There was a time about 50 years ago when music journalists were the social media influencers of their day - well known and well respected. Record sales lived and died on their reviews, and music fans flocked to music magazines such as Billboard, Cashbox, Melody Maker, Record World, and, of course, Rolling Stone to read these music journalists.

Today, music journalists are not as widely known, and record sales do not hinge on their reviews, yet they are still relevant as they interpret music for us and attach cultural significance to the music we hear.

One of the best music journalists writing today is a Vermont native Ray Padgett. He is the author of Cover Me: The Stories Behind the Greatest Cover Songs of All Time (2017) and, in the 33 1/3 series, I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen (2020). He writes the Substack newsletter Flagging Down the Double E’s, about Bob Dylan in concert, and is the founder of the cover-songs blog Cover Me. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, SPIN, Vice, and MOJO.

In short, Padgett has what it takes to write about music in its multiple forms. In his latest book, Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members, he collects 40 original, in-depth interviews from the perspective of the musicians standing a few feet away from him on stage – from his earliest days in the ‘60s all the way through the 21st century Never Ending Tour.

The book is significant because the world of Dylan’s bands and his road life has seemed fairly obtuse for decades now. Many people in this book have never spoken before about their time with Dylan, or certainly not in as much depth. Interviewees span every era of Dylan’s career, from Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Martin Carthy talking about the early folk scene up through Benmont Tench and Alan Pasqua talking about recording Rough and Rowdy Ways. This guest list guiding the backstage tour also includes one-off sit-ins, behind- the-scenes touring personnel, and even a notable Grammy Awards stage-crasher.

Padgett is the ideal interviewer—he really knows his stuff, so he can draw the best out of every musician he talks to. Padgett has done the grunt work of tracking down Dylan’s many collaborators over the years and getting the inside story.

Here's a quote that defines what this book means to Dylan fans.

"If you're like me, you've waited your entire adult life for this book. Padgett digs deep and shines a spotlight on the people standing (and sitting) behind the man behind the shades," says Jon Wurster, writer/performer/drummer (Mountain Goats, Bob Mould, Superchunk).

As Padgett notes in the book, these sidemen and sidewomen are the only ones who can answer questions such as (paraphrasing a Dylan song): “How does it feel … to stand onstage next to Dylan and realize he’s just launched into a song you’ve never rehearsed?” “How does it feel … to spend months on end riding buses and planes with Bob Dylan from town to town?” “How does it feel … to be expected to keep those songs fresh every night, with little explicit direction from the boss?” As Padgett points out, Dylan has made it clear over the years that “his heart is first and foremost in live performance, so the musicians with the closest access to Dylan’s creative force are those that have logged miles with him on the road.”

Padgett arranges the interviews in roughly chronological order, running from Dylan’s days in Greenwich Village in the early ’60s — interviews with Noel Paul Stookey, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Happy Traum, for example — up to his 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways, addressed in an interview with Benmont Tench. Readers can dip into the interviews with artists who interest them the most, or they can read from first interview to last. As with any book of interviews, there is some overlap and repetition, but each interviewee offers a singular enough perspective that the repetition is not bothersome.

Padgett includes interviews with people who did not share the stage with Dylan, but who came to know him by booking him and creating spaces for him. Betsy Siggins, for example, who was a founder of iconic Cambridge, Massachusetts, folk club Club 47, first meets Dylan at her club and later at the Newport Folk Festival. She recalls her impressions of Dylan in ’63 and ’64: “He was a magnet. When he performed with Joan [Baez] in workshops, those were stunning performances. … People were curious about his ability to write prolifically."

Regina McCrary of The McCrary Sisters sang with Dylan for three years, from 1979 to 1981, during his “born again” period. She recalls getting a call from a friend asking if she wanted to audition for Dylan: “I did not know who Bob Dylan was if he was standing next to me on the bus stop. Other than a few songs, I never knew who he was.” When she showed up for the audition, she sang three songs: “Everything Must Change,” “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” and “Amazing Grace.” “The first song I don’t think moved him,” McCrary says. “The second song made him look, and the third song he jumped up and said, ‘That’s what I want.’” McCrary also reveals her method for keeping up with Dylan on stage: “Bob really never did the same song the same way all the time. There were times that he walked up on stage, and you could tell that he was feeling and thinking different. I learned to watch his mouth and watch his feet. That helped me as far as if he changed the phrasing of how he did a song, or he wanted a beat to change, or to slow down or speed up, or to put another feel on it. You would watch him, and you could just kick right in.”

Other reviewers of the book have noted that, "You don’t want big names in a book such as this. Most of them have already told their stories many times. You want Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Happy Traum, David Mansfield, Spooner Oldham, Fred Tackett, Stan Lynch, Christopher Parker, Dickey Betts, Larry Campbell and Benmont Tench, whose impressions are not worn thin by overexposure. You want someone like Jim Keltner, with a lifetime of service to music and a deep love of how it feels to explore it in Dylan’s company."

In the book, Keltner opines, “The thing I love about Bob is his fearlessness. There’s a fearlessness from some artists that transmits to the musicians playing. When that happens, you get the best from the musicians, because the musicians are not worried about tempo or about whether they’re rushing or they’re dragging or whether they’re not in the pocket. It’s not about finding a pocket. It’s more about searching for the vibe, searching for the thing that makes the song live.”

Let's be clear. This is no stuffy, exhaustive biography or a ponderous tome of music criticism. Pledging My Time brings Dylan to life in a way that he’s never come to life before.

Padgett is a superior interviewer. He's enthusiastic, sympathetic, alert and perceptive, equally good at prompting and just letting people talk. In essence, he draws the best from the people interviewed. 

More than most people, Bob Dylan presents himself to the world as a jigsaw puzzle, full of complexities and seeming contradictions and bits that are hard to fit together. Maybe some missing bits, too, and others that once fitted but no longer do. Each of us assembles the puzzle as best we can. The keyboards player Benmont Tench, closes the book with words that seem to express the feelings of many who’ve worked with Dylan.

“You can read about Bob’s life,” he says, “and you can pay attention to what he says, and you can learn from it, but when you play music with somebody of that caliber, you learn something entirely different. It can only be passed on by that person. And those of us who have the opportunity to play with that person can pass on what we took away, but we only each take away a certain part of our experience with someone like that. Long may he live, because he’s something else.” 

 Dylan has released more than 50 albums and has written more than 600 songs, some of the most famous being “Blowin' in the Wind,” “Like A Rolling Stone,” “All Along The Watchtower,” “Knockin' On Heaven's Door” and “Make You Feel My Love.”

For me, Bob Dylan revealed his courage in the 1960s when he went electric despite the boos from his avid folk fans who excoriated him. Dylan proved that you could couple folk introspection with the visceral edge of rock ‘n’ roll, showing that individualistic expression counted for far more than any preordained notions of what ‘authenticity’ should sound like.  

 I highly recommend Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members by Ray Padgett for music and Dylan fans. It's a great book about a great man.