Bob Dylan Biography, Facts

Bob Dylan (Robert Allen Zimmerman) was born May 24, 1941, is widely regarded as one of America's greatest popular songwriters. Bob Dylan learned guitar at the age of 10 and autoharp and harmonica at 15. 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 "The Times They Are A-Changin'" during that era of extreme change. The radical insurgent group The Weathermen named themselves after a lyric in his "Subterranean Homesick Blues" ("You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows").

Bob Dylan started university studies in 1959 in Minneapolis. During his Dinkytown days Zimmerman began introducing himself as Bob Dylan (or Dillon). Dylan has never explained the exact source for the pseudonym, sometimes alluding to an apparently mythical uncle, sometimes to the hero of Gunsmoke, to its similarity to his middle name, and occasionally acknowledging some reference to the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

He quit college at the end of his freshman year, but stayed in Minneapolis, working the folk circuit there, with temporary sojourns in Denver and Chicago. In January 1961, enroute to Minneapolis from Chicago, he changed course, and headed to New York City to perform and to visit his ailing idol Woody Guthrie. Initially playing mostly in small "basket" clubs for little pay, he soon gained some public recognition after a review in the New York Times (September 29, 1961) by critic Robert Shelton, while John Hammond, a legendary music business figure, signed him to Columbia Records. His performances, like his first Columbia album (1962's Bob Dylan), consisted of familiar folk, blues and gospel material seasoned with a few of his own songs. As he continued to record for Columbia, 1962 also saw Dylan recording some of his lesser songs for Broadside (a folk music magazine and record label), under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt. By the time his next record, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, in which his girlfriend Suze Rotolo appeared on the cover, was released in (1963), he had begun to make his name as both a singer and composer, specialising in protest songs, initially in the style of Guthrie and soon practically developing his own genre.

His most famous songs of the time are typified by "Blowin' In The Wind", its melody partially derived from the traditional slave song "No More Auction Block", coupled with lyrics challenging the social and political status quo. In hindsight, the lyrics to some of these songs may appear unsophisticated ("How many times must the cannonballs fly before they are forever banned"), but compared to the largely anemic popular culture of the 1950s they were a breath of fresh air, and the songs fueled the zeitgeist of the 1960s. "Blowin' In The Wind" itself was widely recorded, an international hit for Peter, Paul and Mary, setting an enduring precedent for other artists to cover Dylan's songs. While Dylan's topical songs made his early reputation, Freewheelin' also mixed in 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"). The song "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" occupies a plane perhaps above even "Blowin' In The Wind", with its hard hitting imagery and almost God's-eye perspective. It represents a nearly alchemical moment in modern songwriting in which time-tested folk structures are reworked into a latter-day idiom encompassing world events and deep personal reflection (the citizen's life "flashing before his eyes" under the apprehension of apocalypse). The song gained even more resonance as the Cuban missile crisis developed only a few weeks after Dylan began performing it. Joan Baez took it upon herself to record and perform his early material regularly; others who covered his songs included 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 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.

Dylan's Protest:

In 1963, Dylan was becoming increasingly prominent in the civil rights movement, singing at rallies including the March on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr. 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. This 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 tempered by two formidable love songs, "Boots of Spanish Leather" and "One Too Many Mornings," and the epic renunication of "Restless Farewell." The Brechtian-influenced "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll", a highlight of the album, describes a young socialite's killing of a hotel maid. Never explicitly mentioning race, the song leaves no doubt that the killer is white, the victim black. At the end of the year, however, 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 everyman) in assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

Another Side Of Bob Dylan:

Bob Dylan's next album — the accurately but prosaically titled Another Side Of Bob Dylan, recorded on a single June evening in (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, "I Don't Believe You" a prototypical rock and roll song played on acoustic guitar, and "It Ain't Me Babe" a romping rejection of the role his reputation thrust at him. His newest direction was signaled by three songs: "Chimes of Freedom," long and impressionistic, sets elements of social commentary against a denser metaphorical landscape, in a style later characterised by Allen Ginsberg as "chains of flashing images"; "My Back Pages" even more personally attacks the simplistic and archly serious of his own earlier topical songs; and a musically undeveloped "Mr. Tambourine Man," recorded that night but fortunately left off the album.

In the early 1960s, Dylan had adopted a sort of Huckleberry Finn persona and told picaresque tales of knocking around, hopping freights, and working at folksy jobs. In that phase, lasting a few years, he sang and wrote somewhat like the Woody Guthrie of 25 or 30 years earlier. However, as he “brought it all back home” (the result of psychedelic drug experiences, or so have claimed some who knew him), Dylan’s point of view as a writer became at once more thoroughly contemporary and more surrealistic, and probably more honest.

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 had already been enhanced by Dylan's influence), and the rock and roll of his youth, the first side contained his first significant original uptempo rock songs. 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" owed much to Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business" and was provided with an early music video courtesy of D. A. Pennebaker's cinema verite presentation of Dylan's 1965 tour, Don't Look Back.

Side 2 of the album was a different matter, including four 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, while "Gates Of Eden," "It's All Over Now Baby Blue," and "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" have justifiably been fixtures in Dylan's live performances for most of his career.

That summer, Bob Dylan stoked the drama of his legacy by performing his first electric set (since his high school days) with a pickup group drawn mostly from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at the Newport Folk Festival. Dylan had appeared at Newport twice before in 1963 and 1964. Two wildly divergent accounts of the crowd's response in 1965 survive to this day. The settled fact is that Dylan, met with a mix of cheering and booing, left the stage after only three songs. As one legend has it, the boos were from the outraged folk fans Dylan alienated with his electric guitar. By one apocryphal account, folk great Pete Seeger even grabbed an axe, threatening to cut the power during the performance. The other story says that the fans were upset by poor sound quality and a surprisingly short set. Whatever sparked the crowd's disfavor, Dylan soon re-emerged and sang two far better received solo acoustic numbers. But the import of the appearance at Newport worked its way into the awareness of this restless generation: thoughtful acoustic music was no longer enough even for tradition-aware singers like Dylan; times were spinning out of control and electricity was needed to express it. By the end of 1964, he had ended his romantic relationship with Baez and had begun dating a former model named Sara Lowndes, whom he subsequently married. Simultaneously, he gave the Byrds "Mr. Tambourine Man" to record for their debut album. The Byrds gave the song a ringing, electric arrangement, but by the time the single became a hit, Dylan was already exploring his own brand of folk-rock. Inspired by the British Invasion, particularly the Animals' version of "House of the Rising Sun," Dylan recorded a set of original songs backed by a loud rock & roll band for his next album. While Bringing It All Back Home (March 1965) still had a side of acoustic material, it made clear that Dylan had turned his back on folk music. For the folk audience, the true breaking point arrived a few months after the album's release, when he played the Newport Folk Festival supported by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. The audience greeted him with vicious derision, but he had already been accepted by the growing rock & roll community. Dylan's spring tour of Britain was the basis for D.A. Pennebaker's documentary Don't Look Back, a film that captures the songwriter's edgy charisma and charm.

Breakthrough of Dylan:

Dylan made his breakthrough to the pop audience in the summer of 1965, when "Like a Rolling Stone" became a number two hit. Driven by a circular organ riff and a steady beat, the six-minute single broke the barrier of the three-minute pop single. Dylan became the subject of innumerable articles, and his lyrics became the subject of literary analyses across the U.S. and U.K. Well over 100 artists covered his songs between 1964 and 1966; the Byrds and the Turtles, in particular, had big hits with his compositions. Highway 61 Revisited, his first full-fledged rock & roll album, became a Top Ten hit shortly after its summer 1965 release. "Positively 4th Street" and "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" became Top Ten hits in the fall of 1965 and spring of 1966, respectively. Following the May 1966 release of the double-album Blonde on Blonde, he had sold over ten million records around the world. During the fall of 1965, Dylan hired the Hawks, formerly Ronnie Hawkins' backing group, as his touring band. The Hawks, who changed their name to the Band in 1968, would become Dylan's most famous backing band, primarily because of their intuitive chemistry and "wild, thin mercury sound," but also because of their British tour in the spring of 1966. The tour was the first time Britain had heard the electric Dylan, and their reaction was disagreeable and violent. At the tour's Royal Albert Hall concert, generally acknowledged to have occurred in Manchester, an audience member called Dylan "Judas," inspiring a positively vicious version of "Like a Rolling Stone" from the Band. The performance was immortalized on countless bootleg albums (an official release finally surfaced in 1998), and it indicates the intensity of Dylan in the middle of 1966. He had assumed control of Pennebaker's second Dylan documentary, Eat the Document, and was under deadline to complete his book Tarantula, as well as record a new record. Following the British tour, he returned to America.

Motorcycle Crash:

On July 1966, he was injured in a motorcycle accident outside of his home in Woodstock, NY, suffering injuries to his neck vertebrae and a concussion. Details of the accident remain elusive -- he was reportedly in critical condition for a week and had amnesia -- and some biographers have questioned its severity, but the event was a pivotal turning point in his career. After the accident, Dylan became a recluse, disappearing into his home in Woodstock and raising his family with his wife, Sara. After a few months, he retreated with the Band to a rented house, subsequently dubbed Big Pink, in West Saugerties to record a number of demos. For several months, Dylan and the Band recorded an enormous amount of material, ranging from old folk, country, and blues songs to newly written originals. The songs indicated that Dylan's songwriting had undergone a metamorphosis, becoming streamlined and more direct. Similarly, his music had changed, owing less to traditional rock & roll, and demonstrating heavy country, blues, and traditional folk influences. None of the Big Pink recordings were intended to be released, but tapes from the sessions were circulated by Dylan's music publisher with the intent of generating cover versions. Copies of these tapes, as well as other songs, were available on illegal bootleg albums by the end of the '60s; it was the first time that bootleg copies of unreleased recordings became widely circulated. Portions of the tapes were officially released in 1975 as the double-album The Basement Tapes.

Dylan married secretly Sara Lownds on November 22, 1965. Their first child, Jesse Byron Dylan, was born in January 1966. While Dylan and the Hawks met increasingly receptive audiences on tour (though not before the audience reaction led Helm to leave the group late in 1965), their studio efforts foundered. At John Hammond's suggestion, producer Bruce Johnston brought Dylan to Nashville to record, surrounding him with a cadre of top-notch session men, with only Robertson and Kooper brought down from New York to play more limited roles. The Nashville sessions brought out what Dylan would later call "that thin wild mercury sound" and a classic record often viewed as one of the greatest in American popular music, Blonde on Blonde.

Dylan began an ambitious "world tour" of Australia and Europe in the spring of 1966, including a famously raucous confrontation with an audience at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in England, and returned to New York after his European tour finished, but the pressures on him continued to increase: his publisher was demanding a finished manuscript of the poem/novel Tarantula, and manager Albert Grossman had already scheduled a grueling summer/fall concert tour. The pace of his private and professional life seemed unsustainable. On July 29 1966, near his home in Woodstock, New York, the brakes of his Triumph 500 motorcycle locked, throwing him to the ground.

Bob Dylan made his first public appearances in 18 months at a pair of Guthrie memorial concerts in January 1968.

Dylan's next release, Nashville Skyline (1969), was virtually a mainstream country record featuring a mellow-voiced, contented Dylan, a duet with Johnny Cash, and a hit single "Lay Lady Lay". Dylan appeared on Cash's new television show, then gave a high-profile performance at the Isle of Wight rock festival (shunning the more famous Woodstock event).

In 1969 or 1970, he moved back to Greenwich Village, published Tarantula for the first time in November of 1970, and performed at the Concert for Bangladesh. During 1972, he began his acting career by playing Alias in Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which was released in 1973. He also wrote the soundtrack for the film, which featured "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," his biggest hit since "Lay Lady Lay." The Pat Garrett soundtrack was the final record released under his Columbia contract before he moved to David Geffen's fledgling Asylum Records. As retaliation, Columbia assembled Dylan, a collection of Self Portrait outtakes, for release at the end of 1973. Dylan only recorded two albums -- including 1974's Planet Waves, coincidentally his first number one album -- before he moved back to Columbia. The Band supported Dylan on Planet Waves and its accompanying tour, which became the most successful tour in rock & roll history; it was captured on 1974's double-live album Before the Flood.

Dylan's 1974 tour was the beginning of a comeback culminated by 1975's Blood on the Tracks. Largely inspired by the disintegration of his marriage, Blood on the Tracks was hailed as a return to form by critics and it became his second number one album. After jamming with folkies in Greenwich Village, Dylan decided to launch a gigantic tour, loosely based on traveling medicine shows. Lining up an extensive list of supporting musicians -- including Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Rambling Jack Elliott, Arlo Guthrie, Mick Ronson, Roger McGuinn, and poet Allen Ginsberg -- Dylan dubbed the tour the Rolling Thunder Revue and set out on the road in the fall of 1975. For the next year, the Rolling Thunder Revue toured on and off, with Dylan filming many of the concerts for a future film. During the tour, Desire was released to considerable acclaim and success, spending five weeks on the top of the charts. Throughout the Rolling Thunder Revue, Dylan showcased "Hurricane," a protest song he had written about boxer Rubin Carter, who had been unjustly imprisoned for murder. The live album Hard Rain was released at the end of the tour. Dylan released Renaldo and Clara, a four-hour film based on the Rolling Thunder tour, to poor reviews in early 1978.

Running through the fall of 1975 and again through the spring of 1976 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. The spring 1976 half of the tour was documented by a TV concert special, Hard Rain, and an LP of the same title; no concert album from the better-received and better-known opening half of the tour would be released until 2002, when Live 1975 appeared as the fifth volume of Dylan's Bootleg Series.

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 concert film The Last Waltz, including about half of Dylan's set, was released in 1978. Dylan's 1978 album Street Legal was well reviewed (with some disparaging exceptions). Lyrically one of his more complex and absorbing, it suffered from a poor sound mix (attributed to his studio recording practices), submerging much of its instrumentation in the sonic equivalent of cotton wadding until its remastered CD release nearly a quarter century later.

Bob Dylan's work in the late 1970s and early 1980s was dominated by his becoming, in 1979, a born-again Christian (although he had showed hints of interest in Christianity since 1967). 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 masterworks 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 the sincere "Precious Angel", the syncopated "Gonna Change My Way of Thinking" and the forboding title track "Slow Train Coming". Other songs of note from this period include "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."

In 1982, Dylan traveled to Israel, sparking rumors that his conversion to Christianity was short-lived. He returned to secular recording with 1983's Infidels, which was greeted with favorable reviews. Bob Dylan returned to performing in 1984, releasing the live album Real Live at the end of the year. Empire Burlesque followed in 1985, but its odd mix of dance tracks and rock & roll won few fans. However, the five-album/triple-disc retrospective box set Biograph appeared that same year to great acclaim. In 1986, Dylan hit the road with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers for a successful and acclaimed tour, but his album that year, Knocked Out Loaded, was received poorly. The following year, he toured with the Grateful Dead as his backing band; two years later, the souvenir album Dylan & the Dead appeared. In 1988, Dylan embarked on what became known as "The Never-Ending Tour" -- a constant stream of shows that ran on and off into the late '90s. In 1992, he returned to recording with Good As I Been to You, an acoustic collection of traditional folk songs. It was followed in 1993 by another folk album, World Gone Wrong, which won the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album. After the release of World Gone Wrong, Dylan released a greatest-hits album and a live record.

Dylan released Time Out of Mind, his first album of original material in seven years, in the fall of 1997. Time Out of Mind received his strongest reviews in years and unexpectedly debuted in the Top Ten. Its success sparked a revival of interest in Dylan -- he appeared on the cover of Newsweek and his concerts became sell-outs. Early in 1998, Time Out of Mind received three Grammy Awards -- Album of the Year, Best Contemporary Folk Album and Best Male Rock Vocal. Another album of original material, Love and Theft, followed in 2001. Soon after its release, Dylan announced that he was making his own film, to star Jeff Bridges, Penelope Cruz, John Goodman, Val Kilmer.