Book stores and libraries are stuffed with tomes about Bob Dylan. The meaning of Dylan. The lyrics of Dylan. The meaning of the lyrics of Dylan. The philosophy of Dylan. Album by Album. Song by Song. Year by Year. However, you might have noticed that, thus far, Dylan has escaped the slings and arrows from his inner circle. And, while Suze Rotolo recently dropped a book on their time together in Greenwich Village and one-time Dylan insider Victor Maymudes put out his memoir a few years back, there have been no sordid tales from ex-wives, ex girlfriends or groupies.
Until now. Britta Lee Shain’s Seeing the Real You At Last: Life and Love on the Road with Bob Dylan bills itself as a “tender romance” and offers up the first intimate portrait of Dylan from an insider and, of course, from the female perspective. But a romance? I dunno.... maybe I’m jaded.
Shain comes into the inner circle via a blind date with Dylan’s road manager and it’s hard to believe the date would have happened at all sans that Dylan connection. But it does and they soon become a couple. Enter Dylan. Enter the butterflies and fantasies for super-fan Shain. Flirtation, teasing and cocktail parties eventually lead to a tour invite, most of the time without her boyfriend around, and the conclusion to all of this is probably rather obvious. And, while Shain does do some wardrobe shopping in her official….uh…”position,” she also books Dylan’s road women in and out of the tour when she is “with” the boyfriend and even picks one up at the airport and drives her to Bob’s house, where they proceed to make love for hours while she sits in the adjacent room. For some reason, this makes her angry…confused….hurt. Huh? Really?
There is some insight into Dylan – the person — and the stories from the road are “another side of Bob Dylan,” if clearly filtered through the author’s lens. But, in my opinion, we learn a lot more about Shain than Dylan. She tells us she is the only one who truly understands Dylan. She gets him like no one else. And, yes, she believes that new song was almost certainly written for her. And that favorite song he played at the concert was, in fact, meant for her. Anyone hear this story before?
Shain observes a few “rules of celebrity” that are applied to Dylan throughout the book but, unfortunately she forgets a key one: Players gonna play, And, in this book, Dylan certainly comes off as a player. Unfortunately, in that game someone always loses. Love minus zero. No limit.
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