Echo Helstrom News Today

The Dylan Center in Tulsa offers a read as endlessly fascinating, as vital to the American story, as its subject himself

Bob Dylan and band at the Beacon Theatre, New York City, December 1, 2019. (Photo by John Hall.) This photo is included in Paul Metsa’s new book. You can walk into an Iron Range bar on the weekend and see any of the five character types imbued in Bob Dylan’s persona: the greaser dressed in

Join Chevaliers Books for a book talk and enactment of THE DYLAN TAPES, written by Anthony Scaduto and edited by Stephanie Trudeau, on Tuesday, August 23.

Just before he died, Tony discovered all his interview tapes in our basement. Scaduto’s ‘basement tapes’ comprise more than thirty-six hours of conversations with Dylan, Joan Baez, Echo Helstrom, Suze Rotolo, John Hammond Sr., Phil Ochs, Izzy Young, Mike Porco, and on and on.

On somewhat of a lark, realizing little by way of epiphany had been revealed about the childhood circumstances that yielded Bob Dylan, Thompson went where few journalists had gone before—poking around the mining town of Hibbing, Minnesota. There he confronted a question: how to reach the essence of a person who is, by his own design, inscrutable? 

Anthony Scadutos posthumously published The Dylan Tapes is an engrossing journey into the research process of one gifted writer as he profiled another.

For a few heady years in the Village, Shelton and Dylan were buddies; hanging out, often with their respective girlfriends—Suze Rotolo and Baez in Dylan’s case. The friendship did not prevent Shelton from being critical, in person and in print, sometimes to Dylan’s annoyance. But he was fairminded and he understood from the moment he first heard him perform at a Gerde’s hootenanny in June 1961 that Dylan mattered, that his was a talent like no other. His review led to a contract with Co...