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The following biography
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Free Encyclopedia.”
Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman May
24, 1941) is widely regarded as one of America's greatest popular
songwriters. 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").
More broadly, Dylan is credited with
expanding the vocabulary of popular music, moving it beyond traditional
boy-and-girl themes into the heady realms of politics/social commentary,
philosophy. In doing so he created a modern style which combines lyrical
stream of consciousness with often absurdist social and political
moralizing, defying folk music convention and appealing widely to the
counterculture of the time. This innovation was consistent with Dylan's
steadfast devotion to the richest traditions of American song, from folk
and country/blues to rock 'n' roll and rockabilly, to Gaelic balladry,
even jazz, swing, and Broadway.
* * * *
Music career and personal life
Beginnings
Dylan was born and spent
his earliest years in Duluth, Minnesota; After his father Abraham was
stricken with polio, the family returned to nearby Hibbing, his mother
Beatty's home town, as Robert neared his sixth birthday. His
grandparents were Lithuanian, Russian and Ukranian Jewish emigrants, and
his parents were part of the area's small but close-knit Jewish
community.
Dylan spent much of his
youth listening to the radio, at first the powerful blues and country
music stations beamed all the way from New Orleans and, later, early
rock and roll. He made his earliest known recordings (with two friends)
on Christmas Eve 1956, in a department store booth, singing verses of
songs by Carl Perkins, Little Richard, Lloyd Price, The Penguins, and
others. Dylan formed several bands while in high school; the first, The
Shadow Blasters, was short-lived, but the second, the Golden Chords,
proved more durable and more successful. In 1959 he toured briefly,
under the name of Elston Gunnn with Bobby Vee, playing piano and
supplying handclaps.
An able but not outstanding
student, he started university studies in 1959 in Minneapolis, where he
was actively involved in the local Dinkytown folk music circuit. 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.
Dylan quit college at the
end of his freshman year, but stayed in Minneapolis, working the folk
circuit there, with temporary sojourns in Denver, Colorado and Chicago,
Illinois. 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.
At the time his voice,
musicianship and songwriting were still raw. 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, specializing 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.
While undeniably a fine
interpreter of traditional songs, Dylan was hardly a "good" singer under
the narrow strictures of American popular-commercial music; many of his
songs first reached the public through versions by other artists. Joan
Baez, a friend and sometime lover, 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 -- a sort of "po' boy adrift
in the wide world" posture that rapidly changed to hipster arbiter of
all things cool and uncool.
Protest and another side
By 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, politicized 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 renunciation
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.
By 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.
Perhaps inevitably, then,
his 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 characterized by Allen Ginsberg
as "chains of flashing images"; "My Back Pages" even more personally
attacks the simplistic and arch seriousness 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 up-tempo 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.
Creative height, motorcycle crash
The single "Like a Rolling
Stone" was a US hit, cementing his reputation as a lyricist; at over six
minutes, devoid of a bridge, the song also helped to expand the limits
of hit radio. Its signature sound, with a full, jangling band and a
simple organ riff, would characterize his next album, Highway 61
Revisited (titled after the road that led from his native Minnesota to
the musical hotbed of New Orleans; and referencing any number of blues
songs; e.g. Mississippi Fred McDowell's "61 Highway."). The songs were
in the same vein as the hit single, surreal litanies of the grotesque
flavored by Mike Bloomfield's blues guitar, a tight rhythm section and
Dylan's obvious enjoyment of the sessions. Electric amplification and
the blues-rock backbeat ruled this album and all thought of Dylan
remaining exclusively in the "new folk" category should have been
abandoned. The closing song, "Desolation Row", is a lengthy apocalyptic
vision with references to many figures of Western culture.
In support of the record,
Dylan was booked for two US concerts, and set about assembling a band.
Bloomfield was unwilling to leave the Butterfield Band, so Dylan mixed
Al Kooper and Harvey Brooks from his studio crew with bar-band stalwarts
Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm, best known for backing Ronnie Hawkins.
In August 1965 at Forest Hills Auditorium, the group were heckled from
an audience who, Newport notwithstanding, still demanded the acoustic
troubadour of previous years; their reception on the 3rd of September at
the Hollywood Bowl was more uniformly favorable.
Neither Kooper nor Brooks
wanted to go on the road steadily with Dylan, and he was unable to lure
his preferred band, a crew of west coast musicians best known for
backing Johnny Rivers, featuring guitarist James Burton and drummer
Mickey Jones, away from their regular commitments. Dylan then hired
Robertson and Helm's full band, the Hawks, for his tour group, and began
a string of studio sessions with them in an effort to record the
follow-up to Highway 61 Revisited.
Dylan secretly married 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 Bob
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 undertook an
ambitious "world tour" of Australia and Europe in the spring of 1966.
The first half of these concerts were solo acoustic. The second half,
backed by the Hawks, provoked much jeering and slow handclapping. The
tour culminated in a famously raucous confrontation with his audience at
the Manchester Free Trade Hall in England. Immortalized mistakenly as
the "Royal Albert Hall" concert, the recording was officially released
in 1998. At the climax of the concert, a folk fan angry that Dylan had
adopted an electric sound, shouted "Judas!" from the audience, and Dylan
responded, "I don't believe you! You're a liar!" before turning to the
band and exhorting them to "Play fuckin' loud!" as they launched into
the last song of the night —"Like a Rolling Stone".
After his European tour,
Dylan returned to New York but the pressures on him continued to
increase: his publisher was demanding a finished manuscript of the
poem/novel Tarantula, 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. 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.
Once Dylan was well enough
to resume creative work, he began editing footage into Eat the Document,
a rarely exhibited follow-up to Don't Look Back. He began recording
music with the Hawks at his home and, legendarily, the basement of the
Hawks' nearby "Big Pink". The relaxed atmosphere yielded renditions of
many of Dylan's favored old and new songs and some newly written pieces.
These originals, at first compiled as demos for other artists to record,
began to circulate on their own merits. Columbia belatedly released
selections from them in 1975 as The Basement Tapes.
Unsurprisingly, Dylan's
official output appeared strongly influenced by his changed lifestyle.
The first album he released after the accident, John Wesley Harding
(1967), was a contemplative record set in a landscape which drew on both
the American West and the Old Testament. It included "All Along The
Watchtower" with lyrics derived from the Book of Isaiah (21; 5 – 9). The
song was later immortalized by Jimi Hendrix in a version that Dylan
himself has acknowledged as definitive. The sparse structure and
instrumentation, coupled with lyrics which took the Judeo-Christian
tradition seriously, marked a departure not only from Dylan's own work,
but from the escalating psychedelic fervor of the 1960s musical culture.
Woody Guthrie died in
October 1967, and 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).
The 1970s
In the early 1970s Dylan's
output was of varied and unpredictable quality. "What is this shit?"
notoriously asked Greil Marcus, Rolling Stone magazine writer and Dylan
loyalist, about 1970's Self Portrait, a poorly received double LP
including few original songs that forced critics to re-evaluate Dylan's
career and reputation. Later that year, Dylan released New Morning,
something of a return to form. His unannounced appearance at George
Harrison's 1971 Concert For Bangladesh was widely praised, but reports
of a new album and a return to touring came to nothing.
In 1972, Dylan signed onto
Sam Peckinpah's film Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, providing the
soundtracks and taking a minor role as "Alias," a minor member of
Billy's gang. "Knockin' on Heaven's Door", among Dylan's most-covered
songs, has proved much more durable than the film itself.
In 1973, after his contract
with Columbia ran out, Dylan signed with David Geffen's new Asylum
label. He recorded Planet Waves with The Band; like New Morning, Planet
Waves was initially viewed as a return to peak form, but in retrospect
appears less substantial (although "Forever Young" has proved to be one
of Dylan's most lasting songs). Columbia almost simultaneously released
Dylan, a haphazard collection of studio outtakes often termed a
"revenge" release.
In early 1974, Dylan and
the Band staged a high-profile, coast-to-coast tour of North American;
promoter Bill Graham claimed he received more ticket purchase requests
than any prior tour by any artist. The tour is documented on the Before
the Flood album, but Dylan refused to allow a tour film to be made.
After the tour, Dylan and
his wife became publicly estranged. He filled a small red notebook with
songs springing from the breakup, and in September, with the help of
John Hammond, quickly recorded the album Blood on the Tracks in the New
York City studio where his recording career began. Word of Dylan's
efforts soon leaked out, and expectations were high, but Dylan delayed
the album's release, then rerecorded half the songs in Minneapolis at
year's end. Released early in 1975, BOTT was critically acclaimed and
commercially successful, although Dylan's fans still debate the relative
merits of the ultimate release and the original recordings.
That summer, Dylan wrote
his first successful "protest" song in 12 years (an eponymous 1971
tribute to George Jackson sank almost unnoticed), championing the cause
of boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter who he believed had been wrongfully
imprisoned for a triple homicide in Paterson, New Jersey. (Carter was
retried and reconvicted in the mid-1970s, then released in 1985 when
that conviction was overturned). After visiting Carter in jail Dylan
wrote "Hurricane", a sympathetic presentation of Carter's situation.
Despite its length, the song was released as a single and performed at
every 1975 date of Dylan's next tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue. The
tour was something different: a varied evening of entertainment
featuring many performers drawn mostly from the resurgent Greenwich
Village folk scene, including T-Bone Burnett; Steven Soles; David
Mansfield; former Byrds frontman Roger McGuinn; Scarlet Rivera, a violin
player Dylan discovered while she was walking down the street to a
rehearsal, her violin case hanging on her back; and a reunion with Joan
Baez. Joni Mitchell added herself to the Revue in November, and poet
Allen Ginsberg accompanied the troupe, staging scenes for the film Dylan
was simultaneously shooting.
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.
The fall 1975 tour with the
Revue also provided the backdrop to Dylan's three hour and fifty-five
minute film Renaldo and Clara, its sprawling, improvised and frequently
baffling narrative mixed with striking concert footage and
reminiscences. Released in 1978, the movie received generally poor,
sometimes scathing reviews, and had a very brief theatrical run. Later
in that year, Dylan allowed a two-hour edit, dominated by the concert
performances, to be more widely released.
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.
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 two albums of exclusively
religious songs, and a third that seemed mostly so; of these, the first,
Slow Train Coming (1979) is generally regarded as the most accomplished.
When touring from the fall of 1979 through the spring of 1980, Dylan
refused to play secular music and delivered increasingly long
sermonettes on stage, often discussing the apocalyptic predictions of
Hal Lindsey.
Hard-working elder statesman
1980s
Doldrums set in through
much of the 1980s, with his work varying from the well-regarded (1983's
Infidels) to the dreadful (1988's Down in the Groove). Infidels was more
noteworthy for what it did not include than for what it did, as Dylan
left off the album what many consider to be one of his greatest songs,
"Blind Willie McTell", as well as "Foot of Pride", "Someone's Got a Hold
of My Heart" and "Lord Protect My Child", which were later released on
the boxed set The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased)
1961-1991. Many Dylan devotees consider an early version of the LP,
prepared by producer/guitarist Mark Knopfler, to be superior to the
final version both in performance and in song selection. The decade's
later 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 the long, clever "Brownsville Girl") to even Down in the
Groove (1988) (containing the catchy "Silvio", with lyrics written by
Grateful Dead collaborator Robert Hunter. Dylan made a number of music
videos during this period, but only "Political World," found any regular
airtime on MTV.
In late 1985, Dylan married
his longtime backup singer Carolyn Dennis (often professionally known as
Carol Dennis). Their daughter, Desiree, was born early in 1986. The
couple divorced in the early 1990s.
In 1987 he starred in
Richard Marquand's movie Hearts of Fire in which he played a washed up
rock star turned chicken farmer whose teenage lover (Fiona) leaves him
for a jaded English synth-pop sensation (Rupert Everett). The film was a
critical and commercial dud. When asked in a press conference if he had
anything to do with writing this movie Dylan replied, attempting to
stifle his laughter, "I couldn't have possibly written anything like
that."
Dylan was inducted into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. Later that spring, he took part in
the first Traveling Wilburys album project, working with Roy Orbison,
Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, and his good friend George Harrison on
lighthearted, well-selling fare. Dylan added both Lucky and Boo Wilbury
to his growing list of pseudonyms. Despite Orbison's death, the other
four Wilburys issued a sequel in 1990.
Dylan finished the decade
on a critical high note with the Daniel Lanois-produced Oh Mercy (1989).
Lanois's influence is audible throughout Oh Mercy, especially in the
ambience provided by reverb-heavy guitar tracks. "Ring Them Bells" seems
to call for Christians to maintain a visible presence in the world,
perhaps adding fuel to the debate over Dylan's religious orientation.
The track "Most of the Time", a ruminative lost love composition, was
later prominently featured in the film High Fidelity, while "What Was It
You Wanted?" was a love song that doubled as a dry comment on the
expectations of fans.
1990s and beyond
Dylan's 1990s began with
Under the Red Sky (1990), an odd about-face from the serious Oh Mercy.
This album, dedicated to Gabby Goo Goo, puzzlingly included several
apparently childish songs, including "Under the Red Sky" and "Wiggle
Wiggle", all recorded straight-on without any of the studio wizardry of
"Oh Mercy". The dedication can be explained as a nickname for Dylan's
four-year-old daughter, but the story that the album's songs were
written for her entertainment is plainly apocryphal.
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 powerful 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-1990s. 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
jingoism.
With the quality of his
output taking a turn for the better, and a stack of songs reportedly
begun while snowed-in on his Minnesota 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, pericarditis, brought on by histoplasmosis. To his doctors'
surprise and his own he made a speedy recovery and left the hospital
saying "I really thought I'd be seeing Elvis soon." He was back on the
road by the summer.
September saw the release
of the new Lanois-produced album, Dylan's first collection of original
songs in seven years. Time Out of Mind, with its bitter assessment of
love and morbid ruminations, was highly acclaimed and achieved an
unforeseen popularity among young listeners, particularly the song "Love
Sick", later covered by The White Stripes. This collection of complex
songs won him his first solo Album of the Year Grammy Award (he was one
of numerous performers on The Concert for Bangladesh, the 1972 winner.)
The ballad "To Make You Feel My Love", covered by both Garth Brooks and
Billy Joel, generated more royalties than any song he had written since
the 1960s. Black humor is present throughout Time Out of Mind, but comes
out most on the 16 minute blues "Highlands", his longest track to date.
In 2001, his song "Things
Have Changed", penned for the movie Wonder Boys, won an Academy Award
for Best Song. For reasons unannounced, the Oscar (by some reports a
facsimile) tours with him, presiding over shows perched atop an
amplifier.
Love and Theft, an album
that explores divergent styles of American music and revisits Dylan's
own creative roots, emerged as an uplifting piece of art amidst a great
tragedy, having been released on September 11, 2001. Lyrically
adventurous and musically unprecedented in his long career, Love and
Theft, by many accounts, stands among the greatest of his work. Even
those quite familiar with his earlier work may have trouble imagining
Bob Dylan crooning, as he does on "Bye and Bye" and "Moonlight". Many
believe the album's lyrical strengths are as pronounced as in his most
famous earlier work. Though Dylan produced the record himself under the
pseudonym Jack Frost, the record's fresh sound is owed in part to the
accompanists. Tony Garnier, bassist and bandleader, had played with
Dylan for 12 years, longer than any other musician. Larry Campbell, one
of the most accomplished American guitarists of the last two decades,
played on the road with Dylan from 1997 through 2004. Guitarist Charlie
Sexton and drummer David Kemper had also toured with Dylan for years.
Keyboard player Augie Meyers, the only musician not part of Dylan's
touring band, had also played on Time Out of Mind.
2003 saw the release of the
film Masked & Anonymous, largely a joint creative venture with
television producer Larry Charles, featuring one of the largest ever
assemblages of top Hollywood stars in a single film. Dylan and Charles
co-wrote the film under the pseudonyms Rene Fontaine and Sergei Petrov.
As difficult to decipher as one of his songs, Masked & Anonymous was
panned by most major critics and had a limited run in theaters.
In 2005 preproduction began
on a film entitled I'm Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning
Dylan. The movie makes use of seven characters to represent the
different aspects of Dylan's life. The movie is to be directed by Todd
Haynes and the cast currently includes Cate Blanchett, Adrien Brody and
Richard Gere.
Recent live performances
Dylan has played over 100
dates a year for the entirety of the 1990s and the 2000s, a far heavier
schedule than most performers who started out in the 1960s. The "Never
Ending Tour" continues, anchored by long-time bassist Tony Garnier and
filled out with talented musicians better known to their peers than to
their audiences. To the dismay of some fans Dylan refuses to be a
nostalgia act; his reworked arrangements, evolving bands and
experimental vocal approaches keep the music unpredictable night after
night.
Dylan, once famous as a
guitar player, has not been playing guitar in live performance since
2002 (with very rare exceptions). Instead he chooses to play on the
keyboard, with the occasional harmonica solo. Various rumors have
circulated as to why Dylan gave up his guitar, none terribly reliable.
Dylan chooses songs from
throughout his 40 year career, seldom playing the same set twice. While
his chief place in posterity will be as the preeminent songwriter of
latter 20th century America, his roles as recording artist and performer
are cherished just as highly by his contemporaries.
Fan base
Bob Dylan's large and vocal
fan base write books, essays, 'zines, etc. 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.
The poet laureate of
Britain, Andrew Motion, is a vocal supporter of Dylan's work, as are
musicians Lou Reed, Noel Gallagher, Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, Tom
Petty, David Bowie, Ian Hunter and Neil Young. His songs have been
covered by more artists than perhaps any other musician's.
Chronicles Vol. 1
After a lengthy delay,
October 2004 saw the publishing of Bob Dylan's autobiography,
Chronicles, Vol. 1. He once again confounded expectations. Dylan wrote
three chapters about the year between his arrival in New York in 1961
and recording his first album, focusing on the brief period when he
wasn't famous while virtually ignoring the mid-1960s when his fame was
at its height. He also devoted chapters to two lesser-known albums, New
Morning (1970) and Oh Mercy (1989), which contained insights into his
collaborations with the poet Archibald MacLeish and producer Daniel
Lanois respectively. In the New Morning chapter, Dylan expresses
distaste for the label 'spokesman of a generation' and he evinces
disgust with his more fanatical followers.
Another section features
Dylan's account of a guitar strumming style in mathematical detail that
he claimed was the key to his renaissance in the 1990s. Despite the
opacity of some passages, there is an overall clarity in voice that is
generally missing in Dylan's other prose writings, and a noticeable
generosity towards friends and lovers of his early years. At the end of
the book, Dylan describes with great passion the moment when he listened
to the Brecht/Weill song ‘Pirate Jenny’, and the moment when he first
heard Robert Johnson’s recordings. In these passages, Dylan suggested
the process which ignited his own song writing gift.
Six weeks after its
publication, Chronicles, Vol. 1 was number 5 on the New York Times'
Hardcover Non-Fiction best seller list and climbing. Simultaneously,
Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com reported it as their number 2 best
seller among all categories. Chronicles Vol. 1 is the first of three
planned volumes.
* * * *
Known pseudonyms
Elston Gunnn (the spelling
an eccentricity of his adolescence)
Bob Dylan (now legal name)
Blind Boy Grunt
Bob Landy
Robert Milkwood Thomas
Lucky Wilbury
Boo Wilbury
Jack Frost
Sergei Petrov
* * * *
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