Extracts from a new Bob Dylan memoir have come out, written by a long-time Dylan confidant.
The book written by Victor and Jacob Maymudes is titled Another Side of Bob Dylan: A Personal History on the Road and Off the Tracks.
Victor was Dylan’s road manager in the mid-sixties and again for a decade between 1986-1996. Maymudes passed away in 2001 but left his son Jacob, boxes of tapes featuring interviews and stories from his time spent with Dylan.
The book traces their coffee house days in Greenwich Village, their cross country road trip in 1964, the night he met the Beatles, his rocky relationships with women and gives a glaring insight into the secretive singer.
the 1964 road trip included a stop off in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, where Dylan was refused entry into a blacks-only bar and was the first time he heard the Beatles on the radio. “It was a group of friends, all in the know, a nucleus of hip in America. It was something special. The civil rights movement was going on.”
Maymudes writes of meeting the Beatles for the first time in 1964: “Bob tried to roll a joint and it fell to piece in his hands, scattering pot over a bowl of fruit sitting on the table. Victor took over and rolled the joints himself. That helped liven up the party, but Dylan, who’d been drinking, passed out on the floor within an hour. The following morning, Paul came up to me and hugged me for 10 minutes,” says Maymudes, ‘and said, ‘It was so great, and it’s all your fault because I love this pot!'”
Victor also tells the tale of the singer recording the album Another Side of Bob Dylan in one night. “He had never sang the songs in front of anybody before [that night]. He just blurted it out, like electricity building up in a capacitor, and then shooting out, he had packed it all inside himself and let it explode. I was in a daze,” Maymudes says.
Another Side of Bob Dylan: A Personal History on the Road and Off the Tracks by Victor Maymudes, co-written and edited by Jacob Maymudes, is available now on Amazon.
Watch the book trailer below.
