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 Columbia Records. The biography he proposed over dinner on New Year’s Eve 1965 was never intended as a potboiler—but neither was it intended that it would take twenty years to write.