What is it about Bob Dylan that sends writers mad?
Ron Rosenbaum is a man of galactic learning. Theology, neuroscience, American history, psychology, Shakespeare, cosmology, ‘all of Dickens’, nuclear weapons, quantum theory, iron ore – nothing escapes his hungry eye. Except, perhaps, Bob Dylan. Which is unfortunate, given that he’s written a book about him. What is it about Dylan that sends writers mad? Christopher Ricks’s usual mellifluousness succumbs to a pun-overdose; Clinton Heylin’s blindingly completist biographies are as impenetrable as their subject; Sean Wilentz lurches from the unlikely to the banal. With Things Have Changed, Ron Rosenbaum, the de facto ‘Dylan correspondent’ for the Village Voice in the early 1970s, proves that even ‘being there’ confers no immunity. As
