No Depression Journal: ‘The Dylan Tapes’ Resurrects Early Interviews With and About Bob Dylan

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.

The raw material and interviews behind Anthony Scaduto’s iconic biography of Bob Dylan draw an intimate and multifaceted portrait of the singer-songwriter who defined his eraIn 1971, Scaduto, an investigative journalist and pop music critic for the New York Post, turned his considerable skills toward a book that became one of the first authoritative biographies of the young folk singer from Hibbing, Minnesota, making sound waves in the Village. For Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography, he collected hours and hours of interviews with other musicians and Dylan’s friends. As Scaduto’s widow and editor of The Dylan Tapes Stephanie Trudeau writes: “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. This book presents the raw material of audio files transcribed to the written word. The voices jump off the page, each person urgently revealing and talking of his or her time with Bob Dylan.”

Read the article at No Depression.