Bob Dylan (born
Robert Allen
Zimmerman on May 24, 1941) is an American
singer-songwriter, musician, poet and painter who has been a major
figure in
popular music for five
decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when
he was, at first, an informal chronicler and then an apparently
reluctant figurehead of social unrest. A number of his songs, such
as "
Blowin' in the Wind" and
"
The Times They Are
a-Changin'," became anthems for both the
civil rights and
the
anti-war
movements. Dylan's early lyrics incorporated political, social and
philosophical as well as literary influences. They defied existing
pop music conventions and appealed hugely to the then burgeoning
counterculture. While expanding and
personalizing
genres, 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.
Dylan performs with 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. His
accomplishments as a recording artist and performer have been
central to his career, but his greatest contribution is generally
considered to be his songwriting.
He has
received numerous awards
over the years including Grammy, Golden Globe and Academy Awards; he has been inducted into the
Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame
, Nashville Songwriters Hall of
Fame and Songwriters Hall
of Fame. In 2008 a Bob Dylan Pathway was opened in the
singer's honor in his birthplace of Duluth
,
Minnesota. The
Pulitzer Prize
jury in 2008 awarded him a
special citation
for what they called his profound impact on popular music and
American culture, "marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary
poetic power."
Dylan released his most recent studio album,
Christmas in the Heart, on
October 13, 2009. The album comprised traditional Christmas songs,
including "
Here Comes Santa
Claus" and "
Hark!
The Herald Angels
Sing".
All Dylan's royalties from the sale of this
album will benefit the charity Feeding America
in the USA, and similar charities in overseas
markets.
Life and career
Origins and musical beginnings
Robert
Allen Zimmerman (Hebrew name Shabtai Zisel
ben Avraham) was born in St. Mary's Hospital on May 24, 1941, in
Duluth
, Minnesota,
and raised there and in Hibbing
, Minnesota, on the Mesabi Iron Range west of Lake Superior
. 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. His mother's grandparents,
Benjamin and Lybba Edelstein, were
Lithuanian Jews who arrived in the United
States in 1902.
In his autobiography Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan
writes that his paternal grandmother's maiden name was Kyrgyz and her family originated from Istanbul
.
Dylan’s parents, Abram Zimmerman and Beatrice "Beatty" Stone, were
part of the area's small but close-knit Jewish community.
Robert
Zimmerman lived in Duluth until age six, when his father was
stricken with polio and the family returned to his mother's home
town, Hibbing
, where Zimmerman spent the rest of his
childhood. 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. He formed several bands in high school: The
Shadow Blasters was short-lived, but his next, The Golden Chords,
lasted longer and played
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. In 1959 he saw
Buddy Holly in the Winter Dance Party tour and
later recalled how he made eye contact with him. In his 1959 school
yearbook, Robert Zimmerman listed as his ambition "To join
Little Richard." The same year, using the
name Elston Gunnn (sic), he performed two dates with
Bobby Vee, playing piano and providing
handclaps.
Zimmerman
moved to Minneapolis
in September 1959 and enrolled at the University of
Minnesota
. His early focus on rock and roll gave way
to an interest in American folk music. In 1985 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."
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.
During his Dinkytown days, Zimmerman began introducing himself as
"Bob Dylan." In a 2004 interview, Dylan explained: "You're born,
you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You
call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of
the free." In his autobiography,
Chronicles: Volume One,
Dylan acknowledged that he was familiar with the poetry of
Dylan Thomas.
1960s
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
. Guthrie had been a revelation to Dylan and
was the biggest influence on his early performances. Describing
Guthrie's impact on him, Dylan later wrote: "The songs themselves
had the infinite sweep of humanity in them ... [He] was the true
voice of the American spirit. I said to myself I was going to be
Guthrie's greatest disciple." As well as visiting Guthrie in the
hospital, Dylan befriended Guthrie's acolyte
Ramblin' Jack Elliott. Much of
Guthrie's repertoire was actually channeled through Elliott, and
Dylan paid tribute to Elliott in
Chronicles (2004).
From
February 1961, Dylan played at various clubs around Greenwich
Village
. In September, he eventually gained public
recognition when Robert
Shelton wrote a positive review in The New York Times of a show at
Gerde's Folk
City
. 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. Hammond signed Dylan to
Columbia Records in 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. 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.
While working for Columbia, Dylan also recorded several songs under
the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt, for
Broadside Magazine, a folk music
magazine and record label.
Dylan made two important career moves in August 1962. He legally
changed his name to Robert Dylan, 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. Dylan
would subsequently describe Grossman thus: "He was kind of like a
Colonel Tom Parker
figure ... you could smell him coming." 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.
From December 1962 to January 1963, Dylan made his first trip to
the UK. He had been invited by TV director
Philip Saville to appear in a drama,
The Madhouse on Castle Street,
which Saville was directing for
BBC
Television.
At the end of the play, Dylan performed
Blowin' in the Wind, one of the first major public
performances of the song While in London, Dylan performed at
several London folk clubs, including Les
Cousins
, The
Pinder Of Wakefield
, and Bunjies
. He also learned new songs from several UK
performers, including
Martin
Carthy.
By the time Dylan's second album,
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan,
was released in May 1963, he had begun to make his name as both a
singer and a songwriter. Many of the songs on this album were
labeled
protest songs, inspired partly
by Guthrie and influenced by
Pete
Seeger's passion for topical songs.
"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
.
His most famous song at this 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. 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. 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.
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, 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."
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." 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. 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.
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."
"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."
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 Paranoid Blues", was potentially libelous to the
John Birch Society. Rather than comply
with the censorship, Dylan refused to appear on the program.
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. Dylan's third album,
The Times They Are
a-Changin', reflected a more politicized and cynical
Dylan. 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. 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".
By the end of 1963, Dylan felt both manipulated and constrained by
the folk and protest movements. 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, an intoxicated
Dylan brashly questioned the role of the committee, characterized
the members as old and balding, and claimed to see something of
himself (and of every man) in Kennedy's alleged assassin,
Lee Harvey Oswald.
Another Side of Bob
Dylan, recorded on a single June evening in 1964, 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 " 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. 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," 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.
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." 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."
Going electric
Dylan's March 1965 album
Bringing It All Back Home was
yet another stylistic leap, featuring 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. Its free association lyrics both harked back to
the manic energy of
Beat poetry and were
a forerunner of
rap and
hip-hop.
By contrast, the
B side of the
album consisted of four long songs on which Dylan accompanied
himself on acoustic guitar and harmonica. "
Mr. Tambourine Man" quickly became one of
Dylan's best known songs when
The Byrds
recorded an electric guitar version which reached number one in
both the U.S. and the U.K. charts. "
It's All Over Now Baby Blue" and
"
It's Alright Ma
" would be acclaimed as two of Dylan's most important
compositions.
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). 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.
Dylan's 1965 Newport performance provoked an outraged response from
the folk music establishment.
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." 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, 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.
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, in his speech during
Dylan's inauguration into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
said that on first hearing the single, "that snare
shot sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your
mind". In 2004,
Rolling Stone Magazine listed it
at #1 on its list of "The RS 500 Greatest Songs of All Time".
The song
also opened Dylan's next album, Highway 61 Revisited, titled after
the road that led from Dylan's Minnesota
to the musical hotbed of New
Orleans
. The songs were in the same vein as the hit
single, flavored by
Mike
Bloomfield's blues guitar and
Al
Kooper's organ riffs. "
Desolation
Row" offers the sole
acoustic
exception, with Dylan making surreal allusions to a variety of
figures in Western culture during this long song. Andy Gill wrote,
"'Desolation Row' is an 11-minute epic of entropy which takes the
form of a Fellini-esque parade of grotesques and oddities featuring
a huge cast of iconic characters, some historical (
Einstein,
Nero), some biblical
(Noah, Cain and Abel), some fictional (Ophelia, Romeo, Cinderella),
some literary (
T.S. Eliot and
Ezra Pound),
and some who fit into none of the above categories, notably Dr.
Filth and his dubious nurse"
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. 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.
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.
The Nashville sessions produced the double-album
Blonde on Blonde (1966), featuring
what Dylan later called "that thin wild mercury sound".
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.
On November 22, 1965, Dylan secretly married 25-year-old former
model
Sara Lownds. Some of Dylan’s
friends (including
Ramblin' Jack
Elliott) claim that, in conversation immediately after the
event, Dylan denied that he was married. Journalist
Nora Ephron first made the news public in the
New York Post in February
1966 with the headline “Hush! Bob Dylan is wed.”
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.
The tour culminated in a famously raucous
confrontation between Dylan and his audience at the Manchester
Free Trade
Hall
in England. (A recording of this concert,
Bob Dylan
Live 1966, was finally released in 1998.) At the climax of
the evening,
one fan, angry with
Dylan's electric sound, shouted: "
Judas!" to which Dylan responded, "I don't
believe you ... You're a liar!". Dylan turned to his band and
said "Play it fucking loud!", and they launched into the final 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. 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, Dylan crashed his 500cc Triumph Tiger 100 motorcycle on a road near his home in Woodstock
, New York, throwing him to the ground.
Though the extent of his injuries were never fully disclosed, Dylan
said that he broke several
vertebrae in
his neck. Mystery still surrounds the circumstances of the accident
since no ambulance was called to the scene and Dylan was not
hospitalized. Dylan later expressed concern about where his career
and private life were headed up until the point of the crash: "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." Many biographers believe that the crash
offered Dylan the much-needed chance to escape from the pressures
that had built up around him. In the wake of his accident, Dylan
withdrew from the public and, apart from a few select appearances,
did not tour again for eight years.
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. In
1967 he began recording music with the Hawks at his home and in the
basement of the Hawks' nearby house, called "Big Pink". 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.
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, 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,
Kenny Buttrey on drums, and
Pete Drake on steel guitar. 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. 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.
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, where he was backed by The
Band.
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. 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", "I
Threw It All Away" and "Living the Blues".
Dylan next travelled
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.
1970s
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. In general,
Self Portrait, a double LP
including few original songs, was poorly received. Later that year,
Dylan released
New Morning,
which some considered a return to form. In November 1968, Dylan had
co-written "I'd Have You Anytime" with
George Harrison; Harrison recorded both "I'd
Have You Anytime" and Dylan's "If Not For You" for his 1970 solo
triple album
All Things Must
Pass. Dylan's surprise appearance at Harrison's 1971
Concert for
Bangladesh attracted much media coverage, reflecting that
Dylan's live appearances had become rare.
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". On November 4, 1971 Dylan recorded "
George Jackson" which he released a
week later.
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.
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. 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.
Return to touring
Dylan began 1973 by signing with a new record label,
David Geffen's
Asylum
Records, when his contract with
Columbia Records expired. On his next
album,
Planet Waves, he used
The Band as backing group, while rehearsing
for a major tour. The album included two versions of "Forever
Young", which became one of his most popular songs.
Christopher Ricks has connected the chorus
of this song with
John Keats's "
Ode on a Grecian Urn", which contains
the line "For ever panting, and for ever young." As one critic
described it, the song projected "something hymnal and heartfelt
that spoke of the father in Dylan", and Dylan himself commented: "I
wrote it thinking about one of my boys and not wanting to be too
sentimental." Biographer
Howard Sounes
noted that
Jakob Dylan believed the song
was about him.
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. 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.
Dylan delayed the album's release, however,
and re-recorded half of the songs at Sound
80 Studios in Minneapolis
with production assistance from his brother
David Zimmerman.
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." In
Rolling Stone, reviewer
Jon Landau wrote that "the record has been made
with typical shoddiness." However, over the years critics have come
to see it as one of Dylan's greatest achievements, perhaps the only
serious rival to his 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." Novelist
Rick
Moody called it "the truest, most honest account of a love
affair from tip to stern ever put down on magnetic tape."
That
summer Dylan wrote his first successful "protest" song in 12 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. The tour was a
varied evening of entertainment featuring about one hundred
performers and supporters drawn from the resurgent Greenwich
Village folk scene, including
T-Bone
Burnett,
Ramblin' Jack
Elliott,
Joni Mitchell.
David Mansfield,
Roger McGuinn,
Mick
Ronson,
Joan Baez, and violinist
Scarlet Rivera, whom Dylan discovered
while she was walking down the street, her violin case hanging on
her back.
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.
Running through late 1975 and again through early 1976, the tour
encompassed the release of the album
Desire, with many of Dylan's
new songs featuring an almost
travelogue-like narrative style, showing
the influence of his new collaborator, playwright
Jacques Levy. 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.
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. Later in
that year, Dylan allowed a two-hour edit, dominated by the concert
performances, to be more widely released.
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,
The Last Waltz, was released in 1978 and
included about half of Dylan's set. In 1976, Dylan also wrote and
duetted on the song "Sign Language" for
Eric Clapton's
No Reason To Cry.
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. It suffered,
however, from a poor sound mix (attributed to his studio recording
practices), submerging much of its instrumentation until its
remastered CD release nearly a quarter century later.
Born-again period
In the late 1970s, Dylan became a
born-again Christian 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 tried to evangelize him during the recording, he replied: "Bob,
you're dealing with a sixty-two-year old Jewish atheist. Let's just
make an album." 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. 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:
Dylan's embrace of Christianity was unpopular with some of his fans
and fellow musicians.
Shortly before his
murder
, John Lennon recorded
"Serve Yourself" in response to Dylan's "Gotta Serve
Somebody". 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."
1980s
In the fall of 1980 Dylan briefly resumed touring for a series of
concerts billed as "A Musical Retrospective", where he restored
several of his popular 1960s songs to the repertoire.
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.
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. The
Infidels
recording sessions, for example, produced several notable songs
that Dylan left off the album. Most well regarded of these were
"
Blind Willie McTell" (a
tribute to the dead blues singer and an evocation of
African American history), "Foot of
Pride" and "Lord Protect My Child". These songs were later released
on
The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 1961-1991.
Between July 1984 and March 1985, Dylan recorded his next studio
album,
Empire Burlesque.
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 he was hired to make
Dylan's album sound "a little bit more contemporary".
Dylan sang on
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 the
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." 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.
In April 1986, Dylan made a foray into the world of
rap music when he added vocals to a verse of
Kurtis Blow's "Street Rock", which
appeared on Blow's album
Kingdom Blow. Credited with
making arrangements for Dylan's performance are veteran
singer-songwriter-producer, Wayne K. Garfield, who conceived the
collaboration and former Dylan back-up singer,Debra Byrd, who is
now head vocal coach for American Idol. In July 1986 Dylan released
Knocked Out Loaded, an
album containing 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. The album received mainly negative reviews;
Rolling Stone called it "a
depressing affair", and it was the first Dylan album since
Freewheelin'
(1963) to fail to make the Top 50. Since then, some critics have
called the 11-minute epic that Dylan co-wrote with Sam Shepard,
'
Brownsville Girl', a work of
genius. 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." After performing with
these 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.

Dylan in Toronto April 18, 1980
Photo: Jean-Luc Ourlin
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). 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.
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." Dylan then released the album
Down in the Groove,
which was even more unsuccessful in its sales than his previous
studio album. The song "Silvio", however, had some success as a
single. Later that spring, Dylan was a co-founder and member of the
Traveling Wilburys with
George Harrison,
Jeff
Lynne,
Roy Orbison, and
Tom Petty returning to the album charts with the
multi-platinum selling
Traveling Wilburys Vol.
1. 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.
Dylan finished the decade on a critical high note with
Oh Mercy produced by
Daniel Lanois.
Rolling Stone magazine
called the album "both challenging and satisfying". 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. The religious imagery of "Ring
Them Bells" struck some critics as a re-affirmation of faith.
1990s
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.
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 did not make
another studio album of new songs for seven years.
In 1991, Dylan was honored by the recording industry with a
Grammy Lifetime
Achievement Award. The event coincided with the start of the
Gulf War against
Saddam Hussein, and Dylan performed his song
"
Masters of War". Dylan then made a
short speech which startled some of the audience.
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",
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. 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, 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. 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."
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".
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." 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.
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."
2000s
Dylan commenced the new millennium by winning his first
Oscar; his song "
Things Have Changed", penned for the
film
Wonder Boys, won a
Golden
Globe and an
Academy
Award in March 2001. The Oscar (by some reports a facsimile)
tours with him, presiding over shows perched atop an
amplifier.
"Love and Theft" was released
on September 11, 2001. Recorded with his touring band, Dylan
produced the album himself under the
pseudonym Jack Frost. The album was critically
well-received and earned nominations for several Grammy awards.
Critics noted that Dylan was widening his musical palette to
include
rockabilly, Western swing, jazz,
and even lounge ballads.
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”; a few treated it as a serious work of art.
October 2004, Dylan published the first part of his autobiography,
Chronicles: Volume
One. The book confounded expectations. 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.
Martin Scorsese's acclaimed film
biography
No Direction
Home was broadcast in September 2005. The documentary
focuses on the period from Dylan's arrival in New York in 1961 to
his motorcycle crash in 1966, featuring 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 and a Columbia-duPont Award in January
2007. The
accompanying
soundtrack featured unreleased songs from Dylan's early
career.
Modern Times (2006–08)

Dylan, the Spectrum, 2007
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.
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. 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." In April 2009, Dylan broadcast the 100th
show in his radio series; the theme was "Goodbye" and the final
record played was
Woody Guthrie's "So
Long, It's Been Good To Know Yuh". This has led to speculation that
Dylan's radio series may have ended.
On August 29, 2006, Dylan released his
Modern Times album. 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."
Despite some coarsening of Dylan’s voice (a critic for
The Guardian characterised his singing on
the album as "a catarrhal death rattle") 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".
Modern Times entered the U.S.
charts at number one, making it Dylan's first album to reach that
position since 1976's
Desire.
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, and by
Uncut in the UK. 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.
August 2007 saw the unveiling of the award-winning film
I'm Not There, written and
directed by
Todd Haynes, bearing the
tagline "inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan". 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. Dylan's
previously unreleased 1967 recording from which the film takes its
name 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
Eddie Vedder,
Stephen Malkmus,
Jeff
Tweedy,
Willie Nelson,
Cat Power,
Richie
Havens, and
Tom Verlaine.

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. As part of this campaign,
Mark Ronson produced a re-mix of Dylan's
1966 tune "
Most Likely You
Go Your Way ", which was released as a maxi-single. This was
the first time Dylan had sanctioned a re-mix of one of his classic
recordings.
The sophistication of the
Dylan 07 marketing campaign was
a reminder that Dylan’s commercial profile had risen considerably
since the 1990s. This first became evidenced in 2004, when Dylan
appeared in a TV advertisement for
Victoria’s Secret lingerie. Three
years later, in October 2007, he participated in a multi-media
campaign for the 2008
Cadillac
Escalade. Then, in 2009, he gave the highest profile
endorsement of his career, appearing with rapper
Will.i.am in a
Pepsi ad that
debuted during the telecast of
Super
Bowl XLIII. The ad, broadcast to a record audience of 98
million viewers, opened with Dylan singing the first verse of
"Forever Young" followed by Will.i.am doing a
hip hop version of the song's third and final
verse.
Over a
decade after Random House had published
Drawn Blank (1994), a book of Dylan's drawings, an exhibit
of his art, The Drawn Blank Series, opened in October 2007
at the Kunstsammlungen in Chemnitz
, Germany
. This first public exhibition of Dylan's
paintings showcased more than 200 watercolors and
gouaches made earlier in 2007 from the original
drawings. The exhibition's opening also premiered the release of
the book
Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series, which includes
170 reproductions from the series.
In October 2008, Columbia 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. 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 complaints about "rip-off packaging" from some fans
and commentators. The release was widely acclaimed by critics. The
plethora of alternative takes and unreleased material suggested to
Uncut's reviewer:
"
Tell Tale Signs is awash with evidence of (Dylan's)
staggering mercuriality, his evident determination even in the
studio to repeat himself as little as possible."
Together Through Life and Christmas In The
Heart (2009)
Bob Dylan released his album
Together Through Life on April
28, 2009. In a conversation with music journalist Bill Flanagan,
published on Dylan's website, Dylan explained that the genesis of
the record was when French film director
Olivier Dahan asked him to supply a song for
his new
road movie,
My Own Love Song; initially only
intending to record a single track, "Life Is Hard," "the record
sort of took its own direction". Nine of the ten songs on the album
are credited as co-written by Bob Dylan and
Robert Hunter.
The album received largely favourable reviews, although several
critics described it as a minor addition to Dylan's canon of work.
In
Rolling Stone magazine, David Fricke wrote: "The album
may lack the instant-classic aura of
Love and Theft or
Modern Times, but it is rich in striking moments, set in a
willful rawness." Dylan critic Andy Gill wrote in
The Independent that the record
"features Dylan in fairly relaxed, spontaneous mood, content to
grab such grooves and sentiments as flit momentarily across his
radar. So while it may not contain too many landmark tracks, it's
one of the most naturally enjoyable albums you'll hear all
year."
In its
first week of release, the album reached number one in the Billboard 200 chart in the U.S.
, making Bob
Dylan (68 years of age) the oldest artist to ever debut at number
one in the Billboard 200 chart.
It also
reached number one on the UK
album
charts, 39 years after Dylan's previous UK album chart topper
New Morning. This meant
that Dylan currently holds the record for the longest gap between
solo number one albums in the UK chart.
On October 13, 2009, Dylan released a Christmas album,
Christmas in the Heart,
comprising such Christmas standards as "
Little Drummer Boy", "
Winter Wonderland" and "
Here Comes Santa Claus".
The U.S. royalties
from the collection will benefit Feeding America
, which has been described as the nation's leading
hunger-relief charity.
The album received generally favourable reviews.
The New Yorker commented that Dylan had
welded a pre-rock musical sound to "some of his croakiest vocals in
a while", and speculated that Dylan's intentions might be ironic:
"Dylan has a long and highly publicized history with Christianity;
to claim there’s not a wink in the childish optimism of “Here Comes
Santa Claus” or “Winter Wonderland” is to ignore a half-century of
biting satire." In
USA Today,
Edna Gundersen pointed out that Dylan was "revisiting yuletide
styles popularized by
Nat King Cole,
Mel Tormé, and the
Ray Conniff Singers." Gundersen
concluded that Dylan "couldn't sound more sentimental or
sincere".
In an interview published by
Street
News Service, journalist Bill Flanagan asked Dylan why he had
performed the songs in a straightforward style, and Dylan
responded: "There wasn’t any other way to play it. These songs are
part of my life, just like folk songs. You have to play them
straight too."
Never Ending Tour
The Never Ending Tour commenced on June 7, 1988, and 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. By the end of 2008, Dylan and his band had played
more than 2100 shows, anchored by long-time bassist
Tony Garnier and filled out with
talented sidemen. To the dismay of some of his audience, Dylan's
performances remain unpredictable as he alters his arrangements and
changes his vocal approach night after night. Critical opinion
about Dylan’s shows remains divided. Critics such as
Richard Williams and Andy Gill
have argued that Dylan has found a successful way to present his
rich legacy of material. Others have criticised his vocal style as
a “one-dimensional growl with which he chews up, mangles and spits
out the greatest lyrics ever written so that they are effectively
unrecognisable”, and his lack of interest in bonding with his
audience.
Bob
Dylan's European tour of spring 2009 opened in Stockholm
on March 22 and ended in Dublin
on May
6. Dylan is currently touring the United States, concluding
in New York in November.
Personal life
Family
Dylan married
Sara Lownds on November 22,
1965. Their first child,
Jesse Byron
Dylan, was born on January 6, 1966, and they had three more
children: Anna Lea, 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.
In June 1986, Dylan married his longtime backup singer
Carolyn Dennis (often professionally known as
Carol Dennis). 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.
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
had his
Bar Mitzvah. However,
for a period during the late 1970s and early 80s, Bob Dylan
publicly converted to Christianity.
From January to April 1979, Dylan
participated in Bible study classes at the Vineyard School of
Discipleship in Reseda, 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."
By 1984, Dylan was deliberately distancing himself from the
"
born-again" label. He
told
Kurt Loder of
Rolling Stone
magazine: "I've never said I'm born again. That's just a media
term. I don't think I've been an
agnostic. I've always thought there's a superior
power, that this is not the real world and that there's a world to
come."
Since his trilogy of Christian albums, Dylan's faith has been a
subject of scrutiny. In 1997 he told
David Gates of
Newsweek:
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."
Dylan has been described, in the last 20 years, as a supporter of
the
Chabad Lubavitch movement and
has 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.
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.
Dylan has continued to perform songs from his gospel albums in
concert, occasionally covering traditional religious songs. He has
also made passing references to his religious faith—such as in a
2004 interview with
60 Minutes,
when he told
Ed Bradley that "the only
person you have to think twice about lying to is either yourself or
to God." He also explained his constant touring schedule as part of
a bargain he made a long time ago with the "chief commander—in this
earth and in the world we can't see."
In October 2009, Dylan released
Christmas in the Heart, an album
of Christmas songs which included the traditional carols "
O Come All Ye Faithful" and "
O Little Town of
Bethlehem".
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". In 2004, he was ranked number two
in
Rolling Stone magazine's
list of "Greatest Artists of All Time". 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."
Initially modelling his style on the songs of
Woody Guthrie, and lessons learnt from the
blues of
Robert Johnson,
Dylan added increasingly sophisticated lyrical techniques to the
folk music of the early 60s, infusing it "with the intellectualism
of classic literature and poetry".
Paul
Simon suggested that Dylan's early compositions virtually took
over the folk genre: "[Dylan's] early songs were 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."
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."
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, and claiming that
Dylan was a poet worthy of the same close and painstaking analysis.
Former British
poet laureate,
Andrew Motion, argued that Bob Dylan’s lyrics
should be studied in schools.
Since 1996, academics have lobbied the
Swedish
Academy
to award Dylan the Nobel Prize in
Literature.
Dylan’s voice was, in some ways, as startling as his lyrics. New
York Times critic
Robert Shelton
described Dylan's early vocal style as "a rusty voice suggesting
Guthrie's old performances, etched in gravel like
Dave Van Ronk's." When the young
Bobby Womack told
Sam
Cooke he didn’t understand Dylan’s vocal style, Cooke explained
that: “from now on, it's not going to be about how pretty the voice
is. It's going to be about believing that the voice is telling the
truth.”
Rolling Stone magazine ranked Dylan at number
seven in their 2008 listing of “The 100 Greatest Singers of All
Time”.
Bono commented that “Dylan has tried out
so many personas in his singing because it is the way he inhabits
his subject matter.”
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." 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." Other major musicians to have acknowledged Dylan's
importance include
John Lennon,
Paul McCartney,
Neil
Young,
Bruce Springsteen,
David Bowie,
Bryan Ferry,
Syd
Barrett,
Nick Cave,
Patti Smith,
Joni
Mitchell,
Cat Stevens, and
Tom Waits.
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." 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."
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 greatly expanded the folk
culture from which he initially emerged. 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."
Discography
Awards
Notes
- Dylan sang Blowin’ In The Wind at the Washington D.C.
concert, January 20, 1986, which marked the inauguration of
Martin Luther King Day. Gray, 2006,
The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, pp. 63–64.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, p.
14, gives his Hebrew name as Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham
- A Chabad news service
gives the variant Zushe ben Avraham, which may be a Yiddish variant
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, p.
14
- Sounes, Down the Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, pp.
12–13.
- Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One, pp. 92–93.
- Shelton, No Direction Home, pp. 38–39.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, pp.
29–37.
- Shelton, No Direction Home, pp. 39–43.
- An interview with Bobby Vee suggests the young Zimmerman may
have been eccentric in spelling his early pseudonym: "[Dylan] was
in the Fargo/Moorhead area ... 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:
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, pp.
41–42.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, pp.
26–27.
- Biograph, 1985, Liner notes &
text by Cameron
Crowe.
- Shelton, No Direction Home, pp. 65–82.
- This is related in the documentary film No Direction
Home, Director: Martin Scorsese. Broadcast: September 26,
2005, PBS & BBC Two
- Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One, pp. 78–79.
- Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One, p. 98.
- Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One, pp. 244–246.
- Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One, pp. 250–252.
- Robert Shelton, New York Times, 1961-09-21, "Bob
Dylan: A Distinctive Stylist" reproduced online:
- Scaduto, Bob Dylan, p. 110.
- Shelton, No Direction Home, pp. 157–158.
- Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, pp. 283–284.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, pp.
115–116.
- Heylin, 1996, Bob Dylan: A Life In Stolen Moments, pp.
35–39.
- Sounes, Howard. Down the Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan.
Doubleday 2001. p159. ISBN 0-552-99929-6
- Web Guardian newspaper © Guardian News and
Media Limited 2009
- Shelton, No Direction Home, pp. 138–142.
- Shelton, No Direction Home, p. 156.
- The booklet by John Bauldie accompanying Dylan's
The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 1961–1991 (1991) says:
"Dylan acknowledged the debt in 1978 to 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.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, pp.
101–103.
- Ricks, Dylan's Visions of Sin, pp. 329–344.
- Scaduto, Bob Dylan, p. 35.
- Mojo magazine, December 1993.
- Hedin (ed.), 2004, Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader, p.
259. Reproduced online:
- Joan Baez entry, Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, pp.
28–31.
- 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)
- 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, pp. 114–115.
- Dylan performed "Only a Pawn in Their Game" and
"When the Ship Comes In"; see Heylin,
Bob Dylan: A Life In Stolen Moments, p. 49.
- Gill, My Back Pages, pp. 37–41.
- Ricks, Dylan's Visions of Sin, pp. 221–233.
- Shelton, No Direction Home, pp. 200–205.
- Part of Dylan's speech went: "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."; see, Shelton, No Direction
Home, pp. 200–205.
- Shelton, No Direction Home, p. 222.
- 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:
- Shelton, No Direction Home, pp. 219–222.
- Shelton, No Direction Home, pp. 267–271; pp.
288–291.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, pp.
178–181.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, pp.
181–182.
- Heylin, 2009, Revolution In The Air, The Songs of Bob
Dylan: Volume One, pp. 220–222.
- Gill, My Back Pages, pp. 68–69.
- Marqusee, Wicked Messenger, p. 144.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, pp.
168–169.
- Shelton, 2003, No Direction Home, pp. 276–277.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, pp.
208–216.
- Shelton, No Direction Home, pp. 305–314.
- Sing Out, September 1965, quoted in Shelton, No
Direction Home, p. 313.
- "You got a lotta nerve/To say you are my friend/When I was
down/You just stood there grinning" Reproduced online:
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, p.
186.
- Springsteen’s Speech during Dylan’s induction into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,
January 20, 1988 Quoted in Bauldie, Wanted Man, p.
191.
- Gill, 1999, My Back Pages, pp. 87–88.
- Gill, My Back Pages, p. 89.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, pp.
189–90.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, pp.
238–243.
- "The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on
individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that
thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with
whatever that conjures up." Dylan Interview, Playboy,
March 1978; see Cott, Dylan on Dylan: The Essential
Interviews, p. 204. Reproduced online:
- Gill, My Back Pages, p. 95.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, p.
193.
- Shelton, No Direction Home, p. 325.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, pp.
244–261.
- Rolling Stone review of live album of concert said,
"This isn't rock & roll; it's war."
- Dylan's dialogue with the Manchester audience is recorded (with
subtitles) in Martin Scorsese's documentary No Direction
Home
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, p.
215.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, pp.
217–219.
- Cott, Dylan on Dylan: The Essential Interviews, p.
300.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, pp.
268.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, p.
216.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, p.
222–225.
- Marcus, The Old, Weird America, pp. 236–265.
- Helm, Levon and Davis, This Wheel's on Fire, p. 164;
p. 174.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, pp.
282–288.
- Gill, My Back Pages, p. 140.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, pp.
248–253.
- Shelton, No Direction Home, p. 482.
- Heylin, 2009, Revolution In The Air, The Songs of Bob
Dylan: Volume One, pp. 391–392.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, pp.
328–331.
- Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, ´pp. 342–343.
- C. P. Lee wrote: "In Garrett's ghost-written memoir, The
Authentic Life of Billy The Kid, published within a year of
Billy's death, he wrote that 'Billy's partner doubtless had a name
which was his legal property, but he was so given to changing it
that it is impossible to fix on the right one. Billy always called
him Alias. Lee, Like a Bullet of Light: The Films of Bob
Dylan, pp. 66–67.
- Artists to have covered the song include Bryan Ferry, Wyclef Jean and Guns 'n' Roses.
- Sounes, 2001, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan,
pp. 273–274.
- Ricks, Dylan's Visions of Sin, p. 453.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, p.
354.
- Dylan's comment in booklet notes to Biograph,
1985, CBS Records.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, p.
358.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, pp.
368–383.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, pp.
369–387.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, p.
383.
- Hedin, Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader, p. 109.
- Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, p. 579.
- Shepard, Rolling Thunder Logbook, pp. 2–49.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, pp.
386–401,
- Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, p. 408.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, p.
313.
- Lee, Like a Bullet of Light: The Films of Bob Dylan,
pp. 115–116.
- Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, p. 643.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, pp.
480–481.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, pp.
323–337.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, pp.
490–526.
- Dylan Interview with Karen Hughes, (The Dominion,
Wellington, New Zealand), May 21, 1980; reprinted in Cott (ed.),
Dylan on Dylan: The Essential Interviews, pp. 275–278;
reproduced online:
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, pp.
501–503.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, pp.
334–336.
- Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, pp. 215–221.
- Gray, Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan,
pp. 11–14.
- Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, pp. 56–59.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, pp.
354–356.
- Sounes, 2001, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan,
p. 362.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, p.
362.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, p.
367.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, pp.
365–367.
- Gray, 2006, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, p. 63
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, p.
595.
- Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, pp. 95–100.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, pp.
376–383.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, pp.
599–604.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, p.
385.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, pp.
638-640.
- Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One, pp. 145–221.
- Ricks, Dylan's Visions of Sin, pp. 413–20.
- Scott Marshall wrote: "When Dylan sings that 'The sun is going
down upon the sacred cow', it's safe to assume that the sacred cow
here is the biblical metaphor for all false gods. For Dylan, the
world will eventually know that there is only one God." Marshall,
Restless Pilgrim, p. 103.
- Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, p. 174.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, p.
391.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, pp.
664-665. Heylin quotes the speech: "My daddy once said to me, he
said, 'Son, it is possible for you to become so defiled in this
world that your own mother and father will abandon you. If that
happens, God will believe in your ability to mend your own ways.'
"
- Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, p. 423.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, pp.
408–409.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, p.
693.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, p.
420.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, p.
426.
- Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, pp. 556–557.
- Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, pp. 136–138.
- It was shown on September 26-27, 2005, on BBC Two in the UK and PBS in the US.
- Greil Marcus wrote: "There is nothing like 'I'm Not There' in
the rest of the basement recordings, or anywhere else in Bob
Dylan’s career. Very quickly the listener is drawn into the sickly
embrace of the music, its wash of half-heard, half-formed words and
the increasing bitterness and despair behind them. Words are
floated together in a dyslexia that is music itself – a
dyslexia that seems to prove the claims of music over words, to see
just how little words can achieve."; see Marcus, The Old, Weird
America, pp. 198–204.
- Dylan also devoted an hour of his Theme Time
Radio Hour to the theme of 'the Cadillac'. He first sang about
the 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".
-
http://vodpod.com/watch/1328618-2009-super-bowl-commercials-pepsiforever-young-fanhouse
| accessdate=2009-08-28
- Michael Gray expressed his opinion in
his Bob Dylan Encyclopedia blog
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: A Life In Stolen Moments, p.
297.
- Muir, Razor's Edge, pp. 7–10.
- Mark Ellen
argues with Andy
Kershaw about the merits of Dylan's live performances from
mid-2000s, first broadcast on BBC Radio Four, December 5, 2005,
reproduced:
- Muir, Razor's Edge, pp. 187–197.
- Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, pp. 198–200.
- Sounes, Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, pp.
372–373.
- According to Robert Shelton, Dylan's teacher was "Rabbi Reuben
Maier of the only synagogue on the Iron Range, Hibbing's Agudath
Achim Synagogue". See Shelton, No Direction Home, pp.
35–36.
- Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, p.
494.
- Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, pp. 76–80.
- Dylan Interview with Jon Pareles, The New York Times,
September 28, 1997; reprinted in Cott, Dylan on Dylan: The
Essential Interviews, pp. 391–396.
- Fishkoff, The Rebbe's Army: Inside the World of
Chabad-Lubavitch, p. 167.
- Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One, pp. 243–246.
- Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One, pp. 281–288.
- Fong-Torres, The Rolling Stone Interviews, Vol. 2, p.
424. Reproduced online:
- Marqusee, Wicked Messenger, p. 139.
- Shelton, No Direction Home, pp. 108–111.
- Lennon: "In Paris in 1964 was the first time I ever heard Dylan
at all. Paul got the record (The
Freewheelin' Bob Dylan) from a French DJ. For three weeks
in Paris we didn't stop playing it. We all went potty about
Dylan.": Beatles, (2000), The Beatles Anthology, pp.
112–114.
- McCartney: "I'm in awe of Bob ... He hit a period where
people went, 'Oh, I don't like him now.' And I said, 'No. It's Bob
Dylan.' To me, it's like Picasso, where people discuss his various
periods, 'This was better than this, was better than this.' But I
go, 'No. It's Picasso. It's all good.' "
- "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 :
- Song for Bob Dylan on the album
Hunky
Dory, David Bowie, 1971
- In 2007, Ferry released an album of his versions of Dylan
songs, Dylanesque
- 'Bob Dylan's Blues' by Syd Barrett
- 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
- 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."
- Cohn, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, pp. 164–165.
References
- 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
- 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
External links
- BobDylan.com — Official web site, including
lyrics and touring schedule
- Expecting Rain — Dylan news and events, updated
daily
- BobLinks — Comprehensive log of concerts and set
lists with categorized link collection
- Bjorner's Still on the Road — Information on all
known recording sessions and performances by Bob Dylan
- Rocksource Dylan Day-by-day Dylan timeline/chronology,
searchable by day, month, year, location, venue, song title, artist
name and more
- 1987
Photos of Bob Dylan's hometown — a personal photo journal
by two Dylan fans who spent the day in Hibbing
, Minnesota.