Books: The Postman Rings Forever

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