Bob Dylan
LOOKING at the history of
rock and roll, it is impossible to overstate the importance of Bob
Dylan. As Bruce Springsteen put it, inducting Dylan into the Rock
& Roll Hall of Fame, "Bob freed the mind the way Elvis freed the
body. He showed us that just because the music was innately physical
did not mean that it was anti-intellectual. He had the vision
and the talent to make a pop song that contained the whole world. He
invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the
limitations of what a recording artist could achieve, and changed
the face of rock and roll forever."
The grandchild of Jewish-Russian immigrants, Dylan was born
Robert Allen Zimmerman, on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, where
his father, Abe, worked for the Standard Oil Company. In 1947, the
Zimmerman family moved to the small town of Hibbing, where an
unexceptional childhood did little to hint at the brilliance to
come. Robert started writing poems around the age of ten, and taught
himself rudimentary piano and guitar in his early teens. Falling
under the spell of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and other early
rock stars, he started forming his own bands, including the Golden
Chords and Elston Gunn and His Rock Boppers. According to the 1959
Hibbing high school yearbook, his goal was "to join Little Richard."
The young Zimmerman left Hibbing for Minneapolis and the
University of Minnesota in the fall of 1959. The sights and sounds
of the big city opened new vistas for him, and he began to trace
contemporary rock and roll back to its roots, listening to the work
of country, rock, and folk pioneers like Hank Williams, Robert
Johnson, and Woody Guthrie. Indeed, his interest in music had become
so intense that he rarely found the time to go to class. He began to
perform solo at local nightspots like the Ten O'Clock Scholar cafe
and St. Paul's Purple Onion Pizza Parlor, honing his guitar and
harmonica work and developing the expressive nasal voice that would
become the nucleus of his trademark sound. It was around this time,
too, that he adopted the stage name Bob Dylan, presumably in honor
of the late Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, though this is an origin he has
continued to deny throughout his career.
The following year, he dropped out of college and went to New
York with two things on his mind: to become a part of Greenwich
Village's burgeoning folk-music scene, and to meet Guthrie, who
was hospitalized in New Jersey with a rare, hereditary disease of
the nervous system. He succeeded on both counts, becoming a fixture
in the Village's folk clubs and coffee houses and at Guthrie's
hospital bedside, where he would perform the folk legend's own songs
for an audience of one. Spending all of his spare time in the
company of other musicians, Dylan amazed them with his ability to
learn songs perfectly after hearing them only once. He also began
writing songs at a remarkable pace, including a tribute to his hero
entitled "Song to Woody."
In the fall of 1961, Dylan's legend began to spread beyond folk
circles and into the world at large after critic Robert Shelton saw
him perform at Gerde's Folk City and raved in the New York
Times that he was "bursting at the seams with talent." A month
later, Columbia Records executive John Hammond signed Dylan to a
recording contract, and the young singer-songwriter began
selecting material for his eponymous debut album. Not yet fully
confident in his own songwriting abilities, he cut only two original
numbers, rounding out the collection with traditional folk tunes and
songs by blues singers like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Bukka White.
The result (released early in 1962) was an often haunting,
death-obsessed record that, culminating in Dylan's
gravel-voiced reading of "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,"
sounded as much like the work of an aging black blues man as a
twenty-one-year-old Jewish folksinger from Minnesota.
Promising as that first album was, it didn't prepare anyone for
the masterpiece that came next. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan,
released in 1963, contained two of the sixties' most durable folk
anthems, "Blowin' in the Wind" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna
Fall," the breathtaking ballads "Girl From the North Country" and
"Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," and nine other originals
that marked the emergence of the most distinctive and poetic voice
in the history of American popular music. Cementing his reputation
was Peter, Paul, and Mary's folksy cover of "Blowin' in the Wind,"
which went to No. 2 on the pop singles chart.
Dylan's next album, The Times They Are A-Changin',
provided more of the same: the title cut and "The Lonesome Death of
Hattie Carroll" were the standout protest songs, while "Boots of
Spanish Leather" was his saddest and most graceful love song so far.
At the same time, Dylan seemed to be tiring of his position at the
forefront of the protest movement: in "Restless Farewell," the
record's last song, he concluded that he'd "bid farewell and not
give a damn." Sure enough, his next album, pointedly titled
Another Side of Bob Dylan, was his most introspective and
least topical to date, and its finale, "It Ain't Me Babe," was an
even more explicit goodbye to the folk movement he had helped
reinvigorate.
The most revealing song on Another Side was "Ballad in
Plain D," which painted a harsh, one-sided,
blow-by-blow picture of Dylan's breakup with his longtime
girlfriend Suze Rotolo, who can be seen on his arm in happier days
on the Freewheelin' album cover. (More than twenty years
later, Dylan said this was the one song in his catalogue that he
wished he hadn't released.) Shortly after his split with Rotolo, he
became involved with the world's most famous folk diva, Joan Baez.
The relationship proved beneficial for them both, as Baez raided
Dylan's unreleased material for her albums and introduced him to
thousands of fans at her concerts.
At the same time, Dylan was itching to move beyond the acoustic
musical constraints the folk movement imposed. Early in 1965, he
went into the studio with a nine piece band and
recorded Bringing It All Back Home, a half-electric,
half-acoustic album of complex, incisive, biting songs like
"Subterranean Homesick Blues" (featuring the trademark line, "You
don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"), "Mr.
Tambourine Man," and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." A week after
Dylan cut Bringing It All Back Home, the Byrds electrified
his acoustic "Tambourine Man," and by the time it reached the top of
the charts the term "folk-rock" had become part of the
contemporary lexicon.
Dylan's own transition from folk troubadour to rock bard was not
quite so smooth: debuting his new material with the Paul Butterfield
Blues Band at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, he was famously booed
off the stage. Such resistance notwithstanding, Dylan's fame had
long since eclipsed Baez's, and their relationship was starting to
crumble. (D.A. Pennebaker's documentary Don't Look Back was
filmed during this period, and it clearly shows the tension between
Dylan and Baez.) He had begun to see Sara Lowndes, a friend of his
manager Albert Grossman's wife, and by the end of the year would
marry her. In the meantime, he recorded and released the album
Highway 61 Revisited, which contained the monumental single
"Like a Rolling Stone." Clocking in at more than six minutes, it was
the longest, angriest song ever released on a 45, and it reached No.
2 on the Billboard singles chart.
Next up was Blonde on Blonde, a two-record set
recorded in Nashville in early 1966, which took the
stream-of-consciousness lyrics and edgy rock sounds of
Highway 61 Revisited to the next level of artistry. From the
raucous party rock of "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" to the
rambling, hallucinogenic folk 'n' blues of "Stuck Inside of Mobile
With the Memphis Blues Again" to the poignant, apocalyptic balladry
of "Visions of Johanna" and "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,"
Blonde on Blonde took rock and roll to places no one else had
even dreamed of. A tour of England with the Hawks (who would later
change their name to the Band) produced music that was even wilder
and more astonishing, though many of Dylan's old fans continued to
be baffled. The tour reached its peak at the Manchester Free Trade
Hall on May 17, 1966, when the combo recorded a live set that was
bootlegged--and mis-titled--as Live at the Royal
Albert Hall. (If you're lucky enough to find the two-CD
bootleg Guitars Kissing & the Contemporary
Fix--which features a pristine recording of the entire
show--buy it; it's the greatest album never released.)
By this time, Dylan was routinely being hailed as the most
important voice of his generation, but he was reaching a breaking
point; he was, after all, only twenty-five years old. "The
pressures were unbelievable," he would later tell biographer Anthony
Scaduto. "They were just something you can't imagine unless you go
through them yourself. Man, they hurt so much." A near-fatal
motorcycle accident on July 29, 1966, proved a blessing in disguise,
allowing Dylan to retreat to the solitude of his home in Woodstock,
New York, with Sara and their newborn son Jesse to reevaluate his
career and priorities. (The Dylans would ultimately have four
children, with Bob adopting Sara's daughter from a previous
marriage; Jakob, the youngest, is now the leader of the popular band
the Wallflowers.)
A few months later, the Hawks joined him at Woodstock, and they
began recording the loose, country-flavored tracks that would
be bootlegged (and released eight years later) as The Basement
Tapes. Dylan's next official release, though, was the even more
low-key John Wesley Harding. Recorded in Nashville with
a three-piece backing band, John Wesley Harding was
widely considered to be Dylan's pointed reaction to the Beatles'
musically and technically complex landmark LP Sgt. Pepper's
Lonely Hearts Club Band--an interpretation he naturally
denied.
While John Wesley Harding earned glowing reviews and
reached the No. 2 spot on Billboard's album chart (making it
his most commercially successful album to date), it also painted
Dylan into an artistic corner. Gone was what he called his "thin
wild mercury sound," and gone were his outlandish, visionary lyrical
flourishes; the simple, often elegant songs that he was now writing
could not support the hype that painted Dylan as one of the
twentieth century's great poets. Nashville Skyline, his next
album, seemed to revel in disappointing fans' expectations: it was a
straight country record, and despite some lovely songs (especially
"I Threw It All Away") and a hit single ("Lay Lady Lay") it was seen
as Dylan's first real artistic misstep.
As it turned out, Nashville Skyline was just the beginning
of Dylan's slide in the eyes of the critical establishment. Self
Portrait, the two-record set which followed in 1970, was
viewed as a genuine disaster: "What is this shit?" Greil Marcus
asked in his Rolling Stone review. New Morning,
released four months later, was a comeback of sorts--it was at
least listenable--but it was a far cry from Dylan's best work.
The release of his long-awaited book Tarantula in 1971
didn't do anything to rehabilitate his reputation in hip circles.
Even his inspiring set at the George Harrison-organized Concert
for Bangladesh--Dylan's first American concert appearance since
his motorcycle accident five years earlier--seemed to hint at
artistic confusion: he didn't perform a single song written after
1966.
Seemingly floundering, Dylan accepted an invitation from
legendary Western filmmaker Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch) to
appear in and compose the score for his new film, Pat Garrett and
Billy the Kid, which was filming in Mexico and would star
Dylan's friend Kris Kristofferson. The shoot was not a pleasant
experience: the Mexican location proved difficult, Peckinpah was
preoccupied with studio politics (the film was eventually taken out
of his hands and recut), and Dylan floundered in the role of Billy's
sidekick, Alias. But the soundtrack album was a success, and the
single "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" broke the Top 20 (and went on to
become one of Dylan's most covered songs).
At this point, it had been seven years since Dylan's motorcycle
accident, and he had not mounted a full-scale tour since. In
the summer and fall of 1973, he and the Band started rehearsing the
Dylan songbook for a comeback tour, and in early November they took
a few days off to record the album Planet Waves. It was a
hasty, underwritten effort, but that didn't stop it from shooting to
the top of the charts after Dylan and the Band hit the road for a
nationwide tour in January of 1974. (Planet Waves was, in
fact, Dylan's first No. 1 album ever.) The concerts were the stuff
of legend, and promoter Bill Graham said that there were
mail-order requests for more than twelve million tickets,
though only 658,000 seats were available for the forty
shows. An acclaimed two-record live set, Before the
Flood, came out within a few months of the tour, and made it to
No. 3 on the charts.
While the tour seemed to reinvigorate Dylan's creative spirit,
his personal life was in a shambles. He and Sara had separated, and
Dylan's confusion, pain, and anger over their split infused the
songs he was writing with a rare passion. The result was Blood on
the Tracks, perhaps the most mature, moving, and profound
examination of love and loss ever committed to record. Stunning
songs like "Tangled Up in Blue," "Idiot Wind," and "Shelter From the
Storm" were not strictly autobiographical, but their emotional
turbulence clearly reflected Dylan's anguished state of mind. His
second straight No. 1 album, Blood on the Tracks didn't
merely match the brilliance of Dylan's sixties output--in terms
of eloquence and emotional authority, he had reached new heights.
Later that year, a truncated version of The Basement Tapes
was finally released, and was hailed as a found masterpiece. Another
tour soon followed--the ragtag Rolling Thunder Revue, which
featured old friends like Joan Baez and Roger McGuinn, and new ones
such as T-Bone Burnett and playwright Sam Shepard, who was
recruited to write a screenplay to be shot on the road. (The
resulting film, the mostly unscripted Renaldo and Clara, was
a confused four-hour debacle that received very limited
distribution in 1978.) Mid-tour, Dylan released Desire,
which was his third consecutive No. 1 album; it featured the single
"Hurricane," dedicated to the wrongly imprisoned boxer Rubin
"Hurricane" Carter. While nowhere near as impressive as Blood on
the Tracks, Desire was a well-crafted, evocative
effort that contained at least two great songs: the playfully
cinematic "Black Diamond Bay," and the plaintive, heartfelt ode to
his estranged wife, "Sara." The song did not win her back: Dylan and
Sara divorced the following year.
Dylan's first post-divorce album, Street Legal, did
not bode well for the future. Overproduced and lyrically senseless,
it was even worse than Self Portrait, and the world tour that
followed was a pale shadow of the Before the Flood and
Rolling Thunder shows. At thirty-seven, Dylan seemed, both
personally and professionally, at loose ends. Even so, his next move
took the world by surprise: embracing fundamental Christianity, he
released the overtly born-again album Slow Train Coming.
Much to the surprise of his critics, the record was a commercial
success, reaching No. 3 on the charts, spawning the hit single
"Gotta Serve Somebody," and earning Dylan his first Grammy award,
for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance.
The tour that followed was a fire and brimstone affair that
managed to alienate many of Dylan's longtime fans, and his next
album, Saved, failed to crack the Top 20. For the faithful,
though, his next record, Shot of Love offered signs of hope:
"Every Grain of Sand" was a gorgeous, philosophical ballad that took
a far more forgiving tone than his past two albums, while "The
Groom's Still Waiting at the Alter" (the non-LP B-side to
the single "Heart of Mine") was a barn-burning rocker that
would have fit nicely on Highway 61 Revisited.
Infidels (1983) continued the positive trend:
co-produced by Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler, whose
graceful guitar work made it Dylan's best-sounding
record ever, it was also his finest sustained collection of songs
since Blood on the Tracks. Veering away from the overtly
religious material of his last three albums, Dylan recaptured the
complexity and emotional subtlety of his best work on songs like
"Jokerman" and "Don't Fall Apart on Me Tonight." Empire
Burlesque, his self-produced follow-up to
Infidels, was almost as good, ranging from the blistering
soul of "Tight Connection to My Heart" to the gentle acoustic ballad
"Dark Eyes," with only a few missteps.
While Dylan had toured regularly since returning to the stage
with the Band in 1974, beginning in the mid-eighties he hit the
road full-time, first with all-star cronies Tom Petty and
the Heartbreakers and the Grateful Dead, then, starting in 1988,
with a small rock combo led by guitarist and Saturday Night
Live musical director G.E. Smith. Shows on the so-called
Never Ending Tour were generally sloppy, and Dylan tended to mumble
his songs and glower at his audiences, but he stuck with
it--nine years later, he's hardly spent a month off the road.
The original work he's released over the last decade has
continued to contain flashes of genius, but only the Daniel
Lanois-produced Oh Mercy worked to any sustained effect.
Check out the wild, twelve-minute Dylan-Sam Shepard road
song "Brownsville Girl" (from 1987's Knocked Out Loaded) or
the hallucinatory Oh Mercy outtake "Series of Dreams" (from
the revelatory, career-spanning three-CD set The
Bootleg Series) to hear the best of the latter-day Dylan.
Then there are the two fast and funny Traveling Wilburys albums,
which catch Dylan--along with superstar pals George Harrison,
Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, and (on the first record) Roy
Orbison--in an uncommonly lighthearted mood. He followed up
1990's Under the Red Sky with two albums' worth of old folk
and blues covers: 1992's Good As I Been to You and 1993's
World Gone Wrong. While both are largely satisfying efforts,
they didn't win him many new fans.
Early in 1997, though, those who lived in hope of an artistically
born-again Dylan had cause for optimism: musician Jim Dickinson told
a Memphis newspaper that he had played on some recent, Daniel
Lanois-produced Dylan sessions featuring new material Dylan had
composed while stuck at home in Minnesota during a blizzard.
According to Dickinson, one cut was seventeen minutes long, and
overall the material was "so good, I can't imagine he won't use it."
The seventeen-minute song turned out to be "Highlands," the
closing cut on the critically acclaimed Time Out of Mind,
which was released in September and became Dylan's first gold record
of the decade. The success of the album was noteworthy, but 1997
will go down as the year that Dylan knocked on heaven's door,
literally: in May, on the eve of a European tour, he was
hospitalized with histoplasmosis, a potentially fatal infection that
creates swelling in the sac surrounding the heart. Happily, the
songwriter made a rapid recovery, and was back on the road by August
and continued to tour through the remainder of the year, including a
September date in Bologna, Italy, at the behest of Pope John Paul
II. In early December, Dylan was one of five recipients of his
country's highest award for artistic excellence, the Kennedy Center
Honors.
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