A Fascinating Look at Bob Dylan Through the Eyes of His Band

Xavier Badosa, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On a recent Price of Business, Host Kevin Price visited with author Ray Padgett.

Collecting around 50 original, in-depth interviews, Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members is the first look at Bob Dylan’s career entirely 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. With a few exceptions, these artists are not household names, but they have in many cases spent years making music with one of the most revered and mysterious artists in the world.

The world of Dylan’s bands and his road life has seemed fairly impenetrable 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.

If Dylan is, as he famously put it back in 1965, a “song and dance man,” these are the people who have sung and danced alongside him.

Ray Padgett is a music writer based in Burlington, Vermont. He is the author of Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members (2023), 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.