Toby Thompson: Positively Main Street (expanded edition by University of Minnesota Press)

Toby Thompson's "Positively Main Street" is a book which has accompanied me since the early 1970s --
I liked it immensely back then, despite (or because?) of the somewhat "hip" type of journalism which, at times, conjured images of Kerouac et. al. , and I appreciate the fact that University of Minnesota Press has reprinted it with additional info and (for the first time) photographs from Toby's private collection.

It is a very personal book -- and that is its forte. Toby approaches his "subject" in an almost "child-like" manner, enthusiastic and seemingly overjoyed with the tiniest bit of info, be it ever so "trivial", which he uncovers about Dylan's childhood and youth in Hibbing by almost timidly knocking on the doors of some of the folks who knew Robert Zimmerman back then.

Along with Suze Rotolo's memoirs, this is easily my favorite publication about the early Bob Dylan (in this case, Robert Zimmerman) -- not as "factual" as later biographies by Scaduto et. al., but charming in an unpretentious kind of way.

Get the new expanded edition by all means (even if already own the original one) - from amazon.com