The Postman Rings Forever

By Jay Cocks

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."

The composer was not going for simple shock value here. He was speaking with the outcast pride of someone who felt cut loose from his moorings even when he was closest to home. The elder son of diligent Jewish parents in Hibbing, Minn., Robert Allen Zimmerman not only wanted to make music from the time he was a kid, he wanted his life to have the careening energy of a rock song. He rode motor-cycles, sang Little Richard songs at high school talent shows, hung around with a girl from--literally--the wrong side of the tracks and spruced up his moniker. "Straighten out in your book," the subject told the author, "that I did not take my name from Dylan Thomas." Typically, Dylan does not elaborate on the name's origins (Shelton speculates that it comes from Marshal Matt Dillon of Gunsmoke and from a Hibbing family called Dillion). He is also cagey throughout on subjects as various as drugs ("It takes a lot of medicine to keep up this pace," he tells Shelton during the killer concert tour of 1966) and his born-again religious period. But he is forthright about a love affair with Joan Baez, his family life with Sara Lowndes and five children and his celebrity.

"It's not me," Dylan insists. "It's the songs. I'm just the postman. I deliver the songs." No Direction Home is heavily freighted with analyses of those special deliveries and loses some of its personal edge when the two men drift apart in the late '60s. Shelton, however, remains scrupulous to the end. He was in attendance during a period of enormous productivity, but he makes a strong case for Dylan's later work. The output, indeed, may be more erratic these days, but the composer can still equal and top himself when the spirit takes him: recent songs like Every Grain of Sand and Brownsville Girl rank with his best work. Ironically, this scholarly appreciation of the music and lyrics can obscure the man who made them. "Do you really want to know the personal details of an argument," Shelton asks defensively about the Dylan divorce, "or who slapped whom?" If you do, you will have to look elsewhere. Go to the songs, Shelton would suggest. They do not provide the gossip, but they do not skimp on the pain.

And neither does No Direction Home. "God, I'm glad I'm not me," Dylan once said as he scanned a newspaper profile. He can, however, find a little of himself in this book, if he hasn't already turned another page. --By Jay Cocks