the name Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941., in Duluth, Minnesota.  A few years after he was born they moved to Hibby, Minnesota.

The book does a critical study of Bob Dylan.  He also covers just about every song Dylan has written and recorded, his movements, the changes he has went through, and a brief run-down of world history often.  It appears Ian Bell did not are for  Bob Dylan, but to do such a researched study he had to be fascinated by the guy.

Dylan has changed is style or type of music almost as often as he changed pants (just a metaphor).   He started off with a teenage “garage band” and within a year living in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, scrounging for a place to sleep at night.  He dropped his rock for protest songs, and then dropped that for country, then religious almost gospel then on to something else.

He almost completely dropped his Jewish religious upbringing.

Some of his fans let out a Howl when he brought his electric guitar to the Newport Festival because they felt it took out the purity of folk music..  Speaking of “Howl”, he rubbed elbows with beat poet Allen Gingsburg.

He wanted to be near the great.  The first years in New York, he visited protest singer Woody Guthrie (“This Land Is Your Land”) in the hospital in New Jersey often.  Ian Bell vaguely insinuated that once Dylan made singer/songwriter John Prine get out of his car and walk when Prine was criticizing  Bob’s latest song he had written and asked Prine what he thought of it.

He also went to Hendersonville, North Carolina, to visit poet Carl Sandburg, who lived with his sister on a goat farm.  It was an unannounced visit an Carl Sandburg didn’t know who he was.  He did not stay very long, like minutes.

Ian Bell pointed out that if someone crashed on Dylan’s privacy he would be furious, which he proved many times.

Some Dylan fans believe that Bob Dylan has mystic senses.  According to the book he is self-centered, all about himself and his independence.  However, by to his mystic connections:  A true story:

In the Spring of 1975 a sick driver of a pickuip truck apparently lost conscious, ran a red-light and hit me and my Gremlin.  He was on his way to he drug store to get a refill on his medicine.  He went through the windshield and it cost him his life.  The impact knocked me on the other side of the car and then rolled, leaving me turned upside down.  My car radio was playing, “Blood On The Tracks”.
(I was not through with the "It's all about me."