Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman May 24 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota in the USA, is widely regarded as America's greatest popular songwriter. Stephen Foster, Irving Berlin, Woody Guthrie, and Hank Williams are among the few songwriters similarly revered for their enduring contributions to the American oeuvre.Much of his best known work is from the 1960s when his musical shadow was so large that he became a documentarian and reluctant figurehead of American unrest. The civil rights movement had no more moving anthem than his song "Blowin' in the Wind." Millions of young people embraced his song "The Times They Are A-Changin'" during that era of extreme change. The radical political group The Weathermen named themselves after a lyric in Dylan's song "Subterranean Homesick Blues" ("You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows").
After the triumphant early-60's Dylan continued to overshadow his peers while seeing to ever-diminishing media attention. With only four less-than-stellar albums out of 44, Dylan has proved resilience to be one of his many gifts. An image chameleon, he has put his stamp on more styles of American music than perhaps any other songwriter.
When I left my home the sky split open wide
Zimmerman was raised in a Jewish family in Hibbing, Minnesota and spent much of his youth listening to the radio, at first the powerful blues and country music stations and later early rock and roll. He formed his first band, The Golden Chords, while still at high school. Around this time, Zimmerman chose the pseudonym Elston Gunn for himself, playing a few concerts under this name. An able but by no means brilliant student, he started university studies in 1959 in Minneapolis, during which time he was actively involved in the local Dinkytown folk music circuit. During his Dinkytown days, Zimmerman began introducing himself as Bob Dylan. He quit formal studies in early 1961 eventually landing in New York City to perform and to visit his ailing idol Woody Guthrie. Living in Greenwich Village and playing in small clubs, he gained some recognition after a review in New York Times (September 29, 1961) by critic Robert Shelton, that led to John Hammond, a legendary music talent scout, signing him to Columbia Records.
At the time his voice, musicianship and songwriting were still raw. His performances, like his first Columbia album (1962s Bob Dylan), consisted of traditional folk, blues and gospel material interspersed with a few of his own songs. 1962 also saw Dylan recording some songs for Broadside, under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt. By the time of his next record, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), he had begun to make his name as both a singer and composer, specialising in protest songs, initially in the style of Guthrie. His songs of the time are typified by "Blowin' In The Wind", its melody lifted from slave song "No More Auction Block", coupled with lyrics questioning the social and political status quo. With hindsight, the lyrics to some of these songs appear naive and unsophisticated ("How many times must the cannonballs fly before they are forever banned"), when compared to the largely anemic popular culture of the 1950s they were a breath of fresh air, and the songs caught the zeitgeist of the 1960s. "Blowin' In The Wind" itself was widely recorded and a huge hit for Peter, Paul and Mary, setting an enduring precedent for other artists to cover Dylan's songs. Somewhat overlooked among the protest songs on Freewheelin', however, was a mixture of finely crafted bittersweet love songs ("Don't Think Twice It's Alright", "Girl From The North Country") and jokey, frequently surreal talking blues ("Talking World War III Blues", "I Shall Be Free"). This eclecticism would continue to inform his material for much of his career.
While a fine interpreter of songs, Dylan was not widely considered a beautiful singer, and many of his early songs first reached the public through versions by other artists. In spite of his brand as a poor singer, Dylan's own deliveries are unmatched in their nuance and sensitivity; any doubts of this vanish upon listening to "Don't Think Twice It's Alright". Joan Baez, a friend and sometime lover, took it upon herself to record a great deal of his early material, as did many others including The Byrds, Sonny and Cher, The Hollies, Manfred Mann and Herman's Hermits. So ubiquitous were these covers by the mid-1960s that CBS started to promote him with the tag: "Nobody Sings Dylan Like Dylan". Whoever sang his early songs, they were immediately recognizable as his and a good part of his fame rested not only on his lyrical excellence but on the underlying attitude: a sort of po' boy adrift in the wide world.
I could not bear to see
By 1963, Dylan was becoming increasingly prominent in the civil rights movement, singing at rallies including the March on Washington in which Martin Luther King gave his "I have a dream" speech. Dylan's next album, The Times They Are A-Changin', reflected a more sophisticated, politicised and cynical Dylan. The bleak material, concerned with 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 lightened by a single anti-love song, "Boots Of Spanish Leather". The album's best song, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll", describes a young aristocrat's killing of a maid. Never explicitly metioning race, the song leaves no doubt that the killer is white, the victim black.
By the end of the year, however, he started to feel 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 drunk and not-entirely-coherent Dylan questioned the role of the committee and claimed he saw something of himself in Lee Harvey Oswald. The messages, both from Dylan and the elements in the crowd that booed, were clear: Dylan and the civil rights movement were drifting apart. This separation was not ideological, but rather an expression of Dylan's justified reluctance to accept the title "Voice of his Generation".
Perhaps inevitably then, his next album -- the accurately but prosaically titled Another Side Of Bob Dylan (1964) -- had a lighter mood than its predecessor. The surreal Dylan re-emerged on "I Shall Be Free #10" and "Motorpsycho Nightmare" employing a sense of humor which would persist throughout his career. "Spanish Harlem Incident" and "To Ramona" were touching love songs, while "Ballad in Plain D" and "I Don't Believe You" mourned a breakup; perhaps Dylan's parting with long-time girlfriend Suze Rotolo, who had been pictured with him on the front of Freewheelin'. Musically, he had changed too. His piano playing was featured on many of the tracks, with the beat and bass of his left hand presaging his return to rock music the next year. Perhaps more important to his later development, however, were two other tracks. "Chimes Of Freedom" was the first of a new type of Dylan song: lengthy and impressionistic, it retains an element of social commentary but with the topicality of his earlier work replaced by dense metaphorical landscape, a style later characterised by Allen Ginsberg as "chains of flashing images". "My Back Pages", in a similar style, is even more personal, a scathing attack on the dichotomous simplicity and arch seriousness of his own earlier work. By way of excuse, or even apology, he offers only that
- I was so much older then
- I'm younger than that now.
The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face
Throughout this time Dylan's artistic development moved so fast that he frequently left both critics and fans behind. His March 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home was a further stylistic leap. Influenced by The Beatles (whose artistic development came as a direct result of Dylan's influence), and the rock and roll of his youth, the first side contained his first original uptempo rock songs. The music, provided by a full electric band of mainly session musicians, was a definite departure. Lyrically, however, the songs were pure Dylan, exhibiting his dry wit and inhabited by a sequence of grotesque, metaphorical characters (the raucous first single, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"—which owed much to Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business"—was also provided with an early music video courtesy of D. A. Pennebaker's cinema verite presentation of Dylan's 1965 tour, Dont Look Back). Side 2 was a different matter, comprised of lengthy acoustic songs whose undogmatic political, social and personal concerns are illuminated with the rich poetic imagery that would become another trademark. One of these songs, "Mr. Tambourine Man", had already been a hit for The Byrds, albeit in a truncated form, and would remain one of Dylan's most enduring compositions.
That summer, Bob Dylan guaranteed the mythological nature of his legacy by performing his first electric set with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at the Newport Folk Festival. Two wildly divergent accounts of the crowd's response, each equally plausible, exist to this day. The agreed-upon fact is that, upon receiving a mix of boos and cheers, Dylan left the stage after only a few songs. As one legend has it, the boos were from the outraged folk fans Dylan alienated with his electric guitars. According to this account, folk great Pete Seeger grabbed an axe, threatening to cut the power during the performance. Seeger insists there was no axe—he had merely joked about cutting the lines, and that due to excessive volume, not the music itself. When interviewed for the PBS Roots Music series, Seeger stated he was irritated that the lyric to "Maggie's Farm" (a song Seeger admired) was nearly incomprehensible due to the volume and musical arrangement. The other story says that the fans were upset by poor sound quality and a truncated set. Either way, Dylan re-emerged and sang a few solo acoustic numbers to everyone's satisfaction.
Ignoring the occasional negative criticism, Dylan's rapid output (and rapid amphetamine intake) continued unabated through 1965 and 1966. The single "Like A Rolling Stone" was a US hit, cementing his reputation as a lyricist; at over six minutes, devoid of a bridge, "Like a Rolling Stone", also helped to expand the limits of hit radio. Its signature sound, with a full, jangling band and a simple organ riff, would characterise his next album release, Highway 61 Revisited (titled after the road that led from his native Minnesota to the musical hotbed of New Orleans; and also referencing any number of blues songs; i.e. Mississippi Fred McDowell's "61 Highway." ). The songs were in the same vein as the advance single, more surreal litanies of the grotesque, flavoured by Bloomfield's blues guitar, a tight rhythm section and Dylan's obvious enjoyment of the sessions. The closing song, "Desolation Row", a lengthy apocalyptic vision, wore its poeticism and influences on its sleeve, self-consciously referring to both Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.
In support of the record, Dylan was booked for two US concerts, and set about assembling a band. Finding what he was looking for in "The Hawks", then backing R&B singer Ronnie Hawkins, he persuaded the group to join him on tour. In August/September 1965 at Forest Hills Auditorium and the Hollywood Bowl the group were heckled by the audience who, Newport notwithstanding, still expected the acoustic troubadour of previous years. Undaunted, Dylan returned to the studio that October to begin work on his next album, the double Blonde On Blonde.
Musicians in the studio, including The Hawks, who would slowly metamorphose into The Band, honed Dylan's sound, ("that thin wild mercury sound" Dylan called it, obviating further description). The result was another classic record, often included in the top 5 on 'best album of all time' lists. The record eclipsed Dylan's earlier brilliance with masterpieces "Visions of Johanna" and "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again." The earlier surrealism now seemed tempered with more humanity, and the record more coherent than its predecessors, with knowing nods to The Beatles, amongst others. In his personal life, Dylan secretly married Sara Lowndes on November 22, 1965.
Best notify my next of kin, this wheel shall explode
Touring to promote the record remained hectic, however, taking him to Europe and Australia through the summer of 1966, including a famously raucous confrontation with an audience at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in England. At this show, released on CD in 1998, a folk fan calls Dylan "Judas", to which Dylan responds, "I don't believe you. You're a liar." Turning to his band, Dylan urges them to "play fucking loud!" In fact, the audiences' negative reactions caused drummer Levon Helm to quit the band. At the same time, he was pressured to produce book length poem Tarantula, and it appeared that something would have to give. The speed-fuelled (friend Allen Ginsberg referred to him as a "methadrine clown") pace of his private and professional life seemed unsustainable. On July 30 of that year, at his home in Woodstock, New York, the brakes of Dylan's Triumph 500 motorcycle locked, throwing him to the ground. The extent of his injuries was never fully disclosed and, whether through necessity or opportunism, Dylan used an extended convalescence to escape the pressures of stardom.
After convincing Levon Helm to join them, The Band moved into a nearby, big, pink house. Once Dylan was well enough, he began editing footage into Eat the Document, an as-yet unreleased sequel to Dont Look Back. More importantly, he began recording music with The Band in the basement of Big Pink. The relaxed atmosphere yielded renditions of many of Dylan's favorite folk songs, and some new songs he wrote. These originals, at first compiled as demos for other artists to record, began to circulate on their own merits. Columbia released them in 1975 as The Basement Tapes.
Unsurprisingly his official output was to be strongly influenced by the relaxed lifestyle which led to The Basement Tapes. His first release after the accident, John Wesley Harding (1968), was a contemplative record, heavily influenced by the Bible, which included "All Along The Watchtower", later immortalised by Jimi Hendrix. Dylan intended for the album's sparse arrangements to be filled in by later Band overdubs. Upon hearing it, The Band decided to let it stand.
The second release after the motorcycle accident, Nashville Skyline (1969), was a mainstream country record, featuring a mellow voiced, contented Dylan and a duet with Johnny Cash, and though considered by his fans to be a departure from past brilliance, a simple need for new direction after reaching the imagist summit may be closer to the mark. It also garnered Dylan new fans with the hit single "Lay Lady Lay". The same year, Dylan returned to live performance at the Isle of Wight rock festival (having made a brief appearance at Woody Guthrie's memorial concert in 1968).
My loss will be your gain
In the early 1970s Dylan's output was of variable quality. "What is this shit?" asked Greil Marcus, Rolling Stone magazine writer and Dylan loyalist, about 1970s Self Portrait. Marcus may have redeemed himself in Dylan's eyes with the release of his book Invisible Republic (later retitled The Old Weird America), an in-depth treatment of "The Basement Tapes" and their relationship to "The Anthology of American Folk Music". He occasionally reached former heights on New Morning (1970); the mostly-instrumental movie soundtrack album Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid included "Knockin' On Heaven's Door", amongst his most-covered songs. In 1973 he left Columbia Records for David Geffen's newly formed Asylum records, for whom he recorded Planet Waves (1974) with The Band. Columbia's revenge release of studio outtakes and cover versions on the appalling Dylan (1973) did not stop him returning to his old label the next year.
Following a US tour with The Band, which would be captured on the live, unsurprisingly lucrative record Before The Flood (1975), as it documented performances for the tour which had received more ticket requests than any prior tour (by any artist) , he re-entered the studio with a clutch of new songs. Coinciding with his recent estrangement from his wife, each song, from the slow blues "Meet Me In The Morning" to the lengthy "Idiot Wind," offers insight into the darkest aspects of relationships. The resulting album, Blood On The Tracks (1974), was widely heralded as yet another creative peak. Populated by shadowy characters, tricks of time and ever-present wordplay, just beneath consciousness this album seems to inhabit a threatening world (most of all in the well-known "Tangled Up In Blue"). Yet again, Dylan managed to confound listeners with inclusion of the simple narrative of the this-better-be-allegorical "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts". At a time when many younger artists, all of whom were Dylan fans, including Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Waits were lumbered with the tag "the New Bob Dylan", it was evident that it was too early to count out the old Bob Dylan.
In 1975 Dylan wrote his first explicit "protest" song in 10 years, becoming champion of boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, who he believed to bewrongfully imprisoned for a triple homicide. After visiting Carter in jail, Dylan wrote "Hurricane", a retelling of Carter's version of the events. Despite its length, the song was released as a single and performed at every date of Dylan's next tour, the "Rolling Thunder Revue". The tour was a departure: an open ended evening of entertainment featuring many performers picked up on the way, including T-Bone Burnett, Steven Soles, David Mansfield, former Byrds frontman Roger McGuinn, Scarlet Rivera, a violin player Dylan discovered hitchhiking, beat poet Ginsberg, and a reunion with Joan Baez. Running through the winter of 1975/76 the tour also encompassed the release of the album Desire (1976), with many of Dylan's new songs featuring an almost travelogue-like narrative style, showing the influence of his new collaborator, playwright Jacques Levy. Rolling Thunder, some highlights from which were released in 2002, also provided the backdrop to his film "Renaldo and Clara", a sprawling, improvised and frequently baffling narrative interspersed with footage of the tour. His 1978 album Street Legal was well reviewed and lyrically one of his most complex and absorbing, although its production was uncharacteristacally intrusive.
I've been saved by the blood of the lamb
Dylan's work in the late 1970s and early 1980s was dominated by his becoming, in 1978, a born-again Christian. He released three albums of primarily religious songs; of these, some fans regard Slow Train Coming (1979) as most worth attention. Because of their religious content, many listeners overlook the masterpieces contained on these records, which received harsh critical receptions that may have contributed to Dylan's loss of interest in creating high-quality albums in the mid-Eighties. Ranking among his best work are songs such as the sincere "Precious Angel", the syncopated "Gonna Change My Way of Thinking", and the forboding "Slow Train". "Solid Rock", "Saving Grace", "Pressing On" and "In the Garden" from Saved (1980), plus "Every Grain of Sand" and the title song from Shot of Love (1981), along with the Shot of Love outtakes "Caribbean Wind" and "Angelina" are all songs worthy of general attention. When touring to support these albums, Dylan refused to play secular music, and recordings reveal that he delivered short sermons on stage, typefied by:
- Years ago they used ..., said I was a prophet. I used to say, "No I'm not a prophet" they say "Yes you are, you're a prophet. I said, "No it's not me". They used to say :"You sure are a prophet". They used to convince me I was a prophet. Now I come out and say Jesus Christ is the answer. They say, "Bob Dylan's no prophet." They just can't handle it.
It's my work, he'd say, and I do it for pay
Doldrums set in through much of the 1980s, with his work varying from the adequate-to-good (1983s Infidels) to the dreadful (1988s Down In The Groove), all the while crossing the world on his "Neverending Tour". Infidels was more noteworthy for what it did not include than for what it included, as Dylan left off the album what many consider to be some of his best work ever: "Blind Willie McTell," "Foot of Pride," "Someone's Got a Hold of My Heart" and "Lord Protect My Child," all of which were later released on the boxed set, "The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3". Still, these lesser albums each contain gems, from 1985's Empire Burlesque ("When the Night comes Falling from the Sky" and "Dark Eyes") to Knocked Out Loaded 1986 (with its Kris Kristofferson cover "They Killed Him" and the long, clever "Brownsville Girl") to Down in the Groove 1988 (containing the understated "Death is not the End" the catchy "Silvio", cowritten with Grateful Dead collaborator Robert Hunter, and the folk ballad "Shenendoah").
His 1988 release, Dylan and the Dead documents the beginnings of Dylan's latest rise to prominence. Though the album is not great on its own, the tour forced Dylan to revisit his old material and play entirely different songs every night. Later in the 1988, he took part in the Travelling Wilburys album project, working with Roy Orbison, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, and his good friend George Harrison on lighthearted, well-selling fare. Reportedly, Dylan entered the first meeting of this supergroup with the idea that he wanted their output to sound like Prince's. Though falling short of that lofty goal, Bob added both Lucky and Boo Wilbury to his growing list of pseudonyms.
Thanks to these projects, Dylan finished the decade with Daniel Lanois-produced Oh Mercy (1989), his first solid album since "Infidels". Thanks to his uniquely dense arrangements, Lanois can be heard throughout Oh Mercy, especially in the use of legato guitars as strings in their pop music sense. The track "Most of the Time" was prominantly featured in the film ode to musical snobbery, 2000's High Fidelity.
Dylan's 1990's began with Under the Red Sky (1990), an odd departure from the serious Oh Mercy. This album, dedicated to Gabby Goo Goo, puzzlingly consisted of childish songs, including "Under the Red Sky", "Wiggle Wiggle", and "Cat's in the Well". A later discovery by biographer Howard Sounes of Dylan's concealed 1985 marriage and child, makes sense out of the nonsense songs. They seemingly were written for the entertainment of Dylan's 5 year old daugheter, Desiree Gabrielle (Gabby Goo Goo?) Dennis-Dylan. Beside these songs sits "Born in Time", one of Dylan's most sincere love songs.
The next few years saw Dylan returning to his folk roots with two albums covering old folk and blues numbers: Good As I Been To You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993), featuring nuanced interpretations and ragged but highly original acoustic guitar work, led by a stunning version of "Lone Pilgrim". His 1995 concert on MTV Unplugged, and the album culled from it, marked Dylan's only newly-recorded output during the mid-1990's. Essentially a greatest hits collection, it was notable for its inclusion of "John Brown" an unreleased 1963 song detailing the ravages of both war and jinogism.
With the quality of his output taking a turn for the better, and a stack of songs written while snowed-in on his Minnessota ranch, Dylan returned to the recording studio with Lanois in January of 1997. That spring, before the album's release, Dylan was hospitalized with a life-threatening heart infection. Ever cryptic, he left the hospital saying, "I really thought I'd be seeing Elvis soon." His work ethic unmatched, he was on the road by the summer.
Feel like a fighting rooster - feel better than I ever felt
With September came his first album of original songs in seven years. Time Out of Mind, with its bitter assessment of love and morbid ruminations, was acclaimed as yet another peak. The collection of swampy songs won him his first Album of the Year Grammy. His brilliance is present on "Not Dark Yet" and the ballad "Make You Feel My Love", which was covered by both Garth Brooks and Billy Joel. Black humor is present throughout Time Out of Mind, but comes out most on his longest release to date, the 16 minute blues "Highlands." In 2001, his song "Things Have Changed", penned for the movie Wonder Boys, won an Academy Award for best original song in a motion picture. For reasons unannounced, the Oscar tours with him, presiding over shows perched on top of his amplifier.
September 11, 2001 was the unfortunate release date of Love and Theft, an album that explores divergent styles of American music and revisits Dylan's own creative roots. Lyrically adventurous, and musically unprecedented in his long career, 'Love and Theft' stands among the greatest of his work. The record must be heard to be understood, as even those quite familiar with his earlier work cannot imagine Bob Dylan crooning, as he does on "Bye and Bye" and "Moonlight". Nor can one envision exactly how a knock-knock joke can be fit into song, as is the case in "Po' Boy". The album's strengths, are predominantly lyrical:
- Every step of the way we walk the line
- Your days are numbered, so are mine
- Time is pilin' up
- ''I'm forty miles from the mill - I'm droppin' it into overdrive
- Settin' my dial on the radio
- I wish my mother was still alive
- ''Well, George Lewis told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew
- ''"You can't open your mind, boys
- ''To every conceivable point of view."
- ''They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway Five
- ''Judge says to the High Sheriff,
- ''"I want him dead or alive
- ''Either one, I don't care."
- High Water everywhere
2003 saw the release of the film Masked & Anonymous,largely a joint creative venture with television producer Larry Charles and featuring one of the largest assemblages of top Hollywood stars ever to gather in one movie. Dylan and Charles co-wrote the film under the pseudonyms Rene Fonatine and Sergei Petrov. As difficult to decipher as one of his songs, Masked & Anonymous was viciously panned by most major critics and had a limited run in theaters. This may not be the movie's fault, as its black comedy is often mistaken for ponderous philosophy.
We're going all the way 'til the wheels fall off and burn
Despite the brilliance of his most recent records, Dylan does his best work on the road. He has played over 100 nights a year for the entirety of the 1990's and the 2000's. To the dismay of some older fans, Dylan refuses to be a nostalgia act; his reworked arrangements and stellar band keep the music brilliant night after night. Playing keyboard, guitar, and harmonica, Dylan chooses songs from throughout his 40 year career, never playing the same set twice.
And is our purpose not the same on this earth, to love and follow his direction?
Bob Dylan's large and vocal fan base write books, essays, 'zines, at a furious rate. They also maintain a massive internet presence with daily Dylan news, another site which rigorously documents every song he has ever played in concert, and one where visitors bet on what songs he will play on upcoming tours. Within minutes of the end of concerts, setlists and reviews are posted by his loyal following.
And they are in good company. Poet laureate of Great Britain, Andrew Motion, is a vocal supporter of Dylan's work. As are Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, David Bowie, and Neil Young. His songs have been covered by more artists than perhaps any other musician.
I'll know my song well before I start singin'
Reccommended Albums
- The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963)
- The Times They Are A-Changin (1964)
- Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964)
- Bringing It All Back Home (1965)
- Highway 61 Revisited (1965)
- Blonde on Blonde (1966)
- Blood on the Tracks (1974)
- Desire (1975)
- Infidels (1983)
- Oh Mercy (1989)
- World Gone Wrong (1993)
- Time Out of Mind (1997)
- Love and Theft (2001)
Lot of water under the bridge, Lot of other stuff too
External Links
- http://www.expectingrain.com is the definitive Dylan resource.
- See Columbia Records-sponsored site [1].
- Bob Dylan tour dates
