Shelton’s inside story of Bob Dylan’s life became the basis of the best biography written about Bob Dylan’s explosive period of success and his comeback in the 1970s.īob Dylan is the topic of more than 990 books on but none of them show the man and artist better than No Direction Home. It was the weight of Shelton’s review in the NY Times that pushed the recording contract onto the front burner. Shelton’s NY Times article helped Dylan get widespread attention including a record contract with Columbia two weeks later.Ĭolumbia Records producer John Hammond already knew about Dylan. Shelton helps to put many of the early songs in context. Robert Shelton is one of the best sources, albeit tainted by his friendship with Dylan, to connect some facts to the songs. He showed that you could write songs and become famous singing your own material.ĭylan’s use of code in his music and weird press conferences begs for someone to decipher the riddles he created. Even Carol King, who later became famous as a singer songwriter, worked in the Brill Building churning out hit tunes for others.īob Dylan changed all that. However, many of us are fascinated by the iconic singer who made singer-songwriters the only real musicians.īefore Bob Dylan, songwriters, for the most part, worked on Tin Pan Alley and wrote hits for singers. Obviously, casual readers of Dylan’s work are better served by reading the Wikipedia article. 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. Shelton wrote up one of those performances for the newspaper and the rest, they say, is history.

Dylan was playing in Gerdes, a Greenwich Village folk club, at the time. (Updated) Robert Shelton was the first mainstream, music critic to discover Bob Dylan in 1961. No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan

No direction home by robert shelton