He had never heard of the visitor who stood on the porch of his North Carolina farm, but Carl Sandburg could sure spot a comer. "You look like you are ready for anything," the old poet said. "I would like to ask you about 40 good questions."
By the time of that brief pilgrimage in 1964, Bob Dylan, younger than Sandburg by more than a half-century, had already made three record albums, answered about 40,000 questions from a growing legion of fans and skeptical press, and was reinventing American music. "You certainly look like an intense young man," Sandburg observed, a nice bit of folksy lowballing considering that Dylan, back then, burned like Blake's tiger. Bob gave Carl a copy of The Times They Are a-Changin 'and headed off down the road.
Shortly afterward the young singer-composer would release four more albums and become the paradigm of the culture he had helped to create: part shaman, part avatar and, as he was to suggest in a later song, part jokerman too. The cumulative heat and emotional pressure became too much, even for a stoker like Dylan. He wracked himself up in a 1966 motorcycle accident and caught a quick glimpse of a fast and nasty end.
It is still an amazing trajectory, one that No Direction Home puts into thoughtful and compassionate perspective. Almost two decades in the writing, this is the first biography to have enjoyed such close cooperation from the subject. Still, boundaries were set down early. "You can't ask me about how I sleep," Dylan announced. "You can't ask me about how I make it, and you cannot ask me what I think I am doing here. Other than that, we'll just get along fine."
Dylan and Shelton had been getting along fine ever since the singer showed up in Greenwich Village in 1961 and the author, then a music reviewer for the New York Times, turned in a rave. The two became cronies and, for a time, neighbors. Shelton's evocations of the Village folk scene in the '60s are affectionate but level, describing Dylan's stormy and formative love affair with Suze Rotolo, which inspired many of his early tunes, and bringing bemused skepticism to Dylan's own tales of his arrival in Manhattan ("Cats would pick us up and chicks would pick us up and we would do anything you wanted, as long as it paid"). Whacked on Rimbaud and Woody Guthrie, Dylan was a mythomaniac with a backhand regard for truth. Accepting an award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee in 1963, he got fired up and tanked up and informed the assembled dignitaries, "Lee Oswald, I don't know exactly where--what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I, too--I saw some of myself in him."