For five decades, Bob Dylan’s songs – with their social, political, and philosophical themes – have been the anthem to a nation facing an identity crisis.
Though the artist himself denied beliefs that he was the voice of his generation, the impact Dylan has had on American culture is near unprecedented. He redefined popular music, and has become the influence for change not just in the United States, but across the entire world.
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Born and raised in Minnesota, Bob Dylan – birth name Robert Allen Zimmerman – was obsessed with music from an early age. In his youth, he could often be found listening to the radio – first to country stations, and eventually rock and roll. He soon learnt to play piano and guitar, inspired by the likes of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard, and founded his own band in high school, The Golden Chords. The group often played at school dances and talent shows, and their passion for the craft was evident. On once occasion, their performance of Rock and Roll is Here to Stay by Danny & the Juniors was so intense, the principal cut the microphone.
Dylan graduated in 1959. Under their pictures in the high school yearbook, students were asked to provide a caption encapsulating their life goals. Dylan’s read: “To join Little Richard”.
That same year, he moved to Minneapolis and enrolled at the University of Minnesota. Here, his love for rock was replaced with an interest in American folk. The sudden change made sense; from the age of 10, Dylan had written poetry, having found an appreciation for the form’s ability to portray meaning. It was the same with folk.
“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 explained in the line notes for his 1985 album, Biograph.
He quickly became involved in the local folk music community, performing shows at a coffeehouse not far from campus. It was during this time that Dylan began to reimagine himself. He called himself Bob Dylan, and told stories of how, as a teenager, he had traveled the country on a train (and, at one point, in a circus), performing across the nation. It was a romantic fabrication, but not even his girlfriend knew the truth until one day when his identification card slipped out of his wallet. Three years later, he’d have his name changed legally. Folklore suggests that his new surname was a reference to either Matt Dillon, sheriff from TV series Gunsmoke, or poet Dylan Thomas, but Dylan would later admit not much thought had gone into the choice. “I just chose that name and it stuck.”
“People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.”
After a year in college, Dylan dropped out and soon made the move to New York City, where he made constant visits to his idol, Woody Guthrie, who was hospitalised with a severe illness. Despite his condition, Guthrie continued to inspire and aid Dylan as he performed across Greenwich Village.
Nine months later, he was starting to make headway into the industry. The New York Times gave a glowing review to one of his shows, and he was hired to play harmonica on Carolyn Hester’s third album. It was during this latter gig that he caught the eye of producer John Hammond, who signed him to Columbia Records in October, 1961.
March of the following year saw Dylan release his first album, entitled simply Bob Dylan. It sold 5000 copies, just enough to break even, and consisted mostly of cover songs. Other producers on Columbia began to refer to Dylan as ‘Hammond’s Folly’, but Hammond defended his artist, with the support of Johnny Cash.
Hammond was replaced a year later by Tom Wilson, a rising African-American jazz producer, at the behest of Dylan’s new manager, Albert Grossman. After performing on a variety of records for other artists under a range of pseudonyms, Dylan made his first trip to the UK in December, 1962, at the invitation of TV director Philip Saville. Saville cast Dylan in Madhouse on Castle Street, a television play punctuated by the artist performing some of his songs. At the end of the play, Dylan performed Blowin’ in the Wind. It was one of the first times the song had been performed publicly.
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was released in May of 1963. By that time, Dylan had developed a reputation, but the album took his career to a whole new level. Many of the songs featured on the record were protest songs: Oxford Town told the story of James Meredith, who risked dire repercussions by becoming the first black student to enrol at the University of Mississippi. Blowin’ in the Wind, its melody partially derived from an old slave song, questioned the socio-political status quo. Then there was A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall, which received extensive airplay following the Cuban Missile Crisis.
As it was deep, so was it funny, with humour playing a key part in Dylan’s professional persona. Such a range and raw performance style (Joyce Carol Oates said it was “as if sandpaper could sing”) drew widespread attention, including from The Beatles. “We just played it, just wore it out. The content of the song lyrics and just the attitude—it was incredibly original and wonderful,” George Harrison told Mojo in 1993.
Freewheelin’ established Dylan as the supreme folk singer of his time. He was only 22. Today, the record’s first printing is considered the most valuable and rare album in America.
As other artists took a lighter, pop-influenced approach to covers of Dylan songs throughout the 60s, Dylan’s position as a figurehead for counterculture grew.
During rehearsals for The Ed Sullivan Show, CBS’s head of programming warned him that his song Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues might be libellous. Rather than bow to censorship, Dylan walked off set and did not return. A few months later, he joined Joan Baez in the March on Washington to show support for the civil rights movement.
Within the year, Dylan grew disenchanted by the folk and protest movements. Controversially, when he accepted the Tom Paine Award from the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, he took the stage drunk, criticised the committee, and declared that he could see a bit of himself in Kennedy’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald. “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.”
In contrast with this statement, Dylan’s 1964 release, The Times They Are a-Changin’, was a more cynical and politically-charged album than his last. Devoid of the expected humour, the album did not sell as well as Freewheelin’, but the title track would become one of Dylan’s best known songs. “This was definitely a song with a purpose. I wanted to write a big song, some kind of theme song, with short concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way.”
Another Side of Bob Dylan, recorded in a single night later that year, marked Dylan’s transition from a folk icon to a star of both the folk and pop worlds. With this transition came the leap to electric instruments for the release of Bringing It All Back Home. The first single, Subterranean Homesick Blues, was used for the opening video to a documentary about Dylan’s 1965 tour of the UK. Instead of miming in the video, as is traditional, Dylan chose to write key lyrics on large cards, which he presented to the camera. The clip is now iconic, and has been imitated an untold number of times in music videos and advertising.
After a controversial performance at Newport Folk Festival in 1965, a rift opened between Dylan and the folk community. “Our traditional songs and ballads are the creations of extraordinarily talented artists working inside disciplines formulated over time …’But what of Bobby Dylan?’ scream the outraged teenagers … Only a completely non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music, could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel,” declared Ewan MacColl in a review for Sing Out! magazine.
Dylan responded by releasing Positively 4th Street, a barbed track aimed at the heart of the folk community.
Though he no longer had the support of folk fans, Dylan continued to find greater and greater success. Like a Rolling Stone, released in 1965 as the opening track to Highway 61 Revisited, redefined what a pop single could be. “…that snare shot sounded like somebody’d kicked open the door to your mind,” Bruce Springsteen recalled during his speech at Dylan’s inauguration to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Dylan spent most of the next year on tour, and was soon exhausted. He responded by taking illegal and prescription drugs, though the true extent of his habit was clouded by Dylan’s history of telling embellished tales to the media.
“Behind every beautiful thing, there’s some kind of pain.”
After the tour, he was faced with increased pressure. ABC had paid an advance on a TV show, his publisher was calling for a new novel, and a concert tour loomed later in the year.
He reacted by crashing his motorcycle near his New York home. The circumstances of the accident remain unclear; no ambulance was called to the scene, and Dylan did not go to the hospital. “Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race,” he later confessed. Dylan withdrew from public life, and would not tour again for nearly eight years.
After recovering, Dylan returned to the recording studio, but his releases were of mixed quality. In the 70s, when he finally returned to touring, he grew apart from his wife.
In 1975, he returned to his former glory with the Rolling Thunder Revue, a major tour which featured hundreds of performers from the Greenwich Village folk scene, including T-Bone Burnett, Joni Mitchell, David Mansfield, and Scarlet Rivera, whom Dylan had discovered. At each show, Dylan performed his eight minute single Hurricane, proclaiming the innocence of former champion boxer Rubin Carter in a triple murder for which he had been found guilty.
The late 70s saw Dylan become a born again Christian, releasing two albums of gospel music. Many fans did not appreciate the heavy theological themes in his songs. He recorded Gotta Serve Somebody, to which John Lennon responded by releasing Serve Yourself.
Dylan released a handful of albums in the 80s, and even made a foray into rap on the opening verse of Kurtis Blow’s song Street Rock. He also toured with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and the Grateful Dead.
Jack Nicholson presented the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award to Dylan in 1991, before he returned to his roots with the blues albums Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong.
In 1997, Dylan was hospitalised with a life-threatening heart infection. “I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon,” he said upon release. Shortly after, he performed before Pope John Paul II, who then treated the 200,000-strong audience to a homily based on Blowin’ in the Wind.
That same year, his highly acclaimed album Time Out of Mind was released, and was called the best overall Dylan album in years. It won him his first ever Grammy Award for Album of the Year.
The following decade, Dylan won a Polar Music Prize, a special citation from the Pulitzer Prize Jury, and an Academy Award for his song Things Have Changed, written for the film The Wonder Boys. His Oscar now tours with him, perched on top of an amplifier.
2010 saw Dylan perform at the White House to celebrate the civil rights movement. Two years later, President Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, declaring “there is not a bigger giant in the history of American music”.
Copies of Dylan’s albums have been sold 120 million times worldwide, making him one of the most successful performing artists of all time.
“Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it’s like they didn’t fade away at all.”
Though Bob Dylan does not perform as much as he used to, his influence remains strong. His intellectual drive, unconventional style, and professional persona continue to inform music culture in the United States and across the world.
May he never fade away.