No Direction Home: The Life And Music Of Bob Dylan
by Robert Shelton
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Book Summary Information
Author: Robert SheltonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-07-09
ISBN: 0306812878
Number of pages: 576
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Book Reviews of No Direction Home: The Life And Music Of Bob Dylan
Book Review: The Most Sympathetic Critic
Summary: 5 Stars
Written by the critic widely-credited with launching Dylan's career, Shelton had unusual access to Dylan, his family, and his friends. The result is that interview material is abundant, and the book is exceptionally helpful in understanding Dylan's career. Shelton never quite flies over the material to get a complete view, but he was there, on the ground, going through the Village at the time. It is disorganized but fascinating, filled with wonderful anecdotes but not always discerning in the choice of material. He seems to believe all that people tell him. That makes for a wonderful friend and a great guy but a biographer who remains mostly uncritical.
This is an authentic and valuable portrait for what it is, and what it is is a great book.
--Lawrence J. Epstein, author of Political Folk Music in America from Its Origins to Bob Dylan
Summary of No Direction Home: The Life And Music Of Bob Dylan
Robert Shelton wrote the rave review of Bob Dylan in the New York Times that is generally credited with being the piece that "discovered" him in 1961. Twenty-five years later, Shelton, who had followed Dylan's career faithfully, published No Direction Home. Here is the "empathetic and rather magnificent" (Washington Post Book World) story of Dylan, musician and phenomenon.
Robert Shelton, a critic for the New York Times in 1961, caught an early Bob Dylan gig at Folk City in Greenwich Village and wrote an effusive review for the newspaper. The coverage in the Times was a huge boost to the career of the then-struggling folksinger, and Shelton and Dylan became friends, seeing each other frequently around the Village folk scene. When Shelton, in the 1980s, finally got around to finishing his full-length biography of Dylan, he could draw upon a wealth of insider stories from the early days. The book is naturally strongest when describing Dylan's early career, from his coffeehouse gigs as a Woody Guthrie disciple to the insanely high artistic peaks of the mid-'60s. A particularly engaging passage concerns a freeform interview Shelton conducted with Dylan as they flew high above the Midwest in early 1966; Shelton's memories of Dylan are essential reading for fans. Shelton saw much less of the notoriously private Dylan as the years passed, and the book loses momentum as he becomes less of an eyewitness and more of a distant observer, though Dylan's story is credibly told up through the mid-1980s. --Robert McNamara
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