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Bob Dylan

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Performers and composers

   Bob Dylan
   Dylan performing at St. Lawrence University on November 26, 1963.
   Dylan performing at St. Lawrence University on November 26, 1963.
   Background information
   Birth name Robert Allen Zimmerman
   Also known as Elston Gunn, Blind Boy Grunt, Lucky Wilbury, Elmer
   Johnson, Sergei Petrov, Jack Frost, et al.
   Born May 24, 1941 (age 65)
   United States Duluth, Minnesota, USA
   Genre(s) Folk, rock, blues, country
   Occupation(s) Singer- songwriter, author, poet, artist, actor,
   screenwriter, disc jockey
   Instrument(s) Vocals, guitar, harmonica, keyboards
   Years active 1956- Present
   Label(s) Columbia
   Associated
   acts Joan Baez, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Al Kooper, The Band,
   Rolling Thunder Revue, Traveling Wilburys, The Grateful Dead.
   Website www.bobdylan.com

   Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941) is an American
   singer-songwriter, author, musician and poet who has been a major
   figure in popular music for five decades. Much of Dylan's best known
   work is from the 1960s when he became an informal documentarian and
   reluctant figurehead of American unrest. Some of his songs, such as "
   Blowin' in the Wind" and " The Times They Are a-Changin'", became
   anthems of the anti-war and civil rights movements. Forty years later,
   his 2001 album "Love and Theft", reached the top five on the charts in
   the U.S. and the UK. His latest studio album, Modern Times, released on
   August 29, 2006, became his first US #1 album in thirty years, making
   him the oldest living person to top the charts at the age of 65.

   Dylan's early lyrics incorporated politics, social commentary,
   philosophy and literary influences, defying existing pop music
   conventions and appealing widely to the counterculture of the time.
   While expanding and personalizing musical styles, he has shown
   steadfast devotion to many traditions of American song, from folk and
   country/ blues to rock 'n' roll and rockabilly, to Celtic balladry,
   even jazz, swing and Broadway.

   Dylan performs with the guitar, keyboard and harmonica. Backed by a
   changing lineup of musicians, he has toured steadily since the late
   1980s on what has been dubbed the Never Ending Tour. He has also
   recently performed alongside other major artists, such as Paul Simon,
   Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Jack White and Eric Clapton.
   Although his contributions as performer and recording artist have been
   central to his career, his songwriting is generally held as his highest
   accomplishment.

   His career accomplishments have been recognized with the Polar Music
   Prize, the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, Kennedy Center Honours,
   and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Nashville
   Songwriters and Songwriters Hall of Fame. He has even been nominated
   several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan was listed as
   one of TIME Magazine's 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

Biography

Beginnings

   Robert Zimmerman in high school
   Enlarge
   Robert Zimmerman in high school

   Robert Zimmerman was born in Duluth, Minnesota, and was raised there
   and in Hibbing, Minnesota, on the Mesabi Iron Range northwest of Lake
   Superior. His grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Lithuania,
   Russia, and Ukraine, and his parents, Abraham Zimmerman and Beatrice
   Stone (Beatty), were part of the area's small but close-knit Jewish
   community. He lived in Duluth until age seven, when his father was
   stricken with polio. The family returned to nearby Hibbing, Beatty's
   hometown, where Robert Zimmerman spent the rest of his childhood.

   Zimmerman spent much of his youth listening to the radio—first to the
   powerful blues and country stations broadcasting from Shreveport and
   later, to early rock and roll. He formed several bands while at high
   school: the first, The Shadow Blasters, was short-lived (according to
   legend this band tried to play at the high school talent show, but did
   not make the cut); the second, The Golden Chords, lasted longer and
   played covers including "Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay" at their high
   school talent show. In his 1959 school year book, Robert Zimmerman
   listed his ambition as "To join Little Richard." The same year, he
   performed two dates under the name of Elston Gunn with Bobby Vee,
   playing piano and providing handclaps.

   Robert Zimmerman enrolled at the University of Minnesota in September
   1959 and moved to Minneapolis. His musical focus on rock and roll gave
   way to an interest in subtler, Gael-inflected American folk music,
   typically performed with an acoustic guitar. He soon became actively
   involved in the local Dinkytown folk music circuit, fraternizing with
   local folk enthusiasts and occasionally "borrowing" many of their
   albums. During his Dinkytown days, Zimmerman began introducing himself
   as "Bob Dylan". In his autobiography, Chronicles (2004), Dylan wrote:
   "What I was going to do as soon as I left home was just call myself
   Robert Allen.... It sounded like a Scottish king and I liked it."
   However, by reading Downbeat magazine, he discovered that there was
   already a saxophonist called David Allyn. A little later he became
   acquainted with the work of writer Dylan Thomas and made a choice
   between Robert Allyn and Robert Dylan: "I couldn't decide—the letter D
   came on stronger" he explained. He decided on "Bob" because there were
   several Bobbies in popular music at the time.

   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, he headed for New York City to perform and to visit
   his ailing musical idol Woody Guthrie in a New Jersey hospital. Guthrie
   had been a huge revelation to Dylan and was a major influence. In the
   hospital room, Dylan also met Woody's old road-buddy Ramblin' Jack
   Elliott visiting Guthrie the day after returning from his trip to
   Europe. Bob and Jack became friends and much of Guthrie's repertoire
   was actually channelled through Elliott. Dylan paid a fulsome tribute
   to Elliott in Chronicles (2005).

   After initially playing mostly in small "basket" clubs for little pay,
   he gained some public recognition after a positive review in The New
   York Times by critic Robert Shelton. Shelton's review and word-of-mouth
   around Greenwich Village led to legendary music business figure John
   Hammond's signing Dylan to Columbia Records that October.

   His performances, like his first Columbia album Bob Dylan (1962),
   consisted of familiar folk, blues and gospel material combined with
   some of his own songs. As he continued to record for Columbia, he
   recorded more than a dozen songs for Broadside Magazine a folk music
   magazine and record label, under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt. In
   August 1962, Robert Allen Zimmerman went to the Supreme Court building
   in New York and changed his name to Robert Dylan.

   By the time his next record, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, was released
   in 1963, he had begun to make his name as both singer and songwriter.
   Many of the songs on this album were labelled protest songs, inspired
   partly by Woody Guthrie and influenced by Pete Seeger's passion for
   topical songs. "Oxford Town" was a sardonic account of James Meredith's
   ordeal as the first black student to risk enrollment at the University
   of Mississippi.

   His most famous song of the time, " Blowin' in the Wind", partially
   derived its melody from the traditional slave song "No More Auction
   Block", and coupled this to Dylan's lyrics questioning the social and
   political status quo. The song was widely recorded and became an
   international hit for Peter, Paul and Mary, setting a precedent for
   other artists. While Dylan's topical songs solidified his early
   reputation, Freewheelin' also included a mixture of love songs and
   jokey, frequently surreal talking blues. Humor was a large part of
   Dylan's persona, and the range of material on the album impressed many
   listeners including the Beatles. George Harrison said, "We just played
   it, just wore it out. The content of the song lyrics and just the
   attitude - it was incredibly original and wonderful."

   The Freewheelin' song " A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall", built melodically
   from a loose adaptation of the stanza tune of the folk ballad Lord
   Randall, with its veiled references to nuclear apocalypse, gained even
   more resonance as the Cuban missile crisis developed only a few weeks
   after Dylan began performing it. Like " Blowin' in the Wind", " A Hard
   Rain's a-Gonna Fall" marked an important new direction in modern
   songwriting, blending a stream-of-consciousness, imagist lyrical attack
   with traditional folk progressions to create a sound and sense that
   struck listeners as somehow new and ancient simultaneously. Soon after
   the release of Freewheelin, Dylan emerged as a dominant figure of the
   so-called "new folk movement" headquartered in Lower Manhattan's
   Greenwich Village.
   With Joan Baez during the Civil Rights March in Washington D.C., 1963
   Enlarge
   With Joan Baez during the Civil Rights March in Washington D.C., 1963

   While an interpreter of traditional songs, Dylan's singing voice was
   unusual and untrained and his phrasing as a vocalist was eccentric. He
   sang his songs in a style that hearkened back to the folk-singers of
   the 1920s and 30s, which was almost unheard-of in the music industry of
   the time. Many of his most famous early songs first reached the public
   through versions by other performing musicians who were more
   immediately palatable. Joan Baez, celebrated as the queen of the folk
   movement, became Dylan's advocate as well as his lover. In addition to
   jumpstarting Dylan's performance career by inviting him onstage during
   her concerts, she recorded several of his early songs and was
   influential in bringing Dylan to national and international prominence.

   Others who recorded and released his songs around this time included
   The Byrds, Sonny and Cher, The Hollies, Peter, Paul and Mary, Manfred
   Mann, The Brothers Four, Judy Collins and Herman's Hermits, most
   attempting to impart more of a pop feel and rhythm to the songs where
   Dylan and Baez performed them mostly as sparse folk pieces keying
   rhythmically off the vocals. These covers were so ubiquitous by the
   mid-1960s that CBS started to promote him with the tag "Nobody Sings
   Dylan Like Dylan".

Protest and another side

   By 1963, Dylan and Baez were becoming increasingly prominent in the
   civil rights movement, singing together at rallies including the March
   on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his " I have a dream"
   speech. In January, he appeared on British television in the BBC play
   Madhouse on Castle Street, playing the part of a "hobo guitar-player".
   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 accompanied by two love songs, "Boots of Spanish Leather" and "One
   Too Many Mornings", and the renunciation of "Restless Farewell". The
   Brechtian-influenced " The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" describes
   a young socialite's killing of a hotel maid. The song never explicitly
   mentions race, but many sources wrote it leaves no doubt that the
   killer is white, the victim black.

   By the end of 1963, 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 every man) in
   assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

   His next album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, recorded on a single June
   evening in 1964, had a lighter mood than its predecessor. The surreal
   Dylan reemerged on "I Shall Be Free #10" and "Motorpsycho Nightmare",
   accompanied by a sense of humor that has often reappeared over the
   years. "Spanish Harlem Incident" and "To Ramona" were love songs, "I
   Don't Believe You" a rock and roll song played on acoustic guitar, and
   "It Ain't Me Babe" a rejection of the role his reputation thrust at
   him. His newest direction was signaled by three lengthy songs: the
   impressionistic " Chimes of Freedom" 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"
   attacks the simplistic and arch seriousness of his own earlier topical
   songs; and " Mr. Tambourine Man", written before many songs included on
   Another Side but held back for Dylan's next release.

   In 1964-65 Dylan’s appearance changed rapidly as he made his move from
   leading contemporary song-writer of the folk scene to rock’n’roll star.
   His scruffy jeans and work shirts were replaced by a Carnaby Street
   wardrobe. A London reporter wrote: “Hair that would set the teeth of a
   comb on edge. A loud shirt that would dim the neon lights of Leicester
   Square. He looks like an undernourished cockatoo.” Dylan also began to
   play with interviewers in increasingly cruel and surreal ways.
   Appearing on the Les Crane TV show and asked about a movie he was
   planning to make, he told Crane it would be a cowboy horror movie.
   Asked if he played the cowboy, Dylan replied. “No, I play my mother.”

   His March 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home was a huge stylistic
   leap. Influenced by The Animals (whose recording of " House of the
   Rising Sun" was racing up the US charts), and the rock and roll of his
   youth, the album featured his first significant up-tempo rock songs.
   The 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 cinéma vérité presentation of
   Dylan's 1965 tour, Dont Look Back. Its free association lyrics both
   harked back to the manic energy of Beat poetry and were a forerunner of
   rap and hip-hop. In 1969, the militant Weatherman group took their name
   from a line in " Subterranean Homesick Blues" ("You don't need a
   weatherman to know which way the wind blows").

   The second side of the album was a different matter, including four
   lengthy acoustic songs whose undogmatic political, social and personal
   concerns are illuminated with the poetic imagery that became another
   trademark. One of these songs, " Mr. Tambourine Man", had already been
   a hit for The Byrds, albeit in a truncated form, while "Gates of Eden",
   "It's All over Now Baby Blue", and "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only
   Bleeding)" have been fixtures in Dylan's live performances for most of
   his career.

   That summer Bob Dylan made history by performing his first electric set
   (since his high school days) with a pickup group drawn mostly from the
   Paul Butterfield Blues Band, i.e. Mike Bloomfield, guitar, Sam Lay,
   drums, Jerome Arnold, bass, plus Al Kooper, organ and Barry Goldberg,
   piano, at the Newport Folk Festival. Dylan had appeared at Newport
   twice before in 1963 and 1964, and two wildly divergent accounts of the
   crowd's response in 1965 emerged. The settled fact is that Dylan, met
   with a mix of cheering and booing, left the stage after only three
   songs. As one version of the legend has it, the boos were from the
   outraged folk fans Dylan alienated by his electric guitar. An
   alternative account has it that audience members were upset by poor
   sound quality and a surprisingly short set. Whatever sparked the
   crowd's disfavor, Dylan soon reemerged and sang two much better
   received solo acoustic numbers, "It's All over Now, Baby Blue" and "Mr.
   Tambourine Man".

   The significance of Dylan's 1965 Newport performance was that he
   outraged the folk music establishment. Ewan MacColl wrote in Sing Out!:
   "Our traditional songs and ballads are the creations of extraordinarily
   talented artists working inside traditions formulated over time... But
   what of Bobby Dylan?... Only a non-critical audience, nourished on the
   watery pap of pop music could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel."
   Dylan had outlined his position in the sleeve notes for Bringing It All
   Back Home where he wrote, "i accept chaos. i am not sure whether it
   accepts me."

   Many in the folk revival had embraced the idea that life equalled art,
   that a certain kind of life defined by suffering and social exclusion
   in fact replaced art. Folksong collectors and singers often presented
   folk music as an innocent characteristic of lives lived without
   reflection or the false consciousness of capitalism. This philosophy,
   both genteel and paternalistic, was ultimately what Dylan had run afoul
   of by 1965. But at an Austin press conference in September of that
   year, on the day of his first performance with Levon and the Hawks, he
   described his music not as a pop charts-bound break with the past, but
   as “historical-traditional music.” Dylan later told interviewer Nat
   Hentoff: “What folk music is... is based on myths and the Bible and
   plague and famine and all kinds of things like that which are nothing
   but mystery and you can see it in all the songs….All these songs about
   roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese
   and swans that turn into angels…and seven years of this and eight years
   of that and it’s all really something that nobody can touch....(the
   songs) are not going to die.” It was this mystical, living tradition of
   songs that served as the palette for Bringing It All Back Home and
   subsequent collections, which would seem to confer their status as
   'historical-traditional'.

Creative height, motorcycle crash

   The single " Like a Rolling Stone" was a U.S. and UK hit; at over six
   minutes and devoid of a bridge, it helped to expand the limits of songs
   played on hit radio. In 2004, Rolling Stone listed it at number one on
   its list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. Its signature sound —
   with a full, jangling band and an organ riff — characterized his next
   album, Highway 61 Revisited. Titled after the road that led from
   Dylan's native Minnesota to the musical hotbed of New Orleans, the
   songs passed stylistically through the birthplace of blues, the
   Mississippi Delta, and referenced any number of blues songs. For
   example, 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 rhythm section and
   Dylan's obvious enjoyment of the sessions. The closing song, "
   Desolation Row", is an apocalyptic vision with references to many
   figures of Western culture.

   In support of the record, Dylan was booked for two U.S. concerts and
   set about assembling a band. Mike 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
   Tennis Stadium, the group was heckled by an audience who, Newport
   notwithstanding, still demanded the acoustic troubadour of previous
   years. The band's reception on September 3 at the Hollywood Bowl was
   more uniformly favorable.

   Neither Kooper nor Brooks wanted to tour 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 on January 6, 1966. Dylan and Lownds
   had four children in total: Jesse, Anna, Samuel, and Jakob (born
   December 9, 1969). Dylan also adopted Sara Lownds' first daughter Maria
   Lownds (born October 21, 1961) from a prior marriage. In the 1990s the
   youngest of the pair's children, Jakob Dylan, became well known as the
   lead singer of the band The Wallflowers. Jesse Dylan is a film director
   and a successful businessman.

   While Dylan and the Hawks met increasingly receptive audiences on tour,
   their studio efforts floundered. Producer Bob Johnston had been trying
   to persuade Dylan to record in Nashville for some time. In February
   1966 Dylan agreed and Johnston surrounded him with a cadre of top-notch
   session men. At Dylan's insistence, Robertson and Kooper came down from
   New York City to play on the sessions. The Nashville sessions created
   what Dylan later called "that thin wild mercury sound" - Blonde on
   Blonde (1966). Al Kooper said the record was a masterpiece because it
   was "taking two cultures and smashing them together with a huge
   explosion": the musical world of Nashville, and the world of the
   "quintessential New York hipster" Bob Dylan.

   For many critics, Dylan's mid-'60s trilogy of albums – Bringing It All
   Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde – represents one
   of the great cultural achievements of the 20th century. In Mike
   Marqusee's words: "Between late 1964 and the summer of 1966, Dylan
   created a body of work that remains unique. Drawing on folk, blues,
   country, R&B, rock’n’roll, gospel, British beat, symbolist, modernist
   and Beat poetry, surrealism and Dada, advertising jargon and social
   commentary, Fellini and Mad magazine, he forged a coherent and original
   artistic voice and vision. The beauty of these albums retains the power
   to shock and console."

   Dylan undertook a "world tour" of Australia and Europe in the spring of
   1966. Each show was split into two parts. Dylan performed solo during
   the first half, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar and harmonica.
   In the second half, backed by the Hawks, he played high voltage
   electric music. This contrast provoked many fans, who jeered and slowly
   handclapped.

   The tour culminated in a famously raucous confrontation between Dylan
   and his audience at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in England
   (officially released on CD in 1998 as The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob
   Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert). At the climax of the
   concert, one fan, angry with Dylan's electric sound, shouted: " Judas!"
   and Dylan responded, "I don't believe you. You're a liar!" He turned to
   the band and, just within earshot of the microphone, articulated with
   almost mathematical precision: "Play ... fuckin' ... loud!" They then
   launched into the last song of the night — "Like a Rolling Stone" —
   with an apocalyptic intensity.

   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. Manager Albert Grossman had
   already scheduled an extensive summer/fall concert tour. On July 29,
   1966, while Dylan rode his Triumph 500 motorcycle in Woodstock, New
   York, its brakes locked, throwing him to the ground. Though the extent
   of his injuries were never fully disclosed, it was confirmed that he
   indeed broke his neck. Dylan used an extended convalescence to escape
   the pressures of stardom: "When I had that motorcycle accident ... I
   woke up and caught my senses, I realized that I was just workin' for
   all these leeches. And I really didn't want to do that."

   Once Dylan was well enough to resume creative work, he began editing
   footage of his 1966 tour into Eat the Document, a rarely exhibited
   follow-up to Don't Look Back. In 1967 he began recording music with the
   Hawks at his home and 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 songs, initially
   compiled as demos for other artists to record, provided hit singles for
   Julie Driscoll, The Byrds, and Manfred Mann. Columbia belatedly
   released selections from them in 1975 as The Basement Tapes. Later in
   1967, the Hawks (soon to be rechristened as The Band) independently
   recorded the album Music from Big Pink, thus beginning a long and
   successful recording and performing career of their own.

   In December 1967 Dylan released John Wesley Harding, his first album
   since the motorcycle crash. It was a quiet, contemplative record of
   shorter songs, set in a landscape which drew on both the American West
   and the Bible. 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. It included " All
   Along the Watchtower", with lyrics derived from the Book of Isaiah
   (21:5–9). The song was later recorded by Jimi Hendrix, whose celebrated
   version Dylan himself acknowledged as definitive in the liner notes to
   Biograph. Dylan live has performed Hendrix's arrangement since 1974.

   Woody Guthrie died in October 1967, and Dylan made his first public
   appearances in eighteen months at a pair of Guthrie memorial concerts
   the following January.

   Dylan's next release, Nashville Skyline (1969), was virtually a
   mainstream country record featuring instrumental backing by Nashville
   musicians, a mellow-voiced, contented Dylan, a duet with Johnny Cash,
   and the hit single " Lay Lady Lay". In 1969 Dylan appeared on the first
   episode of Cash's new television show and then gave a high-profile
   performance at the Isle of Wight rock festival (after rejecting
   overtures to appear at the Woodstock Festival far closer to his home).

1970s

   In the early 1970s critics charged Dylan's output was of varied and
   unpredictable quality. "What is this shit?" Rolling Stone magazine
   writer and Dylan loyalist Greil Marcus notoriously asked, upon first
   listening to 1970's Self Portrait. In general, Self Portrait, a double
   LP including few original songs, was poorly received. Later that year,
   Dylan released New Morning, which some considered a return to form. His
   unannounced appearance at George Harrison's 1971 Concert for Bangladesh
   was widely praised, but reports of a new album, a television special,
   and a return to touring came to nothing.

   In 1972 Dylan signed onto Sam Peckinpah's film Pat Garrett and Billy
   the Kid, providing the songs (see Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
   (album)) and taking a role as "Alias", a minor member of Billy's gang.
   The most memorable song, " Knockin' on Heaven's Door", has proved its
   durability, having been covered by over 150 recording artists.

   Dylan signed with David Geffen's new Asylum label when his contract
   with Columbia Records expired in 1973, and he recorded Planet Waves
   with The Band while rehearsing for a major tour. The album included two
   versions of "Forever Young". The phrase may have been lifted from John
   Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn ("For ever panting, and for ever young")
   but Dylan turned it into an emotional work which has become one of his
   most popular concert songs. Columbia Records simultaneously released
   Dylan, a haphazard collection of studio outtakes (almost exclusively
   cover songs), which was widely interpreted as a churlish response to
   Dylan's signing with a rival record label. In January 1974 Dylan and
   The Band embarked on their high-profile, coast-to-coast Bob Dylan and
   The Band 1974 Tour of North America; promoter Bill Graham claimed he
   received more ticket purchase requests than for any prior tour by any
   artist. A live double album of the tour, Before the Flood, was released
   on Asylum Records.

   After the tour, Dylan and his wife became publicly estranged. He filled
   a small red notebook with songs about his marital problems, and quickly
   recorded a new album entitled Blood on the Tracks in September 1974.
   Word of Dylan's efforts soon leaked out, and expectations were high.
   But Dylan delayed the album's release, and then re-recorded half of the
   songs in Minneapolis by year's end.

   Released in early 1975, Blood on the Tracks received mixed reviews. In
   the NME, Nick Kent described "the accompaniments [as] often so trashy
   they sound like mere practise takes." In Rolling Stone, reviewer Jon
   Landau wrote that "the record has been made with typical shoddiness".
   Over the years critics have come to see it as one of Dylan's greatest
   achievements, perhaps the only serious rival to his great mid 60s
   trilogy of albums. In Salon.com, Bill Wyman wrote: "Blood on the Tracks
   is his only flawless album and his best produced; the songs, each of
   them, are constructed in disciplined fashion. It is his kindest album
   and most dismayed, and seems in hindsight to have achieved a sublime
   balance between the logorrhea-plagued excesses of his mid-'60s output
   and the self-consciously simple compositions of his post-accident
   years." The songs have been described as Dylan's most intimate and
   direct.

   That summer Dylan wrote his first successful "protest" song in twelve
   years, championing the cause of boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter who he
   believed had been wrongfully imprisoned for a triple homicide in
   Paterson, New Jersey (an eponymous 1971 tribute to George Jackson, a
   Black Panther who was killed in prison, sank almost unnoticed). After
   visiting Carter in jail, Dylan wrote " Hurricane", presenting the case
   for Carter's innocence. Despite its 8½ minute length, the song was
   released as a single, peaking within the top forty on the U.S.
   Billboard Chart, and performed at every 1975 date of Dylan's next tour,
   the Rolling Thunder Revue. The tour was a varied evening of
   entertainment featuring many performers drawn mostly from the resurgent
   Greenwich Village folk scene, including T-Bone Burnett; Allen Ginsberg;
   Ramblin' Jack Elliott; Steven Soles; David Mansfield; former Byrds
   frontman Roger McGuinn. British guitarist Mick Ronson ; 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 (the tour marked Baez and Dylan's first joint performance in
   more than a decade). 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. Sam Shepard was
   initially hired as the writer for this film, but ended up accompanying
   the tour as informal chronicler.

   Running through late 1975 and again through early 1976, the tour
   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 the LP Hard Rain; no concert album from the
   better-received and better-known opening half of the tour was released
   until 2002, when Live 1975 appeared as the fifth volume in Dylan's
   official Bootleg Series.

   The fall 1975 tour with the Revue also provided the backdrop to Dylan's
   nearly four-hour film Renaldo and Clara, a sprawling and improvised
   narrative mixed with 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 acclaimed cinematic chronicle of this
   show, The Last Waltz, was released in 1978 and included about half of
   Dylan's set.

   Dylan and Lownds were divorced on June 29, 1977, though they reportedly
   remained in regular contact for many years and, by some accounts, even
   to the present day.

   Dylan's 1978 album Street Legal was lyrically one of his more complex
   and cohesive; it suffered, however, 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. He released two albums of
   exclusively religious material and a third that seemed mostly so; of
   these, the first, Slow Train Coming (1979), is generally regarded as
   the more accomplished, winning him a Grammy Award for "Best Male
   Vocalist". The second album, Saved (1980), was not so well-received.
   When touring from the fall of 1979 through the spring of 1980 Dylan
   refused to play secular music and delivered sermonettes on stage, such
   as:

     Years ago they used ..., said I was a prophet. I used to say, "No
     I'm not a prophet" they say "Yes you are, you're a prophet." I said,
     "No it's not me." They used to say "You sure are a prophet." They
     used to convince me I was a prophet. Now I come out and say Jesus
     Christ is the answer. They say, "Bob Dylan's no prophet." They just
     can't handle it.

   Dylan's religious conversion was met with distrust by some fans and
   fellow artists. Shortly before his December 1980 shooting, John Lennon,
   for example, recorded "Serve Yourself", in negative response to Dylan's
   "Gotta Serve Somebody". But for Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner,
   writing in his review for Slow Train Coming, Dylan had not "sold out"
   totally to born-again Christianity so much as he had simply shifted
   focus. According to him, Dylan was still Dylan, and the same intensity
   and passion had been present in Dylan's protest songs of the 1960s.
   Wenner commented:

          Slow Train Coming is pure, true Dylan, probably the purest and
          truest Dylan ever. The religious symbolism is a logical
          progression of Dylan's Manichaean vision of life and his
          pain-filled struggle with good and evil.

          "I don't go to church or to a synagogue. I don't kneel beside my
          bed at night. I don't think I will. I have yet to face the
          terror I read about in all the great literature. But, since
          politics, economics and war have failed to make us feel any
          better—as individuals or as a nation—and we look back at long
          years of disrepair, then maybe the time for religion has come
          again, and rather too suddenly—'like a thief in the night.'"

Later career

1980s

   In the fall of 1980 Dylan briefly resumed touring, restoring several of
   his most popular 1960s songs to his repertoire, for a series of
   concerts billed as "A Musical Retrospective". Shot of Love, recorded
   the next spring, featured Dylan's first secular compositions in more
   than two years, mixed with explicitly Christian songs. The haunting "
   Every Grain of Sand" reminded some critics of William Blake’s verses.

   In the 1980s the quality of Dylan's recorded work varied, from the
   well-regarded Infidels in 1983 to the panned Down in the Groove in
   1988. Critics such as Michael Gray condemned Dylan's 1980s albums both
   for showing an extraordinary carelessness in the studio and for failing
   to release his best songs.

   The Infidels recording sessions produced several notable outtakes, and
   many have questioned Dylan's judgment in leaving them off the album.
   Most well-regarded of these were " Blind Willie McTell" (which was both
   a tribute to the dead blues singer and an extraordinary evocation of
   African American history reaching back to "the ghosts of slavery
   ships"), "Foot of Pride" and "Lord Protect My Child"; these songs were
   later released on the boxed set The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare &
   Unreleased) 1961-1991. An earlier version of Infidels, prepared by
   producer/guitarist Mark Knopfler, contained different arrangements and
   song selections than what appeared on the final product.

   Dylan contributed vocals to USA for Africa's famine relief fundraising
   single " We Are the World". On 13 July 1985, he appeared at the climax
   of the Live Aid concert at JFK Stadium, Philadelphia. Backed by Keith
   Richards and Ron Wood, Dylan performed a ragged version of "Hollis
   Brown", his ballad of rural poverty, and then said to a worldwide
   audience exceeding one billion people: "I hope that some of the money
   ... maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe ... one or two
   million, maybe ... and use it to pay the mortgages on some of the farms
   and, the farmers here, owe to the banks." His remarks were widely
   criticised as inappropriate, but they did inspire Willie Nelson to
   organise a series of events, Farm Aid, to benefit debt-ridden American
   farmers.

   In June 1986 Dylan married his longtime backup singer Carolyn Dennis
   (often professionally known as Carol Dennis). Their daughter, Desiree
   Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan, was born on January 31, 1986. The couple
   divorced in October 1992.

   In 1987 Dylan starred in Richard Marquand's movie Hearts of Fire, in
   which he played a washed-up-rock-star-turned-chicken farmer called
   "Billy Parker", whose teenage lover ( Fiona) leaves him for a jaded
   English synth-pop sensation ( Rupert Everett). The film was a critical
   and commercial flop. 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, working with Roy Orbison, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, and
   his good friend George Harrison on lighthearted, well-selling fare.
   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. "Ring Them Bells" seems to call for Christians to
   maintain a visible presence in the world. The track "Most of the Time",
   a lost love composition, was later prominently featured in the film
   High Fidelity, while "What Was It You Wanted?" has been interpreted
   both as a catechism and a wry comment on the expectations of critics
   and fans. Dylan made a number of music videos during this period, but
   only "Political World" found any regular airtime on MTV.

1990s

   Dylan performs at a 1996 concert in Stockholm.
   Enlarge
   Dylan performs at a 1996 concert in Stockholm.

   Dylan's 1990s began with Under the Red Sky (1990), an about-face from
   the serious Oh Mercy. The album was dedicated to "Gabby Goo Goo", and
   contained several apparently simple songs, including "Under the Red
   Sky" and "Wiggle Wiggle". The "Gabby Goo Goo" dedication was later
   explained as a nickname for Dylan's four-year-old daughter. Sidemen on
   the album included George Harrison, Slash from Guns N' Roses, David
   Crosby, Bruce Hornsby, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Elton John. Despite the
   stellar line-up, the record received bad reviews and sold poorly. Dylan
   would not make another studio album of new songs for seven years.

   The next few years saw Dylan returning to his roots with two albums
   covering old folk and blues numbers: Good as I Been to You (1992) and
   World Gone Wrong (1993), featuring interpretations and acoustic guitar
   work. Many critics and fans commented on the quiet beauty of the song
   "Lone Pilgrim", penned by a 19th century teacher and sung by Dylan with
   a haunting reverence. An exception to this rootsy mood came in Dylan's
   1991 songwriting collaboration with Michael Bolton; the resulting song
   "Steel Bars", was released on Bolton's album Time, Love & Tenderness.
   In 1995 Dylan recorded a live show for MTV Unplugged. He claimed his
   wish to perform a set of traditional songs for the show was overruled
   by Sony executives who insisted on a greatest hits package. The album
   produced from it (see MTV Unplugged (Bob Dylan album)) included " John
   Brown", an unreleased 1963 song detailing the ravages of both war and
   jingoism.

   With a collection of songs reportedly written while snowed-in on his
   Minnesota ranch, Dylan returned to the recording studio with Lanois in
   January 1997. Late that spring, before the album's release, he was
   hospitalized with a life-threatening heart infection, pericarditis,
   brought on by histoplasmosis. His scheduled European tour was
   cancelled, but Dylan 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 midsummer, and in early fall performed before Pope John Paul II
   at the World Eucharistic Conference in Bologna, Italy. The Pope treated
   the audience of 200,000 people to a sermon based on Dylan's lyric "
   Blowin' in the Wind".

   September saw the release of the new Lanois-produced album, Time Out of
   Mind. With its bitter assessment of love and morbid ruminations,
   Dylan's first collection of original songs in seven years became highly
   acclaimed. It also achieved an unforeseen popularity among young
   listeners, particularly the opening song, "Love Sick". 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 love song "To Make You Feel My Love" was covered
   by both Garth Brooks and Billy Joel.

   In December 1997 President Clinton presented Dylan with a Kennedy
   Center Honour in the East Room of the White House, paying this tribute:
   "He probably had more impact on people of my generation than any other
   creative artist. His voice and lyrics haven't always been easy on the
   ear, but throughout his career Bob Dylan has never aimed to please.
   He's disturbed the peace and discomforted the powerful."

2000 and beyond

   In 2000 his song "Things Have Changed", penned for the film Wonder
   Boys, won a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song and 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" was released on September 11, 2001. Dylan produced the
   album himself under the pseudonym Jack Frost, and its distinctive sound
   owes much 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. The
   album was critically well-received and nominated for several Grammy
   awards. Critics noted that at this late stage in his career, Dylan was
   deliberately widening his musical palette. The styles referenced in
   this album included rockabilly, Western swing, jazz, and even lounge
   ballads.

   "Love and Theft" was controversial due to some similarities between the
   lyrics of the song "Floater" to Japanese writer Junichi Saga's book
   Confessions of a Yakuza. It is unclear if Dylan intentionally lifted
   any material. Dylan's publicist had no comment.

   In February of 2003, an 8-minute long epic ballad called "Cross The
   Green Mountain", written and recorded by Dylan, was released as the
   closing song on the soundtrack to the Civil War movie "Gods and
   Generals", and later appeared as one of the 42 rare tracks on the
   iTunes Music Store release of "Bob Dylan: The Collection". A music
   video for the song was also produced in promotion of the motion
   picture.

   2003 also saw the release of the film Masked & Anonymous, a creative
   collaboration with television producer Larry Charles, featured many
   well-known actors. Dylan and Charles cowrote the film under the
   pseudonyms Rene Fontaine and Sergei Petrov. As difficult to decipher as
   some 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, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale and Richard Gere.

   Martin Scorsese's film biography No Direction Home was shown on
   September 26 and September 27, 2005 on BBC Two in the United Kingdom
   and PBS in the United States. An accompanying soundtrack was released
   in August 2005, which contained much previously unavailable early Dylan
   material. The documentary received a Peabody Award in April 2006.

   Dylan himself returned to recording studio at some point in 2005. He
   recorded at least one song, "Tell Ol' Bill", for the motion picture
   North Country. The song is an original composition, not the similarly
   titled traditional folk song.

   In February 2006, Dylan recorded tracks for a new album in New York
   City that resulted in the album Modern Times, released on August 29,
   2006. This date also included the iTunes Music Store release of Bob
   Dylan: The Collection, a digital box set containing all of his studio
   and live albums (773 tracks in total), along with 42 rare & unreleased
   tracks and a 100 page booklet. To promote the digital box set and the
   new album (on iTunes), Apple released a 30 second TV spot featuring
   Dylan, in full country & western regalia, lip-synching to "Someday
   Baby" against a striking white background. In a well-publicized
   interview to promote the album, Dylan criticised the quality of modern
   sound recordings and claimed that his new songs "probably sounded ten
   times better in the studio when we recorded 'em".

   Despite some coarsening of Dylan’s voice ( The Guardian critic
   characterised his singing on the album as “a catarrhal death rattle”)
   most reviewers gave the album high marks and many described it as the
   final instalment of a successful trilogy, embracing Time Out of Mind
   and Love and Theft. The track most frequently singled out for praise
   was the final song “Ain’t Talkin’”, a nine minute talking blues in
   which Dylan appeared to be walking “through all-enveloping darkness,
   before finally disappearing into the murk”. Modern Times made news by
   entering the US charts at #1, making it Dylan's first album to reach
   that position since 1976's Desire. At 65, Dylan became the oldest,
   still-living musician to top the Billboard albums chart. The record
   also shot to number one in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, New
   Zealand, Norway and Switzerland.

   In September 2006 Scott Warmuth, an Albuquerque, N.M.-based disc
   jockey, noted similarities between Dylan's lyrics in the album, Modern
   Times and the poetry of Henry Timrod, the 'Poet Laureate of the
   Confederacy'. A wider debate developed in The New York Times and other
   journals about the nature of "borrowing" within the folk process and in
   literature.

   May 3, 2006, was the premiere of Dylan's DJ career, hosting a weekly
   radio program, Theme Time Radio Hour, for XM Satellite Radio. Amongst
   the classic and obscure records played on his show from the 30s, 40s
   and 50s, Dylan has also played tracks by Blur, Prince, Billy Bragg &
   Wilco, Mary Gauthier and even L.L. Cool J and The Streets. In the fall,
   2006, Dylan announced the next installment of his " Never Ending Tour",
   commencing in Vancouver and ending in New York.

Recent live performances and the Never Ending Tour

   Dylan performing in Bologna in November 2005.
   Enlarge
   Dylan performing in Bologna in November 2005.

   Dylan has played roughly 100 dates a year for the entirety of the 1990s
   and the 2000s, a heavier schedule than most performers who started out
   in the 1960s. The " Never Ending Tour" continues, anchored by longtime
   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 known 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 increasingly frequent harmonica
   solos. Various rumors have circulated as to why Dylan gave up his
   guitar, none terribly reliable. At a 2006 concert in Boston, Dylan said
   "I would love to play the guitar, but then I would have to find someone
   to play this thing. Someday." According to David Gates, a Newsweek
   reporter who interviewed Dylan in 2004, "...it has to do with his
   guitar not giving him quite the fullness of sound he was wanting at the
   bottom... He's thought of hiring a keyboard player so he doesn't have
   to do it himself, but hasn't been able to figure out who."

   Dylan chooses songs from throughout his 40-year career, seldom playing
   the same set twice.

Fan base

   Bob Dylan's large and vocal fan base writes books, essays, ' zines,
   etc. at a furious rate. They also maintain a massive Internet presence
   with daily Dylan news, a site which rigorously documents every song he
   has ever played in concert, one that documents bootlegs that have been
   released on vinyl and disc, and one where visitors bet on what songs he
   will play on upcoming tours; along with many hundreds of other sites.
   Within minutes of the end of concerts, set lists 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, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen,
   Tom Petty, David Bowie, Mike Watt, Roger Waters, Ian Hunter, and Tom
   Waits.

   The Dylan pool, which was created in 2001 has been featured on CNN,
   CBC, BBC, and the Associated Press. To the Associated Press, "The pool
   reflects both the obsessive interest Dylan still draws 40 years into
   his career and the way this road warrior has structured his career." It
   allows interaction between fans while adding a level of competition
   through the unique online Bob Dylan fantasy game.

   ISIS Magazine was founded in 1985 and is the longest running
   publication about Bob Dylan. Edited since its inception by renowned
   Dylan expert Derek Barker, the magazine, which is published bi-monthly,
   has subscribers in 32 countries.

Chronicles Vol. 1

   After a lengthy delay, October 2004 saw the publishing of Dylan's
   autobiography Chronicles, Vol. 1, with which he once again confounded
   expectations. Dylan wrote three chapters about the year between his
   arrival in New York City in 1961 and recording his first album. Dylan
   focused on the brief period before he was a household name, 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 poet Archibald MacLeish and producer Daniel Lanois. In the New
   Morning chapter, Dylan expresses distaste for the "spokesman of a
   generation" label bestowed upon him, and evinces disgust with his more
   fanatical followers.

   Another section features Dylan's account of a guitar-playing 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.

   Chronicles, Vol. 1 reached number two on The New York Times' Hardcover
   Non-Fiction best seller list in December 2004 and was nominated for a
   National Book Award. Simultaneously, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble
   reported the book as their number two best-seller among all categories.
   Chronicles Vol. 1 is the first of three planned volumes.

Band

   The current members of Bob Dylan's touring band:
     * Bob Dylan - vocals, keyboard, harmonica
     * Stu Kimball - rhythm guitar
     * Denny Freeman - lead guitar
     * Donny Herron - pedal steel guitar, lap steel guitar, electric
       mandolin, banjo, violin
     * Tony Garnier - bass guitar, standup bass
     * George Receli - drums
     * Tommy Morrongiello - occasional rhythm guitar, guitar tech

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