THE first time the teenage Michael Gray heard Bob Dylan on the radio – singing the iconic The Times They Are A-Changin' – he laughed at how "un-pop" and "un-youthful" the song was.
In those days of the early 1960s, Gray's tastes in music ran to appreciation of beat combos down at the Cavern Club, or rock and rollers at the Liverpool Empire. Introspection, folk, blues... they hadn't yet appeared on the radar.
"When I left Merseyside to study English and History at York University, I came across young blokes with acoustic guitars, sitting in common rooms singing Dylan's Masters of War. It seemed dreary and dirge-like, with none of the bite and flavour of Dylan's delivery.
"I remember people being outraged by his protest songs and his voice early on, but by the fourth album the political had become personal. It had taken a while to get used to the voice, but I had come to find his lyrics fascinating.
"I was learning how to use critical analysis in the study of the Romantic Poets and George Eliot. The more I listened to and thought about the multi-layered words and stories of Dylan's songs, the more I felt they could bear the weight of the same scrutiny.
"I felt he was a serious artist who belonged with those other poets, and not in the same category as Gerry and the Pacemakers. He was also teaching us that there didn't have to be a gulf between pop culture and 'high' culture. For most people in the mid-60s this was not obvious. In art, Roy Lichtenstein was doing the same."
Michael Gray left university to teach English in Devon. What he really wanted to do was write at length about Dylan – not about the minutiae of the musician's life and loves, but the art, the music and words that made the man from Minnesota into a revolutionary force in the world of song.
When Gray set about writing a critical narrative of Bob Dylan's work called Song and Dance Man (published here in 1972) he could have had no idea that the artist's career would have such longevity and that, at 65, he is about to release his 44th album in August.
Or, indeed, that he, Gray, would have not only have published a third updated edition of the original book (the second was in 1991 and third in 1999), but also have compiled The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, the ultimate compendium of facts about the artist's body of work, inspirations and associations.
Some of the 850 entries in the 800-odd pages read more like highly enjoyable essays, in which the man who has analysed Dylan's works in the closest detail adds his own critical view to the known (and many little-known) facts.
From a description of the low-key first performance of Blowin' in the Wind in 1962 to the inside track on how the purity of folk queen and Dylan collaborator Joan Baez's voice really irritated Dylan, and the influence of Edgar Allan Poe on the singer-songwriter, the book is a feast for Dylan geeks and less zealous but nostalgic lovers of his best works alike.
No artist has been so discussed, argued and written about. Few have caused such consternation as Dylan has, especially when he "went electric" and later when he espoused evangelical Christianity. Many musicians have had deep artistic troughs, but not so many have had his regular sublime highs, each reaching new and different peaks.
"One of the most fascinating things about Dylan is that his career has been prolific but patchy," says Gray, who lives with his food writer wife Sarah Beattie and family at Kirkbymoorside, North Yorkshire.
"Many others have been content to find success and keep repeating the formula. He never settled into one niche and milked it by repeating himself. That was a risky course to take, but at the same time led him to explore many different new areas of music, telling stories in a different way from everyone else."
A contract to produce the American version of Song and Dance Man I gave Gray the freedom to leave teaching. He wrote widely about Dylan and the British music scene for newspapers and magazines around the world.
In the '70s, he left the freelance life for a while to become head of press for the United Artists label, and had a spell as the manager of Scottish star Gerry Rafferty, following his monster hit with Baker Street. A white Cadillac didn't really compensate for having little do to – Rafferty turned down most invitations and offers, so Gray returned to what was fast becoming his life's work. Gray also wrote a biography of legendary rocker Frank Zappa.
Most of the 1990s were spent hunched over a keyboard, writing millions of words about Dylan for Song and Dance Man III. Later, Gray developed a touring one-man show about Bob Dylan, which involves photographs, video and music. He says he's not a Dylan "anorak", separating himself from the adoring masses by asserting that he has never shied away from criticising the star.
He escapes the easy categorisation of "geek", and certainly doesn't flinch from panning certain songs and the more facile of Dylan's lyrics. The 1976 album Desire comes in for a few brickbats in the Encyclopedia.
It suffered by comparison with the high point of Blood on the Tracks (1975), but in its own right, writes Gray, it has a "featherweight pop song" (Mozambique) and carries a protest song (Hurricane), "the weakness of which is shown by how much better the music is than the ideas behind the words".
Bob Dylan has little time for those who write about him, but in 1978 Gray was invited to join the icon backstage at Hammersmith Odeon, when he returned for a series of gigs in London after an absence of 12 years.
Dylan had, apparently, liked a piece Gray had written in Melody Maker. It was their one and only meeting.
"He was in the backstage area, and people were taken to meet him in small groups. I was with a few people who included Bianca Jagger and Jack Nicholson. I was too old and sane to think Bob Dylan and I would be soulmates, but still, it's strange, meeting someone who has meant such a lot to you when you mean nothing to them. It was rather an ordeal, and I don't really remember what was said. But he was very Bob Dylan, very charismatic."
The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia came about because fans of Song and Dance Man wanted its staggeringly exhaustive research compiled in a less discursive, reference format. Gray admits it can't be definitive.
"I spent a year on it exclusively, and it was exhausting. The deadline stopped me, so obviously there's more I could have done."
His next book is half-written, and arose directly from the story of Blind Willie McTell, a 1930s blues singer who died without due recognition. McTell's life and music influenced Dylan to write the eponymous 1983 song.
"When I was 20 and listened to Dylan properly for the first time, I knew he was important and that he had changed everything, but who would have known that he would have lived this long?
"Much of his later work may have been much less important and great as what came before, but you can only revolutionise the world once, just as John Osborne did very young, with Look Back in Anger."
Gray's choice of eight Desert Island Discs would include only three songs by Dylan ("I couldn't possibly pick them now"). Only three? "I play his music more than anyone else's – but I do have a life."
Expert though he is, Michael Gray says he will never write an obituary of Bob Dylan. "I wouldn't want his death to become a gig for me."
sheena.hastings@ypn.co.uk

The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia is published by Continuum. To order a copy of the book for £25 plus £1.95 P&P, call the Yorkshire Post Book Shop on 0800 0153232 or order online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk.
Michael Gray will be signing a copies of the book at Nunnington Hall, near Helmsley in North Yorkshire tomorrow from 2pm-4pm. The Official Bob Dylan Photographic Exhibition is at Nunnington Hall until July 9. For information, tel 01439 748283.