Customer Reviews

No Direction Home: The Life And Music Of Bob Dylan

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A master in the day, Bob Dylan's story of his early coffee shop day up untill about the mid-80's. Robert Shelton in 1961 wrote a article for Dylan that help his music take off.Dylan went from the Village folk scene to performing in front of large crowds of people. This book shows the transition from a coffee shop to the big stage. While telling you a blow for blow story of Dylan's life right up untill the mid-80's. The story starts out close to Dylan and over the span of the novel it come more of a distant observer. This book summerizes the whole time period and makes Dylan's personality better known. His songs have more impact now that you understand his motives. I recomend reading it.

Whether or not this is the BEST Dylan biography is hard to say, there are millions of them out there...certainly it has to be the best-researched, and one of the most heartfelt; Shelton gave Dylan his first great review, "discovered" him, in effect, and though he critically assesses Dylan's subsequent works there's never a doubt that he's Dylan's biggest fan. A midnight conversation on a private jet between Shelton and Dylan in the mid-60's is the best thing in the book, fascinating reading...but there is such a concept as too much of a good thing, and the minutae Shelton indulges in gets tiring. He apparently went to every concert and every party Dylan did, and his insistence on inserting himself into the scene makes me wonder about his objectivity. Maybe Shelton thought he was one of the new journalists. I don't know. But less Shelton would've been helpful. Also, Shelton insists on punctuating almost every paragraph with a hidden line from one of Dylan's songs; for awhile it's clever, but it gets old fast.
The book was out of print for a long time, and that's too bad. I hope it stays in print. It's incredibly packed with facts and interpretations and long quotes both from Dylan and those close to him. It's just TOO MUCH, that's all. But good. A worthy biography of the most potent force in popular music since Sinatra. How's that for a name out of left field?

Expertly written by Robert Shelton (the New York Times music and popular culture reviewer generally credited for "discovering" Dylan in 1961), No Direction Home: The Life And Music Of Bob Dylan is a faithful and definitive biography of the talented artist and his unforgettable music. An extensively detailed chronicle which explores all sides and aspects of a cherished and popular figure in American music, No Direction Home is a welcome addition to 20th Century Music History Studies collections and "must" reading for all Bob Dylan fans.

I really enjoyed this book. This is the first book I've read about Dylan so I can't say this is the best because I have nothing to compare it with but I found it very enjoyable and I liked the fact that the author is a friend and who acknowledges that so we know from what bias he is writing, a bias I rather enjoyed because there really is no objective way to look at Dylan- it's all subjective and this book is a great subjective overview. I also enjoyed how the author gave his commentary on Dylan's music and lyrics but left room for other interpretations- I think that's how Dylan wants his lyrics to be interpreted- leaving them open for each individual to have his own opinion. It's also cute how the author uses Dylan's lyrics to name his chapters and sections. I recommend this book to anyone who's a Dylan fan and/or interested in the folk/rock music period of the early 60's especially.

Who is Bob Dylan? None of the biographies I've read - Sounes, Heylin, Scaduto, and a short book by Toby Thompson (1971) - are by people that really knew him. Shelton is the New York Times reviewer who heard Dylan play in a Greenwich Village coffee house not too long after he came to NY and wrote a very promising review about him, which helped him on his way... Shelton also got to know him, spent time with him, and was able to piece many things together and interview people that were not mentioned in the other books. The interviews and stories are interesting and informative, fill in gaps left by the other books, and we get more of a feeling of Dylan, especially before he came to NY and as he was developing. This is a very well written book. Fans will like it a lot.

You must be interested in Dylan, as both a folk artist and a renegade, to take on this lengthy biography. If you are though, Shelton provides you with almost a Bible of Dylan from 1941 in Duluth, MN to 1985 in NYC - through all his different stages, his changing emotions, his passions - and of course his music. Getting into Dylan can be intense but he'll rumble your soul and twist your head a couple times so you get to see whats all around you. His influence on music and society is absolutely far-reaching. This book is excellent!!!

This book only covers up to 1985 or so (because that's when it was written), but for the Hibbing-to-1985 period it's the best possible Dylan biography.

This book was so well written and planned. this book makes you feel as if you have been through many of Dylan's travels with him. It provides detailed childhood stories about dylan and him intimate relationships. I highly recommend this book for all dylan fans.

. . .start (of course) with the albums, of course, especially "Freewheelin'," "Highway 61 Revisited," "Blonde on Blonde," and "John Wesley Harding," "Basement Tapes," "Blood on the Tracks," "Bootleg Series Vol 4," and maybe "World Gone Wrong." Then check out "Don't Look Back" on DVD. Shelton's book has a lot of great information about Dylan, but it's not the best organized or most concise biography you'll ever come across (maybe it's the editor who worked on the book's fault [?]). It's also now a bit dated, published in 1986. Clinton Heylin's "Man Behind the Shades" (1991) and Howard Sounes' "Down the Highway" (2001) are both more up-to-date and easier reads. Greil Marcus' "Invisible Republic" (1997)does a better job of placing Dylan's music in a historical context. "No Direction Home" is a sprawling collection of interview excepts, biography, oral history, the author's personal recollections of Dylan, musicology, and literary criticism that never really connects the dots, but there is a lot of great information for the experienced or semi-experienced Dylan enthusiast to wade through

Robert Shelton was the first mainstream, music critic to discover Bob Dylan in 1961. Dylan was playing in Gerdes, a Greenwich Village folk club, at the time.

Shelton wrote up one of those performances and the rest they say is history.

Weighing in at a hefty 3 lb, 330 dense pages and 290,000 words, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan is the definitive insider's view of Bob Dylan's life and career up to 1978. No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (The Acclaimed Biography)

Obviously, casual readers of Dylan's work are better server by reading the Wikipedia article.

However, many of us are fascinated by the iconic singer who made singer-songwriters the only real musicians.

Before Bob Dylan, songwriters worked on Tin Pan Alley and wrote hits for singers. Even Carol King, who later became famous as a singer songwriter worked in the Brill Building churning out hit tunes for others.

Bob Dylan changed all that. He showed that you could write songs and become famous singing your own material.

Dylan's use of code in his music and contacts with the press and public begs for someone to decipher the riddles Dylan created.

Robert Shelton is one of the best sources, albeit tainted by his friendship with Dylan, to connect some facts to the songs. Shelton helps to put many of the early songs in context.

Shelton's NY Times article helped Dylan get widespread attention including a record contract with Columbia two weeks later.

Columbia Records producer John Hammond already knew about Dylan. It was the weight of Shelton's review in the NY Times that pushed the recording contract onto the front burner.

Shelton's inside story of Bob Dylan's life became the basis of the best biography written on Bob Dylan's explosive period of success and his comeback in the 1970s.

Bob Dylan is the topic of more than 990 books on Amazon.com but none of them reveal the man and artist better than No Direction Home.

Having read more than 50 books about Bob Dylan, I can safely say that none of them get as close to who Bob Dylan really is.

Robert Shelton became a Dylan's friend during the next two decades after their introduction at Gerdes. He wrote extensively on Dylan and his work during this period.

At times Shelton toured with Dylan. He was there at most of the momentous moments in Dylan's career such as the famous rock band performance that shocked the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

Early on, Shelton asked Dylan's permission to write this book and Dylan agreed.

For their friendship, Shelton got exclusive access to Dylan's parents and brother David. He also was able to interview people like Suze Rotolo, Dylan's girlfriend on the cover of Freewheelin Bob Dylan, and numerous musicians from the 60s.

To some extent their friendship makes Shelton slightly circumspect in reporting the "dirt" on Dylan.

Shelton refrains from a tell-all exploitation style which put him at odds with book publishers who wanted salacious bits about Dylan's personal life, marriage and love affairs.

However, what we get is real inside information on Dylan, what he was doing, how he worked and created his songs and performances. We also learn about his influences and relationships with other musicians.

After reading only a few chapters of No Direction Home it becomes obvious most of the other biographers are not privy to the detailed facts of Dylan's life and career.

Dylan was known for treating journalists to interviews where he is toying with them, putting them on. Dylan mostly played the role of trickster or joker with the media, most famously put down as Mr. Jones.

"You know something is happening, but you don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?" Dylan sang in Ballad of Thin Man his composite for all the inane reporters who have attempted to interview him.

Dylan still does that. He told a recent Rolling Stone interviewer that he travels with a boxing trainer to keep himself in shape. Rolling Stone printed that Dylan myth as if it were true.

There are also innumerable verbatim interviews with Dylan in this book. Shelton gives hints but doesn't outright call Dylan on some of the more outrageous statements.

When this book was republished, an interview with Dylan and Shelton claiming Dylan's heroin use was leaked to the media. One can suppose that was intended to make the book a candidate for TMZ. Readers looking for that type of disclosure will be disappointed.

No Direction Home was published first in 1986 and re-published with some updating this spring in time for Bob Dylan's 70th birthday.

Shelton felt his original publisher hacked the book up and much of the original material has been restored by the editors.

The result is a lengthy book that sometimes tries one's patience but in the end rewards with the most detailed portrait of the man and artist.

Robert Shelton died in 1995, a relatively obscure writer living in England. His great legacy is providing us a true biography of one of the last century's most influential musicians.

The only criticisms of the book are that it ends just before Dylan's conversion to Christianity and the Prelude tries too hard to emphasize Dylan's significance.

No Direction Home is not related to the Martin Scorsese biography of Bob Dylan. That film was was produced by Jeff Rosen, who is chief Bob Dylan archivist at Columbia Records.

Available from Amazon.com