The Music of Bob Dylan
What can you write about someone who, essentially, is a whole genre of music? About someone who posted in his high school yearbook that his ambition was “to join Little Richard?” About someone who’s latest recordings are as influential as the first ones he made close to fifty years ago?
Born on May 24, 1941, Robert Zimmerman grew up in Duluth and then Hibbing, Minnesota and played in a few rock cover bands while in high school. By the time he started college at the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis) in the fall of 1959, he was already leaving the rock scene for what he thought were the realistic, thoughtful and serious trappings of folk music. Performing locally, he started using the stage name of “Bob Dylan.”
Dropping out of college, Dylan moved to New York to join the folk scene of the big city. He made a point of visiting his idol, Woody Guthrie (who was hospitalized with Huntington’s Disease) and also made friends of Guthrie’s pal Ramblin’ Jack Eliot, who taught Dylan much of Guthrie’s music. Performing at many Greenwich Village clubs, he was noticed and signed to Columbia Records, who released his self-titled debut album in 1962. While his first album barely broke even, his second, The Free Wheelin’ Bob Dylan, saw the young artist get plenty of attention, both as a performer and a songwriter. His songs could have a topical bite, but they also could be wonderfully humorous and artists from all over the world took an interest in his music and his performances. And things would just keep growing from there.
By 1965, Dylan was back playing electric rock, although now it was rock that was “realistic, serious and thoughtful.” His four albums from the mid-sixties, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding (though the latter was very spare – guitar, bass, drums and pedal steel), would inspire musicians of all genres for the next forty years. After a motorcycle accident in the summer of 1966, Dylan set aside touring for eight years. But he still wrote and recorded at his own home and at “Big Pink,” a house where the Band (who as “The Hawks” had backed up Dylan in some of his early electric sets) worked and lived. Much of the music recorded there was released years later as “The Basement Tapes.” He also still performed, playing at Woody Guthrie’s memorial concert in Carnegie Hall in the winter of 1968 (Guthrie having passed away in October 1967) as well as the Isle of Wight Festival in the summer of 1969.
While some fans will claim his music through the sixties as their favorite, others will be just as (if not more) passionate about his work of the 1970’s. Planet Waves, Blood on the Tracks¸ Desire and Street Legal, gathered all sorts of reviews, some good and some not so kind. Blood on the Tracks, much like the Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, has seen much of the critical world change its tune – claiming it as Dylan’s finest work. And though his work through the next decade would also set the critics off to both ends of the spectrum, Dylan would be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in early 1988. He would also co-found the band, the Traveling Wilburys, that same spring.
Through the present day, Dylan still writes, records and tours. Some of his latest albums, Time Out of Mind (1997), Love and Theft (2001) and Modern Times (2006) show Dylan still can play in almost any style from rockabilly to lounge song, from blues and back to folk. And his latest release, Together Through Life, scheduled to be released on April 28, 2009, promises to be just as interesting, with guests artists such as Mike Campbell (best known as Tom Petty’s guitarist in the Heartbreakers) and Los Lobos, not to mention quite a few songs cowritten with long time Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter.
