Bob Dylan

Born: Robert Allen Zimmerman
May 24, 1941
Duluth, Minnesota

Bob Dylan influenced everyone in his generation, including The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix.  Hendrix so admired Dylan that he performed and recorded several of his songs, including the hit "All Along the Watchtower".  Excerpts of the following biography are taken from the excellent, in-depth record found in Wikipedia.

Bob Dylan was raised in Duluth and Hibbing, Minnesota, on the Mesabi Iron Range northwest of Lake Superior. His grandparents were Jewish immigrants from present-day Lithuania, Russia, and Ukraine.  His parents, Abraham Zimmerman and Beatrice Stone (Beatty), were part of the area's small but close-knit Jewish community.

Zimmerman lived in Duluth until age seven. When his father was stricken with polio, the family returned to nearby Hibbing, Beatty's hometown, where Robert Zimmerman spent the rest of his childhood.

Zimmerman spent much of his youth listening to the radio—first to the powerful blues and country stations broadcasting from Shreveport and later, to early rock and roll.  He formed several bands while at high school.

The first, The Shadow Blasters, was short-lived (according to legend this band tried to play at the high school talent show, but did not make the cut). The band which followed, The Golden Chords, lasted longer and played covers including "Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay" at their high school talent show.

In his 1959 school year book, Robert Zimmerman listed his ambition as "To join Little Richard."  The same year, he performed two dates under the name of Elston Gunn with Bobby Vee, playing piano and providing handclaps.

Zimmerman enrolled at the University of Minnesota in September 1959 and moved to Minneapolis. His musical focus on rock and roll gave way to an interest in subtler, Gael-inflected American folk music, typically performed with an acoustic guitar. He soon became actively involved in the local Dinkytown folk music circuit. He fraternized with local folk enthusiasts and occasionally "borrowed" many of their albums.

During his Dinkytown days, Zimmerman began introducing himself as "Bob Dylan". In his autobiography, Chronicles (2004), Dylan wrote: "What I was going to do as soon as I left home was just call myself Robert Allen.... It sounded like a Scottish king and I liked it." However, by reading Downbeat magazine, he discovered that there was already a saxophonist called David Allyn.

A little later he became acquainted with the work of writer Dylan Thomas and made a choice between Robert Allyn and Robert Dylan: "I couldn't decide—the letter D came on stronger" he explained. He decided on "Bob" because there were several Bobbies in popular music at the time.

Dylan quit college at the end of his freshman year. He stayed in Minneapolis, working the folk circuit there with temporary journeys in Denver, Colorado, and Chicago, Illinois. In January 1961, he headed for New York City to perform and to visit his ailing musical idol Woody Guthrie in a New Jersey hospital.

Guthrie had been a huge revelation to Dylan and was a major influence. In the hospital room, Dylan also met Woody's old road-buddy Ramblin' Jack Elliott visiting Guthrie the day after returning from his trip to Europe. Bob and Jack became friends and much of Guthrie's repertoire was actually channelled through Elliott. Dylan paid tribute to Elliott in Chronicles (2005).

After initially playing mostly in small "basket" clubs for little pay, Dylan gained some public recognition after a positive review in The New York Times by critic Robert Shelton. Shelton's review and word-of-mouth around Greenwich Village led to legendary music business figure John Hammond's signing Dylan to Columbia Records that October.

Recording Career     [ top of page ]

His performances, like those on his first Columbia album Bob Dylan (1962), consisted of familiar folk, blues and gospel material combined with some of his own songs. As Dylan continued to record for Columbia, he recorded more than a dozen songs for Broadside Magazine a folk music magazine and record label, under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt.

In August 1962, Robert Allen Zimmerman went to the Supreme Court building in New York and changed his name to Robert Dylan.

By the time Dylan's next record, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, was released in 1963, he had begun to make his name as both singer and songwriter. Many of the songs on this album were labelled protest songs, inspired partly by Woody Guthrie and influenced by Pete Seeger's passion for topical songs.  "Oxford Town" 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 of the time, "Blowin' in the Wind", partially derived its melody from the traditional slave song "No More Auction Block", and coupled this to Dylan's lyrics questioning 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 other artists.

While Dylan's topical songs solidified his early reputation, Freewheelin' also included a mixture of love songs and jokey, frequently 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 Freewheelin' song "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall", built melodically from a loose adaptation of the stanza tune of the folk ballad Lord Randall, with its veiled references to nuclear apocalypse, gained even more resonance as 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 traditional folk progressions to create a sound and sense that struck listeners as somehow new and ancient simultaneously.

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

Soon after the release of Freewheelin, Dylan emerged as a dominant figure of the so-called "new folk movement" headquartered in Lower Manhattan's Greenwich Village. While an interpreter of traditional songs, Dylan's singing voice was considered unusual. Dylan was untrained as a vocalist. His phrasing sounded eccentric to many but was actually in a style hearkening back to the folk-singers of the 1920s and '30s.

This was a singing style to which Dylan might have been familiar from hearing it himself from recordings, but it was a manner virtually unheard-of in the music industry of the time.  Many of his most famous early songs first reached the public through versions by other performing musicians who were more immediately palatable.

Joan Baez, celebrated as the queen of the folk movement, became Dylan's advocate as well as his lover.  In addition to jumpstarting Dylan's performance career by inviting him onstage during her concerts, she recorded several of his early songs and was influential in bringing Dylan to national and international prominence.

Others who recorded and released his songs around this time included The Byrds, Sonny and Cher, The Hollies, Peter, Paul and Mary, Manfred Mann, The Brothers Four, Judy Collins and The Turtles, most attempting to impart more of a pop feel and rhythm to the songs where Dylan and Baez performed them mostly as sparse folk pieces keying rhythmically off the vocals. These covers were so ubiquitous by the mid-1960s that CBS started to promote him with the tag "Nobody Sings Dylan Like Dylan".

Protest Singer     [ top of page ]

By 1963, Dylan and Baez were both prominent in the civil rights movement, singing together at rallies including the March on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his "I have a dream" speech.  In January, Dylan appeared on British television in the BBC play Madhouse on Castle Street, playing the part of a "hobo guitar-player".

His next album, The Times They Are a-Changin', reflected a more sophisticated, politicized and cynical Dylan. This bleak material, addressing such subjects as the murder of civil rights worker Medgar Evers and the despair engendered by the breakdown of farming and mining communities ("Ballad of Hollis Brown", "North Country Blues"), was accompanied by two love songs, "Boots of Spanish Leather" and "One Too Many Mornings", and the renunciation of "Restless Farewell".

The Brechtian-influenced "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" describes a young socialite's killing of a hotel maid. The song never explicitly mentions race, but many sources wrote it leaves no doubt that the killer is white, the victim black.

By the end of 1963, Dylan felt both manipulated and constrained by the folk-protest movement. Accepting the "Tom Paine Award" from the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee at a ceremony shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a drunken, rambling Dylan questioned the role of the committee, insulted its members as old and balding, and claimed to see something of himself (and of every man) in assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

His next album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, recorded on a single June evening in 1964, had a lighter mood than its predecessor. The surreal Dylan reemerged on "I Shall Be Free #10" and "Motorpsycho Nightmare", accompanied by a sense of humor that has often reappeared over the years. 

"Spanish Harlem Incident" and "To Ramona" were love songs, "I Don't Believe You" a rock and roll song played on acoustic guitar, and "It Ain't Me Babe" a rejection of the role his reputation thrust at him.

His newest direction was signaled by three lengthy songs: the impressionistic "Chimes of Freedom" sets elements of social commentary against a denser metaphorical landscape in a style later characterized by Allen Ginsberg as "chains of flashing images"; "My Back Pages" attacks the simplistic and arch seriousness of his own earlier topical songs; and "Mr. Tambourine Man", written before many songs included on Another Side but held back for Dylan's next release.

Rock Star     [ top of page ]

In 1964-65 Dylan’s appearance changed rapidly, as he made his move from leading contemporary song-writer of the folk scene to rock’n’roll star. His scruffy jeans and work shirts were replaced by a Carnaby Street wardrobe.

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 play with interviewers in increasingly cruel and surreal ways. 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.”

His March 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home was a huge stylistic leap.  Influenced by The Animals (whose recording of "House of the Rising Sun" was racing up the US charts), and the rock and roll of his youth, the album featured his first significant up-tempo rock songs.

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, 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. 

In 1969, the militant Weatherman group took their name from a line in "Subterranean Homesick Blues" ("You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows").

The B side of the album was a different matter, including four lengthy acoustic songs whose undogmatic political, social and personal concerns are illuminated with the poetic imagery that became another trademark. One of these songs, "Mr. Tambourine Man", had already been a hit for The Byrds, albeit in a truncated form, while "Gates of Eden", "It's All Over Now Baby Blue", and "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" have been fixtures in Dylan's live performances for most of his career.

That summer Bob Dylan made history by performing his first electric set (since his high school days), with a pickup group drawn mostly from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, i.e. Mike Bloomfield (guitar), Sam Lay (drums), Jerome Arnold (bass), plus Al Kooper (organ) and Barry Goldberg (piano), while headlining at the Newport Folk Festival. 

Dylan had appeared at Newport twice before, in 1963 and 1964, and two wildly divergent accounts of the crowd's response in 1965 emerged. The settled fact is that 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 Dylan alienated by his electric guitar.

An alternative account has it that audience members were upset by poor sound quality and a surprisingly short set. Whatever sparked the crowd's disfavor, Dylan soon reemerged and sang two much better received solo acoustic numbers, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" and "Mr. Tambourine Man".

The significance of Dylan's 1965 Newport performance was that he outraged 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?... Only a non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel." Dylan had outlined his position in the sleeve notes for Bringing It All Back Home where he wrote, "i accept chaos. i am not sure whether it accepts me."

Many in the folk revival had embraced the idea that life equaled art, that a certain kind of life defined by suffering and social exclusion in fact replaced art.  Folksong collectors and singers often presented folk music as an innocent characteristic of lives lived without reflection or the false consciousness of capitalism.  This philosophy, both genteel and paternalistic, was ultimately what Dylan had run afoul of by 1965.

But at an Austin press conference in September of that year, on the day of his first performance with Levon and the Hawks, he described his music not as a pop charts-bound break with the past, but as “historical-traditional music.” 

Dylan later told interviewer Nat Hentoff: “What folk music is... is based on myths and the Bible and plague and famine and all kinds of things like that which are nothing but mystery and you can see it in all the songs….All these songs about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels…and seven years of this and eight years of that and it’s all really something that nobody can touch....(the songs) are not going to die.” 

It was this mystical, living tradition of songs that served as the palette for Bringing It All Back Home and subsequent collections.

The single "Like a Rolling Stone" was a U.S. and UK hit; at over six minutes, it helped to expand the limits of songs played on hit radio. In 2004, Rolling Stone listed it at number one on its list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.  Its signature sound — with a full, jangling band and an organ riff — characterized his 1965 album, Highway 61 Revisited.

Titled after the road that led from Dylan's native Minnesota to the musical hotbed of New Orleans, the songs passed stylistically through the birthplace of blues, the Mississippi Delta, and referenced any number of blues songs. For example, Mississippi Fred McDowell's "61 Highway".

The songs were in the same vein as the hit single, surreal litanies of the grotesque flavored by Mike Bloomfield's blues guitar, a rhythm section and Dylan's obvious enjoyment of the sessions. The closing song, "Desolation Row", is an apocalyptic vision with references to many figures of Western culture.

A mix of folk music, rock and roll and Dylan's own brand of surrealism, Blonde on Blonde (1966) is often considered one of the finest recordings of American popular music.  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 for backing Ronnie Hawkins.

In August 1965 at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, the group was heckled by an audience who, Newport notwithstanding, still demanded the acoustic troubadour of previous years. The band's reception on September 3 at the Hollywood Bowl was more uniformly favorable.

Neither Kooper nor Brooks wanted to tour with Dylan, and he was unable to lure his preferred band, a crew of west coast musicians best known for backing Johnny Rivers, featuring guitarist James Burton and drummer Mickey Jones, away from their regular commitments.

Dylan then hired Robertson and Helm's full band, The Hawks, for his tour group, and began a string of studio sessions with them in an effort to record the follow-up to Highway 61 Revisited.

While Dylan and the Hawks met increasingly receptive audiences on tour, their studio efforts floundered. Producer Bob Johnston had been trying to persuade Dylan to record in Nashville for some time. In February 1966 Dylan agreed and Johnston 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 created what Dylan later called "that thin wild mercury sound" - Blonde on Blonde (1966). Al Kooper said the record was a masterpiece because it was "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.

For many critics, Dylan's mid-'60s trilogy of albums – Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde – represents one of the great cultural achievements of the 20th century.

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."

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 slowly handclapped.

The tour culminated in a famously raucous confrontation between Dylan and his audience at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in England (officially released on CD in 1998 as The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert).

At the climax of the concert, one fan, angry with Dylan's electric sound, shouted: "Judas!" and Dylan responded, "I don't believe you... You're a liar!" He turned to the band and, just within earshot of the microphone, told them to "Play it fucking loud!" They then launched into the last song of the night — "Like a Rolling Stone" — with an apocalyptic intensity.

Motorcycle Accident      [ top of page ]

After his European tour, Dylan returned to New York, but the pressures on him continued to increase. His publisher was demanding a finished manuscript of the poem/novel Tarantula. Manager Albert Grossman had already scheduled an extensive summer/fall concert tour.

On July 29, 1966, while Dylan rode his Triumph 500 motorcycle in Woodstock, New York, its brakes locked, throwing him to the ground. Though the extent of his injuries were never fully disclosed, it was confirmed that he indeed broke his neck.

Dylan used an extended convalescence to escape the pressures of stardom: "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 really didn't want to do that."

Once Dylan was well enough to resume creative work, he began editing footage of his 1966 tour into Eat the Document, a rarely exhibited follow-up to Don't Look Back. In 1967 he began recording music with the Hawks at his home and the basement of the Hawks' nearby "Big Pink".

The relaxed atmosphere yielded renditions of many of Dylan's favored old and new songs and some newly written pieces.  These songs, initially compiled as demos for other artists to record, provided hit singles for Julie Driscoll, The Byrds, and Manfred Mann.

Columbia belatedly released selections from them in 1975 as The Basement Tapes. Later in 1967, the Hawks (soon to be rechristened as The Band) independently recorded the album Music from Big Pink, thus beginning a long and successful recording and performing career of their own.

In December 1967 Dylan released John Wesley Harding, his first album since the motorcycle crash. It was a quiet, contemplative record of shorter songs, set in a landscape which drew on both the American West and the Bible.

The sparse structure and instrumentation, coupled with lyrics which 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 celebrated version Dylan himself acknowledged as definitive in the liner notes to Biograph. Dylan live has performed Hendrix's arrangement since 1974.

Woody Guthrie died on October 3rd 1967, and Dylan made his first public appearances in eighteen months at a pair of Guthrie memorial concerts the following January.

Continue: Nashville Skyline      [ top of page ]