A collection of the best writing about Bob Dylan by the late Peter Stone Brown. Peter was a freelance writer, singer-songwriter and renowned Dylanologist. His rootsy debut album Up Against It was recorded in the Austin studio of childhood friend Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel. Debuting on the Americana charts in 1996, it featured many legendary Austin session players including Cindy Cashdollar who would play on Bob Dylan’s Time out of Mind the following year.
He had a love for Bob Dylan that would find him attending nearly 200 concerts spanning 1963 to 2018.
In 2008 Jeff Rosen commissioned Peter to write liner notes for Bob Dylan’s Tell Tale Signs, he spent about a week listening to tracks sent by Dylan’s office, suggesting songs and writing as he listened. In the end his notes didn’t make the final release but were posted on Bobdylan.com.
For more than twenty years Peter spoke of writing a book about Bob Dylan called The Joker and the Thief. He’d drafted various outlines of how it would go, spoken to numerous friends over the years about it, but he kept getting pulled into other work.
Fortunately much of what has become his body of work on Dylan, from concert and album reviews to prose pieces, span many of the ideas Peter had for the book and are contained herein.