Keith Negus’ biography of Bob Dylan is excellent, particularly because it attends to Dylan's music, which has not been addressed until now. It is scholarly, written with fluency, precision, clarity and depth. Negus has that literary knack by which the need for concision (the book is in a series of quite short biographies of popular musicians) does not prevent him from easing up and thinking about things. He makes productive references to the 26 texts that directly concern Dylan, citing 10 writers in the first eight pages alone, all of which are to the point and effortlessly folded into the general drift. Value judgements are not repressed, thankfully, but kept to a minimum and usually justified. The index is thorough, listing every song mentioned. The book contains an excellent collection of photographs, though their reproduction is a little disappointing.

The difficulty of Negus’ task cannot be underestimated: 40 studio albums across 50 years as well as several live shows and compilations (not to mention Negus’ evident recourse to the vast Dylan bootleg library). His task was further complicated by Dylan's in some ways understandable defensiveness. Moreover, during the time that Negus was writing, CBS were issuing a few live recordings from the 1960s and 1970s, as what they cunningly dubbed ‘The Bootleg Series’. Then again, in Reference Dylan2004 Dylan published the first volume of his autobiography, Chronicles. Negus has made important references to all these new resources. This is not only now the book to read on Dylan, but it is also essential for anyone seriously concerned with popular music, because it shares insights and discusses many general issues, both ideological and musicological, that are of importance to popular musicology as a whole.

In the first chapter, ‘Surroundings’, Negus illustrates Dylan's highly informal, though nonetheless self-consciously produced, stage persona by way of a comparison between his 1964 New York Philharmonic Hall concert and that in Manchester's Free Trade Hall two years later (pp. 5–13). Negus discusses Dylan's Jewish identity (pp. 10f), his introspective and visionary teens (pp. 12f), and his early extreme sensitivity to mechanical, natural and ambient sound (pp. 13–18), not to mention his extraordinary audio-sponge-like absorption of the music he heard in his musically formative teenage years: folksong, country, blues, rock ‘n’ roll and R&B (pp. 19–23). The chapter ends with a fascinating account of Dylan's first negotiations with the music business (pp. 24–8).

The second chapter, ‘Chronologies’, which is divided into nine, more-or-less chronologically defined sections, gives a remarkably even-handed, always interesting history that stays pretty close to Dylan's music from his first album in 1961 to Modern Times in 2006.

One of Negus’ strengths as a ‘pop’ musicologist is his understanding of the technology of studio production, which is a vital element in Dylan's bands’ recorded music that classically trained musos can be unaware of. With respect to Highway 61 (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966), Negus draws attention to Dylan's meeting with Phil Spector and his interest in Spector's ‘wall of sound’ production methods, which is particularly apparent on Blonde on Blonde (1966) (p. 38). Further on in the book there are two detailed analyses of studio techniques, the first with reference to Empire Burlesque (1985) (p. 56), and the second to Oh Mercy (1989), which was recorded in far more informal sessions with Daniel Lanois in New Orleans (pp. 62–5).

Another particularly rich aspect of his chapter is when he discusses Blood on the Tracks (1975), Desire (1976) and Street Legal (1978), together with Dylan's tours at this time. Because he produced versions of many of the songs of Blood on the Tracks in more than one studio, there has been a proliferation of bootlegs, which Negus shows provide insights into Dylan's creative interests at this time, most especially concerning changes of key, which affected the clarity of his voice in the studio mix, and his experiments with changed textures (pp. 48f).

Negus discusses how the CBS 3 CD Biograph collection of 1985 re-ordered Dylan's past, freeing songs from albums, so that newcomers to his oeuvre did not think of the place of any song in any particular era (pp. 57f). Moreover, he proposes that, as a result of Dylan's ‘Never Ending Tour’ (1,913 gigs between 1988 and 2006), which has involved constantly changing live shows, his performances have become far more significant than his albums (p. 60).

Chapter 3, ‘Traditions’, includes an interesting discussion of Dylan's creative dialectic between originality and the quasi-organic emergence of his songs from pre-existing ones, or rather from pre-existing styles and genres: nursery rhymes and fairy tales (pp. 73–5), the blues (pp. 75–82), which he says ‘can be heard in the way that Dylan's melodies slide across and between notes’ (p. 76), country music (pp. 86–7) and folksong (pp. 87–97). Negus points up that these four influences are all free from copyright laws (p. 97).

Chapter 4 concerns Dylan's words. From early on in his career Dylan transgressed distinctions between ‘high art’ and popular music by drawing on diverse literary resources including Humphrey Bogart's films, the Bible, T.S. Eliot and the Beat Poets (pp. 98–113). While these literary allusions won over more educated listeners than popular song could have ever previously assumed, they have also attracted some rather imaginative literary critiques, concerning which Negus is wisely circumspect (pp. 99–104).

Dylan, as Negus says, rhymed compulsively (p. 116) and, particularly in the late 1960s, allowed this habit to sometimes lapse into nonsense (p. 37). Nonetheless, Negus warns critics off bringing inappropriate values to bear on Dylan's songs. He cites Dave Van Ronk, who said that the title of ‘All Along the Watchtower’ is ‘flawed and “sloppy” because “a watchtower is not a road or a wall, and you can't go along it”’ (p. 101). Negus replies, ‘Well you can go along it in a song. You can do lots of odd things in songs’ (p. 101). He also warns off autobiographical approaches to the words of his songs, which have only very limited pertinence, in the sense that there are only a handful of songs in which Dylan can be assumed to be the ‘I’ of the lyrics (pp. 104–8).

The extensive literature on Dylan is, without exception, unconcerned with his music (pp. 127–31) which, as Negus says, is to ignore the essential temporal nature of musical experience (p. 128). In this last chapter Negus considers first melody, then rhythm and audience participation. Dylan's melodies, Negus says, have often been characterised by ‘a sudden rising and falling pattern’ (p. 132), though in recent years his phrases, in performances at least, tend to turn upwards at the end (p. 133). A second characteristic of Dylan's melodies is that they are often grounded in very short ‘loops’, comprising repeated phrases or riffs (p. 135).

Negus also notes Dylan's preference for pentatonic scales which, as he says, are much less directed than diatonicism, giving ‘… the impression of being suspended in a permanent now’ (p. 138). He suggests that Dylan's pentatonic melodies, at least in his early songs, derive from his preference for the black notes of the piano when song writing, and from his passion for the Delta blues, folk and gospel (p. 137). He also draws attention to Dylan's characteristic falling minor thirds and chant-like passages (pp. 139–42).

In the second part of his last chapter Negus discusses Dylan's ‘system’ for producing songs, which he talks about in his biography. This is the only issue that I disagree with Negus about, since he thinks of Dylan's system as being rhythmic (p. 146) while I think it is melodic. Fortunately this has no effect on the rest of his discussion of Dylan's rhythms, which focuses on the way in which, in concert, he plays off his vocal rhythms against those of the drums (p. 198).

Negus closes his book with reports on how audiences sing along with Dylan in his more recent concerts, and how he often leaves refrains to the audience. Negus thinks, perhaps over-optimistically, that this singing along can express collective freedom (p. 153). Whatever the case, this insight is a fine way to end such a brilliant biography.