Bob Dylan
'I think of myself as a song-and-dance man.' — at a 1965 press conference in San Francisco
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Members and colleagues ⏳🌊
- InfluenceWoody Guthrie
The idol who taught the boy from Hibbing how to sing and how to live as a drifter, he was the man whose sickbed Dylan sought out the moment he arrived in New York.
- LoverSuze Rotolo
In the early 1960s she drew him into the worlds of art·theater·the civil rights movement, and she appeared beside him on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.
- FriendshipJoan Baez
Already a star, she brought the unknown Dylan onto her stage, and in 1975 they sang together again in the Rolling Thunder Revue.
- ManagerAlbert Grossman
As his manager in the 1960s he handled concerts and publishing, turning a folk singer into a popular star.
- FriendshipRobbie Robertson
As guitarist of the Hawks·the Band, he shared the jeered tour of 1966, the basement recordings and the 1974 comeback tour.
- FriendshipGeorge Harrison
They wrote songs together in the Woodstock years, a longtime friendship that carried on through the Concert for Bangladesh and the Traveling Wilburys.
I. A boy from the north country · 1941–1960
(Duluth) He was born in May 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota. His given name was Robert Allen Zimmerman. His father, Abram, was a clerk for Standard Oil; his mother, Beatrice, called Beatty by the family, was the daughter of a Jewish immigrant family from Eastern Europe. He has a younger brother, David. (Hibbing) After his father was stricken with polio and had to stop working, the family moved to his mother's hometown of Hibbing, an iron-mining town. His father ran an appliance·furniture store with his brothers. In this town of long winters, where open-pit mines had eaten deep into the earth, the boy spent his nights searching the radio for blues and country from the distant South, and for the songs of Hank Williams. (Rock and roll) In high school he fell hard for Little Richard and formed a band. At a school talent show, the story goes, he pounded the piano so hard and sang so close to shouting that the principal brought down the stage curtain. Under ambitions in his 1959 yearbook, he wrote that he wanted to join Little Richard. (Minneapolis) In the fall of 1959 he entered the University of Minnesota, but he spent more time in the coffeehouses of Dinkytown, the campus neighborhood, than in lecture halls. After hearing an Odetta record he traded his electric guitar for an acoustic one, and around this time he began calling himself Bob Dylan. The story that the name came from the poet Dylan Thomas spread widely, but he himself explained it differently each time. The decisive influence was Woody Guthrie's autobiography Bound for Glory. He absorbed Guthrie's way of talking and singing wholesale, and in the winter of 1960 he left school.
II. Greenwich Village · 1961–1964
(New York) In January 1961 he arrived in a snowy New York. He went straight to a hospital in New Jersey to visit Woody Guthrie, who was suffering from Huntington's disease, and wrote a song dedicated to him, “Song to Woody.” Singing with a harmonica slung around his neck at Café Wha? and Gerde's Folk City in Greenwich Village, he made a name as a young man who soaked up old folk songs faster than anyone. (Columbia) In September 1961 Robert Shelton of The New York Times wrote a glowing review, and producer John Hammond signed him to Columbia Records. His 1962 debut album consisted mostly of old folk·blues songs and sold poorly; inside the company some called him Hammond's folly. Around this time manager Albert Grossman took him on and began systematically managing his concerts and publishing rights. In 1962 he also legally changed his name. (Suze) His girlfriend Suze Rotolo led him into the world of art museums, Brecht's theater and the civil rights movement. On the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan in 1963, the two walk arm in arm down a snow-covered West 4th Street. (Protest) On the same album, “Blowin' in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall” took on the terror of nuclear war and racial discrimination. Joan Baez, already a star, brought him onto her stage, and in August 1963 he sang at the March on Washington as well. Yet the label of spokesman for a generation chafed. In 1964, with Another Side of Bob Dylan, he turned from slogans toward the inner life. That August he met the Beatles for the first time in New York; they drew inspiration from his lyrics, and he from their harmonies and energy.
This is the song that pinned on him the label of spokesman for a generation. The question a twenty-one-year-old in Greenwich Village posed in the era of the civil rights movement is held in this one song.
- Recorded in July 1962 at Columbia's New York studio, produced by John Hammond. With nothing but an acoustic guitar and a harmonica set in a neck rack (harmonica holder), the voice and the sound of the fingers come across very close.
- All three verses share the same structure. Each fires off a string of questions and then defers the answer to the same refrain, so that as the verses change, only the weight of the questions grows.
- Dylan himself acknowledged that the melody was borrowed from the spiritual “No More Auction Block.” Heard side by side with the original, it reveals how a tune carrying the memory of slavery became a new song.
- The harmonica interludes between verses are played deliberately thin and rough. Set beside the hit version Peter, Paul and Mary sang that same year in smooth three-part harmony, the rawness of Dylan's original stands out all the more.
III. Taking up the electric guitar · 1965–1966
(Turn) In March 1965 Bringing It All Back Home filled one side with an electric band and the other with acoustic guitar. When the Byrds arranged his “Mr. Tambourine Man” for twelve-string electric guitar and took it to number one, the term folk rock was born. His spring tour of England was captured in D. A. Pennebaker's documentary “Dont Look Back.” (Newport) In June he recorded “Like a Rolling Stone,” and on July 25 he took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric guitar, alongside Mike Bloomfield and others. Boos erupted from the audience; accounts that the sound was a mess and the set too short still circulate alongside the reading that it was the folk purists' sense of betrayal. The story that Pete Seeger tried to cut the cables with an ax was corrected by Seeger himself as an exaggeration. (The Hawks) From that fall he toured with the Hawks, Ronnie Hawkins's former backing band and later the Band. The booing followed him all the way to England in 1966, and at a May concert in Manchester, when an audience member called him Judas, he turned to the band and told them to play louder. The recording of that night circulated for decades as a bootleg before its official release in 1998. (Speed) In these years he was putting out albums at a pace of about two a year. Moving sessions that had stalled in New York to Nashville, he released the double album Blonde on Blonde in the summer of 1966. Amid ceaseless touring and recording and a barrage of reporters' questions, he was utterly exhausted, and at press conferences he would often sidestep the questions themselves with absurd answers.
It came from the heart of the year he turned his back on folk expectations and took up the electric guitar. He sang it even on that Newport stage where he was booed.
- The song opens with a single crack of drummer Bobby Gregg's snare drum. It is that very first moment Springsteen, in his induction speech, described as the sound of someone kicking open the door to your mind.
- Al Kooper came to play guitar and ended up sitting at the Hammond organ. Not an organist, he recalled that he watched for the chord changes and followed them half a beat late, and that slightly late organ became the song's signature expression. Producer Tom Wilson objected at first, but in the end had the organ turned up.
- Mike Bloomfield's Fender Telecaster plays short lines (obbligato) that slip in between the vocal phrases. Each time the voice rests, lend your right ear to it.
- At more than 6 minutes, its length broke the convention that a radio single runs 3 minutes. It is addressed in the second person, in the tone of someone interrogating a fallen adversary, and each time the refrain returns the voice grows sharper.
- The live version he unleashed with the Hawks right after the heckler's shout at the 1966 Manchester concert is far louder and rougher than the studio take. Played back to back, the two versions convey the tension of that night.
A peak on the verge of exhaustion, completed after sessions stalled in New York were moved to Nashville. A few months later, an accident brought his first headlong run to a halt.
- Recorded at Columbia's Nashville studio at the urging of producer Bob Johnston. Local recording professionals (session musicians) such as Charlie McCoy and Kenny Buttrey recalled waiting on call until dawn while Dylan finished his lyrics.
- The song on the video card is “Visions of Johanna.” It is where you hear most clearly the album's tone, which Dylan, in a 1978 interview, called that thin, wild mercury sound. Listen for the passages where Al Kooper's organ and Robbie Robertson's guitar tangle like threads.
- Kenny Buttrey's drumming creates a relaxed groove, laying the beat slightly back. Over the unhurried rhythm, Dylan's long sentences flow by.
- It is one of the first double albums in rock, and its entire final side is given over to a single song of more than 11 minutes, “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” For its time, the length was radical.
IV. The silence of Woodstock · 1966–1974
(The accident) In July 1966 he was in a motorcycle accident near Woodstock, New York. He is known to have said later that it gave him the occasion to escape the clamor of fame and live an ordinary life with his family. The touring stopped, and for nearly 8 years afterward he did not undertake a major tour. (The basement) In 1967, when members of the Band moved nearby, they recorded old folk songs and new ones almost daily in the basement of a pink house known as Big Pink. Made with no thought of release, these recordings spread as bootlegs and came out only in 1975 as The Basement Tapes. In 1967, a year seething with psychedelia, this homespun sound walked against the times. (Restraint) At the end of 1967, John Wesley Harding gathered short songs in the tone of scripture and parable, accompanied only by bass and drums. In 1968 his father died. That same year Jimi Hendrix rerecorded “All Along the Watchtower” with storm-force electric guitar, and Dylan later said he was so overwhelmed by that interpretation that he came to perform it onstage Hendrix's way himself. (Country) On Nashville Skyline in 1969 he changed even his voice, to a soft baritone, and sang a duet with Johnny Cash. Self Portrait in 1970 met with a cold reception from critics; he later explained it as an album meant to shake off the expectations placed on him. Around this time he ended his relationship with Grossman. In 1971 he made a surprise appearance at the benefit concert for Bangladesh organized by George Harrison, and in 1973 he appeared in the film “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” and wrote “Knockin' on Heaven's Door.” In early 1974 he finally went back on the road with the Band.
A brief parable from John Wesley Harding, born of the Woodstock silence. It is also the rare case in which Hendrix's reinterpretation changed the way the songwriter himself played it.
- The lineup is just three people: Dylan on acoustic guitar and harmonica, Charlie McCoy on bass and Kenny Buttrey on drums. The empty space left by stripping away psychedelia's glitter creates the song's tension.
- It runs a little over 2 and a half minutes, with three verses and no chorus. Many have remarked that the last verse feels like the beginning of the story, so that the narrative comes full circle. After the final verse, go back to the start and listen again.
- Set beside Jimi Hendrix's 1968 version, the same song becomes an entirely different beast. In a 1995 interview Dylan said he had been overwhelmed by Hendrix's interpretation.
- After his 1974 tour with The Band, the song turned into a Hendrix-style electric arrangement in Dylan's live shows. Compare the version on the live album Before the Flood with the studio take.
V. Back on the road · 1974–1987
(Blood) Blood on the Tracks, released in January 1975, was full of songs of loss and regret. Many read it as autobiography, but in his memoir he wrote that the songs were borrowed from Chekhov's short stories. In 1974 he studied painting with the artist Norman Raeben and learned to set past·present·future on a single canvas, and he explained that this became the album's way of telling, in which viewpoint and time blur together. (Rolling Thunder) In the fall of 1975 he assembled the Rolling Thunder Revue, a tour run like a wandering theater troupe. Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn and the poet Allen Ginsberg made the rounds of small-town theaters with him, and he sang with his face painted white. That summer he had seen Patti Smith perform at the New York club The Other End and gone backstage to encourage her. “Hurricane,” which pleaded the innocence of the boxer Rubin Carter, then serving time for murder, became the opening track of Desire in 1976. (Faith) In late 1978 he revealed that he had embraced the Christian faith. Slow Train Coming, from 1979, was produced by Jerry Wexler with Dire Straits' Mark Knopfler on guitar, and it earned him his first Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance. On the tour that followed he dropped the old songs and sang only new gospel numbers; some in the audience turned their backs, but he did not retreat, speaking of his faith between songs. (Searching) The 1980s were years of looking for a way forward. In 1983 he made Infidels with Knopfler, and at the 1984 Slane concert in Ireland he shared the stage with U2's Bono. In 1985 he appeared at Live Aid as well. Yet in Chronicles he confessed that around this time he felt cut off from his own old songs.
An album in which a way of telling time, learned in painting class, became song. Though it deals with loss and regret, Dylan named Chekhov's short stories as its source.
- Recording was finished in New York in September 1974, but in December Dylan recut five songs in Minneapolis with local musicians gathered by his brother David. The “Tangled Up in Blue” on the video card is the Minneapolis recording, and it rolls along faster and brighter than the New York take.
- The guitar on “Tangled Up in Blue” is said to have been played in a retuning that lets a chord ring without any strings being pressed (open tuning). Listen for the broad resonance of the open strings ringing together.
- The narrator moves between I and he, and past and present blur within a single verse. Dylan explained that in Norman Raeben's art classes he learned how to place time on a single canvas.
- The original New York recordings were released in 2018 as the Bootleg Series set More Blood, More Tracks. Set beside the darker, more private New York takes, built around acoustic guitar, you can hear how the album's countenance changed.
VI. The never-ending road · 1988–2015
(Comeback) In January 1988 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In his induction speech Bruce Springsteen said that when he first heard the snare shot that opens “Like a Rolling Stone” at fifteen, it was as if someone had kicked open the door to his mind. That year he formed the Traveling Wilburys with George Harrison, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne, and he co-wrote U2's “Love Rescue Me” with Bono. (Tour) The tour that began in June 1988 went on year after year at around a hundred shows annually and came to be called the Never Ending Tour. The arrangements changed night after night, and audiences often recognized a familiar song only several bars in. In 1989 Oh Mercy, produced by Daniel Lanois in New Orleans, won him praise he had not received in years. (Roots) At the 1992 thirtieth-anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden, Neil Young, Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder and Mike McCready, and George Harrison came out to sing his songs. In 1992 and 1993 he returned to his starting point with two albums of old folk·blues recorded alone. In 1995 the Rolling Stones recorded “Like a Rolling Stone” anew; in early 1998 he shared bills with Van Morrison, and in May of that year he set out on a West Coast tour with Joni Mitchell. (Late years) Time Out of Mind, made again with Lanois in 1997, dealt with the shadows of age and death and won the Grammy for Album of the Year. Love and Theft followed in 2001, the memoir Chronicles: Volume One in 2004, and Martin Scorsese's documentary No Direction Home in 2005, and in 2006 Modern Times reached No. 1 on the Billboard album chart for the first time in 30 years. Beginning in 2006 he spent 3 years as a radio DJ spinning old records, and in 2012 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
An album in which a voice hardened by the Never Ending Tour sings head-on about aging and death. It set him once more at the center of his times.
- Produced by Daniel Lanois at Criteria Studios in Miami. He had many musicians, among them two drummers, Jim Keltner and Brian Blade, play at the same time in one room, so the sound piles up layer upon layer like fog.
- The song on the video card is “Not Dark Yet.” Over a slow, walking beat, the lingering tones of organ and guitar spread like late-afternoon light, and the narrator speaks in the tone of a monologue, calmly accepting a life that is drawing to its close.
- The voice is rough and cracked, but it was recorded right up against the microphone, so that even the breath can be heard. Played after his 1960s recordings, it reveals the same man making the years themselves the material of song.
- The closing track, “Highlands,” runs over 16 minutes. Its story flows on above the same accompaniment loop repeated again and again, and its very length is the album's full stop.
VII. The singing poet · 2016–2026
(Nobel) In October 2016 the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition. For a while he said nothing, and in December he skipped the ceremony, citing a prior commitment. In his place Patti Smith sang “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall.” When nerves made her lose the lyrics, she apologized to the audience and took the song up again. The following year he recorded and sent in a lecture on the marks that Moby-Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey had left on his songs. (Standards) From 2015 to 2017 he recorded American standards once sung by Frank Sinatra, across three releases. Hearing him lavish care on old love songs in a voice that had been called harsh in his youth showed that, for him, song had never been only a matter of lyrics but of melody and breath. (Lockdown) In March 2020, as the world went into lockdown, he released the 17-minute “Murder Most Foul” without warning. Rough and Rowdy Ways, out in June, placed him, on the verge of eighty, at the center of critical attention once again. That same year he sold the publishing rights to the 600-odd songs he had written to Universal Music Publishing Group, and in 2022 he sold the rights to his recorded masters to Sony Music. (Archive) In 2022 he published The Philosophy of Modern Song, a book of essays on sixty-six songs by other musicians, and the same year the Bob Dylan Center, which opened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, began making his manuscripts and recordings public. In late 2024 A Complete Unknown, a film depicting the first half of his 1960s, was released. Past eighty, he keeps touring into the 2020s, still singing old songs in new arrangements.
A song released without warning in March 2020, as lockdowns were beginning. A Nobel-winning songster weaves the history of American popular music into one long recitation.
- At 16 minutes 56 seconds, it is the longest of Dylan's recordings. Even so, it reached No. 1 on Billboard's Rock Digital Song Sales chart, becoming the first chart-topping song under his name.
- With no drumbeat, piano and violin are laid down as if drifting. Because the rhythm does not push forward, the listener ends up following the flow of the words rather than the beat.
- Its delivery is closer to recitation, with almost no melody. Taking the 1963 Kennedy assassination as its starting point, it speaks calmly, as if bearing witness to the wounds of an era.
- As it moves into its later stretch, song after song and musician after musician is called by name, unfolding like a catalogue of American popular music. Note down the names as you listen, and it becomes a journey through music history in itself.
Lesser-known stories
(Elston Gunn) In the summer of 1959, before the folk legend began, he briefly joined the band of the rising rock-and-roll singer Bobby Vee in Fargo, North Dakota, as a pianist under the stage name Elston Gunn. Vee recalled that it didn't last long, since many of the venues had no piano. Dylan remembered Vee warmly in Chronicles, and at a 2013 concert in St. Paul, Minnesota, he introduced Vee in the audience and then sang his song “Suzie Baby.” Because of his early image as a wandering folk singer, his rock-and-roll days long remained a mere footnote. (Pseudonym) In 1963, because his contract barred him from using his real name on another label's record, he took part in an album released by the folk magazine Broadside under the alias Blind Boy Grunt. The name, mimicking the nicknames of old blues singers, shows how early he took pleasure in wearing masks. (Iron and brush) He has painted since the 1960s. The cover painting of The Band's first album, Music from Big Pink, is his as well. He also welded scrap metal into iron gate sculptures and exhibited them at London's Halcyon Gallery in 2013, saying that growing up in iron-ore country, he had always kept iron close. Overshadowed by his music, this work is little known outside the art world. (Radio) From 2006 to 2009 he hosted roughly a hundred episodes of the satellite radio show Theme Time Radio Hour. Choosing one theme at a time, such as weather, coffee or money, he spun blues·country·doo-wop records and added brief stories. That a man known for saying little turned out to be a talkative DJ shows how vast a pile of records his music stands on.
Glossary 📚🔎
Folk revival
(Word origin) Folk shares a root with the German Volk and means people, the common folk. Revival comes from the Latin for coming back (re) to life (vivere), and means a reawakening, a renewal. (In rock) The movement, from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, in which American college campuses and coffeehouses sought out and sang old folk songs anew. The songs of older singers like Woody Guthrie found fresh love among the young, and Bob Dylan and Joan Baez emerged from this current. It is like the day your classmates suddenly start singing, as a fad, the old nursery songs your grandmother used to sing. (Elsewhere) In theater and film, revival means bringing a long-ago work back to the stage.
Protest song
(Word origin) Protest combines the Latin pro (before) and testari (to testify), meaning to bear witness openly before others. From there it came to mean objection and resistance. (In rock) A song that raises its voice against social problems such as war, racial discrimination and poverty. Dylan's songs of the early 1960s are the classic examples, and people sang them together at civil rights rallies. If a whole class turned a petition to change the school lunches into a song and sang it together, that would be a small protest song.
Folk rock
(In rock) Music that adds electric guitar and drums to the lyrics and melodies of folk, once sung to acoustic guitar, and plays them with the sound of a rock band. The name spread in 1965 when the Byrds scored a big hit by arranging Dylan's “Mr. Tambourine Man” for a shimmering twelve-string electric guitar. It is like putting a new ingredient such as cheese into the kimbap you always eat and getting a taste that is familiar yet new.
Session musician
(Word origin) Session comes from the Latin sessio, a sitting, and means a stretch of time in which people sit and work together. (In rock) A professional musician who belongs to no particular band and is called in to play whenever there is a recording. Their specialty is reading charts quickly and locking in at once even on songs they have never heard. Nashville session musicians played on Dylan's Blonde on Blonde. Think of the piano teacher brought in specially to accompany the school play, rather than a classmate. (Elsewhere) At meetings and conferences a session is one segment of the program; on computers it is the state of being connected.
Bootleg
(Word origin) Bootleg originally referred to the leg of a boot. Because 19th-century American smugglers hid bottles of liquor in their boot tops to sell them, the word came to mean an illegal item made in secret. (In rock) A record that secretly presses recordings the record company never officially released, in other words a pirate edition. Great White Wonder, a 1969 collection of Dylan's unreleased recordings, is counted as the most famous early rock bootleg. It is like a video a friend secretly shot at the school talent show and passed around without permission. Columbia later began compiling such unreleased recordings itself and issuing them as the official Bootleg Series. (Elsewhere) In America, bootleg still refers to moonshine and illegal copies of all kinds.
Gospel
(Word origin) Gospel comes from the Old English gōdspel, that is, 'good news.' Rendered in Hanja it becomes 福音 (bogeum, 'blessed tidings'). (In rock) A music of praise that grew up in Black American churches, marked by powerful choirs, hand-clapping, and call-and-response singing. Many rock and soul singers learned to sing in this music. Beginning in 1979, Dylan released gospel-flavored albums steeped in his faith over the course of several years. Think of the swelling thrill at a choir contest when one voice sings out first and the whole class answers back at full volume. (Elsewhere) In everyday English it also means a truth beyond question.
Open tuning
(In rock) A way of tuning the guitar strings to pitches other than the usual ones, so that strumming them without pressing any string with the left hand still rings out a chord. The open strings resonate together, making the sound broad and rich, and you can change chords by laying a single finger across all the strings. Dylan's “Tangled Up in Blue” is known to have been played this way. Picture a recorder altered so that, with not a single hole covered, it sounds a do-mi-sol chord all on its own.