Bob Dylan

ROCK AND ROLL POET
It is impossible to conceive of rock and roll’s maturation from teenage recreation
into intellectually expressive music without Bob Dylan. Comparable
only to the Beatles in infl uence, Dylan brought poetry to rock. More impressive,
though, is the massive body of music Dylan has written, performed, and
recorded over his unparalleled half-century career.
Often called “the voice of his generation,” Dylan’s actual voice was instantly
identifi able for its nasal qualities. With it, he created and shed a half-dozen
musical identities, each a phase in a relentless artistic development. Dylan was
a hard-core folkie who imitated Woody Guthrie and learned songs from ancient
records, a protest singer who sang against injustice, a confessional songwriter
who poured his heart out onstage, a confrontational rock icon in dark sunglasses
who played stinging blues, a country crooner, a mysterious fi gure in
white makeup, a born-again Christian who testifi ed for Jesus, and an old-time
bandleader in a suit and cowboy hat. In nearly every capacity, Dylan broke
new ground. Rock and roll, in a sense, transformed around him, and Dylan’s
sometimes confounding actions gained praise and acceptance years later.


Idiosyncratic and unpredictable, Dylan changed directions in an effort to
escape the labels placed on him by fame. At nearly every turn, Dylan’s moves
were designed to provoke, as when he plugged in an electric guitar at the
Newport Folk Festival, directed a four-hour movie with no discernible plot,
released an all-country album sung and written in an unrecognizable voice, or
allowed one of his songs to be used in a lingerie advertisement. In his autobiography,
Dylan even admitted to recording several intentionally inferior
albums in order to lessen the burdens of his popularity.
One obsessive fan who combed through Dylan’s trash claimed that his science
of “Dylanology” would reveal the true meaning of the artist’s cryptic
lyrics. Since the 1960s, the songwriter has led an extremely private life. After
a very public divorce in the late 1970s, Dylan secretly remarried, only acknowledging
it in passing references to “my wife” in his autobiography.
At the center, however, has always been Bob Dylan’s songwriting. Throughout
every stage of his career, he has employed a musical language drawn from his
encyclopedic knowledge of traditional folk, country, and early rock. This strength
has enabled Dylan to tap into the deep wellspring of American music and invested
his creative endeavors with a sense of timelessness. It has also served as a bedrock
for the songwriter, helping him to rebound after a motorcycle accident in the
1960s, as well as rejuvenating his career in the early 1990s.
Dylan combined this vocabulary with poetry that could be surreal, tender,
hilarious, biting, oblique, and perfectly obvious—sometimes simultaneously.
Though many of his early followers complained that Dylan stopped writing
political songs when he “went electric” in 1965, Dylan’s lyrics frequently
included elements of social commentary, whether direct or hidden. Writers and
professors have made a cottage industry of Dylanology, from examinations of
Dylan’s views on religion to multi-volume studies of Dylan’s live performances
to an historical treatise on how Dylan relates to “the old, weird America.”
“Songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment,” Dylan
wrote in 2004. “They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness
of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic. . . . Whatever
the case, it wasn’t that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had
no ambitions to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as
hell and a big trick.”

Despite writing an autobiography and being interviewed for a major documentary,
Dylan remains elusive, the result of a lifetime of self-mythologizing.
“I was with the carnival off and on for six years,” he told radio host Cynthia
Gooding in 1962, at the start of his career. “I was clean-up boy. I was mainliner
on the Ferris wheel. Do the shoreline thing. Use to do all kinds of stuff
like that. . . . I didn’t go to school for a bunch of years, skipped this, skipped
that.” 2
None of what Dylan told her was true. His name wasn’t even Bob Dylan. It
was Robert Zimmerman, and he was from Minnesota.

FROM HIBBING TO HIGHWAY 61
Robert Allen Zimmerman was born in Duluth, Minnesota, on May 24, 1941,
to Abraham Zimmerman and Beatrice Stone. Abe was the son of Russian immigrants
and worked for the Standard Oil Company. At the end of World
War II, as the work force swelled, Abe lost his job. After the birth of Bobby’s
brother David, in 1945, their father was stricken with polio. As Abe recovered,
the family moved seventy-fi ve miles east to Beatrice’s hometown, Hibbing.
Duluth was several hours north of Minneapolis, a port city on the shore
of Lake Superior. Hibbing was smaller, an Iron Range town once known for
its mineral deposits. Abe joined his brothers at their furniture and appliance
business.
Bobby sang from an early age. He was four when he performed “Some
Sunday Morning” and “Accentuate the Positive” at a Mother’s Day gathering.
Far from the childhood circus career he later invented for himself, Bobby’s
childhood was quite normal. He and his friends stole crabapples from neighbors’
yards, played on Pill Hill (the site of an ore dump), and built clubhouses.
When Bobby was in kindergarten, Abe bought a house on Seventh Avenue. In
the house, Dylan claimed to have found something of great signifi cance. “[It]
has kind of mystical overtones,” he recalled many years later.
The people who had lived in the house previous to that time, they had left some
of their furniture, and among that furniture was a great big mahogany radio,
like a jukebox. It had a 78 turntable when you opened up the top. And I opened
it up one day and there was a record on there, a country record. It was a song
called “Drifting Too Far from the Shore.” I think it was the Stanley Brothers, if
not Bill Monroe. I played the record and it brought me into a different world. 3
Thus began a lifelong romance with music.
Though boxers, wrestlers, circuses, and stock car races came to Hibbing, it
was the movies and the radio that gave young Bobby glimpses of the world
outside the Iron Range. His great uncle owned the Lybba Theater, a tenminute
walk from the Zimmerman house, and Bobby was a regular. The radio
was different. Late at night, after the serials ended, Bobby could pick up powerful
AM signals that traveled north up the Mississippi River from as far away as Louisiana and Mexico. Through this music, Dylan began to yearn for
the world outside Hibbing.
Bobby discovered early rock musicians Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, Little Richard,
and Elvis Presley, as well as country legends like Hank Williams. He began to
collect records. Now profi cient on piano, Bobby formed his fi rst band, the
Golden Chords. At their appearance at Hibbing High’s Jacket Jamboree Talent
Festival, the Golden Chords were cut off mid-set as Bobby pounded the
piano and emulated the raucous vocals of Little Richard. Under the infl uence
of bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Jimmy Reed, Bobby switched to an electric
guitar and formed several other bands. None lasted very long.
On January 31, 1959, he and his friends traveled to the Duluth Armory,
where he saw Buddy Holly perform. Standing in the front row, Dylan made
eye contact with his hero, an event he remembered vividly forty years later.
Three days later, Holly died in a plane crash, along with fellow musicians
Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper. It became known as “the Day the Music
Died,” but for Bobby Zimmerman, music was busy being born.
That same spring, Bobby discovered folk music, via a high school graduation
gift: a set of records by Leadbelly, the great country blues singer and
guitarist who’d served time in prison for murder. By the fall, Bobby Zimmerman
escaped Hibbing. When he arrived in Minneapolis, he was Bobby
Zimmerman no longer.

“The fi rst time I was asked my name in the Twin Cities, I instinctively and
automatically without thinking simply said, ‘Bob Dylan,’ ” 4 Dylan wrote in his
autobiography. Initially, he’d meant to call himself Robert Allyn, a variation
on his middle name. “Unexpectedly, I’d seen some poems by Dylan Thomas.
Dylan and Allyn sounded similar.” 5 For many years, Dylan denied taking his
name from the Irish poet. He told some that it was his uncle’s name, his
mother’s maiden name, or a town in Oklahoma. It was the fi rst of many
myths Dylan would create for himself.
In Minneapolis, he worked hard to become Bob Dylan. First, he traded his
electric guitar for an acoustic. Then, he learned as much as he could about
folk music. Though Bob barely attended classes, he studied for hours in the
Bohemian neighborhood Dinkytown. He exchanged songs with local musicians
like John Koerner and expanded his repertoire. Quickly, Dylan developed
the skill to memorize a song after only one listen, either from a fellow performer or a recording. He listened to Blind Lemon Jefferson, John Jacob
Niles, the New Lost City Ramblers, and countless others. Stories abound of
Dylan’s outright thefts of friends’ record collections.
He also discovered Woody Guthrie, the author of “This Land Is Your
Land,” “Pretty Boy Floyd,” “Pastures of Plenty,” “Hard Travelin’,” and literally
hundreds of other songs. “They had the infi nite sweep of humanity in
them,” Dylan later declared. He became obsessed with the itinerant Oklahomaborn
folksinger and read Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound for Glory . “I went
through it cover to cover like a hurricane,” Dylan wrote, “totally focused on
every word, and the book sang out to me like a radio.” 6 He now predominantly
performed Guthrie songs, dressed like Guthrie in a cowboy hat, and
even began to talk like his hero, with a thick Okie accent.
Guthrie’s records were rare, so Dylan could only learn songs from other
musicians.
I’d always be checking the repertoires of every out of town performer who came
through to see what Guthrie songs they knew that I didn’t, and I was beginning
to feel the phenomenal scope of Woody’s songs—the Sacco and Vanzetti ballads,
Dust Bowl and children songs, Grand Coulee Dam songs, venereal disease songs,
union and workingman ballads, even his rugged heartbreak love ballads. Each
one seemed like a towering tall building with a variety of scenarios all appropriate
for different situations. 7
Informed that a musician named Ramblin’ Jack Elliott had already made a
career of being a second Woody, Dylan varied his act slightly. He learned harmonica
from Tony Glover. Though there was a left-wing political scene around
the Dinkytown folk circles, Dylan was uninterested. He only cared about
music. In 1960, he decided he’d outgrown Minneapolis. He spent the summer
in Denver, where he met guitarist Jesse Fuller, and spent time in Chicago and
Madison before he caught a ride to New York with a friend of a friend.
Dylan arrived in Manhattan on January 24, 1961, a bitter night. “Coldest
winter in 17 years,” he would sing on “Hard Times in New York Town.”
According to the New York Times , it was actually twenty-eight years. Within
days, Dylan had left Manhattan and crossed the Hudson River to meet his hero,
Woody Guthrie, in an unlikely place: Greystone Hospital in north central
New Jersey.
Guthrie was the victim of a rare degenerative disease, Huntington’s chorea.
By 1961, he lived permanently at Greystone, his body crippled. Dylan
became a regular visitor. With his guitar he played Woody’s requests, usually
for Guthrie’s own songs. Though the older folksinger was fatally ill, he immediately
liked the scrawny kid with the chubby cheeks and the black corduroy
hat. Through Guthrie, Dylan met Sidsel and Bob Gleason of East Orange,
one of many couples who took Dylan in after he arrived in New York. Dylan
relied on these older patrons, as well as a series of girlfriends, for places to
sleep.

Empowered by Guthrie’s approval, Dylan took to the famed folk clubs of
Greenwich Village. He immediately secured a residency at Cafe Wha?, where
he played harmonica alongside Fred Neil. The folk scene in New York was
large and had an established hierarchy of clubs, performers, and labels. With
a boyish charm that many compared to Huckleberry Finn, Dylan won friends
and rose through the ranks. He passed time at Izzy Young’s Folklore Center
near Washington Square Park, an archive of recordings, instruments, and
folk music literature that was a hub for musicians.
Another Bohemian couple Bob stayed with, boasted a massive library. “You
couldn’t help but lose your passion for dumbness,” Dylan remembered. “I
usually opened up some book to the middle, read a few pages and if I liked it
went back to the beginning.” 8 Dylan read political philosophy like Niccolò
Machiavelli’s The Prince , gothic horror writers like Edgar Allen Poe, populist
autobiographies of American heroes like Davy Crockett, Romantic poets such
as Byron and Shelley, psychotherapist Sigmund Freud, Russian revolutionary
Alexander Pushkin, and hundreds of others. He also spent time in the New
York Public Library, poring over microfi lm of Civil War–era newspapers.
Dylan wrote his fi rst songs, including “Talkin’ Hava Negila” and “Talkin’
Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues,” in a style derivative of Woody Guthrie.
He gigged wherever he could, at the Commons, the Gaslight, Gerde’s Folk
City, and elsewhere. He jammed with Village musicians, and served as an
opening act for several artists, including blues legend John Lee Hooker. He
was also hard at work inventing his persona, such as when he told Woody
Guthrie’s wife, Marjorie, that he was from New Mexico, or when he introduced
a song by saying he’d learned it on the Brazos River in Texas. Onstage,
Dylan perfected a wry presence that recalled Charlie Chaplin. He slipped
between stories and songs in a style he learned from hipster monologist Lord
Buckley.
On September 29, 1961, the New York Times published Robert Shelton’s
review of one of Dylan’s performances at Folk City, titled “Bob Dylan: A Distinctive
Stylist.” That same month, Dylan participated in his fi rst recording
session, where he accompanied Carolyn Hester on harmonica. At a rehearsal,
Dylan met John Hammond, the legendary producer who signed jazz great Billie
Holiday in 1933. Hammond signed Dylan to Columbia Records.
In November, Dylan joined Hammond in Columbia’s Studio A to record his
fi rst album. On Bob Dylan , released in March 1962, Dylan performed almost all
traditional folk songs, including “Man of Constant Sorrow,” “Pretty Peggy-O,”
and “House of the Rising Sun.” Also included was Dylan’s fi rst completely
original composition, “Song to Woody.” The album sold poorly. Dylan was
referred to within Columbia as “Hammond’s folly,” but the producer defended
his protégé.
In early 1962, Dylan got his own apartment, and started to date Suze
Rotolo. A vivacious intellectual, Suze (pronounced “Suzy”) turned Bob on to
art and awakened his political consciousness. Dylan contributed topical songs to Broadside , a new magazine dedicated to spreading new songs, including the
satirical “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues,” about the right-wing political
organization. Suze worked behind the scenes at Theatre de Lys when it presented
a program of songs by German musician/playwright Bertolt Brecht.
One song in particular, “Pirate Jenny,” took hold of Dylan. “Woody had
never written a song like that,” he remembered.
It wasn’t a protest or topical song and there was no love for people in it . . . I
took the song apart and unzipped it—it was the form, the free verse association,
the structure and known disregard for the known certainty of melodic patterns
to make it seriously matter, give it its cutting edge. . . . I wanted to fi gure out
how to manipulate and control this particular structure and form which I knew
was the key that gave “Pirate Jenny” its resilience and outrageous power. 9
The songs began to pour from him, many based on traditional tunes but with
a new strength in them. “The Ballad of Emmitt Till” was dedicated to a black
adolescent killed in Mississippi in 1955.
In April, Dylan wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind,” based on the slave spiritual
“No More Auction Block.” Comprising a series of rhetorical questions, the
song framed the civil rights struggle in nearly biblical terms, but was general
enough to be applicable to any strife. “How many roads must a man walk
down before you call him a man?” Dylan asked in the fi rst line.
In September, he penned “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” which dealt with
the Cuban missile crisis and the imminent threat of nuclear war, with much
the same strategy as “Blowin’ in the Wind.” “I saw a highway of diamonds
with nobody on it,” he sang, describing his vision of a post-nuclear America,
“I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’.” Determined not to be
known merely as a protest singer, he also wrote love songs, both tender, like
“Girl of the North Country,” and bitter, like “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,”
the fi rst of Dylan’s many so-called put-downs. Anchored by these songs, The
Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was released in May 1963, reaching number twentytwo
on the Billboard albums chart. The cover depicted Bob and Suze walking
arm-in-arm down a snow-lined 4th Street.

The Protest Song
During the period leading up to the Revolutionary War, many protest songs
were written in defi ance of British policies in the American colonies. Composers
set new words to familiar British/Celtic tunes to create “The Liberty Song”
(from 1768, decrying new import taxes imposed by the Crown) and “Free
America” (1774). Slaves brought from West Africa contributed to the development
of protest songs when they transformed the church hymns of their white
masters into work songs and emancipation anthems.
In the twentieth century, the songs of the civil rights movement encouraged its
supporters through hazardous, sometimes deadly marches and demonstrations.
The most popular anthem of the era, “We Shall Overcome,” was crafted from
Charles Tindley’s circa 1900 gospel song, “I’ll Overcome Some Day.” Another
movement standard, “No More Auction Block for Me,” was derived from
“Many Thousands Gone”—a post–Civil War song popularized by Negroes who
had fl ed to Canada, where slavery was abolished in 1833.
Folksinger/activist Joan Baez credits Bob Dylan for expanding the lyrical
scope of the protest song. Dylan’s “North Country Blues” (1963), for example,
was one of the fi rst works by a singer-songwriter to decry the negative effects
of globalization, with “words which would move me out of the ethereal but
archaic ballads of yore and into the contemporary music scene of the 1960s.” 1
Singing an international repertoire in several languages, Baez went on to
amass a devoted international following that persists to this day.
When Dylan’s song “Blowin’ in the Wind” became a number two Pop hit for
Peter, Paul, and Mary in 1963, the former gospel singer turned R&B idol Sam
Cooke felt personally challenged by “a white boy writing a song like that.” 2
Cooke quickly wrote and recorded “A Change Is Gonna Come,” a hymn-like
soul ballad that touched on the hardships of African American life and the
struggle for racial justice in the era of segregation. He sang the song on
national television during an appearance on The Tonight Show in February
1964 and it became a Top Ten R&B hit after his death in December.
Phil Ochs (1940–76) was among the foremost writers of folk protest songs
of the 1960s: The title of his 1964 debut album was All the News That’s Fit to
Sing . The assassination of President Kennedy (“That Was the President”), the
U.S. Marines’ invasion of the Dominican Republic (“Santo Domingo”), the
plight of immigrant farm workers (“Bracero”)—all were grist for his compositional
mill. Ochs’s public profi le far exceeded his modest record sales, and he
struggled with this contradiction throughout a career in which he helped to
organize protests and support left-wing political causes both in the United
States and abroad. The singer struggled with alcoholism, depression, and disillusionment
brought on by the decline of the New Left; during a trip to Africa,
a brutal mugging damaged his vocal chords. Phil Ochs committed suicide on
April 9, 1976.
Diverse voices and political orientations entered into the protest music of
the Vietnam War era: rowdy folk-rooted satire (the Fugs’ “Kill for Peace”),
apocalyptic electrifi ed rock songs (“Machine Gun” by Jimi Hendrix), and funky
R&B hits (Edwin Starr’s “Stop the War Now”). The protest current in pop
music reached a chilling dénouement of sorts in 1970 when “Ohio” by Crosby,
Stills, Nash, and Young commemorated the killing of four Kent State University
students by the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970. In subsequent
decades, a new style of topical song—from Jackson Browne’s anti–mass media
“Information Wars” to Steve Earle’s pro-democracy call to arms, “The Revolution Starts Now”—would attempt to speak inclusively and globally to a new popular
consciousness.


In August 1962, Dylan signed with a new manager, Albert Grossman. The
owner of the Gate of Horn, a folk club in Chicago, and a savvy businessman,
Grossman transformed Dylan from a folk sensation into an international
superstar. In July 1963, Peter, Paul, and Mary—a group masterminded by
Grossman—released their single of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” It sold over a
million copies and charted at number two.
Another new friend was Joan Baez, the most famous folk singer in the
country. Introduced in early 1963, as Dylan’s relationship with Suze crumbled,
Baez and Dylan began a romance. Dylan would join her onstage frequently
over the next two years, starting in July at the Newport Folk Festival
in Rhode Island, as well as on an August tour. On August 28, Dylan and Baez
played in front of the Lincoln Memorial as part of the March on Washington,
singing “When the Ship Comes In” in front of some 150,000 people from the
same podium where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would deliver his famous
speech. It had been barely three years since Bobby left Hibbing.
Dylan remained busy in Manhattan, penning dozens of songs for Broadside
, contributing columns to Hootenanny , and writing freeform poetry.
Much of the latter was published in concert programs and liner notes for
himself and others, including Baez. He wrote “The Times They Are A-Changin’,”
another biblically infl uenced anthem, which became the title of his third album.
Released to wide acclaim in February 1964, The Times They Are A-Changin’
announced Dylan to the world, charting at number twenty. It featured a similar
mix of socially aware ballads, such as “With God on Our Side” and more
personal numbers, like “Boots of Spanish Leather.”
But Dylan did not want to be hemmed in by the demands of his followers.
On one side were associates from Dinkytown, such as Paul Nelson, who told
Bob that topical songs did not make good art. On the other were politically
engaged folksingers and their fans, who wanted Dylan to be their new poster
boy. In December, Dylan accepted the Tom Paine Award from the Emergency
Civil Liberties Union, an organization of New York’s wealthy, old-guard liberals.
Dylan was uncomfortable. Slightly drunk, he berated them obscurely.
“There’s no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there’s only up and
down,” 10 he told them.
In spring 1964, Dylan and three friends drove coast to coast in a station
wagon. Dylan played several shows along the way, but mostly he went to see
the country. When he returned, he declared he was going to only write songs for himself. At the Newport Folk Festival that summer, where he played to
15,000 fans, he debuted “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a powerful, surreal epic.
Under the infl uence of marijuana, Dylan’s phrases and rhymes swelled, giving
the lyrics a magical feel.
In the fall, he invited a group of friends into the studio. With a bottle of red
wine at his side, Dylan recorded a dozen new songs live for Another Side of
Bob Dylan . Some, such as “Chimes of Freedom,” were politically aware as
well as poetic. Others, like “Motorpsycho Nitemare” and “I Don’t Believe
You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)” were more social comedy than
social consciousness, fi lled with biting one-liners. Though the album didn’t
sell as well as his two previous releases, only reaching number forty-three,
Dylan continued to expand his following, and grew further apart from the
Greenwich Village scene. Bob spent more and more time staying with Albert
Grossman in Woodstock, an idyllic town 100 miles north of Manhattan. By
1965, he’d moved there full-time.
Dylan’s music continued to evolve at a rapid rate. Though he had recorded
two songs with a backing band in December 1962, Bob had not played rock
and roll since he left Hibbing. In spring 1965, he recorded Bringing It All
Back Home . The fi rst side featured Dylan backed by a blues band put together
by producer Tom Wilson. Though many folk purists decried the harder sound,
defi ant songs like “Maggie’s Farm” were no less protests than “Blowin’ in the
Wind.” “I thought I’d get more power out of it with a small group in back of
me,” Dylan said simply of his decision to employ the combo. 11
The second side featured four long acoustic ballads, including “Mr. Tambourine
Man” and “Gates of Eden,” as well as the pointed “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only
Bleeding)” which spawned such aphorisms as “money doesn’t talk, it swears”
and “even sometimes the president of the United States has to stand naked.” It
was the fi rst Dylan album to break the Top Ten, reaching number six.
In April 1965, the Byrds’ rock adaptation of “Mr. Tambourine Man” hit
number six on the Billboard chart. It brought Dylan’s name to further millions,
and began a national folk-rock craze. Bob traveled to England for a ten-show
tour, during which he broke up with Joan Baez. Documented by fi lmmaker D.A.
Pennebaker in Don’t Look Back , the fi lm opened with an early video for “Subterranean
Homesick Blues,” the fi rst song on Bringing It All Back Home , which
Dylan delivered in a near-rap over a Chuck Berry beat. Dylan performed well on
the tour, though he grew bored playing the same songs over and over. He told
others he was on the verge of quitting.

THIN WILD MERCURY MUSIC
The week after he returned to the United States, Dylan wrote what he described
as “a long piece of vomit.” “It wasn’t called anything, just a rhythm thing on
paper all about my steady hatred directed at some point that was honest.” 12
Affi xed with a chorus, the song became “Like a Rolling Stone.” A few weeks
later, producer Tom Wilson convened a new band for Dylan. Relying on serendipity,
Bob barely gave the musicians any instructions. Despite the fact that
it was over six minutes in length, Columbia released “Like a Rolling Stone”
as a single on July 20. It instantly went to number two on the Hot 100, Dylan’s
fi rst appearance there. Almost forty years later, the editors of Rolling
Stone —a magazine named in part for the song—ranked it the greatest song of
all time.
On July 25, 1965, Dylan made his third and fi nal appearance at the Newport
Folk Festival. Though “Like a Rolling Stone” blasted from radios around
the country, Bob had never performed live with an electric guitar. With members
of his studio band, including guitarist Mike Bloomfi eld and guitarist Al
Kooper, Dylan’s brief set was greeted with both boos and cheers. He left the
stage after only three songs. When he returned, he performed “It’s All Over
Now, Baby Blue,” the fi nal song from Bringing It All Back Home , alone on
acoustic guitar. He enunciated the lyrics clearly, saying goodbye to the folk
scene that had made him famous.
With a new producer, Bob Johnston, Dylan recorded eight more songs to
complete Highway 61 Revisited , named for the road that—like the Mississippi
River—connected the singer’s North Country home to the Deep South.
It was, in Dylan’s words, “the main thoroughfare of the country blues.” Even
in 1965, “it was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same onehorse
times, the same spiritual ancestors.” 13 Dylan used his poetry to update
the swinging blues he’d heard years before on the radio. Driven by the guitar
lines of Mike Bloomfi eld and the rich organ of Al Kooper, the album was an
instant hit that reached number three.
Backed by a rhythm and blues bar band known as the Hawks, Dylan toured
across the country. In the fi rst half of the show, Bob played by himself to rapturous
silence from the audience. In the second half, joined by the Hawks, he
was met nearly every night with jeers. Interviews and press conferences were
theaters of the absurd, in which Dylan often made fun of the journalists. In
San Francisco, a reporter requested that Bob “defi ne folk music,” to which
Dylan responded, “a constitutional replay of mass production.” 14
Dylan was a cult hero. Because listeners found so much meaning in his lyrics,
they expected Dylan to have the answers to the world’s problems. Dylan
continued to tour, though his physical state worsened as he grew dependent
on amphetamines. “It takes a lot of medicine to keep up this pace,” he admitted
to journalist Robert Shelton. 15 In the same interview, he all but admitted
to using heroin.
Besides touring, Dylan also wrote a “novel.” Published six years later as
Tarantula , it was actually a sprawling jumble of fragments. In spring 1966, he
traveled to Nashville with Al Kooper and Hawks’ guitarist Robbie Robertson,
and recorded a new album—his third in under a year. With country session
musicians at his call, Dylan wrote much of the double-LP Blonde on Blonde
in the studio.

“The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual
bands in the Blonde on Blonde album,” Dylan said in 1978. “It’s that thin,
that wild mercury sound. It’s metallic and bright gold, with whatever that
conjures up.” 16 Dylan continued to draw inspiration from folk music, fashioning
lyrics from Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s “I Wish I Was a Mole in the
Ground” into a verse of “(Stuck Inside of Mobile with the) Memphis Blues
Again.” Dylan’s songs grew even longer, including the seven-and-a-half-minute
urban drama of “Visions of Johanna,” and “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,”
which took up the entirety of the album’s fourth side.
The “Sad-Eyed Lady” was Sara Lowndes. A friend of manager Albert
Grossman’s wife, Bob had met Sara in Woodstock. She was an actress and
occasional hostess at the Playboy Club. The two were married on November
22, 1965, in a private ceremony. On January 3, 1966, Sara give birth to their
fi rst child, Jesse Dylan. Bob went to great lengths to protect his wife and child
from the press, and until February it was not known that he’d even married.
Dylan spent the fi rst months of his son’s life touring, with no end in sight:
Albert Grossman had booked several years worth of engagements.
In April, Dylan traveled to Australia, France, and England with the Hawks.
Drummer Levon Helm had quit in frustration, sick of being booed, and was
replaced by Mickey Jones. Dylan had grown musically tight with the quintet,
especially guitarist Robbie Robertson. Still, the jeers continued. On the
second to last night of the tour, May 25, they played the Royal Festival Hall
in Manchester, England. The day before, Bob had celebrated his twenty-fi fth
birthday.
Before the encore, a fan stood up and shouted at Dylan: “Judas!”
“I don’t believe you,” Dylan sneered back. “You’re a liar .” He turned to the
Hawks. “Play fucking loud ,” he told them. The band blasted into “Like a
Rolling Stone.” 17
Two months later, back in Woodstock on July 29, the brakes of Dylan’s
Triumph 650 locked up, throwing Bob over the bike’s handlebars. He would
perform in public only a half-dozen times over the following eight years.

IN THE BASEMENT AND BEYOND
Rumors circulated that Bob Dylan was seriously crippled, and that he had
retired from music. Other gossip suggested that Dylan had a severe drug problem.
Dylan did nothing to clarify the situation. He suffered a mild concussion
and cracked vertebrae. He canceled all of his tour dates and future plans. He
was only twenty-fi ve. With Sara at his side, he recovered. The Tarantula
manuscript, overdue to his publisher, gathered dust. He relaxed and took up
painting. The following summer, when he started to make music again, it
wasn’t on a stage, or even in a studio, but in a basement.Big Pink was a house in nearby West Saugerties rented by members of the
Hawks. In Woodstock, rejoined by drummer Levon Helm, they became
known simply as The Band. In the spring of 1967, Dylan and The Band fell into
a routine: smoke a joint and jam in the basement. At fi rst, they just played old
folk, blues, and R&B songs, but Dylan quickly began writing again, composing
lyrics on a typewriter at the kitchen table. He was just as prolifi c as ever,
recording up to fi fteen songs a day, some of them improvised over traditional
chord changes. Organist Garth Hudson captured the proceedings on Robbie
Robertson’s Uher multi-track tape recorder.
Over the course of several months, Bob Dylan and The Band recorded over
thirty new originals, as well as literally hundreds of tossed-off covers. When
they were done, the songs spanned a phenomenal range, the covers alone
comprising a thorough tour of American music. Dylan’s new originals ranged
from novel jokes such as “See You Later, Allen Ginsberg” to major statements
like “I Shall Be Released” and “I’m Not Here (1956).”
Some were recorded as demos for other artists to cover. Manfred Mann
scored a number ten single with “The Mighty Quinn” in January 1968. As the
acetates circulated, bootleggers got hold of them. A steady stream of illicit
Dylan records could now be found at record shops around the country, containing
many songs from the basement sessions, as well as private tapes Bob
had made for friends over the years.
In October 1967, Dylan returned to Nashville and cut John Wesley Harding
with a stripped-down band of session musicians. With a sparse, stark backing
and a muted gray LP cover, the lyrics were fi lled with oblique morality tales.
A hungry public sent the album to number two. Jimi Hendrix covered “All
Along the Watchtower” within the year. Dylan has often announced his preference
for the guitarist’s rendition.
Though Dylan stayed out of the public eye, his following was undiminished.
People started arriving at his Woodstock sanctuary. Where he had once
sought to mythologize himself, Dylan now wished to make himself plain.
Besides a tribute concert to Woody Guthrie, who died in October 1967, Bob
did not perform. He wanted a normal life. In 1969, he recorded a country
album, Nashville Skyline . The lyrics were as simple as possible, and Dylan
sang in a voice all but unrecognizable to longtime listeners. Johnny Cash, a
Dylan fan and one of Bob’s heroes, guested on a remake of “Girl of the North
Country,” and wrote the liner notes.
The album charted at number three and the harassment from fanatics did
not stop. “I was sick of the way my lyrics had been extrapolated, their meanings
subverted into polemics,” Dylan wrote. 18 Indeed, the Weathermen, one of
the most renowned and violent radical groups of the 1960s, took their name
from a lyric in “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” from Bringing It All Back
Home .
The Dylans, with new baby Jakob, moved back to Manhattan, where selfproclaimed
“garbologist” A.J. Weberman rifl ed through the family’s trash looking for “clues” as to Dylan’s state of mind. Convinced Dylan was a junkie,
Weberman staged protests outside his front door, and demanded that Bob make
a statement. When A. J. harassed Sara, it was too much. Bob found Weberman
on Elizabeth Street and beat him up.
Though Dylan still enjoyed playing and recording, he put less of himself
into his music. In 1970, he issued another double album, boldly titled Self
Portrait . It was fi lled with stray covers, live recordings from a disastrous set
with The Band at the Isle of Wight festival in the summer of 1970, and other
odds and ends. Greil Marcus began his Rolling Stone review by asking: “What
is this shit?” Simply by virtue of being new Bob Dylan product, Self Portrait
made it all the way to number four. Though 1970’s New Morning ( Billboard ,
number seven) reunited Bob with organist Al Kooper, and featured a bright
accessible sound that expressed Dylan’s own personal happiness, the songwriter
soon all but stopped recording. He was content to rest.
In 1973, Dylan freed himself from both Albert Grossman and Columbia
Records. He signed with David Geffen’s fl edgling Asylum imprint, and the
Dylans relocated to Malibu, California, north of Los Angeles. With his new
record contract, Dylan called on The Band, who’d achieved a remarkably successful
career on their own. After a preliminary session at Robertson’s Malibu
studio, Dylan and the group decided they could record and tour. In November
1973, they recorded Planet Waves , which became Dylan’s fi rst number one
album.
On January 3, 1974, at Chicago Stadium, in front of an audience of 18,500,
Bob Dylan and The Band began a forty-show cross-country tour. Though
Dylan had played big shows before, most of his tours had concentrated on
theaters. Now, he was in an arena every night. The shows were rapturously
received and Asylum issued a double live album, Before the Flood ( Billboard ,
number three). Dylan, however, was far from satisfi ed. “When [Elvis] did
‘That’s All Right, Mama’ in 1955, it was sensitivity and power,” he explained
later. “In 1969, it was just full-out power. There was nothing other than just
force behind that. I’ve fallen into that trap, too.” 19
After the tour, Dylan returned to Manhattan. Since returning to the road,
Bob had recommitted himself to his music. His marriage felt the strain. Temporarily
separated from Sara in New York, he once again became a regular on
the Village folk scene, sitting in with old friends at old haunts. He also studied
with painter Norman Raeben, who—according to Dylan—taught the songwriter
a new way to look at the world. Inspired, Dylan began a new batch of
songs, many of them character-driven narratives.
The fi rst of the new songs was titled “Tangled Up in Blue.” In it, Bob was
trying to tell a story and be a present character in it without it being some kind
of fake, sappy attempted tearjerker. I was trying to be somebody in the present
tense, while conjuring up a lot of past images. . . . I wanted to defy time, so that
the story took place in the present and the past at the same time. When you look at a painting, you can see any part of it, or see all of it together. I wanted that
song to be like a painting. 20
Back on Columbia, Dylan recorded Blood on the Tracks at Studio A in the fall
of 1974. On many of the tracks, at fi rst, he recorded only with bassist Tony Brown.
Bob deemed the album complete, and had vinyl pressings made. Over the holidays
in Minnesota, he played a test copy for his brother David, who pronounced
it too glum. The two rounded up a band of local folk musicians, who re-recorded a
number of the tracks, including “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Simple Twist of
Fate.”
Released in January 1975, Blood on the Tracks reached number one and
began Dylan’s busiest year in nearly a decade. He spent the spring and summer
in New York, where he reestablished old creative relationships and forged
new ones. Introduced to theater director Jacques Levy, the two bonded. Several
times, they retreated to Levy’s house in South Hampton, on the east end
of Long Island, to write songs that ventured further into Dylan’s new interest
in narrative. Dylan tried new genres, from cowboy tales (“Romance in Durango”)
to gypsy fantasies (“One More Cup of Coffee [Valley Below]”) to
gangster biographies (“Joey”). They also penned a song dedicated to Rubin
“Hurricane” Carter, a boxer serving time in jail for what many believed to be a
racially motivated murder frame-up. After rewriting several lyrics to avoid legal
liability, Dylan rush-released it as a single. “Hurricane” only reached number thirtythree,
though it helped Carter secure a mistrial. That summer, Columbia also
released a cleaned up version of The Basement Tapes ( Billboard , number seven).
In a whirlwind, Bob assembled musicians for his next album. They included
everybody from legendary rock guitarist Eric Clapton to harmonica player
Sugar Blue, who ordinarily played on a Village street corner. They also featured
Scarlett Rivera, a mysterious-looking violinist Dylan had spotted on the
street and immediately recruited. The sessions maintained a spontaneous feel,
and Desire reached number one.
The spontaneity carried over into the organization of the tour, the Rolling
Thunder Revue. Wary of the giant operation the tour with The Band had been
the previous year, Bob sought to keep it looser. Shows were booked in small
theaters under assumed names, and not announced until a week previous.
Bobby Neuwirth, a painter and folk musician who served as Dylan’s righthand
man and road manager in 1965 and 1966, rounded up a troupe. When
the buses rolled into Plymouth, Massachusetts, in October 1975, the assembled
included Dylan, Neuwirth, Scarlett Rivera, poet Allen Ginsberg (a friend
since the 1960s), Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Joan Baez. Along with another
dozen musicians and hangers-on, they criss-crossed New England.
During the tour, Dylan decided to fi lm a movie, improvising scenes with the
musicians. When Sara Dylan joined her sometimes-wayward husband on
tour, and acted opposite Baez on screen, the results were sometimes uncomfortable.
Wearing whiteface make-up, both onstage and on camera, Bob Dylan became a character named Renaldo. Playwright Sam Shepard was brought in
to help write dialogue, though he did not compose much. Between the chaos
of the fi lm, which Dylan called Renaldo and Clara , the shows were an incredible
success. They also staged two shows billed as “Night of the Hurricane,”
at Boston Garden in Massachusetts and Madison Square Garden in New York
City, to draw attention to Rubin Carter’s case.
The tour resumed in 1976, though the shows did not have the same spark.
Dylan’s marriage fi nally ended when Bob and Sara were divorced on June 28,
1977. Over many hours in the studio, Dylan and producer Howard Alk edited
Renaldo and Clara . When they were done, the fi lm was four hours long. Bob
tried to explain the movie in several interviews. “It’s about the essence of man
being alienated from himself and how, in order to free himself, to be reborn,
he has to go outside himself.” 21 He did not try to explain the plot. The fi lm
bombed, and was never released on video.
Embittered, Dylan recorded a new album, Street-Legal ( Billboard , number
eleven), and formed a new band for what many critics dubbed “the alimony
tour.” Where the Rolling Thunder Revue was loose, the new group was as
rehearsed as a Las Vegas stage show. With an eleven-piece band behind him,
including three back-up vocalists, Bob recast 1965’s acoustic love song “Love
Minus Zero/No Limit” as calypso and turned the plaintive blues of “Don’t
Think Twice, It’s Alright” into reggae. Like Renaldo and Clara , both the 115-
show tour and the album were panned by critics. Dylan had reached another
breaking point. On tour in late November, in an Arizona hotel room, Bob
Dylan saw Jesus and was reborn.

SLOW TRAIN COMING
“There was a presence in the room that couldn’t have been anybody but
Jesus,” Dylan said two years later. “Jesus put his hand on me. It was a physical
thing. I felt it. I felt it all over me. I felt my whole body tremble. The glory
of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up.” 22 “I truly had a born-again
experience. If you want to call it that. It’s an over-used term, but it’s something
that people can relate to.” 23
After the tour, Dylan attended classes four days a week at the Vineyard School
of Discipleship in Tarzana, California, near Malibu. The church included several
members of the Rolling Thunder Revue, including guitarist T-Bone Burnett and
mandolinist David Mansfi eld. In April, Dylan contacted veteran Atlantic Records
producer Jerry Wexler. He told Wexler he wanted a more modern sound. It
would be the fi rst Dylan album to feature extensive use of overdubbing, a technique
he’d largely eschewed in the ten years since it had become commonplace.
Wexler assembled a band that included Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfl er.
Despite its evangelical overtones, “Gotta Serve Somebody,” Slow Train Coming
’s fi rst single, was as packed with put-downs as “Like a Rolling Stone.” Released in August 1979, the album peaked at number three. “Gotta Serve
Somebody” earned Dylan his fi rst Grammy Award, for Best Vocal Performance.
In November, a year after his conversion, Dylan began to perform again. He
started with a fourteen-night run at San Francisco’s Warfi eld Theater. Setting
the pattern for the next year, Bob played only his Christian material. He
preached from the stage. “If you want rock and roll, you go down and rock
and roll,” he told a restless audience in Tempe, Arizona. “You can go and see
Kiss and you can rock and roll all the way down to the pit!” 24
Shortly after the Warfi eld shows, longtime fan Paul Williams published a
book titled Dylan—What Happened? , articulating possible reasons for the
singer’s conversion. Dylan bought over 100 copies to give to his friends to
explain his newfound beliefs. “We talk about him, we listen to his music, and
all our friends want to talk about him too,” Williams theorized. “So much
attention directed at one man! Maybe he turned to Christ so he’d have somewhere
to refer all this energy that gets thrown at him. If you don’t want to be
the messiah, and people keep treating you like one anyway, it makes sense to
hook up with somebody who’s willing to accept that karma.” 25
In 1980, Dylan released Saved and returned to the Warfi eld. At the urging
of promoter Bill Graham, Dylan added secular songs back into his set list.
Saved ( Billboard , number twenty-two) was the fi rst Bob Dylan album since
Another Side of Bob Dylan not to make the Top Twenty. In 1981, he released
his fi nal religious album, Shot of Love ( Billboard , number thirty-three). It
concluded with “Every Grain of Sand,” in which Dylan questioned his faith.
By the fall of 1981, Bob was back to playing much of his pre-religious material.
Keyboardist Al Kooper even joined Dylan for the fi rst time in over a
decade. He’d reached another end.
“Too many distractions had turned my musical path into a jungle of vines,”
Dylan wrote of his experience during the 1980s. “I’d been following established
customs and they weren’t working . . . Many times I’d come near the
stage before a show and would catch myself thinking that I wasn’t keeping my
word with myself. What that word was, I couldn’t exactly remember, but I
knew it was back there somewhere.” 26
Dylan released four albums of new songs, though what was left off was
often better than what was issued. Like many of his contemporaries, Dylan’s
1980s albums were mired in excessive use of synthesizers, which buried his
distinct guitar playing deep in the mix. He never publicly announced the end
of his Christian period, though his songs were no longer evangelical. In
1989, he participated in a telethon raising funds for Chabad Lubavitch, a
Hasidic Jewish group, playing recorder and fl ute alongside actor Harry Dean
Stanton.
In 1987, Dylan toured with the Grateful Dead. Longtime fans, the Dead
wanted to play their favorite Dylan songs. Bob observed that the Dead were
more familiar with his songs than he was. In long rehearsal sessions they
played a broad array of material, but the actual concerts stuck mostly to the
classics and were less than satisfactory. Still, during the rehearsals, Dylan had
a musical revelation.
During a break, Dylan entered a nearby jazz club, where he suddenly
remembered a style of singing taught to him by blues guitarist Lonnie Johnson
in the 1960s. It was a mathematical technique. “It’s a highly controlled system
of playing and relates to the notes of a scale, how they combine numerically,
how they form melodies out of triplets and are axiomatic to the rhythm and
the chord changes,” 27 Dylan described later. It allowed Dylan to improvise his
vocals in the way a jazz musician might solo over a set of chord changes. Though
the song might be unrecognizable to the audience, Bob was enthralled.
Inspired by the Grateful Dead, Dylan encouraged his manager to book him
on extensive tours that would return him to the same towns year after year.
He wanted to build a new following, separate from those who knew him only
for his 1960s persona. Dylan established a semi-permanent road band. Though
the members rotated, they did so over a long period of time. As of 2007, bassist
Tony Garnier had served with Dylan for nineteen years, the longest musical
partnership of Dylan’s career. Other long-standing accompanists included
Saturday Night Live bandleader G.E. Smith, roots-rock guitarists Larry
Campbell and Charlie Sexton, as well as former Jerry Garcia Band drummer
David Kemper. The Never-Ending Tour—as it was semi-offi cially known—
began June 7, 1988, at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, California.
Dylan recorded a new album with producer Daniel Lanois in New Orleans.
Bolstered by Lanois’s textured arrangements, and accompanied by local musicians,
1989’s Oh Mercy ( Billboard , number thirty) was Bob’s strongest effort in
years. On stage, Dylan dipped into a seemingly endless well of songs by other
artists. He played folk songs like “House of the Rising Sun” and “Pretty Peggy-
O” that he’d not performed since his Greenwich Village days. He also covered
material by contemporaries like the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Van
Morrison, Bruce Springsteen, and others. He performed country by Johnny Cash
and Hank Williams, as well as early rock and roll by Chuck Berry and Buddy
Holly.
In the early 1990s, the now fi fty-year-old Dylan released two solo acoustic
albums of folk songs. The fi rst time he’d recorded alone since 1964, 1992’s
Good As I Been to You ( Billboard , number fi fty-one) and 1993’s World Gone
Wrong ( Billboard , number seventy) featured songs from the age “before the
Children of the Sun—before the celestial grunge, before the insane world of
entertainment exploded in our faces,” Dylan wrote in his cryptic liner notes
to the latter.
Snowed in at his Minnesota farm in 1996, Dylan wrote a new batch of
songs, soon recorded with Daniel Lanois, this time in Miami. The album Time
Out of Mind, concluded with “Highlands,” a sixteen-minute half-spoken
blues narrative. On May 29, however, before the album could be released,
Bob was admitted to the hospital with histoplasmosis, a heart infection. He
was back on the road by August 3.
Time Out of Mind was released in September 1997 to critical acclaim and
impressive sales. Charting at number ten, it was Dylan’s fi rst Top Ten entry in
almost twenty years and won three Grammy Awards including Album of the
Year. Dylan’s touring continued unabated. He had evolved into an old-time country
bandleader, wearing a suit, tie, and cowboy hat on stage. On September 11,
2001, he released “Love and Theft,” another album of Americana-informed rock.
Its title referenced Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working
Class , a 1995 book by historian Eric Lott about minstrelsy, and some lyrics
were adapted from Japanese author Dr. Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza .
Bob Dylan also became involved in a number of extra-musical projects. In
2003, he starred in Masked & Anonymous, a movie he co-wrote with director
Larry Charles under the pseudonyms Sergei Petrov and Rene Fontaine. Dylan
played Jack Fate, a washed-up caricature of himself in a dystopian United States,
sprung from jail to play a dubious benefi t concert. With co-stars John Goodman,
Jeff Bridges, Luke Wilson, and Jessica Lange, the fi lm was a modest cult success.
Two years later, Dylan published Chronicles, Volume One, the fi rst part of a
proposed three-volume autobiography. Non-linear in structure and divulging
little with regard to divorce, marriage, and the lives (or even the names) of his
children, Chronicles reads like a road trip of Dylan’s psyche. Vivid recollections
of the sights, sounds, and scene-makers of 1960s New York mark the path of his
artistic development; poets and songwriters, both past and present, serve as
guides to the singer’s creative process, with evocative side trips to New Orleans,
Woodstock, and Hibbing. Whether or not Dylan told the whole truth was, as
always, a matter for debate but Chronicles was the most successful non-musical
endeavor of his career. The book reached number two on the New York Times
best-seller list and was nominated for a National Book Award.
Bob also sat for extensive interviews with manager Jeff Rosen for Martin Scorsese’s
No Direction Home, a 2005 documentary for PBS’s American Masters
series. In 2006, he launched a weekly radio show on XM Satellite Radio, Theme
Time Radio Hour . He devoted each episode to playing songs about a specifi c
subject, such as baseball, spring cleaning, friends and neighbors, and others.
During shows on the Never-Ending Tour, an announcer introduced Dylan
nightly with a summary of his career:
“Ladies and gentleman, please welcome the poet laureate of rock ‘n’ roll. The
voice of promise of the sixties counterculture. The guy who forced folk into bed
with rock, who donned makeup in the seventies and disappeared into a haze of
substance abuse, who emerged to fi nd Jesus, was written off as a has-been, and
who suddenly shifted gears, releasing some of the strongest music of his career
beginning in the late nineties. Ladies and gentlemen, Columbia Recording
artist Bob Dylan!”
In 2006, Bob Dylan released Modern Times , his thirty-second studio album,
and his fi rst number one album since 1976’s Desire . The Never Ending Tour
rolled on down the highway.
Inducting Bob Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, Bruce
Springsteen recalled the initial impact of “Like a Rolling Stone”:
“The fi rst time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening
to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody’d kicked
open the door to your mind . . . ”
“Bob freed your mind the way Elvis freed your body. He showed us that
just because music was innately physical did not mean that it was antiintellectual.
He had the vision and the talent to make a pop record that
contained the whole world.”

TIMELINE
September 1959
Robert Zimmerman enrolls in the University of Minnesota and begins to call himself
Bob Dylan.
January 24, 1961
Bob Dylan arrives in New York City.
March 1962
Columbia Records releases Bob Dylan .
July 1963
Peter, Paul, and Mary’s version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” charts at number two Pop.
July 20, 1965
Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” charts at number two.
July 25, 1965
Bob Dylan “goes electric” at the Newport Folk Festival in Newport, Rhode Island.
July 29, 1966
Dylan is hurt in a motorcycle accident in Woodstock, New York, and temporarily
retires from live performance.
May 17, 1967
Don’t Look Back, D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary of Dylan’s 1965 tour of England,
premieres in San Francisco.
April 1967
With The Band, Bob Dylan begins to record music in the basement of a house in
Saugerties, New York.
November 1971
Macmillan publishes Tarantula , Dylan’s experimental novel, written in 1965 and
1966.
January 3, 1974
With The Band, Dylan begins his fi rst concert tour in eight years.
December 8, 1975
As part of the Rolling Thunder Revue, Bob Dylan stages “Night of the Hurricane” at
New York’s Madison Square Garden, a benefi t for jailed boxer Rubin “Hurricane”
Carter.
January 25, 1978
Renaldo and Clara , Bob Dylan’s directorial debut, is released theatrically.
November 1978
Bob Dylan experiences a religious revelation in Arizona and becomes a born-again
Christian.
July 1987
Dylan tours with the Grateful Dead as his backing band.
June 1988
Bob Dylan begins the Never-Ending Tour.
May 29, 1997
Dylan is admitted to a hospital with a heart infection.
February 25, 1998
Bob Dylan wins three Grammy Awards for Time Out of Mind .
October 5, 2004
Simon & Schuster publishes Chronicles, Volume One , the fi rst part of a proposed
three-book autobiography.