Bob Dylan Performing Artist: 1974-1986, The Middle Years

This second volume of Paul Williams' writings on Bob Dylan, from 1992, offers a singularly lucid and informed interpretation of the mature work of Dylan. Williams' three-volume biography of Bob Dylan, focusing on him as a musician, has become a standard work on Dylan. As Jonathan Cott appraised, "Anything Paul Williams writes about Bob Dylan—and always in his wonderfully unpretentious, conversational and heartfelt manner—is worth reading. Performing Artist immediately enters the canon as one of the few necessary books on Dylan." The founder of Crawdaddy! magazine, the first American rock music journal, Paul Williams is the author of 18 books. Rolling Stone called him "head and shoulders and arms and maybe even legs above everyone else ... smart, daring, knowledgeable, and he writes like a whiz. The essential oils of rock permeate his every sentence."