The facts of Bob Dylan’s life — even the facts he kept out of public for decades, such as his second marriage in the ‘80s — are so well known at this point. It seems unlikely that a fan could somehow not to know that he was born Robert Zimmerman in Hibbing, Minnesota.

Only at the very beginning of his career did Dylan successfully hide his background — the lid was officially lifted in a 1963 Newsweek profile, around the time of his third album, The Times They Are a-Changin’ — but that secretive aspect has long made him irresistible to biographers, never mind critics. Really, too irresistible: I pity the poor Dylan-book completist, whose shelves are spent in vain.

For all the shelf space its successors take up, the first serious attempt at the life of Dylan remains a touchstone: Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography by Anthony Scaduto, published in 1971. Available as an e-book though long out of print, Scaduto’s book is brisk, sharp, and evenhanded. A reporter for the New York Post in the pre-tabloid ‘50s and ‘60s, Scaduto covered the Mafia and also took to covering rock ‘n’ roll. He’d already written a quickie Beatles biography when he was approached to put another rocker between covers.

At one point, while interviewing the folk singer Phil Ochs for his Dylan book, Scaduto had the tables turned on him: “What kind of a book is this going to be?” probed Ochs. Scaduto responded with aplomb: “A critical biography, which sounds rather pretentious, especially since Al Grossman won’t let me quote the lyrics. Basically, a biography—a good solid job.” When Ochs asked about his background, Scaduto replied: “I’ve been into rock all my life. Basically, that’s it. And I’m a professional writer and someone said, ‘Hey, how about a book on Bobby Dylan?’” A purely artless answer, and one that gladdens my heart. Sometimes good ideas are things you stumble upon. Sometimes what a task calls for is sheer professionalism.

Scaduto died in December 2017, as he was beginning to prepare The Dylan Tapes: Friends, Players, & Lovers Talkin’ Early Bob Dylan, a collection of interview transcripts for the biography that University of Minnesota Press has just published. It’s edited by Stephanie Trudeau, Scaduto’s widow and one-time research assistant, and while it doesn’t displace the book built upon the conversations built upon, it has its own fascinations.

When An Intimate Biography was published, its most revelatory parts were Scaduto’s depictions of Dylan’s youth in and around Hibbing and Duluth, and his brief stint at the University of Minnesota. In transcript form, this tendency goes deeper. The sit-downs with Dylan’s Minnesota confrères, as when his high school girlfriend Echo Helstrom recalls their class’s 10th reunion in August 1969: It was in Hibbing, you know? The Moose Club rooms. ... Oh, right downtown! … Howard Street.” (She meant the Moose Lodge.)

Echo’s mother, Martha Helstrom, played a critical role in Dylan’s musical formation—she owned “a lot of country and western and hillbilly kind of music,” as Scaduto puts it. “Well, they were mostly those old timers, like in the ’40s and ’50s, those kind of records,” Martha tells him. “Most of them were these sad, sad songs like that ‘Ohio Prison Fire’ and some old cowboy songs and some in the same order of what he writes.” This is echoed throughout The Dylan Tapes—one eyewitness or friend after the other attests to the burgeoning Dylan’s absorption of country music, though the Cambridge folk singer Eric Von Schmidt seems to disparage it, telling Scaduto: “I really got into Nashville Skyline out west. The first cut with Johnny Cash threw me, I’ve got to admit. I broke up laughing and couldn’t believe it.”

Hibbing had a “right side [and] wrong side,” as Helstrom explains: “Either you come from a nice home or you come from, you know, like my place, slightly decrepit, you know? And that distinguishes the good people from the bad people.” Some of the latter showed up to that 1969 class reunion, which Dylan had to leave after an hour, because “some dum-dum, which is the usual thing in that town, tried to start a fight with him.”

Dylan’s need for privacy, his hard line between public and private selves, seems to have been hard-wired. When Echo asked if he was Jewish, “It was again one of those things where he didn’t want anybody to know anything ... and he got a funny little look on his face and he didn’t say anything.” He “never ever” discussed it again. At the Ten O’Clock Scholar during Dylan’s short time at the U of M campus, he prevailed upon his high-school girlfriend to “keep my mouth shut,” she says, about “who I was, where I was from.”

There’s a smile in the way Gretel Hoffman, a U of M confrere who taught Dylan to play “The House of the Rising Sun,” offhandedly notes that “everybody was” smoking marijuana around the Minneapolis folk scene, and there are deadpan, deeply Minnesotan LOLs in her gentle debunking of the idea that “Positively 4th Street” might be about Dinkytown, rather than New York: “I think it’s the Village Fourth Street,” she tells Scaduto. “Kind of because [our] Fourth Street as a symbol or as an image doesn’t have any power. ... You know, if anything, Fourteenth Avenue has more. ... But it was Dinkytown. So, the street was really irrelevant.”

Dylan’s pre-rock years in New York — cherubic Woody Guthrie acolyte, fledgling songwriter, swain first of activist Suze Rotolo (interviewed here, as is her sister Carla) and then folk queen Joan Baez (her Q&A, as expected, is full of loving razz, her preferred mode when speaking of “Bobby”) — are accounted for in plentiful detail. The Izzy Young interview, in particular, is a motherlode. Young ran the Folklore Center, and was one of Dylan’s key early supporters in the Village. Befitting a folklorist, Young kept extensive early notes on Dylan, and the singer also dictated an early biography to him, complete with tall tales: “So in the beginning for example, he was telling us how he knew Woody and Jack Elliott, as if he were the center of this thing, and nobody thought to call up Paul Nelson in Minneapolis and say, ‘Hey, who’s this Bob Dylan?’”

John Hammond, who signed Dylan to Columbia Records, extols the studio work of Bob Johnston, who helmed Dylan’s albums starting with Highway 61 Revisited. (They were still working together when Scaduto was writing the book.) Hammond calls Johnston “the perfect man [to be] producing Bob Dylan . . . ten times better a producer, I assure you, than I was. ... He’s a songwriter; he completely understood Bobby. He was irreverent — he was everything. He let Bobby have his head completely, and yet gave him direction when it was necessary, and it was just marvelous.”

What emerges in parts throughout the book is Scaduto himself. Early in their interview, Scaduto tells Izzy Young, “I find my greatest stuff is when people ramble.” The same went for him. He’s a seasoned reporter who probes without overplaying his hand, but he’s ready to step up when he has to.

Mike Porco, the owner of Gerde’s Folk City, where a Dylan appearance got him his first notice in the New York Times, by Robert Shelton, asks why Shelton wasn’t writing the book. Scudato explains: “Shelton was so close to Dylan that he doesn’t know how to handle him, whereas I was never close to Bobby. I’ve always been at a distance, and I can write about some of these things. I don’t want to hurt Dylan, but I could write about some of these things without having to worry that I might destroy a friendship, because I don’t have a friendship, whereas Shelton and Al Aronowitz, it’s the same thing. He can’t write about Dylan because he’s too close to him.”

Scaduto doesn’t, you could argue, get very close to Dylan, either: Their exchange closes the book. Scaduto had asked for Dylan’s input, and Dylan asked in turn to see the manuscript. He wound up liking it: “Some of it is pretty straight. And some of it very straight. Some of it is exactly the way it happened.” Dylan offered a number of corrections and amendments that Scaduto would include. The most famous of these was Dylan’s description of hearing the Beatles for the first time while on a road trip in Colorado, an account that instantly encrusted into both acts’ respective myths. But Dylan is also clearly on the defense, most notably on the topic of his wife and kids—he wants them omitted from the manuscript and gets threatening about it.

This was still 1970: The bulk of Dylan’s career was still ahead of him. In the years to come, he would play judo with his own history, leveraging it to his own ends and largely keeping his privacy in the bargain. (His marriage to Carolyn Dennis, from 1986 to 1992, didn’t come out until 2001, when author Howard Sounes added it to an updated edition of his Dylan biography, Down the Highway.) Still, it says something about Dylan’s charisma that he’d even attempt to menace “Tough Tony,” as Scaduto had been nicknamed for his unflinching Mafia coverage. The author’s stoicism in the face of Dylan’s bluster typifies his approach to Dylan’s life story in miniature.

Stephanie Trudeau, editor of The Dylan Tapes: Friends, Players, and Lovers Talkin’ Early Bob Dylan written by her late husband Anthony Scaduto, will discuss the book with documentary filmmaker Dr. Susan Hagedorn in a virtual event with SubText Books on Thursday, May 26, at 7 p.m. CT. Register at the SubText website.