Tangled Up in Bob

This comprehensive approach is standard in D Studies. Bob is a big topic, getting bigger all the time, as he continues to flummox presumptions of reclusiveness by barnstorming 100 dates a year, churning up ever more Dylanology in his wake. Clinton Heylin's recent update of Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited now tips in at 780 pages, a strain on the bookshelf that also includes Heylin's Bob Dylan: A Life in Stolen Moments — a day-by-day account of Dylan's doings from the years 1941 to 1995. Even more colossal is Michael Gray's ever-expanding revise of Song and Dance Man III — The Art of Bob Dylan, which now stretches to 918 pages, including a 111-page chapter titled "Even Post-Structuralists Oughta Have the Pre-War Blues." But even this seems curt compared with Oliver Trager's forthcoming (release is timed to Dylan's sixtieth birthday, on May 24th) Back Pages: The Definitive Encyclopedia of Bob Dylan. Talk about bringing it all back home (the UPS man who delivered the 1,179-page manuscript to my house was puffing hard): This deeply annotated sprawl of song analysis and cool gossip is enough to keep D fans occupied through a short nuclear winter.

It does not stop, as witnessed by the more-than-5,000-item sales list put out by Rolling Tomes Inc., the Bob megalopolis run by the charming Mick and Laurie McCuistion out in Grand Junction, Colorado. In addition to their quarterly On the Tracks, the McCuistions, who have four full-time employees engaged in what Laurie calls "Bob work," recently added a monthly newsletter titled "Series of Dreams," because, as Laurie says, "there's just so much stuff happening all the time."

As everyone agrees, the current red-hot center of Dylanology is Bill Pagel's Boblinks Web site, based in Madison, Wisconsin, which, in addition to posting a set list (and several highly personalized reviews) within a half-hour of Bob leaving the stage in any part of the world, also offers access to more than 300 other Dylan pages. Here, along with linkage to Sony's own "official" Bobdylan.com and its mighty lyric finder, one encounters the various personal Dylan shrines, cyber tours of Hibbing, Minnesota (where signs welcome the traveler to the "home of Kevin McHale"), hundreds of interviews with the Bobhead and numerous pages such as "A Lily Among Thorns: Exploring Bob Dylan's Christianity." "Lily" offers a compendium of Dylan's Slow Train/Saved-period brimstone preaching: On one particular tempestuous evening in Tempe, Arizona, the Rev. Bob, in a sin-killing lather over persistent cries of "Rock & roll!!!" screams, "If you want rock & roll, you can go down with rock & roll! You can see Kiss! You can rock & roll all the way down to the Pit!"

Displaying ecumenicalism befitting its seeker hero, Boblinks also features "Bob Dylan: Tangled Up in Jews." The site offers "highlights of Dylan's Judaic journeys," such as "changing his name from Zimmerman," "studying with Lubavitch Hasidim," and a description of the First Annual Bob Dylan Ceremonial New Year's Bread Toss," in which Bob's rabbi shares where it's at and The Man himself blows the Jewish horn."