I can hear the cavils already: Oh, please, not another Bob Dylan book. And that’s fair, even coming from someone who reveres his music — there’s a whole lot of bad Dylan writing out there.

But not only does Ray Padgett’s Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members, published last week by Padgett’s own EWP Press, get points for finding a new wrinkle on an old idea, it’s frequently a joy to read. Padgett, the author of the 33 1/3 volume on I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen, runs a Substack dedicated to parsing Dylan shows titled Flagging Down the Double E’s. His enthusiasm is infectious, but he’s no mere cataloguer or crank. Several of the interviews in Pledging began on that website, but many others are special to the book.

Padgett is an ideal interlocutor: so deeply knowledgeable that little gets by him, but not so obsessive that his questions amount to mere data points. He knows how to follow up, to get that extra detail that opens new doors. And the tales he coaxes out are often great — and many haven’t been heard before at all, a rarity in the vast world of Dylan bibliography.

Pledging My Time reverses the usual order of things in another way: Dylan’s early years take up relatively little space here. His first album is now 60 years old, and many of his peers are no longer with us, including most of the Band, Dylan’s legendary ’60s and ’70s collaborators. But Padgett lands a number of key witnesses to his early career. The British folk singer Martin Carthy describes Dylan’s first U.K. appearances, where he “didn’t go down terribly well” at the Singers Club, run by Ewan MacColl. “It wasn’t acceptable for an English person to sing American songs,” Carthy tells Padgett. “[MacColl] had a tendency to dismiss people who were not following that line. . . . ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ as far as they were concerned, was just not interesting. They liked songs that named names.”

There are entire books about Dylan going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival — Elijah Wald’s is thorough and generous — but Padgett gets vivid snapshots of that tumultuous year from two participants. Organist Barry Goldberg played with him at Newport. “I knew we were doing something really important and different and controversial,” he says. “Any time you do something controversial, everybody’s not going to go along with it and dig it. Some people did, and some people were shocked. I remember it was about 50-50. People remember the boos more than the people who were really into it and dug it.”

A week later, Dylan and most of the same band played in Los Angeles to a “more receptive and easygoing than the Forest Hills” one, according to bassist Harvey Brooks: “It wasn’t Greenwich Village. Which was, one, very intellectual; two, very opinionated; three, they always want things to stay the same. It’s very ritualized. Change has got to be an earthquake or something.”

Dylan took most of the late ’60s and early ’70s off from touring, but when he came back, he did so in force. Accompanying him strictly as a friend on his 1974 tour with the Band — the biggest rock tour of its time — was Louis Kemp, who gives Padgett perhaps the book’s most revealing interview. “Louis Kemp saw Bob Dylan perform before anyone else in this book,” writes Padgett. “In fact, he was at what might be the first-ever Bob Dylan concert. That is, if you count Talent Night at a Jewish summer camp as a ‘concert.’ And, for that matter, if you count a 13-year-old piano-basher named Bobby Zimmerman as ‘Bob Dylan.’” And yes, it’s the same guy who owns the Louis Kemp Seafood Company.

This, in fact, was the reason Dylan hired him to produce the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975. Dylan had tried to do it with big New York concert promoters: “They all poo-pooed it,” Kemp recalls. But Dylan, as Kemp quotes him, “want[ed] to drive from city to city so I can get a taste for all these places.’” When Dylan asked Kemp to produce it, the Duluth entrepreneur balked. “Then he threw a line at me: ‘If you can sell fish, you can sell tickets.’ I laughed.”

But Kemp accepted, leading to one of the richest passages in the book — his meeting with Columbia Records president Walter Yetnikoff, requesting tour support for this strange offering. Yetnikoff went blank when asked for money. Kemp told him, “Well, that’s too bad, Walter, because if you’re not going to be a partner with Bob on this, then I can’t cooperate with you ... Maybe you can score some tickets on the street.” As Kemp headed for the door, Yetnikoff gave in. “I had no conflicts of interest,” Kemp explains. “I didn’t have five or ten other clients that needed the blessings of Walter Yetnikoff and Columbia down the road. Bob knew that and I knew that, and that’s why I could play a strong hand. Walter knew that, too.”

This kind of judo move was typical. Over and over, Dylan’s M.O. for his potential players is consistent: Want to get in the water? OK, swim or get out. Scarlet Rivera, the violinist on the 1975 edition of the Rolling Thunder Revue and the album Desire, from 1976, has the most mythical version of this story: Dylan literally pulled his car up while she was walking on a New York street and asked to hear her play. “We went to his loft in the Village. He asked me to play along with him. He just didn’t give me any information like, ‘This is what key it’s in and here’s a chart.’ After playing for like an hour, he got up abruptly. He said, ‘I got to go hear a friend play in the Village.’”

The friend was Muddy Waters, then the greatest living bluesman. Dylan joined for a tune, then called for “my violinist”: “Muddy threw me a solo. The whole band turned and watched me while I was soloing, including Muddy and Bob, staring me down. Then they both smiled and that was it.” Soon Dylan’s management reached out: “You were chosen to be part of Rolling Thunder. Here’s the tour schedule.”

Everything about the Revue was ad hoc, on purpose. “We didn’t know where we were going, because it was a secret,” says Ronee Blakely, a singer on the tour as well as one of the stars of another kind of revue, Robert Altman’s film Nashville, also in 1975. “We’d only be told on the day of where we were headed.” They barnstormed the Northeast to instant sellout crowds, but when the tour went south the following year, it faced a tougher market; at the Houston stop, Willie Nelson was added to the bill to put people in seats.

In 1979, Dylan released Slow Train Coming, the first of three albums (Saved followed in 1980, and Shot of Love arrived in 1981) in which he explicitly embraced a new Christian faith. Well, reading the stories of the musicians on the accompanying tours is more enjoyable than listening to those records.

“The first three nights at Warfield Theatre, I had never experienced this before in my life or since,” says keyboardist and songwriter Spooner Oldham of the gospel tour’s opening. “Okay, first song. Half the audience: clap, clap, clap. Half the audience: boo, boo, boo. I had never been booed before and thought, ‘How weird is this?’” Fred Tackett, the Little Feat bassist who toured with Dylan throughout this period, notes: “The very best comment that I ever saw was a guy in the front row had a poster board. Written on the poster board was, ‘Jesus loves your old songs.’ I thought, ‘Great point.’”

Dylan’s ’80s are rightly considered to be a wilderness period. Dylan’s muse seemed to desert him, by his own later admission in Chronicles Volume One. One notable exception — for its rowdiness, if nothing else — was Dylan’s appearance in 1984 on Late Night with David Letterman, backed by members of L.A. punks the Plugz. “It was a very surreal evening,” recalls bassist Tony Marsico. “Liberace did a cooking segment, and then we played with Dylan. Like a weird fucking dream.” Particularly for Letterman’s house band: “Paul Shaffer tried to jam along with us at soundcheck,’ Marsico recalls. “It didn’t go well for Paul. Bob told [promoter] Bill Graham, ‘Lose the clown on the keyboard.’”

But near decade’s end, Dylan devised a new way of doing things. Instead of trying to outpace his legend by hitting the road with the Grateful Dead or Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers (whose Stan Lynch and Benmont Tench provide two of the most entertaining Q&A’s here), Dylan began playing small venues in college towns, building a new fan base through constant road work and ever-evolving arrangements of his catalog. First the fans and then Dylan’s organization itself began referring to this as the Never Ending Tour.

From 1988 to 1990, two members of Dylan’s band did double time working on Saturday Night Live: guitarist G.E. Smith and drummer Christopher Parker. “Luckily for us, we never had to give notice” to the NBC show, Parker tells Padgett. “Bob and [manager] Elliot Roberts worked around our schedule. They didn’t book gigs on a Saturday night. They didn’t book gigs on a Thursday if we were doing pre-records. G.E. and I racked up thousands of miles flying back and forth.”

One Halloween, Smith decided to prank the boss by dressing the entire band like Dylan: “Gray sweatshirt, baseball hat, and shades,” recalls tour manager Richard Fernandez. When Dylan showed up for soundcheck, “He just looked. He didn’t say nothing. Played the whole soundcheck — 20, 30 minutes. Put the guitar down. I’m leading him and his security guy to the dressing room. I opened the door, and he stops. He goes, ‘Hey, tell those guys I want my clothes back when this is over.’”

Dylan’s bands became less slick and much heavier over the ’90s — thanks, in part, to four years mid-decade with the hard-hitting Winston Watson on drums. Watson had first caught Dylan’s show in 1992 in L.A. “I didn’t know anything about Dylan,” he tells Padgett. “I had heard the songs everybody heard, and made fun of his voice just like anybody else. It just was not my thing at all. I was into Soundgarden and Alice in Chains.” He was not impressed: “At that Pantages show, I remember nobody really being happy and everybody drinking. It just seemed like no one was having a good time. I remember saying to myself, ‘Man, you couldn’t pay me to play in that band!’”

Instead, Watson’s enthusiasm helped Dylan’s stock rise among young listeners. “[H]e wanted to rock,” Watson explains. “Neil [Young] was out with Pearl Jam. Rock was the thing at that time. According to some of those cats that I talked to in management, it brought in a lot of the kids. The fact that we were rocking and rolling, that we could do Woodstock ’94 and Unplugged and all that stuff, that was speaking to a generation that hadn’t even heard him, really.” At Woodstock ’94, he remembers, “We stayed at a hotel in Albany near the airport. I met Nine Inch Nails, Cypress Hill and some other bands all raging at the airport bar. The Nine Inch guys thought I was in Cypress Hill, and the Cypress Hill guys thought I was with Nine Inch.”

Not every story here is a valentine. One brief sit-down with the great pop-rock singer-songwriter Marshall Crenshaw reveals the story of his audition for Dylan’s bass seat, only for the boss to nix it last-minute. Far worse was the treatment of veteran guitarist Duke Robillard, formerly of the Fabulous Thunderbirds. Dylan asked him to audition repeatedly for years before he finally relented, joining up in 2013. Out came the teeth: “He’d swear at me over the mic … He’d come up near me with a harp mic, and he’d start swearing. Obviously it was at me, because he’s right up next to me … After about three days of that, I just told the manager, ‘Look, I’m going to leave. I can’t be treated like this.’” When it kept going, Robillard recalls, “He got very mad at me for actually continuing to leave.”

But the tenor of Pledging My Time is better summarized by another of Dylan’s songwriting peers, Richard Thompson, who played a handful of times with the bard. One night, after Thompson opened for Dylan, he had to leave for the next date before the headliner began—and that set included a cover of Thompson’s classic “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.” Thompson didn’t find out about it until he saw someone post about it on Facebook. “I thought, ‘Well, I don’t really believe that. Why would Bob cover one of mine?,’ Thompson tells Padgett. “When it sank in, I thought, ‘Well, that’s fantastic. I’ve covered 75 of his; he’s covered one of mine.’ I think that that’s the right ratio.”

Learn more about the book and order a copy here.