Bob Dylan. Things Have Changed

In the wake of the recent hit biopic A Complete Unknown, this probing appreciation asks: Do the lyrics of Bob Dylan tell the true story of the ever-changing, ever-radical life and career of the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter?In a dingy windowless bungalow on the Warner Brothers back lot in Hollywood in 1977, in the midst of what may have been the longest interview he ever gave (it stretched over ten days), a chain-smoking Bob Dylan confessed to journalist Ron Rosenbaum that he was troubled by something missing from his music.
Dylan - who was editing a dramatic movie based on his life, even as his life seemed to be falling apart - told Rosenbaum there was a sound he was after that he'd only come close to on one record so far. The sound, he told Rosenbaum, was of "thin, wild mercury."This is a book that captures the elusive mercurial artist and his work in a way no other has - a vivid, compelling pursuit of Dylan, successively a hipster folkie, a Greenwich Village sparkplug of a cultural revolution, who plugged into an amplifier to drive away folkie solemnity, then became a countrified crooner, the man who, just months after Rosenbaum's interview, became a fire-breathing, proselytizing Christian .