Bob Dylan, the American singer and songwriter, best known for his political protest music during the 1960s.
Bob Dylan was one of the two or three core musicians to turn popular music into something completely new in the 1960s. It is difficult to overestimate the impact that Dylan’s songs had on generations of listeners, for his lyrics, with their colourful but elusive imagery, spoke straight to the hearts of those who heard his songs.
In 1960, in spite of the rock’n’roll explosion of the 1950s, pop music was dominated by a few young singers who were usually closely manipulated by the music industry. They sang songs that were widely regarded as trite, and output was limited to a few hit singles. There were also other types of music—such as jazz, rhythm and blues (R&B), blues, and folk—that were considered to be more important, but which had a more limited following. There was also a thriving country music scene. By 1970, however, this disparate group had been amalgamated into the rock music that has dominated popular music ever since. It is music that has allowed individuals to take charge of their own artistic direction and express themselves on albums rather than just on singles.
Bob Dylan was at the centre of this sea change. The developments he pioneered have been documented in countless books, essays, films, and documentaries, rivalled in number only by those devoted to the BEATLES, whom Dylan notably influenced. Aside from the Beatles, his work has been a powerful influence on many musicians from the 1960s on. It can be traced in the work of the ROLLING STONES; his “All Along the Watchtower” was the biggest hit single released by legendary guitarist Jimi HENDRIX; he was the model for a nonstop stream of so-called “new Dylans.”
Born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, Dylan grew up listening first to the works of LITTLE RICHARD, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee LEWIS before turning to folk music in the late 1950s. Inspired first by LEADBELLY and then Woody GUTHRIE, Dylan began performing in local Minnesota coffeehouses while he was in college there. In 1960, he moved to New York, and after a series of gigs in Greenwich Village he was invited by producer John Hammond to make a demo for Columbia Records. By 1962, his debut album, Bob Dylan, was in the stores and his career began its meteoric ascent. Though the debut album had only two original songs, “Talkin’ New York Blues” and “Song to Woody,” its follow-up, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, featured Dylan originals that were to become classics, such as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” “Masters of War,” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”
These songs had a bitterness and savagery that was something new in the folk music of the early 1960s. They used biting imagery and were fresh and arresting. Over the next two years, Dylan’s productions grew in depth and interest. The basic musical content was limited, confined to simple melodies with guitar accompaniment and harmonica breaks. The lyrics, however, were wide-ranging. They dealt with personal as well as political issues, and included historical and literary allusions. Suddenly, folk music had found a new voice that was recognised in all quarters. For the first time, there was earnest discussion about what the lyrics of a pop song might actually mean.
Bob Dylan, the American singer and songwriter, best known for his political protest music during the 1960s.
In 1965, Dylan’s career took a new turn. He formed an electric band that recorded half his Bringing It All Back Home album. When this band appeared at the Newport Folk Festival that year, it was roundly booed. Folk was one thing, rock’n’roll was another. This mixing of a serious genre with an ephemeral one was felt to be heresy. However, Dylan had sound reasons for moving into a new musical genre. His two albums of the mid-1960s—Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde—delivered a new type of song in which the rock instrumentation added to the impact, but in which the lyrics were even more incisive, expressing sorrow, wit, love, and despair.
In July 1966, a serious motorcycle accident kept Dylan in seclusion in Woodstock, New York, for many months. During that time, he and his band recorded series of classic songs known as “the basement tapes.” These became the most widely bootlegged discs in history known as The Great White Wonder, and were not publicly released until 1975, when Columbia Records released them as a two-LP set The Basement Tapes. Instead, fans were treated to Dylan’s stark, acoustic John Wesley Harding, which contained his original version of “Watchtower” and was laden throughout with peculiar but unmistakable religious imagery. Its follow-up, the country-inspired Nashville Skyline, disconcerted its hearers on its 1969 release because of the notable deepening of Dylan’s voice, and the simplicity of the lyrics. So, by the end of the decade, Dylan had produced one of the most important sets of work i n popular music, and in doing so had embraced a vast range of musical styles.
Many of Dylan’s 1970s albums were scattered in their musical direction: Self Portrait bore a Dylanpainted cover and contained a surprising number of cover songs (written by others), and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid was simply a soundtrack album done for Sam Peckinpah’s film of the same name. Though both 1974’s Planet Waves and its live successor Before the Flood won plaudits, it was 1975’s Blood on the Tracks that is now regarded as Dylan’s finest album of the 1970s. Apparently a mixture of autobiography and nostalgia, it includes “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.” Only the second Dylan album to reach the top of the charts, Blood on the Tracks served as a prelude to 1976’s Desire, which also went to No. 1 o n the charts.
Dylan’s subsequent albums have struck a wayward path, as has his career itself. A surprising conversion to Christianity resulted in striking albums such as Slow Train Coming (1979), Saved (1980) Shot of Love (1981), and Infidels (1983), which contained Dylan’s most barbed lyrics since his songs of the 1960s. His nonstop touring with, among others, Latin-rock musician SANTANA and rock group The Grateful Dead has been captured on live albums such as Real Live (1984) and Dylan and the Dead (1989), and his celebrated project with the Traveling Wilburys (with George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne) produced two unique albums.
In 1992, a 30th Anniversary Concert was held at New York’s Madison Square Garden, and featured a host of top-line artists who were all there to praise (and perform) Dylan’s work. Artists included Harrison, Petty, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, Lou Reed, Johnny and June Carter CASH, Roger McGuinn, Willie NELSON, and Stevie WONDER among many, many others. Following that event, Dylan released two relatively low-key but striking albums that recalled his earliest work as a folk singer. Good As I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993) featured Dylan playing other artists’ material, much of it very old, using the same guitar and harmonica format that he had employed in New York in the early 1960s.
Dave DiMartino
SEE ALSO:
CHARTS; COUNTRY; FOLK MUSIC; FOLK ROCK; POPULAR MUSIC; ROCK MUSIC.
FURTHER READING
Marcus, Greil. Invisible Republic-Bob Dylan’s
Basement Tapes (New York: Henry Holt, 1997); Scaduto, A. Bob Dylan (London: Helter Skelter/Rogan House, 1996); Shelton, Robert. No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997); Shepard, Sam. Rolling Thunder Logbook (New York: Viking, 1977).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
The Basement Tapes-, Biograph; Blonde on Blonde; Blood on the Tracks; The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1–3 (Rare and Unreleased) 1961–91; Bringing It All Back Home; Highway 61 Revisited; Infidels; John Wesley Harding; Slow Train Coming.