Friday 04 May, 2001
Poet-Musician Bob Dylan
Robert Allen Zimmerman, better known as Bob Dylan, will celebrate his 60th birthday on the 24th of May. Unsurprisingly, the man who was once described by a critic as 'bursting at the seams with talent' is still creating.
So far, he has released more than 40 albums. In March, he picked up an Oscar for Things Have Changed, the soundtrack to Michael Douglas' film Wonder Boys. And at the moment, he is in the midst of an intensive worldwide tour. So, how does it feel?
Music Mix: Times Changed - Dylan at 60 charts the rise of one of the most mythologised figures in popular culture. Part One of the 3-part series, examines the life of the poet-musician up to the 1960s.
Roots
Robert Zimmerman was born in 1941, in the town of Duluth, Minnesota. At ten, he dedicated a poem to his mother. By the time he had reached his teens, he had taught himself a couple of chords from a book, enough to play the piano and the guitar.
In 1959, he went to Minneapolis and enrolled at the University of Minnesota. It was there that he dropped his name and adopted Dylan, inspired by Dylan Thomas.
Folk Music
By the time the first wave of rock 'n' roll was dying out in the late fifties, Dylan had come to the conclusion that the folk scene held more creative possibilities. For many, rock had become naïve and limiting whereas folk tradition tapped into the good and bad of American culture. But the folk movement was not homogeneous. Dylan explains:
'There was a purist side to it, many people didn't want to hear you, if you couldn't play a song exactly the way Aunt Mellie Jackson played it. So I just kind of blazed my way through…And then I heard Woody Guthrie one time, before I got to New York, and then it all came together for me.'
Guthrie, writer of songs such as This Land Is Your Land, had come to personify the image of a traveling musician. He had a particular sound and he spoke about things that needed to be said. The lifestyle and the politics struck a chord with Dylan.
Greenwich Village
Inspired by his hero Woody Guthrie and Beat writer Jack Kerouac, Dylan moved to the centre of Bohemian life - New York's Greenwich Village. Joan Baez, a folk singer, remembers seeing him play:
'I heard a squeaky little rat singing in the Folk song club in the Village and I was just stoned. I mean he was obviously one out of a couple of million.'
In 1963, Dylan performed with Baez, who was at the height of her career. For a while, they were lovers. Another folk singer who witnessed Dylan's arrival on the scene was Tom Paxton. Paxton first saw him at Gerde's Folk City, a folk music venue, where artists could only sing a maximum of three songs, per session. Paxton was impressed:
| 'Dave Van Ronk and I had both sung our three songs…and this skinny kid in the corduroy cap, harmonica rack, and a Gibson guitar got up and sang three Woody Guthrie songs; both of us thought: very good, who's that? And indeed, Bob became the most talked about artist in the Village.' |
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Career Break
A few months later, at Gerde's Folk City, Dylan chose to sing a song he had penned himself. Dedicated to Guthrie, Song To Woody signaled the break in his career. Until then, most artists at the venue, with the exception of Guthrie, only played versions. Dylan recalls the moment:
'I just felt like playing it one night, and I played it. I wanted just a song to sing and there came a certain point where I couldn't sing anything - I had to write what I wanted to sing. Because what I wanted to sing, nobody else was writing. What I felt was going on, nobody was writing. I couldn't find that song anywhere else - if I could have, I probably would never have started writing.'
Had he not chosen to break with tradition at Gerde's Folk City, a billion-dollar industry devoted to analysing him and producing books, articles, films, photographs and web sites about him, would probably not exist. But for Dylan, to pioneer simply meant believing in his own ideas. He says:
| 'The easiest way to do something is just don't ask anybody's opinion. I mean, if you really believe in what you're doing. I've asked people's opinion and it's been a great mistake…' |
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By 1961, Dylan was poised for fame. The extra push he needed came from a review of a concert, which described his voice as 'anything but pretty' and his career direction as 'straight up.' The next day, John Hammond signed Dylan to Columbia Records.
A year later, Dylan produced a self-titled first album, consisting mainly of cover songs. He followed it with The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, containing the classics Masters Of War and Blowin' In The Wind.
Three years later, Dylan married Sara Lowndes, whom he divorced in the 70s. She was the first of several wives.
New Rock
During the 60s decade, America was rocked by internal and external conflict - the assassination of President Kennedy, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Civil Rights marches. Dylan's songs provided the perfect soundtrack.
But a new sound, led by the Beatles, was proving there was still life in rock 'n' roll. Drug and booze fuelled tours were also probably turning his vision away from social comment to something more visceral.
The first indication of this was Dylan's album Bringing It All Back Home, released in 1965. On the original LP version, it had one side of acoustic songs; the other was backed by a full rock 'n' roll band. Tracks included Maggie's Farm and the legendary Subterranean Homesick Blues.
Then, at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, he confirmed that he had swapped folk for rock. The move was considered a desertion by the folk establishment and was met with exhilaration from enchanted others.
But this change was just one of many which define the formerly named Robert Allen Zimmerman. Further changes in his life, such as leaving Judaism and becoming a born-again Christian, his secret marriage, his role as a father, and his music, will be looked at in Part Two and Part Three of Music Mix: Times Changed - Dylan At 60.
|  |  | | | Dylan’s Contribution |  |
| | Howard Sounes, the author of Down The Highway: A Life of Bob Dylan, says:
'He put rhythm and blues together with serious lyrics. You didn't have to just sing about Cadillacs, and teenage love, and that kind of frippery, you could actually sing about life itself.'
Music Mix: Times Changed - Dylan At 60 can be listened to live Online on:
Monday: 0830 / 1830
Tuesday: 0030 / 1330
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| | | | Bootleg Album |  |
| | In 1966, at a concert in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, Bob Dylan picked up an electric guitar and began to play. He was unprepared for the reaction.
Concert-goers began to heckle and jeer. People who were there to listen to Dylan's protest music felt he had sold out to commercialism, to trade in pop.
The show was only released on an album in 1998, titled Live 1966. However, sales of the bootleg, which has been available all along, have reached 150,000.
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