‘Marcus’s contention is that there can be found in American folk a community as deep, as electric, as perverse and as conflicted as all America, and that the songs Dylan recorded out of the public eye, in a basement in Woodstock with the group who would later become The Band, are where that community as a whole gets to speak . . . Books this good should be burnt’ Mark Sinker, Wire

‘We owe God a death, and Greil Marcus owed all God’s children a lifework on Bob Dylan. And here it is, one heaven of a book . . . what Marcus brings to these songs is a variety of good things: fierce fervour, social convictions, a loving discrimination, never a touch of envy and an extraordinary ability to evoke in words the very feel (throaty, threatening, thorough, thick with thought) of a man’s voice, of this man’s voice’ Christopher Ricks, Guardian

‘You will want to read its most provoking parts over and over and chances are, twenty years from now, it will stand as one of the classics of American criticism’ Mikal Gilmore, Observer

‘A rare ability to describe the genesis of a song and make it sound better than any song you have ever heard’ Tim Adams, Times Literary Supplement