Those left in his wake, so many interviewed by Shelton here, are as often bitter chewing over their memories of Dylan as they are gentle. This chrysalis was strange, and was not to be owned by any community- for Dylan was ever and always aggressively individual, radically apart. (Shelton wrote the 1961 New York Times piece that “discovered” Dylan, was his friend, critic, and media ambassador throughout the decades that followed, and even accompanied Dylan and the Band on the famous 1966 world tour- this is almost an “authorized” biography…) From early glimmerings of Dylan’s youth in Hibbing and Duluth, a chubby-cheeked kid aping Brando and James Dean, roaming the desolate streets of a hometown losing its vitality as the mining industry waned, through all of those wrecked and rugged mythic backroads of Middle America that led Bob circuitously to New York City and fame and the world beyond, the book’s pace mirrors its subject's phases of development- the early chapters loping through Dylan’s opaque early days as well as the history of American folk and Black music, the music that Dylan would come to incorporate, subsume, and transform throughout his career, the excrescence of Depression-era America still making those railroad tracks hum from coast to coast, vibrating like a plucked guitar string or a church bell in a little impoverished Minnesota town on the wrong side of the Mississippi, or echoing like the shadowy plains out of which Dylan emerged to be unwillingly christened folk music’s new protest messiah- an honor which he immediately rejected and violently shed. Shelton’s book is a Citizen Kane-style kaleidoscope, a fragmented searching-out and recollection of shards from multiple perspectives, forming a bewilderingly contradictory portrait of America’s most enigmatic bard- and to be sure, any successful portrait of Dylan should aspire to be no less than a puzzle, a bewildering one, for what public figure is more intentionally protean, what pop star has ever lived as complexly masked and anonymously as Robert Zimmerman? However, Shelton is an especially privileged mosaic maker, as he was close to Dylan from the start of his career in New York. "Not since Rimbaud said ‘I is another’ had an artist been so obsessed with escaping identity… Dylan as an identifiable persona has been disappearing into his songs, which is what he wants.
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