Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan
Dylan at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
Dylan at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
Background information
Birth name Robert Allen Zimmerman
Also known as Elston Gunn[1] Blind Boy Grunt, Lucky Wilbury/Boo Wilbury, Elmer Johnson, Sergei Petrov, Jack Frost, Jack Fate, Willow Scarlet, Robert Milkwood Thomas.
Born May 24, 1941 (1941-05-24) (age 68)
Duluth, Minnesota, U.S.
Occupation(s) Singer-songwriter, author, poet, screenwriter, disc jockey
Instrument(s) Vocals, guitar, harmonica, keyboards, piano, bass
Years active 1959–present
Label(s) Columbia, Asylum
Associated acts The Band, Traveling Wilburys, Grateful Dead, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
Website www.bobdylan.com

Bob Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman, May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota) is an American singer-songwriter, author, poet, and painter, who has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. Much of Dylan's most celebrated work dates from the 1960s, when he became an informal chronicler and a reluctant figurehead of American unrest. A number of his songs, such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'",[2] became anthems of the civil rights movements. His most recent studio album, Modern Times, released on August 29, 2006, entered the U.S. album chart at number one, and that same year was named Album of the Year by Rolling Stone magazine.[3]

Dylan's early lyrics incorporated political, social, philosophical, and literary influences, defying existing pop music conventions and appealing widely to the counterculture. While expanding and personalizing musical styles, he has explored many traditions of American song, from folk, blues and country to gospel, rock and roll and rockabilly to English, Scottish and Irish folk music, and even jazz and swing.[4] Dylan performs with the guitar, piano and harmonica. Backed by a changing line-up of musicians, he has toured steadily since the late 1980s on what has been dubbed the "Never Ending Tour". Although his accomplishments as performer and recording artist have been central to his career, his songwriting is generally regarded as his greatest contribution.[5]

During his career, Dylan has won many awards for his songwriting, performing, and recording. His records have earned Grammy, Golden Globe, and Academy Awards, and he has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2008, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power."[6]

Contents

Life and career

Origins and musical beginnings

Robert Allen Zimmerman (Hebrew name Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham)[7][8] was born in St. Mary's Hospital on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota,[9] and raised there and in Hibbing, Minnesota, on the Mesabi Iron Range west of Lake Superior. Research by Dylan’s biographers has shown that his paternal grandparents, Zigman and Anna Zimmerman, emigrated from Odessa in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine) to the United States following the antisemitic pogroms of 1905.[10] His mother's grandparents, Benjamin and Lybba Edelstein, were Lithuanian Jews who arrived in America in 1902.[10] In his autobiography, Chronicles, Vol. 1, Dylan wrote that his paternal grandmother's maiden name was Kirghiz and her family originated from Istanbul.[11]

His parents, Abram Zimmerman and Beatrice "Beatty" Stone, were part of the area's small but close-knit Jewish community. Zimmerman lived in Duluth until age seven. When his father was stricken with polio, the family returned to nearby Hibbing, where Zimmerman spent the rest of his childhood.[12]

Robert Zimmerman spent much of his youth listening to the radio—first to blues and country stations broadcasting from Shreveport, Louisiana and, later, to early rock and roll.[13] He formed several bands in high school: the first, The Shadow Blasters, was short-lived; but his next band, The Golden Chords,[14] lasted longer playing covers of popular songs. Their performance of Danny and the Juniors' "Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay" at their high school talent show was so loud that the principal cut the microphone off.[15] In his 1959 school yearbook, Robert Zimmerman listed as his ambition "To join Little Richard."[16] The same year, using the name Elston Gunn,[1][17] he performed two dates with Bobby Vee, playing piano and providing handclaps.[18]

Zimmerman enrolled at the University of Minnesota in September 1959, moving to Minneapolis. His early focus on rock and roll gave way to an interest in American folk music. In a 1985 interview Dylan explained the attraction that folk music had exerted on him: "The thing about rock'n'roll is that for me anyway it wasn't enough...There were great catch-phrases and driving pulse rhythms...but the songs weren't serious or didn't reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings."[19] He soon began to perform at the 10 O'clock Scholar, a coffee house a few blocks from campus, and became actively involved in the local Dinkytown folk music circuit.[20][21]

During his Dinkytown days, Zimmerman began introducing himself as "Bob Dylan".[14] Dylan recalled: "What I was going to do as soon as I left home was just call myself Robert Allen...It sounded like a Scottish king and I liked it." However, in reading Down Beat magazine, he discovered there was a saxophonist named David Allyn. Dylan adds, "I'd seen some poems by Dylan Thomas. Dylan and Allyn sounded similar. Robert Dylan. Robert Allyn. The letter D came on stronger."[22]

Relocation to New York and record deal

Dylan dropped out of college at the end of his freshman year. In January 1961, he moved to New York City, hoping to perform there and visit his musical idol Woody Guthrie, who was seriously ill with Huntington's Disease in Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital.[23] Guthrie had been a revelation to Dylan and was the biggest influence on his early performances. Dylan would later say of Guthrie's work, "You could listen to his songs and actually learn how to live."[21] As well as visiting Guthrie in the hospital, Dylan befriended Woody's acolyte Ramblin' Jack Elliott. Much of Guthrie's repertoire was actually channeled through Elliott, and Dylan paid tribute to Elliott in Chronicles (2004).[24]

From February 1961, Dylan played at various clubs around Greenwich Village, finally gaining some public recognition after Robert Shelton wrote a positive review in The New York Times of a show he played at Gerde's Folk City in September.[25] The same month Dylan played harmonica on folk singer Carolyn Hester's eponymous third album, which brought his talents to the attention of the album's producer John Hammond.[26] Hammond signed Dylan to Columbia Records that October. The performances on his first Columbia album, Bob Dylan (1962), consisted of familiar folk, blues and gospel material combined with two original compositions. The album made little impact, selling only 5,000 copies in its first year, just enough to break even.[27] Within Columbia Records some referred to the singer as "Hammond's Folly" and suggested dropping his contract. Hammond defended Dylan vigorously, and Johnny Cash was also a powerful ally of Dylan at Columbia.[27] While Dylan continued to work for Columbia, he also recorded several songs under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt, for Broadside Magazine, a folk music magazine and record label.[28]

With Joan Baez during the Civil Rights March in Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963

Dylan made two important career moves in August 1962. He changed his name to Robert Dylan at the Supreme Court building in New York, and signed a management contract with Albert Grossman. Grossman remained Dylan's manager until 1970, and was notable both for his sometimes confrontational personality, and for the fiercely protective loyalty he displayed towards his principal client.[29] Dylan would subsequently describe Grossman thus: "He was kind of like a Colonel Tom Parker figure...you could smell him coming."[21] Tensions between Grossman and John Hammond led to Hammond being replaced as the producer of Dylan's second album by the young African American jazz producer Tom Wilson.[30]

By the time Dylan's second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, was released in May 1963, he had begun making his name as both a singer and a songwriter. Many of the songs on this album were labelled protest songs, inspired partly by Guthrie and influenced by Pete Seeger's passion for topical songs.[31] "Oxford Town", for example, was a sardonic account of James Meredith's ordeal as the first black student to risk enrollment at the University of Mississippi.[32]

His most famous song of the time, "Blowin' in the Wind", partially derived its melody from the traditional slave song "No More Auction Block", while its lyrics questioned the social and political status quo.[33] The song was widely recorded and became an international hit for Peter, Paul and Mary, setting a precedent for many other artists who would have hits with Dylan's songs. "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" was based on the tune of the folk ballad "Lord Randall". With its veiled references to nuclear apocalypse, it gained even more resonance when the Cuban missile crisis developed only a few weeks after Dylan began performing it.[34] Like "Blowin' in the Wind", "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" marked an important new direction in modern songwriting, blending a stream-of-consciousness, imagist lyrical attack with a traditional folk form.[35]

While Dylan's topical songs solidified his early reputation, Freewheelin' also included a mixture of love songs and jokey, surreal talking blues. Humor was a large part of Dylan's persona,[36] and the range of material on the album impressed many listeners, including The Beatles. George Harrison said, "We just played it, just wore it out. The content of the song lyrics and just the attitude—it was incredibly original and wonderful."[37]

The rough edge of Dylan's singing was unsettling to some early listeners but an attraction to others. Describing the impact that Dylan had on her and her husband, Joyce Carol Oates wrote: "When we first heard this raw, very young, and seemingly untrained voice, frankly nasal, as if sandpaper could sing, the effect was dramatic and electrifying."[38][39] Many of his most famous early songs first reached the public through more immediately palatable versions by other performers, such as Joan Baez, who became Dylan's advocate, as well as his lover.[14] Baez was influential in bringing Dylan to national and international prominence by recording several of his early songs and inviting him onstage during her own concerts.[40]

Others who recorded and had hits with Dylan's songs in the early and mid-1960s included The Byrds, Sonny and Cher, The Hollies, Peter, Paul and Mary, Manfred Mann, and The Turtles. Most attempted to impart a pop feel and rhythm to the songs, while Dylan and Baez performed them mostly as sparse folk pieces. The cover versions became so ubiquitous that CBS started to promote him with the tag "Nobody Sings Dylan Like Dylan."[41]

"Mixed Up Confusion", recorded during the Freewheelin' sessions with a backing band, was released as a single and then quickly withdrawn. In contrast to the mostly solo acoustic performances on the album, the single showed a willingness to experiment with a rockabilly sound. Cameron Crowe described it as "a fascinating look at a folk artist with his mind wandering towards Elvis Presley and Sun Records."[42]

Protest and Another Side

In May 1963, Dylan's political profile was raised when he walked out of The Ed Sullivan Show. During rehearsals, Dylan had been informed by CBS Television's "head of program practices" that the song he was planning to perform, "Talkin' John Birch Society Blues", was potentially libelous to the John Birch Society. Rather than comply with the censorship, Dylan refused to appear on the program.[43]

By this time, Dylan and Baez were both prominent in the civil rights movement, singing together at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963.[44] Dylan's third album, The Times They Are a-Changin', reflected a more politicized and cynical Dylan.[45] The songs often took as their subject matter contemporary, real life stories, with "Only A Pawn In Their Game" addressing the murder of civil rights worker Medgar Evers; and the Brechtian "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" the death of black hotel barmaid Hattie Carroll, at the hands of young white socialite William Zantzinger.[46] On a more general theme, "Ballad of Hollis Brown" and "North Country Blues" address the despair engendered by the breakdown of farming and mining communities. This political material was accompanied by two personal love songs, "Boots of Spanish Leather" and "One Too Many Mornings".[47]

By the end of 1963, Dylan felt both manipulated and constrained by the folk and protest movements.[48] These tensions were publicly displayed when, accepting the "Tom Paine Award" from the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a drunken, rambling Dylan questioned the role of the committee, insulted its members as old and balding, and claimed to see something of himself (and of every man) in Kennedy's alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.[49]

Bob Dylan performing at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York, 1963.

Another Side of Bob Dylan, recorded on a single June evening in 1964,[14] had a lighter mood than its predecessor. The surreal, humorous Dylan reemerged on "I Shall Be Free #10" and "Motorpsycho Nightmare". "Spanish Harlem Incident" and "To Ramona" are romantic and passionate love songs, while "Black Crow Blues" and "I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)" suggest the rock and roll soon to dominate Dylan's music. It Ain't Me Babe", on the surface a song about spurned love, has been described as a rejection of the role his reputation had thrust at him.[50] His newest direction was signaled by two lengthy songs: the impressionistic "Chimes of Freedom", which sets elements of social commentary against a denser metaphorical landscape in a style later characterized by Allen Ginsberg as "chains of flashing images,"[51] and "My Back Pages", which attacks the simplistic and arch seriousness of his own earlier topical songs and seems to predict the backlash he was about to encounter from his former champions as he took a new direction.[52]

In the latter half of 1964 and 1965, Dylan’s appearance and musical style changed rapidly, as he made his move from leading contemporary songwriter of the folk scene to Folk-Rock pop-music star. His scruffy jeans and work shirts were replaced by a Carnaby Street wardrobe, sunglasses day or night, and pointy "Beatle boots". A London reporter wrote: “Hair that would set the teeth of a comb on edge. A loud shirt that would dim the neon lights of Leicester Square. He looks like an undernourished cockatoo.”[53] Dylan also began to spar in increasingly surreal ways with his interviewers. Appearing on the Les Crane TV show and asked about a movie he was planning to make, he told Crane it would be a cowboy horror movie. Asked if he played the cowboy, Dylan replied, “No, I play my mother.”[54]

Going electric

Main article: Electric Dylan controversy

His March 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home was yet another stylistic leap.[55] The album featured his first recordings made with electric instruments. The first single, "Subterranean Homesick Blues", owed much to Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business" and was provided with an early music video courtesy of D. A. Pennebaker's cinéma vérité presentation of Dylan's 1965 tour of England, Dont Look Back.[56] Its free association lyrics both harked back to the manic energy of Beat poetry and were a forerunner of rap and hip-hop.[57]

By contrast, the B side of the album was interpreted by some folk fans as a conciliatory gesture: four long songs where Dylan accompanied himself on acoustic guitar and harmonica.[58] "Mr. Tambourine Man" had already been a hit for The Byrds, and would become one of his best known songs; while "It's All Over Now Baby Blue" and "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" would be acclaimed as two of Dylan's most important compositions.[58][59]

In the summer of 1965, as the headliner at the Newport Folk Festival, Dylan performed his first electric set since his high school days with a pickup group drawn mostly from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, featuring Mike Bloomfield (guitar), Sam Lay (drums) and Jerome Arnold (bass), plus Al Kooper (organ) and Barry Goldberg (piano).[60] Dylan had appeared at Newport in 1963 and 1964, but in 1965 Dylan, met with a mix of cheering and booing, left the stage after only three songs. As one version of the legend has it, the boos were from the outraged folk fans whom Dylan had alienated by appearing, unexpectedly, with an electric guitar. An alternative account claims audience members were merely upset by poor sound quality and a surprisingly short set.[61]

Dylan's 1965 Newport performance provoked an outraged response from the folk music establishment.[62] Ewan MacColl wrote in Sing Out!, "Our traditional songs and ballads are the creations of extraordinarily talented artists working inside traditions formulated over time... But what of Bobby Dylan?...a youth of mediocre talent. Only a non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel."[63] On July 29, just four days after his controversial performance at Newport, Dylan was back in the studio in New York, recording "Positively 4th Street". The lyrics teemed with images of vengeance and paranoia,[64] and it was widely interpreted as Dylan's put-down of former friends from the folk community—friends he had known in the clubs along West 4th Street.[65]

Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde

In July 1965, Dylan released the single "Like a Rolling Stone", which peaked at #2 in the U.S. and at #4 in the UK charts. At over six minutes in length, the song has been widely credited with altering attitudes about what a pop single could convey. Bruce Springsteen said that on first hearing the single, "that snare shot sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind".[66] In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine listed it at number one on its list of "The RS 500 Greatest Songs of All Time".[67] The song also opened Dylan's next album, Highway 61 Revisited, titled after the road that led from Dylan's native Minnesota to the musical hotbed of New Orleans.[68] The songs were in the same vein as the hit single, flavored by Mike Bloomfield's blues guitar, a rhythm section, and emphasis on Al Kooper's organ riffs. "Desolation Row" offers the sole exception, as Dylan surreally references many figures of Western culture over the course of its eleven and a half minutes.[69]

In support of the record, Dylan was booked for two U.S. concerts and set about assembling a band. Mike Bloomfield was unwilling to leave the Butterfield Band, so Dylan mixed Al Kooper and Harvey Brooks from his studio crew with bar-band stalwarts Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm, best known at the time for being part of Ronnie Hawkins's backing band The Hawks.[70] On August 28 at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, the group was heckled by an audience still annoyed by Dylan's electric sound. The band's reception on September 3 at the Hollywood Bowl was more favorable.[71]

While Dylan and the Hawks met increasingly receptive audiences on tour, their studio efforts floundered. Producer Bob Johnston persuaded Dylan to record in Nashville in February 1966, and surrounded him with a cadre of top-notch session men. At Dylan's insistence, Robertson and Kooper came down from New York City to play on the sessions.[72] The Nashville sessions produced the double-album Blonde on Blonde (1966), featuring what Dylan later called "that thin wild mercury sound".[73] Al Kooper described the album as "taking two cultures and smashing them together with a huge explosion": the musical world of Nashville and the world of the "quintessential New York hipster" Bob Dylan.[74]

On November 22, 1965, Dylan married 25-year-old former model Sara Lownds.[14][75] Some of Dylan’s friends (including Ramblin' Jack Elliott) claim that, in conversation immediately after the event, Dylan denied that he was married.[75] Journalist Nora Ephron first made the news public in the New York Post in February 1966 with the headline “Hush! Bob Dylan is wed.”[76]

Dylan undertook a "world tour" of Australia and Europe in the spring of 1966. Each show was split into two parts. Dylan performed solo during the first half, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar and harmonica. In the second half, backed by the Hawks, he played high voltage electric music. This contrast provoked many fans, who jeered and slow handclapped.[77] The tour culminated in a famously raucous confrontation between Dylan and his audience at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in England.[78] At the climax of the concert, one fan, angry with Dylan's electric sound, shouted: "Judas!" to which Dylan responded, "I don't believe you... You're a liar!" He then turned to the band and, just within earshot of the microphone, said "Play it fucking loud."[79] They then launched into the last song of the night with gusto—"Like a Rolling Stone".

Motorcycle accident and reclusion

After his European tour, Dylan returned to New York, but the pressures on him continued to increase. ABC Television had paid an advance for a TV show they could screen.[80] His publisher, Macmillan, was demanding a finished manuscript of the poem/novel Tarantula. Manager Albert Grossman had already scheduled an extensive concert tour for that summer and fall. On July 29, 1966, the brakes on Dylan's Triumph 500 motorcycle locked on a road near his home in Woodstock, New York, throwing him to the ground. Though the extent of his injuries was never fully disclosed, Dylan said that he broke several vertebrae in his neck.[81] A sense of mystery still surrounds the circumstances of the accident[82] since no ambulance was called to the scene and Dylan was not hospitalized.[81] Commenting on the significance of the crash, Dylan expressed some bitterness at the way he had been treated: "When I had that motorcycle accident ... I woke up and caught my senses, I realized that I was just workin' for all these leeches. And I didn't want to do that. Plus, I had a family and I just wanted to see my kids."[83] Howard Sounes' Dylan biography, Down The Highway, concludes that the crash offered Dylan the much-needed chance to escape from the pressures that had built up around him.[81] In the wake of his accident, Dylan withdrew from the public gaze and, apart from a few select appearances, did not tour again for eight years.[82]

Once Dylan was well enough to resume creative work, he began editing film footage of his 1966 tour for Eat the Document, a rarely exhibited follow-up to Dont Look Back. A rough-cut was shown to ABC Television and was promptly rejected as incomprehensible to a mainstream audience.[84] In 1967 he began recording music with the Hawks at his home and in the basement of the Hawks' nearby house, called "Big Pink".[85] These songs, initially compiled as demos for other artists to record, provided hit singles for Julie Driscoll ("This Wheel's on Fire"), The Byrds ("You Ain't Goin' Nowhere", "Nothing Was Delivered"), and Manfred Mann ("Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)"). Columbia belatedly released selections from them in 1975 as The Basement Tapes. Over the years, more and more of the songs recorded by Dylan and his band in 1967 appeared on various bootleg recordings, culminating in a five-CD bootleg set titled The Genuine Basement Tapes, containing 107 songs and alternate takes.[86] In the coming months, the Hawks recorded the album Music from Big Pink using songs they first worked on in their basement in Woodstock, and renamed themselves The Band,[87] thus beginning a long and successful recording and performing career of their own.

In October and November 1967, Dylan returned to Nashville. Back in the recording studio after a 19-month break, he was accompanied only by Charlie McCoy on bass,[88] Kenny Buttrey on drums,[89] and Pete Drake on steel guitar.[90] The result was John Wesley Harding, a quiet, contemplative record of shorter songs, set in a landscape that drew on both the American West and the Bible. The sparse structure and instrumentation, coupled with lyrics that took the Judeo-Christian tradition seriously, marked a departure not only from Dylan's own work but from the escalating psychedelic fervor of the 1960s musical culture.[91] It included "All Along the Watchtower", with lyrics derived from the Book of Isaiah (21:5–9). The song was later recorded by Jimi Hendrix, whose version Dylan himself would later acknowledge as definitive.[19]

Woody Guthrie died on October 3, 1967, and Dylan made his first live appearance in twenty months at a Guthrie memorial concert held at Carnegie Hall on January 20, 1968.[92]

Dylan's next release, Nashville Skyline (1969), was virtually a mainstream country record featuring instrumental backing by Nashville musicians, a mellow-voiced Dylan, a duet with Johnny Cash, and the hit single "Lay Lady Lay", which had been originally written for the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack, but was not submitted in time to make the final cut.[93] In May 1969, Dylan appeared on the first episode of Johnny Cash's new television show, duetting with Cash on "Girl from the North Country", "It Ain't Me Babe" and "Living the Blues". Dylan next traveled to England to top the bill at the Isle of Wight rock festival on August 31, 1969, after rejecting overtures to appear at the Woodstock Festival far closer to his home.[94]

In the early 1970s critics charged Dylan's output was of varied and unpredictable quality. Rolling Stone magazine writer and Dylan loyalist Greil Marcus notoriously asked "What is this shit?" upon first listening to 1970's Self Portrait.[95][96] In general, Self Portrait, a double LP including few original songs, was poorly received.[14] Later that year, Dylan released New Morning, which some considered a return to form. In the same year Dylan co-wrote "I'd Have You Anytime" with George Harrison, which appeared as the opening track on the ex-Beatle's triple album All Things Must Pass. Dylan's surprise appearance at Harrison's 1971 Concert for Bangladesh attracted much coverage in the media, reflecting the fact that his live appearances had become something of a rarity.[97]

Between March 16 and 19, 1971, Dylan reserved three days at Blue Rock Studios, a small studio in New York's Greenwich Village. These sessions resulted in one single, "Watching The River Flow", and a new recording of "When I Paint My Masterpiece". [47] On November 4, 1971 Dylan recorded "George Jackson" which he released a week later.[47] For many, the single was a surprising return to 'protest' material, mourning the killing of Black Panther George Jackson in San Quentin Prison that summer.[98]

In 1972 Dylan signed onto Sam Peckinpah's film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, providing songs and backing music for the movie, and playing the role of "Alias," a member of Billy's gang who had some basis in history.[99] Despite the film's failure at the box office, the song "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" has proven its durability as one of Dylan's most extensively covered songs. [100]

Return to touring

Dylan started 1973 by signing with a new record label, David Geffen's Asylum Records, when his contract with Columbia Records expired. He recorded his next album, Planet Waves, using The Band as his backing group, while rehearsing for a major tour. The album included two versions of "Forever Young". Christopher Ricks has connected the chorus of this song with John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn",[101] ("For ever panting, and for ever young"), and Dylan has recalled writing the song for one of his own children: "I wrote it thinking about one of my boys and not wanting to be too sentimental."[102] It has remained one of the most frequently performed of his songs.[103] As one critic described it, the song projected "something hymnal and heartfelt that spoke of the father in Dylan."[104]

Columbia Records simultaneously released Dylan, a haphazard collection of studio outtakes (almost exclusively cover songs), which was widely interpreted as a churlish response to Dylan's signing with a rival record label.[105] In January 1974 Dylan and The Band embarked on their high-profile, coast-to-coast North American tour. A live double album of the tour, Before the Flood, was released on Asylum Records.

After the tour, Dylan and his wife became publicly estranged. He filled a small red notebook with songs about relationships and ruptures, and quickly recorded a new album entitled Blood on the Tracks in September 1974.[106] However Dylan delayed the album's release, and re-recorded half of the songs at Sound 80 Studios in Minneapolis with production assistance from his brother David Zimmerman.[107] During this time, Dylan returned to Columbia Records which eventually reissued his Asylum albums.

Released in early 1975, Blood on the Tracks received mixed reviews. In the NME, Nick Kent described "the accompaniments [as] often so trashy they sound like mere practise takes."[108] In Rolling Stone, reviewer Jon Landau wrote that "the record has been made with typical shoddiness."[109] However, over the years critics have come to see it as one of Dylan's greatest achievements, perhaps the only serious rival to his great mid 60s trilogy of albums. In Salon.com, Bill Wyman wrote: "Blood on the Tracks is his only flawless album and his best produced; the songs, each of them, are constructed in disciplined fashion. It is his kindest album and most dismayed, and seems in hindsight to have achieved a sublime balance between the logorrhea-plagued excesses of his mid-'60s output and the self-consciously simple compositions of his post-accident years."[110] Novelist Rick Moody called it "the truest, most honest account of a love affair from tip to stern ever put down on magnetic tape."[111]

Portrait of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg by Elsa Dorfman, 1975.

That summer Dylan wrote his first successful "protest" song in twelve years, championing the cause of boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, who had been imprisoned for a triple murder in Paterson, New Jersey. After visiting Carter in jail, Dylan wrote "Hurricane", presenting the case for Carter's innocence. Despite its 8:32 minute length, the song was released as a single, peaking at #33 on the U.S. Billboard Chart, and performed at every 1975 date of Dylan's next tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue.[112] The tour was a varied evening of entertainment featuring many performers drawn from the resurgent Greenwich Village folk scene, including T-Bone Burnett; Ramblin' Jack Elliott; David Mansfield; Roger McGuinn; Mick Ronson; Joan Baez; and Scarlet Rivera, a violin player Dylan discovered while she was walking down the street to a rehearsal, her violin case hanging on her back. [113] Allen Ginsberg accompanied the troupe, staging scenes for the film Dylan was simultaneously shooting. Sam Shepard was initially hired to write the film's screenplay, but ended up accompanying the tour as informal chronicler.[114]

Running through late 1975 and again through early 1976, the tour encompassed the release of the album Desire (1976), with many of Dylan's new songs featuring an almost travelogue-like narrative style, showing the influence of his new collaborator, playwright Jacques Levy.[115][116] The spring 1976 half of the tour was documented by a TV concert special, Hard Rain, and the LP Hard Rain; no concert album from the better-received and better-known opening half of the tour was released until 2002's Live 1975.[117]

The fall 1975 tour with the Revue also provided the backdrop to Dylan's nearly four-hour film Renaldo and Clara, a sprawling and improvised narrative mixed with concert footage and reminiscences. Released in 1978, the movie received generally poor, sometimes scathing, reviews and had a very brief theatrical run.[118][119] Later in that year, Dylan allowed a two-hour edit, dominated by the concert performances, to be more widely released.[120]

In November 1976 Dylan appeared at The Band's "farewell" concert, along with other guests including Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Van Morrison and Neil Young. Martin Scorsese's acclaimed cinematic chronicle of this show,[121] The Last Waltz, was released in 1978 and included about half of Dylan's set. In this year Dylan also wrote and duetted on the song "Sign Language" for Eric Clapton's No Reason To Cry album [122].

Dylan's 1978 album Street Legal, recorded with a large, pop-rock band, complete with female backing vocalists, was lyrically one of his more complex and cohesive;[123] it suffered, however, from a poor sound mix (attributed to his studio recording practices),[124] submerging much of its instrumentation until its remastered CD release nearly a quarter century later.

Born-again period

Further information: Slow Train Coming

In the late 1970s, Dylan became a born-again Christian[125][126][127] and released two albums of Christian gospel music. Slow Train Coming (1979) featured the guitar accompaniment of Mark Knopfler (of Dire Straits) and was produced by veteran R&B producer, Jerry Wexler. Wexler recalled that when Dylan had started to evangelize to him during the recording, he replied: "Bob, you're dealing with a sixty-two-year old Jewish atheist. Let's just make an album."[128] The album won Dylan a Grammy Award as "Best Male Vocalist" for the song "Gotta Serve Somebody". The second evangelical album, Saved (1980), received mixed reviews, although Kurt Loder in Rolling Stone declared the album was far superior, musically, to its predecessor.[129] When touring from the fall of 1979 through the spring of 1980, Dylan would not play any of his older, secular works, and he delivered declarations of his faith from the stage, such as:

Years ago they... said I was a prophet. I used to say, "No I'm not a prophet" they say "Yes you are, you're a prophet." I said, "No it's not me." They used to say "You sure are a prophet." They used to convince me I was a prophet. Now I come out and say Jesus Christ is the answer. They say, "Bob Dylan's no prophet." They just can't handle it.[130]

Dylan's embrace of Christianity was unpopular with some of his fans and fellow musicians.[131] Shortly before his murder, John Lennon recorded "Serve Yourself" in response to Dylan's "Gotta Serve Somebody".[132] By 1981, while Dylan's Christian faith was obvious, Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times that "neither age (he's now 40) nor his much-publicized conversion to born-again Christianity has altered his essentially iconoclastic temperament."[133]

1980s: Trust Yourself

In the fall of 1980 Dylan briefly resumed touring, restoring several of his most popular 1960s songs to his repertoire, for a series of concerts billed as "A Musical Retrospective". Shot of Love, recorded the next spring, featured Dylan's first secular compositions in more than two years, mixed with explicitly Christian songs. The haunting "Every Grain of Sand" reminded some critics of William Blake’s verses.[134]

In the 1980s the quality of Dylan's recorded work varied, from the well-regarded Infidels in 1983 to the panned Down in the Groove in 1988. Critics such as Michael Gray condemned Dylan's 1980s albums both for showing an extraordinary carelessness in the studio and for failing to release his best songs.[135]

The Infidels recording sessions produced several notable outtakes, and many have questioned Dylan's judgment in leaving them off the album. Most well-regarded of these were "Blind Willie McTell"—both a tribute to the dead blues singer and an extraordinary evocation of African American history reaching back to "the ghosts of slavery ships"[136]—"Foot of Pride" and "Lord Protect My Child";[137] these songs were later released on the boxed set The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991.

Between July 1984 and March 1985, Dylan recorded his next studio album, Empire Burlesque.[138] Arthur Baker, who had remixed hits for Bruce Springsteen and Cyndi Lauper, was asked to engineer and mix the album. Baker has said he felt sure that he had been hired to make Dylan's album sound "a little bit more contemporary".[138]

Dylan contributed vocals to USA for Africa's famine relief fundraising single "We Are the World". On July 13, 1985, he appeared at the climax at the Live Aid concert at JFK Stadium, Philadelphia. Backed by Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, Dylan performed a ragged version of "Hollis Brown", his ballad of rural poverty, and then said to a worldwide audience exceeding one billion people: "I hope that some of the money ... maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe ... one or two million, maybe ... and use it to pay the mortgages on some of the farms and, the farmers here, owe to the banks."[139] His remarks were widely criticized as inappropriate, but they did inspire Willie Nelson to organize a series of events, Farm Aid, to benefit debt-ridden American farmers.[140]

In July 1986 Dylan released Knocked Out Loaded, an album consisting of three cover songs (by Little Junior Parker, Kris Kristofferson and the traditional gospel hymn "Precious Memories"), three collaborations with other writers (Tom Petty, Sam Shepard and Carole Bayer Sager), and two solo compositions by Dylan himself. The album received mainly negative reviews; Rolling Stone called it "a depressing affair",[141] and it was the first Dylan album since Freewheelin' (1963) to fail to make the Top 50.[142] Since then, some critics have called the eleven minute epic that Dylan co-wrote with Sam Shepard, 'Brownsville Girl', a work of genius.[143] In 1986 and 1987, Dylan toured extensively with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, sharing vocals with Petty on several songs each night. Dylan also toured with The Grateful Dead in 1987, resulting in a live album Dylan & The Dead. This album received some very negative reviews: Allmusic said, "Quite possibly the worst album by either Bob Dylan or the Grateful Dead."[144] After performing with these different musical permutations, Dylan initiated what came to be called The Never Ending Tour on June 7, 1988, performing with a tight back-up band featuring guitarist G. E. Smith. Dylan would continue to tour with this small but constantly evolving band for the next 20 years.[47]

In 1987, Dylan starred in Richard Marquand's movie Hearts of Fire, in which he played Billy Parker, a washed-up-rock-star-turned-chicken farmer whose teenage lover (Fiona) leaves him for a jaded English synth-pop sensation (played by Rupert Everett).[145] Dylan also contributed two original songs to the soundtrack—"Night After Night", and "I Had a Dream About You, Baby", as well as a cover of John Hiatt's "The Usual". The film was a critical and commercial flop.[146]

Dylan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in January 1988. Bruce Springsteen's induction speech declared: "Bob freed your mind the way Elvis freed your body. He showed us that just because music was innately physical did not mean that it was anti-intellectual."[147] Dylan then released the album Down in the Groove, which was even more unsuccessful in its sales than his previous studio album;[148] however, the song "Silvio" had some success as a single.[149] Later that spring, Dylan returned to the album charts when he joined Roy Orbison, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, and George Harrison to create a lighthearted, well-selling album as the Traveling Wilburys.[148] Despite Orbison's death in December 1988, the remaining four recorded a second album in May 1990, which they released with the unexpected title Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3.[150]

Dylan finished the decade on a critical high note with Oh Mercy. Rolling Stone magazine called the album "both challenging and satisfying", and said "it can perhaps best be thought of as a collaboration between Dylan and producer Daniel Lanois."[151] Lanois's influence is audible throughout Oh Mercy.[152][153] The track "Most of the Time", a lost love composition, was later prominently featured in the film High Fidelity, while "What Was It You Wanted?" has been interpreted both as a catechism and a wry comment on the expectations of critics and fans.[154] The religious imagery of 'Ring Them Bells' struck some critics as a re-affirmation of faith.[155]

1990s: Not Dark Yet

Dylan's 1990s began with Under the Red Sky (1990), an about-face from the serious Oh Mercy. The album contained several apparently simple songs, including "Under the Red Sky" and "Wiggle Wiggle". The album was dedicated to "Gabby Goo Goo"; this was later explained as a nickname for the daughter of Dylan and Carolyn Dennis, Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan, who was four at that time.[156] Sidemen on the album included George Harrison, Slash from Guns N' Roses, David Crosby, Bruce Hornsby, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Elton John. Despite the stellar line-up, the record received bad reviews and sold poorly. Dylan would not make another studio album of new songs for seven years.[157]

In 1991, Dylan was honored by the recording industry with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. [158] The event coincided with the start of the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein, and Dylan performed his song “Masters of War”. [159] Dylan then made a short speech which startled some of the audience. [159]

The next few years saw Dylan returning to his roots with two albums covering old folk and blues numbers: Good as I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993), featuring interpretations and acoustic guitar work. Many critics and fans commented on the quiet beauty of the song "Lone Pilgrim",[160] penned by a 19th century teacher and sung by Dylan with a haunting reverence. An exception to this rootsy mood came in Dylan's 1991 songwriting collaboration with Michael Bolton; the resulting song "Steel Bars", was released on Bolton's album Time, Love & Tenderness. In November 1994 Dylan recorded two live shows for MTV Unplugged. He claimed his wish to perform a set of traditional songs for the show was overruled by Sony executives who insisted on a greatest hits package.[161] The album produced from it, MTV Unplugged, included "John Brown", an unreleased 1963 song detailing the ravages of both war and jingoism.

Dylan performs at a 1996 concert in Stockholm.

With a collection of songs reportedly written while snowed-in on his Minnesota ranch,[162] Dylan booked recording time with Daniel Lanois at Miami's Criteria Studios in January 1997. The subsequent recording sessions were, by some accounts, fraught with musical tension.[163] Late that spring, before the album's release, Dylan was hospitalized with a life-threatening heart infection, pericarditis, brought on by histoplasmosis. His scheduled European tour was cancelled, but Dylan made a speedy recovery and left the hospital saying, "I really thought I'd be seeing Elvis soon."[164] He was back on the road by midsummer, and in early fall performed before Pope John Paul II at the World Eucharistic Conference in Bologna, Italy. The Pope treated the audience of 200,000 people to a sermon based on Dylan's lyric "Blowin' in the Wind".[165]

September saw the release of the new Lanois-produced album, Time Out of Mind. With its bitter assessment of love and morbid ruminations, Dylan's first collection of original songs in seven years was highly acclaimed. Rolling Stone said "Mortality bears down hard, while shots of gallows humor ring out."[166] This collection of complex songs won him his first solo "Album of the Year" Grammy Award (he was one of numerous performers on The Concert for Bangladesh, the 1972 winner). The love song "Make You Feel My Love" became a number one country hit for Garth Brooks.[14]

In December 1997 U.S. President Bill Clinton presented Dylan with a Kennedy Center Honor in the East Room of the White House, paying this tribute: "He probably had more impact on people of my generation than any other creative artist. His voice and lyrics haven't always been easy on the ear, but throughout his career Bob Dylan has never aimed to please. He's disturbed the peace and discomforted the powerful."[167]

2000s: Things Have Changed

In 2000, Dylan's song "Things Have Changed", penned for the film Wonder Boys, won a Golden Globe and an Academy Award. The Oscar (by some reports a facsimile) tours with him, presiding over shows perched atop an amplifier.[168]

"Love and Theft" was released on September 11, 2001. Recorded with his touring band, Dylan produced the album himself under the pseudonym Jack Frost.[169] The album was critically well-received and earned nominations for several Grammy awards.[170] Critics noted that Dylan was widening his musical palette to include rockabilly, Western swing, jazz, and even lounge ballads.[171] In 2003 Dylan revisited the evangelical songs from his "born again" period and participated in the CD project Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan. That year also saw the release of the film Masked & Anonymous, a collaboration with TV producer Larry Charles that had Dylan appearing in a cast of well-knowns, including Jeff Bridges, Penelope Cruz and John Goodman. The film polarised critics: many dismissed it as an “incoherent mess”[172][173]; a few treated it as a serious work of art.[174][175]

In October 2004, Dylan published the first part of his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One. The book confounded expectations.[176] Dylan devoted three chapters to his first year in New York City in 1961–1962, virtually ignoring the mid-'60s when his fame was at its height. He also devoted chapters to the albums New Morning (1970) and Oh Mercy (1989). The book reached number two on The New York Times' Hardcover Non-Fiction best seller list in December 2004 and was nominated for a National Book Award.[177]

Dylan performing in Bologna in November 2005.

Martin Scorsese's acclaimed[178] film biography No Direction Home was broadcast in September 2005.[179] The documentary focuses on the period from Dylan's arrival in New York in 1961 to his motorcycle crash in 1966; it features interviews with Suze Rotolo, Liam Clancy, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Pete Seeger, Mavis Staples, and Dylan himself. The film received a Peabody Award in April 2006[180] and a Columbia-duPont Award in January 2007.[181] The accompanying soundtrack featured unreleased songs from Dylan's early career.

On August 29, 2006, Dylan released his next album, Modern Times. In a Rolling Stone interview, Dylan criticized the quality of modern sound recordings and claimed that his new songs "probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded 'em."[182] Despite some coarsening of Dylan’s voice (a critic for The Guardian characterised his singing on the album as "a catarrhal death rattle")[183] most reviewers praised the album, and many described it as the final installment of a successful trilogy, embracing Time Out of Mind and "Love and Theft".[184] Modern Times entered the U.S. charts at number one, making it Dylan's first album to reach that position since 1976's Desire, 30 years prior.[185]

Nominated for three Grammy Awards, Modern Times won Best Contemporary Folk/Americana Album and Bob Dylan also won Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance for "Someday Baby". Modern Times was named Album of the Year, 2006, by Rolling Stone magazine,[186] and by Uncut in the UK.[187] On the same day that Modern Times was released the iTunes Music Store released Bob Dylan: The Collection, a digital box set containing all of his albums (773 tracks in total), along with 42 rare and unreleased tracks.[188]

May 3, 2006, was the premiere of Dylan's DJ career, hosting a weekly radio program, Theme Time Radio Hour, for XM Satellite Radio, with song selections revolving around a chosen theme. [189][190] Dylan played classic and obscure records from the 1930s to the present day, including contemporary artists as diverse as Blur, Prince, L.L. Cool J and The Streets. The show was praised by fans and critics as "great radio," as Dylan told stories and made eclectic references with his sardonic humor, while achieving a thematic beauty with his musical choices.[191][192] Music author Peter Guralnick commented: "With this show, Dylan is tapping into his deep love—and I would say his belief in—a musical world without borders. I feel like the commentary often reflects the same surrealistic appreciation for the human comedy that suffuses his music."[193]

August 2007 saw the unveiling of the award-winning film I'm Not There,[194][195] written and directed by Todd Haynes, bearing the tagline "inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan".[196] The movie uses six distinct characters to represent different aspects of Dylan's life, played by Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw.[196][197] Dylan's previously unreleased 1967 recording from which the film takes its name[198] was released for the first time on the film's original soundtrack; all other tracks are covers of Dylan songs, specially recorded for the movie by a diverse range of artists, including Stephen Malkmus, Jeff Tweedy, Willie Nelson, Cat Power, Richie Havens, and Tom Verlaine.[199]

Bob Dylan performs at Air Canada Centre, Toronto, November 7, 2006

On October 1, 2007, Columbia Records released the triple CD retrospective album Dylan, anthologising his entire career under the Dylan 07 logo.[200] As part of this campaign, Mark Ronson produced a re-mix of Dylan's 1966 tune "Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)", which was released as a maxi-single. This was the first time Dylan had sanctioned a re-mix of one of his classic recordings.[201]

The sophistication of the Dylan 07 marketing campaign was a reminder that Dylan’s commercial profile had risen considerably since the 1990s. Dylan generated controversy when he appeared in a TV advertisement for Victoria’s Secret lingerie in 2004,[202] and a multi-media campaign for the 2008 Cadillac Escalade in October 2008.[203] [204]

Over a decade after Random House had published Drawn Blank (1994), a book of Dylan's drawings and paintings, an exhibit of Dylan's art, The Drawn Blank Series, opened in October 2007 at the Kunstsammlungen in Chemnitz, Germany.[205] This first public exhibition of Dylan's paintings showcased 170 watercolours and gouaches.[205] A catalog of the exhibition was also published.[206]

In an interview with The Times[207] in July, 2008, Dylan ended with what may have been an endorsement of presidential candidate Barack Obama:

Well, you know right now America is in a state of upheaval. Poverty is demoralizing. You can't expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor. But we've got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up: Barack Obama. He's redefining what a politician is, so we'll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I'm hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to.[208]

In October 2008, CBS released Volume 8 of Dylan's Bootleg Series, Tell Tale Signs: Rare And Unreleased 1989-2006 as both a two-CD set and a three-CD version with a 150-page hardcover book. The set contains live performances and outtakes from selected studio albums from Oh Mercy to Modern Times, as well as soundtrack contributions and collaborations with David Bromberg and Ralph Stanley.[209] The pricing of the album—the two-CD set went on sale for $18.99 and the three-CD version for $129.99—led to accusations of "rip-off packaging" from some fans and critics.[210][211]

During 2008, Dylan was reported to be curating a project to set some of Hank Williams' "lost" lyrics to music. Dylan is said to be overseeing contributions from Jack White, Willie Nelson, Lucinda Williams, and Norah Jones.[212][213] An attorney for the Hank Williams estate stated that the project began when music publisher Acuff Rose entrusted to Dylan some of the so-called "Shoebox Songs", notebooks and drafts of songs that had been in the possession of Hank Williams' widow.[212]

Never Ending Tour

Main article: Never Ending Tour
Bob Dylan (right on keyboards) at the Roskilde Festival, 2006.

Dylan has played roughly 100 dates a year for the entirety of the 1990s and the 2000s, a heavier schedule than most performers who started out in the 1960s.[214] The "Never Ending Tour" continues, anchored by longtime bassist Tony Garnier and filled out with talented musicians better known to their peers than to their audiences. To the dismay of some critics,[215] Dylan's performances remain unpredictable as he alters his arrangements and changes his vocal approach night after night.[216] Some fans have complained that, as Dylan's vocal range has diminished, he has resorted to a technique they have labelled "upsinging". One critic described the technique as Dylan's "dismantling melodies by delivering phrases in a monotone and ending them an octave higher".[217]

The 2008 installment of Dylan's "Never Ending Tour" has seen Dylan performing in Mexico, and South America, Eastern U.S. and Canada, Russia and Europe, followed by a string of American concerts, beginning in Philadelphia and ending in Santa Barbara.[218]

Personal life

Family

Dylan married Sara Lownds on November 22, 1965; their first child, Jesse Byron Dylan, was born on January 6, 1966. Bob and Sara Dylan had four children: Jesse Byron, Anna Leigh, Samuel Isaac Abraham, and Jakob Luke (born December 9, 1969). Dylan also adopted Sara's daughter from a prior marriage, Maria Lownds (later Dylan), (born October 21, 1961 now married to musician Peter Himmelman). In the 1990s his son Jakob Dylan became well known as the lead singer of the band The Wallflowers. Jesse Dylan is a film director and a successful businessman. Bob and Sara Dylan were divorced on June 29, 1977.[219]

In June 1986, Dylan married his longtime backup singer Carolyn Dennis (often professionally known as Carol Dennis).[220] Their daughter, Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan, was born on January 31, 1986. The couple divorced in October 1992. Their marriage and child remained a closely guarded secret until the publication of Howard Sounes' Dylan biography, Down the Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan in 2001.[221]Dylan currently resides in Malibu, California.

Religious beliefs

Growing up in Hibbing, Dylan and his parents were part of the area's small but close-knit Jewish community, and, in May 1954, Dylan became a Bar Mitzvah.[222] However, for a period during the late 1970s and early 80s, Bob Dylan publicly became a born-again Christian. From January to April 1979, Dylan participated in Bible study classes at the Vineyard School of Discipleship in Reseda, Southern California. Pastor Kenn Gulliksen has recalled: “Larry Myers and Paul Emond went over to Bob’s house and ministered to him. He responded by saying, "Yes he did in fact want Christ in His life. And he prayed that day and received the Lord."[223][224]

Since his trilogy of Christian albums, Dylan has been described as a supporter of the Chabad Lubavitch movement[225] and has publicly and privately participated in Jewish religious events, including the bar mitzvahs of his sons. Subsequently, Jewish news services have reported that Dylan has "shown up" a few times at various High Holiday services at various Chabad synagogues.[226] For example, he attended Congregation Beth Tefillah, in Atlanta, Georgia on September 22, 2007 (Yom Kippur), where he was called to the Torah for the sixth aliyah.[227]

In 1997 he told David Gates of Newsweek:

Here's the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else. Songs like "Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain" or "I Saw the Light"—that's my religion. I don't adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I've learned more from the songs than I've learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.[5]

In an interview published in The New York Times on September 28, 1997, journalist Jon Pareles reported that "Dylan says he now subscribes to no organized religion."[228]

Legacy

Bob Dylan has been described as one of the most influential figures of the 20th century, musically and culturally. Dylan was included in the Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century where he was called "master poet, caustic social critic and intrepid, guiding spirit of the counterculture generation".[229] In 2004, he was ranked number two in Rolling Stone magazine's list of "Greatest Artists of All Time".[230] Dylan biographer Howard Sounes placed him in even more exalted company when he said, "There are giant figures in art who are sublimely good—Mozart, Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, Shakespeare, Dickens. Dylan ranks alongside these artists." [231]

Initially modelling his style on the songs of Woody Guthrie,[232] and lessons learnt from the blues of Robert Johnson,[233] Dylan added increasingly sophisticated lyrical techniques to the folk music of the early 60s, infusing it "with the intellectualism of classic literature and poetry". [234] Paul Simon suggested that Dylan's early compositions virtually took over the folk genre: "[Dylan's] early songs were very rich, simple but very rich, with strong melodies. "Blowin' In The Wind" has a really strong melody. He so enlarged himself through the folk background that he incorporated it for a while. He defined the genre for a while. That's quite an accomplishment."[235]

When Dylan made his move from acoustic music to a rock backing, the mix became more complex. For many critics, Dylan's greatest achievement was the cultural synthesis exemplified by his mid-'60s trilogy of albums—Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. In Mike Marqusee's words: "Between late 1964 and the summer of 1966, Dylan created a body of work that remains unique. Drawing on folk, blues, country, R&B, rock'n'roll, gospel, British beat, symbolist, modernist and Beat poetry, surrealism and Dada, advertising jargon and social commentary, Fellini and Mad magazine, he forged a coherent and original artistic voice and vision. The beauty of these albums retains the power to shock and console."[236]

One legacy of Dylan’s verbal sophistication was the increasing attention paid by literary critics to his lyrics. Professor Christopher Ricks published a 500 page analysis of Dylan’s work, placing him in the context of Eliot, Keats and Tennyson, [237] and claiming that Dylan was a poet worthy of the same close and painstaking analysis.[238] The poet laureate of England, Andrew Motion, argued that Bob Dylan’s lyrics should be studied in schools. [239] Dylan has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.[240][241][242]

Dylan's influence has been felt in several musical genres. As Edna Gundersen stated in USA Today: "Dylan's musical DNA has informed nearly every simple twist of pop since 1962." [243]. Many musicians have testified to Dylan's influence, such as Joe Strummer, who praised Dylan as having "laid down the template for lyric, tune, seriousness, spirituality, depth of rock music."[244] Other musicians to have acknowledged Dylan's importance include John Lennon,[245] Paul McCartney,[246] Neil Young,[247][248] Bruce Springsteen,[249] David Bowie,[250] Bono,[251] Bryan Ferry,[252] Syd Barrett,[253] Nick Cave,[254][255] Patti Smith,[256] Joni Mitchell,[257] and Tom Waits.[258]

There have been dissenters. Because Dylan was widely credited with imbuing pop culture with a new seriousness, the critic Nik Cohn objected: "I can't take the vision of Dylan as seer, as teenage messiah, as everything else he's been worshipped as. The way I see him, he's a minor talent with a major gift for self-hype."[259] Similarly, Australian critic Jack Marx credited Dylan with changing the persona of the rock star: "What cannot be disputed is that Dylan invented the arrogant, faux-cerebral posturing that has been the dominant style in rock since, with everyone from Mick Jagger to Eminem educating themselves from the Dylan handbook."[260]

If Dylan’s legacy in the 1960s was seen as bringing intellectual ambition to popular music, as Dylan advances into his sixties, he is today described as a figure who has expanded the scope of American culture. As J. Hoberman wrote in The Village Voice, “Elvis might never have been born, but someone else would surely have brought the world rock 'n' roll. No such logic accounts for Bob Dylan. No iron law of history demanded that a would-be Elvis from Hibbing, Minnesota, would swerve through the Greenwich Village folk revival to become the world's first and greatest rock 'n' roll beatnik bard and then—having achieved fame and adoration beyond reckoning—vanish into a folk tradition of his own making.” [261]

Discography

Main article: Bob Dylan discography

Awards

Further information: List of Bob Dylan awards and accolades

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 The following interview with Bobby Vee suggests the young Zimmerman may have been eccentric in spelling his early pseudonym: "[Dylan] was in the Fargo/Moorhead area. He was working as a busboy at a place called the Red Apple Cafe. We didn't know that at the time. Bill [Velline] was in a record shop in Fargo, Sam's Record Land, and this guy came up to him and introduced himself as Elston Gunnn--with three n's, G-U-N-N-N." Bobby Vee Interview, July 1999, Goldmine Reproduced online:"Early alias for Robert Zimmerman". Expecting Rain (1999-08-11). Retrieved on 2009-09-11.
  2. ↑ "Dylan 'reveals origin of anthem'". BBC News (2004-04-11). Retrieved on 2008-09-07.
  3. ↑ "The Top 50 Albums of The Year 2006". Rolling Stone (2006-12-11). Retrieved on 2008-09-07.
  4. ↑ Browne, David (2001-09-10). "Love and Theft review". Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved on 2008-09-07.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Gates, David (1997-10-06). "Dylan Revisited". Newsweek. Retrieved on 2008-10-13.
  6. ↑ "The Pulitzer Prize Winners 2008: Special Citation". Pulitzer (2008-05-07). Retrieved on 2008-09-06.
  7. ↑ Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, p.14, gives his Hebrew name as Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham
  8. ↑ A Chabad news service gives the variant Zushe ben Avraham, which may be a Yiddish variant "Singer/Songwriter Bob Dylan Joins Yom Kippur Services in Atlanta". Chabad.org News (2007-09-24). Retrieved on 2008-09-11.
  9. ↑ Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, p.14
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, p.12-13
  11. ↑ Dylan, Bob (2004). "Chronicles, Volume One". Simon & Schuster. pp. 92–93. ISBN 0306812312. 
  12. ↑ Shelton, No Direction Home, 25–33
  13. ↑ Shelton, No Direction Home, 38–39.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 14.3 14.4 14.5 14.6 Updated from The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001). "Bob Dylan: Biography". Rolling Stone. Retrieved on 2008-09-23.
  15. ↑ Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, 29–37
  16. ↑ Shelton, No Direction Home, 39–43.
  17. ↑ Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, p.41–42
  18. ↑ Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, 26–27.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 Biograph, 1985, Liner notes & text by Cameron Crowe.
  20. ↑ Shelton, No Direction Home, 65–82
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 21.2 as related in documentary No Direction Home, Director: Martin Scorsese. Broadcast: September 26, 2005, PBS & BBC Two
  22. ↑ Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. 1, 78–79.
  23. ↑ Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. 1, 98.
  24. ↑ Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. 1, 250–252.
  25. ↑ Robert Shelton, New York Times, 1961-09-21, "Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Stylist" reproduced online: Robert Shelton (1961-09-21). "Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Stylist". Bob Dylan Roots. Retrieved on 2008-09-11.
  26. ↑ Richie Unterberger (2003-10-08). "Carolyn Hester Biography". All Music. Retrieved on 2008-09-11.
  27. ↑ 27.0 27.1 Scaduto, 1972, Bob Dylan, 110
  28. ↑ Shelton, No Direction Home, 157–158
  29. ↑ Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, 283–4
  30. ↑ Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, 115–116.
  31. ↑ Shelton, No Direction Home, 138–142
  32. ↑ Shelton, No Direction Home, 156
  33. ↑ The booklet by John Bauldie accompanying Dylan's The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991 (1991) explains: "It was Pete Seeger who first identified Dylan's adaptation of the melody of 'No More Auction Block' for the composition of 'Blowin' In The Wind'." Dylan himself was to admit the debt in 1978 when he told journalist Marc Rowland: "'Blowin' In The Wind' has always been a spiritual. I took it off a song called 'No More Auction Block'—that's a spiritual and 'Blowin' In The Wind follows the same feeling." pp.6–8
  34. ↑ Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, 101–103
  35. ↑ Ricks, Dylan's Visions of Sin, 329–44.
  36. ↑ Scaduto, Bob Dylan, 35
  37. ↑ Mojo magazine, December 1993
  38. ↑ Hedin (ed.), 2004, Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader, p. 259. Reproduced online:Joyce Carol Oates (2001-05-24). "Dylan at 60". University of San Francisco. Retrieved on 2008-09-29.
  39. ↑ New York Times critic Robert Shelton described Dylan's vocal style as "a rusty voice suggesting Guthrie's old performances, etched in gravel like Dave Van Ronk's." Shelton, No Direction Home, pp. 108–111
  40. ↑ Joan Baez entry, Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, 28–31
  41. ↑ Meacham, Steve (2007-08-15). "It ain't me babe but I like how it sounds". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved on 2008-09-24.
  42. ↑ Biograph, 1985, Liner notes & text by Cameron Crowe. Musicians on "Mixed Up Confusion": George Barnes & Bruce Langhorne (guitars); Dick Wellstood (piano); Gene Ramey (bass); Herb Lovelle (drums)
  43. ↑ Dylan had recorded "Talkin' John Birch Society Blues" for his Freewheelin' album, but the song was replaced by later compositions, including "Masters of War". see Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, 114–115
  44. ↑ Dylan performed "Only a Pawn in Their Game" and "When the Ship Comes In": Heylin, 1996, Bob Dylan: A Life In Stolen Moments, p.49
  45. ↑ Gill, 1999, My Back Pages, pp. 37–41.
  46. ↑ Ricks, Dylan's Visions of Sin, 221–233
  47. ↑ 47.0 47.1 47.2 47.3 "Bob Dylan Timeline". BBC. Retrieved on 2008-09-25.
  48. ↑ Shelton, No Direction Home, 200–205
  49. ↑ Dylan's speech is printed in: Shelton, No Direction Home, 200–205. A partial extract: "There's no black and white, left and right to me any more; there's only up and down and down is very close to the ground. And I'm trying to go up without thinking of anything trivial such as politics."
  50. ↑ Shelton, No Direction Home, p. 222.
  51. ↑ In an interview with Seth Goddard for Life magazine (July 5, 2001) Ginsberg claimed that Dylan’s technique had been inspired by Jack Kerouac: "(Dylan) pulled Mexico City Blues from my hand and started reading it and I said, 'What do you know about that?' He said, 'Somebody handed it to me in '59 in St. Paul and it blew my mind.' So I said 'Why?' He said, 'It was the first poetry that spoke to me in my own language.' So those chains of flashing images you get in Dylan, like 'the motorcycle black Madonna two-wheeled gypsy queen and her silver studded phantom lover,' they're influenced by Kerouac's chains of flashing images and spontaneous writing, and that spreads out into the people." Reproduced online at: "Online Interviews With Allen Ginsberg". University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (2004-10-08). Retrieved on 2009-09-11.
  52. ↑ Shelton, No Direction Home, 219–222
  53. ↑ Shelton, No Direction Home, 267–271, 288–291
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  204. ↑ Dylan also devoted an hour of his Theme Time Radio Hour to the theme of 'the Cadillac'. He had first sung about this car in his 1963 nuclear war fantasy, “Talkin’ World War III Blues”, when he described it as a “good car to drive—after a war”.
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  206. ↑ "The Drawn Blank Series". Prestel Verlag (2007-10-31). Retrieved on 2008-09-16.
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  218. ↑ Pagel, Bill (2008-09-12). "Bob Dylan 2008 Tour Guide". Bob Links. Retrieved on 2008-09-15.
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  234. ↑ "Bob Dylan". Britannica Online. Retrieved on 2008-10-05.
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  247. ↑ "Bob Dylan, I'll never be Bob Dylan. He's the master. If I'd like to be anyone, it's him. And he's a great writer, true to his music and done what he feels is the right thing to do for years and years and years. He's great. He's the one I look to." Time interview with Neil Young, September 28, 2005. Reproduced online :Tyrangiel, Josh (2005-09-28). "Resurrection of Neil Young". Time. Retrieved on 2008-09-15.
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  252. ↑ In 2007, Ferry released an album of his versions of Dylan songs, Dylanesque
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  254. ↑ Mojo: What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Nick Cave: "I guess it's Slow Train Coming by Bob Dylan. That's a great record, full of mean-spirited spirituality. It's a genuinely nasty record, certainly the nastiest 'Christian' album I've ever come across." Mojo, January 1997
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  256. ↑ Time Out interview with Patti Smith, May 16, 2007: "The people I revered in the late ’60s and the early ’70s, their motivation was to do great work and great work creates revolution. The motivation of Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan or The Who wasn’t marketing, to get rich, or be a celebrity.""Patti Smith: interview". Time Out (2007-05-16). Retrieved on 2008-09-08.
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  • Hajdu, David Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina Farrar Straus Giroux, 2001, 328 pages. ISBN 0-374-28199-8
  • Harvey, Todd (2001). The Formative Dylan: Transmission & Stylistic Influences, 1961–1963. The Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0-8108-4115-0. 
  • Hedin (ed.), Benjamin (2004). Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader. W.W.Norton & Co.. ISBN 0-393-32742-6. 
  • Helm, Levon; Stephen Davis (2000). This Wheel's on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band. a capella. ISBN 1-55652-405-6. 
  • Heylin, Clinton (1990). Saved!: The Gospel Speeches of Bob Dylan. Hanuman Books. ISBN 0937815381. 
  • Heylin, Clinton (1996). Bob Dylan: A Life In Stolen Moments. Book Sales. ISBN 0711956693. 
  • Heylin, Clinton (2003). Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited. Perennial Currents. ISBN 0-06-052569-X. 
  • Lee, C. P. (2000). Like a Bullet of Light: The Films of Bob Dylan. Helter Skelter. ISBN 1900924064. 
  • Marcus, Greil (2001). The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes. Picador. ISBN 0-312-42043-9. 
  • Marqusee, Mike (2005). Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s. Seven Stories Press. ISBN 1-58322-686-9. 
  • Marshall, Scott (2002). Restless Pilgrim: The Spiritual Journey of Bob Dylan. Relevant Books. ISBN 0-9714576-2-X. 
  • Muir, Andrew (2001). Razor's Edge: Bob Dylan & the Never Ending Tour. Helter Skelter. ISBN 1-900924-13-7. 
  • Ricks, Christopher (2003). Dylan's Visions of Sin. Penguin/Viking. ISBN 0-670-80133-X. 
  • Scaduto, Anthony. Bob Dylan. Helter Skelter, 2001 reprint of 1972 original. ISBN 1-900924-23-4. 
  • Robert Shelton, No Direction Home, Da Capo Press, 2003 reprint of 1986 original, 576 pages. ISBN 0-306-81287-8
  • Sam Shepard, Rolling Thunder Logbook, Da Capo, 2004 reissue, 176 pages. ISBN 0-306-81371-8
  • Sounes, Howard (2001). Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan. Grove Press. ISBN 0-8021-1686-8. 

External links

Bob Dylan
Studio albums
Bob Dylan · The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan · The Times They Are a-Changin' · Another Side of Bob Dylan · Bringing It All Back Home · Highway 61 Revisited · Blonde on Blonde · John Wesley Harding · Nashville Skyline · Self Portrait · New Morning · Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid · Dylan · Planet Waves · Blood on the Tracks · The Basement Tapes · Desire · Street Legal · Slow Train Coming · Saved · Shot of Love · Infidels · Empire Burlesque · Knocked Out Loaded · Down in the Groove · Oh Mercy · Under the Red Sky · Good as I Been to You · World Gone Wrong · Time out of Mind · "Love and Theft" · Modern Times
Live albums
The Concert for Bangla Desh · Before the Flood · Hard Rain · Bob Dylan at Budokan · Real Live · Dylan & the Dead · The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration · MTV Unplugged · Live 1961-2000: Thirty-Nine Years of Great Concert Performances · Live at the Gaslight 1962 · Live at Carnegie Hall 1963
Compilations
Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits · Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II · Masterpieces · Biograph · Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Volume 3 · The Essential Bob Dylan · Bob Dylan: The Collection · The Best of Bob Dylan · Blues · Dylan
The Bootleg Series
Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991 · Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert · Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue · Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall · Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack · Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs
Concerts & Tours
Going Electric at Newport (1965) · 1966 World Tour · The Concert for Bangladesh (1971) · Tour with The Band (1974) · Rolling Thunder Revue (1975) · Never Ending Tour (1988-present)
Films
Dont Look Back · Eat the Document · Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid · Renaldo and Clara · Hearts of Fire · Masked and Anonymous · No Direction Home · I'm Not There · 65 Revisited · The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965
Writings
Tarantula · Writings and Drawings · Lyrics: 1962–1985 · Drawn Blank · Chronicles, Vol. 1  · Lyrics: 1962–2001  · The Definitive Bob Dylan Songbook
Related articles
Discography · Albums · Songs · Related topics · Traveling Wilburys
Traveling Wilburys
Bob Dylan · George Harrison · Jeff Lynne · Roy Orbison · Tom Petty
Studio albums
Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 · Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3
Compilations
The Traveling Wilburys Collection
Charity albums
Nobody's Child: Romanian Angel Appeal
Singles
"Handle with Care" · "End of the Line" · "She's My Baby" · "Wilbury Twist"
Related articles
Jim Keltner · Dhani Harrison · Full Moon Fever
Persondata
NAME Dylan, Bob
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Zimmerman, Robert Allen (birth name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION Rock and folk musician
DATE OF BIRTH May 24, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Duluth, Minnesota
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH