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Bob Dylan (born May 24, 1941, Duluth , Minnesota , U.S.) is an American folksinger who moved from folk to rock music in the 1960s, infusing the lyrics of rock and roll , theretofore concerned mostly with boy-girl romantic innuendo , with the intellectualism of classic literature and poetry . Hailed as the Shakespeare of his generation, Dylan sold tens of millions of albums, wrote more than 500 songs recorded by more than 2,000 artists, performed all over the world, and set the standard for lyric writing. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. ( See Editor’s Note: About the author .)

He grew up in the northeastern Minnesota mining town of Hibbing , where his father co-owned Zimmerman Furniture and Appliance Co. Taken with the music of Hank Williams , Little Richard , Elvis Presley , and Johnny Ray, he acquired his first guitar in 1955 at age 14 and later, as a high school student, played in a series of rock and roll bands. In 1959, just before enrolling at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis , he served a brief stint playing piano for rising pop star Bobby Vee . While attending college, he discovered the bohemian section of Minneapolis known as Dinkytown. Fascinated by Beat poetry and folksinger Woody Guthrie , he began performing folk music in coffeehouses, adopting the last name Dylan (after the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas ). Restless and determined to meet Guthrie—who was confined to a hospital in New Jersey—he relocated to the East Coast.

Arriving in late January 1961, Dylan was greeted by a typically merciless New York City winter. A survivor at heart, he relied on the generosity of various benefactors who, charmed by his performances at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village , provided meals and shelter. He quickly built a cult following and within four months was hired to play harmonica for a Harry Belafonte recording session. Responding to Robert Shelton’s laudatory New York Times review of one of Dylan’s live shows in September 1961, talent scout–producer John Hammond investigated and signed him to Columbia Records . There Dylan’s unkempt appearance and roots-oriented song material earned him the whispered nickname “Hammond’s Folly.”

Dylan’s eponymous first album was released in March 1962 to mixed reviews. His singing voice—a cowboy lament laced with Midwestern patois, with an obvious nod to Guthrie—confounded many critics. It was a sound that took some getting used to. By comparison, Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (released in May 1963), sounded a clarion call. Young ears everywhere quickly assimilated his quirky voice, which divided parents and children and established him as part of the burgeoning counterculture, “a rebel with a cause.” Moreover, his first major composition , “ Blowin’ in the Wind ,” served notice that this was no cookie-cutter recording artist. About this time, Dylan signed a seven-year management contract with Albert Grossman , who soon replaced Hammond with another Columbia producer, Tom Wilson .

In April 1963 Dylan played his first major New York City concert, at Town Hall. In May, when he was forbidden to perform “ Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” on Ed Sullivan ’s popular television program , he literally walked out on a golden opportunity. That summer, championed by folk music’s doyenne, Joan Baez , Dylan made his first appearance at the Newport Folk Festival and was virtually crowned the king of folk music. The prophetic title song of his next album, The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964), provided an instant anthem.

Millions jumped on the bandwagon when the mainstream folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary reached number two on the Billboard pop singles chart in mid-1963 with their version of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Dylan was perceived as a singer of protest songs, a politically charged artist with a whole other agenda. (Unlike Elvis Presley, there would be no film of Dylan singing “Rock-a-Hula Baby” surrounded by bikini-clad women.) Dylan spawned imitators at coffeehouses and record labels everywhere. At the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, while previewing songs from Another Side of Bob Dylan , he confounded his core audience by performing songs of a personal nature rather than his signature protest repertoire . Although his new lyrics were as challenging as his earlier compositions , a backlash from purist folk fans began and continued for three years as Dylan defied convention at every turn.

On his next album, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), electric instruments were openly brandished—a violation of folk dogma—and only two protest songs were included. The folk rock group the Byrds covered “ Mr. Tambourine Man ” from that album, adding electric 12-string guitar and three-part harmony vocals, and took it to number one on the singles chart. Other rock artists were soon pilfering the Dylan songbook and joining the juggernaut . As Dylan’s mainstream audience increased rapidly, his purist folk fans fell off in droves. The maelstrom that engulfed Dylan is captured in Don’t Look Back (1967), the telling documentary of his 1965 tour of Britain, directed by D.A. Pennebaker.

In June 1965, consorting with “hardened” rock musicians and in kinship with the Byrds, Dylan recorded his most ascendant song yet, “ Like a Rolling Stone .” Devoid of obvious protest references, set against a rough-hewn, twangy rock underpinning, and fronted by a snarling vocal that lashed out at all those who questioned his legitimacy, “Like a Rolling Stone” spoke to yet a new set of listeners and reached number two on the Billboard chart. It was the final link in the chain. The world fell at Dylan’s feet. And the album containing the hit single, Highway 61 Revisited (1965), further vindicated his abdication of the protest throne.

At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan bravely showcased his electric sound, backed primarily by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. After an inappropriately short 15-minute set, Dylan left the stage to a hail of booing—mostly a response to the headliner’s unexpectedly abbreviated performance rather than to his electrification. He returned for a two-song acoustic encore. Nonetheless, reams were written about his electric betrayal and banishment from the folk circle. ( See BTW: Dylan goes electric—the event, the debate .) By the time of his next public appearance, at the Forest Hills (New York) Tennis Stadium a month later, the audience had been “instructed” by the press how to react. After a well-received acoustic opening set, Dylan was joined by his new backing band ( Al Kooper on keyboards, Harvey Brooks on bass, and, from the Hawks , Canadian guitarist Robbie Robertson and drummer Levon Helm). Dylan and the band were booed throughout the performance; incongruously, the audience sang along with “Like a Rolling Stone,” the number two song in the United States that week, and then booed at its conclusion.

Backed by Robertson, Helm, and the rest of the Hawks ( Rick Danko on bass, Richard Manuel on piano, and Garth Hudson on organ and saxophone), Dylan toured incessantly in 1965 and 1966, always playing to sold-out, agitated audiences. On November 22, 1965, Dylan married Sara Lowndes. They split their time between a townhouse in Greenwich Village and a country estate in Woodstock , New York .

In February 1966, at the suggestion of his new producer, Bob Johnston, Dylan recorded at Columbia’s Nashville, Tennessee, studios , along with Kooper, Robertson, and the cream of Nashville’s play-for-pay musicians. A week’s worth of marathon 20-hour sessions produced a double album that was more polished than the raw, almost punklike Highway 61 Revisited . Containing some of Dylan’s finest work, Blonde on Blonde peaked at number nine in Billboard , was critically acclaimed, and pushed Dylan to the zenith of his popularity. He toured Europe with the Hawks (soon to reemerge as the Band ) until the summer of 1966, when a motorcycle accident in Woodstock brought his amazing seven-year momentum to an abrupt halt. Citing a serious neck injury, he retreated to his home in Woodstock and virtually disappeared for two years.

During his recuperation, Dylan edited film footage from his 1966 European tour that was to be shown on television but instead surfaced years later as the seldom-screened film Eat the Document . In 1998 some of the audio recordings from the film, including portions of Dylan’s performance at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England, were released as the album Live 1966 .

In 1967 the Band moved to Woodstock to be closer to Dylan. Occasionally they coaxed him into the basement studio of their communal home to play music together, and recordings from these sessions ultimately became the double album The Basement Tapes (1975). In early 1968 Columbia released a stripped-down album of new Dylan songs titled John Wesley Harding . At least partly because of public curiosity about Dylan’s seclusion, it reached number two on the Billboard album chart (eight places higher than Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits , released in 1967).

In January 1968 Dylan made his first postaccident appearance at a memorial concert for Woody Guthrie in New York City. His image had changed; with shorter hair, spectacles, and a neglected beard, he resembled a rabbinical student. At this point Dylan adopted the stance he held for the rest of his career: sidestepping the desires of the critics, he went in any direction but those called for in print. When his audience and critics were convinced that his muse had left him, Dylan would deliver an album at full strength, only to withdraw again.

Dylan returned to Tennessee to record Nashville Skyline (1969), which helped launch an entirely new genre , country rock . It charted at number three, but, owing to the comparative simplicity of its lyrics, people questioned whether Dylan remained a cutting-edge artist. Meanwhile, rock’s first bootleg album, The Great White Wonder —containing unreleased, “liberated” Dylan recordings—appeared in independent record stores. Its distribution methods were shrouded in secrecy (certainly Columbia, whose contract with Dylan the album violated, was not involved).

Over the next quarter century Dylan continued to record, toured sporadically, and was widely honoured, though his impact was never as great or as immediate as it had been in the 1960s. In 1970 Princeton (New Jersey) University awarded him an honorary doctorate of music. His first book, Tarantula , a collection of unconnected writings, met with critical indifference when it was unceremoniously published in 1971, five years after its completion. In August 1971 Dylan made a rare appearance at a benefit concert that former Beatle George Harrison had organized for the newly independent nation of Bangladesh . At the end of the year, Dylan purchased a house in Malibu , California; he had already left Woodstock for New York City in 1969.

In 1973 he appeared in director Sam Peckinpah ’s film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and contributed to the sound track, including “ Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Writings and Drawings , an anthology of his lyrics and poetry, was published the next year. In 1974 he toured for the first time in eight years, reconvening with the Band (by this time popular artists in their own right). Before the Flood , the album documenting that tour, reached number three.

Released in January 1975, Dylan’s next studio album, Blood on the Tracks , was a return to lyrical form. It topped the Billboard album chart, as did Desire , released one year later. In 1975 and 1976 Dylan barnstormed North America with a gypsylike touring company , announcing shows in radio interviews only hours before appearing. Filmed and recorded, the Rolling Thunder Revue —including Joan Baez , Allen Ginsberg , Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Roger McGuinn —came to motion-picture screens in 1978 as part of the four-hour-long, Dylan-edited Renaldo and Clara .

Lowndes and Dylan divorced in 1977. They had four children, including son Jakob, whose band the Wallflowers experienced pop success in the 1990s. Dylan was also stepfather to a child from Lowndes’s previous marriage. In 1978 Dylan mounted a yearlong world tour and released a studio album, Street-Legal , and a live album, Bob Dylan at Budokan . In a dramatic turnabout, he converted to Christianity in 1979 and for three years recorded and performed only religious material, preaching between songs at live shows. Critics and listeners were, once again, confounded. Nonetheless, Dylan received a Grammy Award in 1980 for best male rock vocal performance with his “gospel” song “ Gotta Serve Somebody.”

By 1982, when Dylan was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, his open zeal for Christianity was waning. In 1985 he participated in the all-star charity recording “ We Are the World ,” organized by Quincy Jones , and published his third book, Lyrics: 1962–1985 . Dylan toured again in 1986–87, backed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and in 1987 he costarred in the film Hearts of Fire . A year later he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame , and the Traveling Wilburys (Dylan, Petty , Harrison, Jeff Lynne, and Roy Orbison ) formed at his house in Malibu and released their first album.

In 1989 Dylan once again returned to form with Oh Mercy , produced by Daniel Lanois . When Life magazine published a list of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century in 1990, Dylan was included, and in 1991 he received a lifetime achievement award from the Recording Academy. In 1992 Columbia Records celebrated the 30th anniversary of Dylan’s signing with a star-studded concert in New York City. Later this event was released as a double album and video. As part of Bill Clinton ’s inauguration as U.S. president in 1993, Dylan sang “ Chimes of Freedom” in front of the Lincoln Memorial .

As the 1990s drew to a close, Dylan, who was called the greatest poet of the second half of the 20th century by Allen Ginsberg , performed for the pope at the Vatican, was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, received a Kennedy Center Honor, and was made Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters (the highest cultural award presented by the French government). In 1998, in a comeback of sorts, he won three Grammy Awards—including album of the year—for Time Out of Mind (1997). In 2000 he was honoured with a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for best original song for “ Things Have Changed ,” from the film Wonder Boys . Another Grammy (for best contemporary folk album) came Dylan’s way in 2002, for Love and Theft (2001).

In 2003 he cowrote and starred in the film Masked & Anonymous and began favouring keyboards over guitar in live appearances. The next year he released what portended to be the first in a series of autobiographies, Chronicles: Volume 1 . In 2005 No Direction Home , a documentary directed by Martin Scorsese , appeared on television. Four hours long, yet covering Dylan’s career only up to 1967, it was widely hailed by critics. A sound track album that included 26 previously unreleased tracks came out before the documentary aired. In 2006 Dylan turned his attention to satellite radio as the host of the weekly Theme Time Radio Hour and released Modern Times , which won a Grammy Award for best contemporary folk album. Dylan also received an award for best solo rock vocal performance for “ Someday Baby.”

In presenting to Dylan Spain’s Prince of Asturias Prize for the Arts in 2007, the jury called him a “living myth in the history of popular music and a light for a generation that dreamed of changing the world,” and in 2008 the Pulitzer Prize Board awarded him a special citation for his “profound impact on popular music and American culture.” In 2009 Dylan released Together Through Life , which debuted at the top of the British and American album charts. He was still actively performing as he entered his 70s, and his 35th studio album, the rootsy Tempest (2012), found him as vigorous as ever. Dylan then turned his attention to the so-called Great American Songbook, especially standards recorded by Frank Sinatra . The resulting albums— Shadows in the Night (2015), Fallen Angels (2016), and the three-disc Triplicate (2017)—earned Dylan praise for his deeply felt interpretations. He returned to spectacular lyrical form yet again with Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020).

Dylan continued to receive awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2012). In 2016 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature for, as noted by the prize-bestowing Swedish Academy , “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

Bob Dylan is one of the most influential singer-songwriters of the 20th century, known for songs that chronicle social and political issues.

Who Is Bob Dylan?

Folk-rock singer-songwriter Bob Dylan signed his first recording contract in 1961, and he emerged as one of the most original and influential voices in American popular music. Dylan has continued to tour and release new studio albums, including Together Through Life (2009), Tempest (2012), Shadows in the Night (2015) and Fallen Angels (2016). The legendary singer-songwriter has received Grammy, Academy and Golden Globe awards, as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, to parents Abram and Beatrice Zimmerman. He and his younger brother David were raised in the community of Hibbing, where he graduated from Hibbing High School in 1959.

Folk Singing

In 1960, Dylan dropped out of college and moved to New York, where his idol, the legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie , was hospitalized with a rare hereditary disease of the nervous system. He visited with Guthrie regularly in his hospital room; became a regular in the folk clubs and coffeehouses of Greenwich Village; met a host of other musicians; and began writing songs at an astonishing pace, including "Song to Woody," a tribute to his ailing hero.

In the fall of 1961, after one of his performances received a rave review in The New York Times , he signed a recording contract with Columbia Records, at which point he legally changed his surname to Dylan. Released early in 1962, Bob Dylan contained only two original songs, but showcased Dylan's gravel-voiced singing style in a number of traditional folk songs and covers of blues songs.

The 1963 release of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan marked Dylan's emergence as one of the most original and poetic voices in the history of American popular music. The album included two of the most memorable 1960s folk songs, "Blowin' in the Wind" (which later became a huge hit for the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary) and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." His next album, The Times They Are A-Changin' , firmly established Dylan as the definitive songwriter of the '60s protest movement, a reputation that only increased after he became involved with one of the movement's established icons, Joan Baez , in 1963.

While his romantic relationship with Baez lasted only two years, it benefited both performers immensely in terms of their music careers—Dylan wrote some of Baez's best-known material, and Baez introduced him to thousands of fans through her concerts. By 1964 Dylan was playing 200 concerts annually, but had become tired of his role as "the" folk singer-songwriter of the protest movement. Another Side of Bob Dylan , recorded in 1964, was a much more personal, introspective collection of songs, far less politically charged than Dylan's previous efforts.

Reinventing His Image

In 1965, Dylan scandalized many of his folkie fans by recording the half-acoustic, half-electric album Bringing It All Back Home , backed by a nine-piece band. On July 25, 1965, he was famously booed at the Newport Folk Festival when he performed electrically for the first time. The albums that followed, Highway 61 Revisited (1965) — which included the seminal rock song "Like a Rolling Stone" — and the two-record set Blonde on Blonde (1966) represented Dylan at his most innovative. With his unmistakable voice and unforgettable lyrics, Dylan brought the worlds of music and literature together as no one else had.

Over the course of the next three decades, Dylan continued to reinvent himself. Following a near-fatal motorcycle accident in July 1966, Dylan spent almost a year recovering in seclusion. His next two albums, John Wesley Harding (1967)—including "All Along the Watchtower," later recorded by guitar great Jimi Hendrix —and the unabashedly country-ish Nashville Skyline (1969) were far more mellow than his earlier works. Critics blasted the two-record set Self-Portrait (1970) and Tarantula , a long-awaited collection of writings Dylan published in 1971. In 1973, Dylan appeared in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid , a feature film directed by Sam Peckinpah. He also wrote the film's soundtrack, which became a hit and included the now-classic song, "Knockin' on Heaven's Door."

Touring and Religion

In 1974, Dylan began his first full-scale tour since his accident, embarking on a sold-out nationwide tour with his longtime backup band, the Band. An album he recorded with the Band, Planet Waves , became his first No. 1 album ever. He followed these successes with the celebrated 1975 album Blood on the Tracks and Desire (1976), each of which hit No. 1 as well. Desire included the song "Hurricane," written by Dylan about the boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter , then serving life in prison after what many felt was an wrongful conviction of triple homicide in 1967. Dylan was one of many prominent public figures who helped popularize Carter's cause, leading to a retrial in 1976, when he was again convicted.

After a painful split with his wife, Sara Lowndes — the song "Sara" on Desire was Dylan's plaintive but unsuccessful attempt to win Lowndes back — Dylan again reinvented himself, declaring in 1979 that he was a born-again Christian. The evangelical Slow Train Coming was a commercial hit, and won Dylan his first Grammy Award. The tour and albums that followed were less successful, however, and Dylan's religious leanings soon became less overt in his music. In 1982, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Rock Star Status

Beginning in the 1980s, Dylan began touring full time, sometimes with fellow legends Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and the Grateful Dead. Notable albums during this period included Infidels (1983); the five-disc retrospective Biograph (1985); Knocked Out Loaded (1986); and Oh Mercy (1989), which became his best-received album in years. He recorded two albums with the all-star band the Traveling Wilburys, also featuring George Harrison , Roy Orbison , Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne. In 1994, Dylan returned to his folk roots, winning the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album for World Gone Wrong .

In 1989, when Dylan was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Bruce Springsteen spoke at the ceremony, declaring that "Bob freed the mind the way Elvis freed the body. ... He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording artist could achieve and changed the face of rock and roll forever." In 1997, Dylan became the first rock star ever to receive Kennedy Center Honors, considered the nation's highest award for artistic excellence.

Dylan's 1997 album Time Out of Mind reestablished this one-time folk icon as one of rock's preeminent wise men, winning three Grammy Awards. He continued his vigorous touring schedule, including a memorable performance in 1997 for Pope John Paul II in which he played "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," and a 1999 tour with Paul Simon . In 2000, he recorded the single "Things Have Changed" for the soundtrack of the film Wonder Boys , starring Michael Douglas . The song won Dylan a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Dylan then took time out from his music to tell the story of his life. The singer released Chronicles: Volume One , the first in a three-book memoir series, in the fall of 2004. Dylan gave his first full interview in 20 years for a documentary released in 2005. Entitled No Direction Home: Bob Dylan , the film was directed by Martin Scorsese .

Later Work & Honors

In 2006, Dylan released the studio album Modern Times . After hitting stores in late August, it reached the top of the album charts the next month. A mixture of blues, country and folk, the album was praised for its rich sound and imagery. Several critics also remarked the album had a playful, knowing quality. Showing no signs of slowing down, Dylan continued to tour throughout the first decade of the 21st century, and released the studio album Together Through Life in April 2009.

In 2010, he released a bootleg album called The Witmark Demos , followed by a new boxed set entitled Bob Dylan: The Original Mono Recordings. In addition, he exhibited 40 of his original paintings for a solo show at the National Gallery of Denmark. In 2011, the artist released yet another live album, Bob Dylan in Concert - Brandeis University 1963 , and in September 2012, he delivered his newest studio album, Tempest . Shadows in the Night , a cover album of American standards, followed in 2015.

A year later, Dylan released Fallen Angels , his 37th studio album, which features more classic songs from the Great American Songbook. In 2017, he continued to celebrate the classics with his three-disc studio album Triplicate , which features 30 American standards, including “Stormy Weather," “As Time Goes By” and “The Best Is Yet To Come.”

In addition to winning Grammy, Academy and Golden Globe awards, Dylan received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2012. On October 13, 2016, the legendary singer-songwriter also received the Nobel Prize in Literature , the first time the honor was bestowed on a musician. He became the first American to receive the honor since novelist Toni Morrison in 1993, and was lauded by the Swedish Academy "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."

Dylan was back in the news in November 2017 with the release of the boxed set Trouble No More — The Bootleg Series Vol. 13 / 1979-1981. Around that time it was announced that his old recording studio in Manhattan's Greenwich Village was being reopened as a luxury apartment building, with lofts available for a minimum of at $12,500 per month. Not long afterward, the door to his room at the famed Chelsea Hotel was sold at an auction for $100,000.

In 2018, Dylan was one of the artists featured on the six-track EP Universal Love: Wedding Songs Reimagined , a collection of classics from various eras revised with same-sex pronouns. Dylan recorded the 1929 standard "She's Funny That Way" as "He's Funny That Way," while later hits like "My Girl" and "And Then He Kissed Me" also received fresh takes with a pronoun twist.

That year the iconic songwriter also launched a whiskey brand called Heaven’s Door Spirits. In August, the Heaven Hill Distillery filed a lawsuit over claims of trademark infringement.

November 2019 brought the release of another cache of little-heard material with Bob Dylan (Featuring Johnny Cash ) — Travelin’ Thru, 1967–1969: The Bootleg Series Vol. 15 . Along with songs from Dylan's 1969 collaborations with Cash, the three-CD set included tracks from his 1970 session with bluegrass great Earl Scruggs and outtakes from the 1967 John Wesley Harding and 1969 Nashville Skyline recording sessions.

Dylan gave fans a pleasant surprise with the March 2020 release of a 17-minute song, "Murder Most Foul," about the assassination of John F. Kennedy . He provided few details about the track in a brief statement, noting only that it was "recorded a while back."

Personal Life

In addition to Baez, Dylan was at one point romantically linked to another singer, gospel icon Mavis Staples, and wished to marry her, though the two never took the trip down the aisle. Dylan and Lowndes, who married in 1965 and divorced in 1977, had four children together: Jesse, Anna, Samuel and Jakob, with Jakob going on to become lead singer of the popular rock group the Wallflowers. Dylan also adopted Lowndes's daughter, Maria, from a previous marriage.

When he is not making music, Dylan has explored his talents as a visual artist. His paintings appear on the covers of his albums, Self Portrait (1970) and Planet Waves (1974), and he has published several books of his paintings and drawings, as well as exhibited his artwork around the world.

QUICK FACTS

• Birth Year: 1941
• Birth date: May 24, 1941
• Birth State: Minnesota
• Birth City: Duluth
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Bob Dylan is one of the most influential singer-songwriters of the 20th century, known for songs that chronicle social and political issues.
• Astrological Sign: Gemini
• University of Minnesota

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Bob Dylan Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/musicians/bob-dylan
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: April 13, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.

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Bob Dylan’s 60 Greatest Songs: Chosen by Paul McCartney, Bono, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Chris Martin and more!

To celebrate bob dylan’s birthday, a galaxy of stars pick their favourite ever dylan tracks..

Picking a favourite  Bob Dylan  song is in many ways an impossible task. This being Dylan, an artist who five decades in is still producing some of his finest work, a list of just 60 tracks means that some of the greatest songs ever composed might not be present ( whaddayamean there’s no Dear Landlord/I Want You/Mississippi?!? ). But by handing the choices over to Dylan’s fellow musicians and songwriters, we feel we’ve given a different perspective (another side of, if you will) on Dylan’s craft and enduring genius. And these aren’t just any musicians, either.

READ MORE: Bob Dylan Live In Texas Reviewed

Some of the names below played on and helped record many of the songs featured, while modern-day acolytes including  Beck ,  Bono  , Coldplay 's Chris Martin and  Lucinda Williams  have lined up to pick their favourite Dylan numbers. The closest we have to the heirs to his crown,  Nick Cave  and  Patti Smith  reveal a fresh perspective on his work, while Dylan’s one-time mentor  Pete Seeger  reveals the true story behind Dylan’s decision to go electric.

Elsewhere, East Coast rapper  Nas  recalls his teenage conversion to Bob, while contemporaries like the late  David Crosby ,  Jimmy Webb  and  Paul McCartney  (arguably the only serious challenger to Dylan’s status as the world’s greatest living songwriter) recall first-hand the seismic changes brought on by Dylan’s songs.

Last year’s  Shadow Kingdom  showed that Dylan’s mercurial magic is as potent as ever, so no doubt we’ll be back here again soon with more revered artists waxing lyrical about their favourite song off his next masterpiece. Until then…

Lonesome Day Blues

( Love And Theft , 2001)

As selected by The Waterboys ’ Mike Scott

“If Dylan had recorded this in the mid ‘70s when I longed above all things for his return to electric rock’n’roll, I’d have been thrilled.  But good things come to them what waits.  I was just as thrilled when I heard it the day it came out in 2001, a teasingly mid-paced barnstormer with a killer blues riff both humorous and sombre that runs like a monolith through every line, and graced by the master’s wittiest, dryest lyrics since Blonde On Blonde. I’ve sung it live myself and it’s a supreme joy the way the lines want to tumble off the tongue, so well-constructed, full of rhythm, sass and cunning.”

Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues

( Time Out Of Mind , 1997)

As selected by Badly Drawn Boy

“It’s Bob Dylan’s funniest song all about how he buys tickets to a picnic but ends up corralled into this ship, which sinks. He wakes up on the shore: ‘My arms and legs were broken, my feet were splintered, my head was cracked, I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t talk, smell, feel, couldn’t see, didn’t know where I was. I was bald.’ He was bald!  Dylan’s great at going that one step further than anyone else. Like rhyming the same rhyme. – in The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll, when he rhymes ‘table’ with ‘table’ twice in a row!”

As selected by This Is The Kit ’s Katie Stables

“Po’ Boy is one of my favourite songs to listen to with my family, everyone waiting for the next punchline and then loving it when he delivers. It’s always great to hear Bob Dylan letting himself have fun with lyrics and rhyming and wit. It’s what he does best. This song feels like an excellent exercise in storytelling, where you choose a word and then build the story up and around it to finish on the rhyme you want to get. The punchline. I of course have no idea how he really went about writing this song, but I really love imagining it. It feels quite cosmic. A stream if narrative consciousness and two-liner dad jokes. There’s such pleasure in the list like nature of the way he rolls out all the anecdotes in the song. The line about Othello and the poison wine has become something of a family catchphrase in our household. It rolls along musically in such and easy going and amicable way that just goes so well with the irony of the lyrics. The twinkle in his eye. The ever-present twinkle in his excellent eye.”

This Wheel’s On Fire

( The Basement Tapes , 1975)

As selected by Siouxsie Sioux

“I chose this for our covers album [1987’s  Through The Looking Glass ] because I thought Julie Driscoll had written it. I’d seen her perform it on Top Of Pops as a kid and I loved her Joan Of Arc look. Then I found out it was by fucking Bob Dylan! I liked the song, so it stayed anyway.”

Sign On The Window

( New Morning , 1970)

As selected by The Black Crowes ’ Rich Robinson

“It’s just Bob on piano at first, then his band are trying to catch up. It comes off in such a great way. Lyrically there’s a lot of reflection on city life. He’s trying to figure out the world and ends up looking for he simple, things. “Build me a cabin in Utah / Marry me a wife, catch a rainbow trout’. That’s beautiful and concise but it has meaning on a greater level. Musically, it’s textured to the point where it sounds like it had earth in it. I covered this song live when I did some solo touring and it made me thing that whatever artists you’re talking about it’s all about the subtleties. And Bob’s music is full of subtlety.”

Song To Woody

( Bob Dylan , 1962)

As selected by Donovan

“I particularly like this song because I was so influenced by Woody Guthrie before I heard Bob’s first record. I was 16 and living rough on the road with my best friend Gypsy Dave. I went home for a bit and Gyp wrote to me and said he’d found a record of a new American folk singer who was doing what I was doing, singing Woody Guthrie songs and wearing a cap and a harmonica harness. I was already kind of committed to the mission before I heard Bob, but Song To Woody confirmed to me that I was not alone in wanting to bring true poetry and new, meaningful, social lyrics back to popular culture. Joan Baez introduced me to Bob. The famous scene in Don’t Look Back where we’re both playing our songs, you’ve got to look closely. There’s a drunk in the room who’s berating Bob about him stealing the tune for With God On Our Side from Dominic Behan. Then Bob turns to me and I sing To Sing For You. Notice he takes not one drag of his cigarette all the way through... he’s listening. Then I ask him to sing a song for me and he does [It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue]. What people miss is that he listens all the way through to my song, acknowledges that it’s good, but not with too many words. He was a bit curious and a little amazed that there was another Guthrie disciple arising out of Europe. But we were no threat to each other. When they used to say I was the British Bob Dylan, I used to quip, ‘No, I’m the Scottish Woody Guthrie.'”

Lily Rosemary And the Jack Of Hearts

( Blood On The Tracks , 1975)

As selected by Ronnie Wood

“I first heard this when I was making my first solo album [1974’s  I’ve Got My Own Album To Do ] and it strikes me now as it did then – strong mini-novel with twists and dark turns like something Ray Bradbury would have written. I love that it gathers momentum and the lyric makes you picture mysterious mining town incidents, bank robbers and hookers. Dylan’s very impressionistic as a painter as well as a songwriter, and fun to play with live. You never quite know where you are – which suits me fine! His band rocks and before going on stage, he always says to the MD, ‘Just give Woody the keys to the songs and once he’s on stage he stays ‘til we finish’. He gave me a cowboy hat, thrown on stage when we played Kilkenny, and he said to me, ‘ Every  time you play with me you get a free hat.’”

Most Of The Time

( Oh Mercy , 1989)

As selected by David Gray

“I got into Dylan when I was 13, and I loved the early, simple stuff best. By the time of  Oh Mercy  in 1989, I’d stopped buying Dylan albums and I only got it on a friend’s recommendation but, as soon as I heard Everything Is Broken, I knew he was back. Most Of The Time is a beautifully simple song. You get this central idea that most of the time he’s on the case, stronger than all that bullshit he has to deal with, but then it becomes a love song and you get this sense of a man with deep sense of longing, thinking of someone he lost long ago. I’s not a pop song, but it’s getting that way. I talked Daniel Lanois about making that album and he said Dylan spooked him, he felt Dylan was inhabiting him like some ghost.”

With God On Our Side

( The Times They Are A-Changin’ , 1964)

As selected by Linton Kwesi Johnson

“It speaks of the wicked ness of the strong against the weak, of powerful nations and what they do – what the American settlers did to the Indians, the Spanish-American war, the American Civil War and First World War. It goes. To the heart of how little we value human life, how we kill for power, for greed, and invoke the name of God while doing so. In a way the song explores a kind of helplessness in the face of evil. It’s the voice of the weak. He’s obviously faced with a conundrum at the end and that’s part of the song’s power, that paradox – ‘If God’s on our side / he’ll stop the next war’. You have to see. It against the backdrop of a world in turmoil – the proliferation of nuclear weapons, anti-colonial struggles going on in Africa and elsewhere, and the Cold War at its height – but the strength of the song is that it’s relevant and still speaks to the conflicts of our time. For me, that’s why Dylan is the greatest protest lyricist ever.”

Simple Twist Of Fate

As selected by Neko Case

“There are some moments here – like where the guy is sitting on the park bench having these weird realisations – that you can actually feel them as he’s having them. The way he sings the lines – ‘She looked at him and he felt a spark tingle to his bones / ‘Twas then he felt alone and wished that he’d gone straight’ – it’s just devastating. There’s so many moments like that which are so painful, but they’re really honest and they’re said in a way that I don’t think anyone had said before… or since. I don’t think Dylan even knows where songs like that come from. A lot of his songs seem born of that spirit.”

Pretty Saro

( Another Self Portrait: The Bootleg Series Vol. 10 , 2013)

As selected by The Coral ’s James Skelly

“It’s my favourite Dylan vocal. Anyone who says he can’t sing, listen to Pretty Saro. It’s like Percy Sledge crossed with Hank Williams. It’s got all the mystery that you want from Dylan, you can’t quite figure about what it’s about. Either the girl is from a higher social class or aspires to be, and he knows that he can never give her the security that she wants. And then at the end he says if I was the dream version of myself, the poet, I’d be eloquent enough to explain it to you, but the fact that he got close enough to touch the dream was enough and that’s what he’ll take away with him. I don’t know how much of the lyrics are his and how much are from the traditional version, but it’s got that romantic and mysterious thing from Dylan which is what I like, it means you get to project your own version onto it.  Self Portrait was slated at the time, but it’s all part of it. Real greats can see 30, 40 years ahead. You throw this curveball, but then that’s what gets you to  Blood On The Tracks  or whatever. Sometimes you’ve got to write and you’ve got to move three moves to get to where you want to.”

Only A Pawn In Their Game

As selected by Pete Seeger

“Back in 1963 I got together with Bob and Theodore Bikel for a voter registration rally in Greenwood, Mississippi. A friend of mine was making a little documentary film there and the mayor told him, We never had a nigger problem here, it’s outside agitators cause the trouble. Well, we had a little song festival in a cotton field and Bob sang Only A Pawn In Their Game which he’d just written about Medgar Evers, the Mississippi Civil Rights activist who was murdered three weeks earlier. The song says just putting the murderers in jail wasn’t enough, It was about ending the whole game of segregation. It was the first song I heard that connected the position of the black field hands with that of the poor whites in the South: ‘He’s taught in his school /From the start by the rule /That the laws are with him /To protect his white skin /To keep up his hate /So he never thinks straight / ‘bout the shape that he’s in.

Generally, Bob wanted to make a record that would make people think. He was very curious and quick to learn. He told me he’d seen me singing when he was at university [University Of Minnesota, 1959-1960]. I remember that was a night when we were picketed by the American Legion - which got us a lot of free publicity. But I must have first met him in New York up in the Broadside magazine’s office [Dylan’s Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues appeared in the first edition, Feb, 1962]. I remember sitting there and Bob and Phil Ochs played their songs and I was thinking, I’m in the same room as two of the greatest songwriters in the world! Two weeks later I had Bob on at a Carnegie Hall Hootenanny and there were so many artists on I had to tell everyone they were limited to 10 minutes and he smiled and said, I’ve got one song that lasts 10 minutes’- and he did A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.

I was always impressed by his independence. He wasn’t going to be any child of the lefties. One night someone introduced him saying, ‘He’s one of ours, and Bob got up and said, ‘I don’t belong to anyone.’ I realised he was a genius turning out one great song after another. Blowin’ In The Wind is still one of the greatest songs of the 20th century. I used to sing Masters Of War occasionally myself and Hard Rain. Bob had drawn lessons from Woody, he knew a good song tells a story or paints a picture and, like Woody, he could combine tragedy and humour. And he didn’t try to be too specific or too clear. I have a little skating rink in my yard and when  John Wesley Harding  came out I remember skating around listening to it over and over on the outdoor speakers thinking, What does this mean? A good song is like a basketball backboard, you bounce your life against it and you catch new ideas rebounding back at you.

There are a lot of reports of me being against him going electric at the ‘65 Newport Folk festival, but that’s wrong. I was the MC that night. He was singing Maggie’s Farm and you couldn’t understand a single word because the mike was distorting his voice. I ran over to the mixing desk and said, Fix the sound, it’s terrible! The guy said, ‘No, that’s how they want it.’ And I did say, If I had an axe I’d cut the cable! But they didn’t understand me. I wanted to hear the words. I didn’t mind him going electric.”

I’ll Be Here Staying Here With You

( Nashville Skyline , 1969)

As selected by Beck

“I didn’t get too deep into his music until I got into the Nashville records. Those are the ones that really got to me, because I was so into country music when I was younger and hearing those records for the first time... I always liked his kind of throwaway love songs. For somebody who’s a giant like him, who writes those great cinematic songs like Visions Of Johanna that draw you into a strange world, to just toss out a good little tune...that’s an aspect of Dylan I always really appreciated.”

(Infidels, 1983)

As selected by legendary reggae drummer Sly Dunbar

“Bob Dylan always does songs in different keys, like he’ll change three, four different keys in a song, and he will change the lyrics on the fly, so when we cut Jokerman, we recorded it and then we had a break overnight. He came in the morning and said, ‘Oh, gentlemen, could you just run Jokerman for me again?’ Nobody know the tape was spinning; we were just running down the music and he said, ‘OK, that’s it’ - it was the take we didn’t know we were taking that he used. It was a surprise; I think we were playing the run-down a bit looser, ‘cos it was just a run-through, but he probably liked something about it.”

Changing Of The Guards

( Street-Legal , 1978)

As selected by Patti Smith

“I’ve always cherished this song. The first time I heard it was when I’d just moved to Detroit and was living in a hotel room with Fred [‘Sonic’ Smith]. I put on Bob’s new record, and Changing Of The Guards was the first song... it just moved me to tears. I would never presume to know what his songs are about, but it has such a mix of tarot card and Joan of Arc imagery. The song starts, ‘Sixteen years...,’ and Joan of Arc was 16 when they shaved her head and burned her at the stake. No matter how bitter or melancholy his songs are, there’s always so much resilience, a sense of him striking back. Like the line that goes, ‘Gentlemen, he said, I don’t need your organisation, I’ve shined your shoes.’... The downtrodden hero always manages to have the last word. I don’t really analyse his songs, but I’ve been following him since I was 16-years-old and I don’t question what he does. He can do what he wants as far as I’m concerned.”

Lay Down Your Weary Tune

( Biograph , 1985)

As selected by The Byrds / The Flying Burrito Brothers ’ Chris Hillman

“This has always, always been a favourite Dylan song of mine. The Byrds got an acetate because our manager Jim Dickson knew Bob. At the time I didn’t like it, but Roger, then known as Jim McGuinn and always an insightful guy, picked it to record on Turn! Turn! Turn!. Such a great opening verse, really a beautiful lyric all around. It is kinda like Dylan Thomas poetry, as if he wrote lyrics for popular music.”

Million Dollar Bash

As selected by Green On Red ’s Chuck Prophet

“Whenever I hear that song, I always picture Dylan on the balcony of some high-rise Manhattan penthouse, kicking it with Marlon Brando and Lenny Bruce and a gaggle of long-legged socialites, taking it all in and just dreaming of fishing by a stream somewhere. Now here he is in Woodstock with his friends - look at The Basement Tapes cover: what a joker Bob is, how are you gonna play a mandolin with a bow? And they look like the kind of guys you’d want to invite over to your parents’ for a barbecue and a softball game. This was one of the times, I think, when Dylan knew he was going to have to take an interest in his own music, and seized the moment to just play with his friends. Perhaps he’s looking back on all those interchangeable people at the million dollar bash and nursing the motherlode of all hangovers - the ‘60s.”

You’re A Big Girl Now

( Blood On The Track , 1975)

As selected by Richard Hell *

“Talking about Dylan is too complicated for just a few words. You can see why everybody writes books about him. It seems that anyone who likes him at all has a relationship with him, whether they admit it or not. He’s been that useful, meaningful and exasperating all your life long. No wonder he resents his fans. And this song is the one for me that’s the most revealing of his bewildering powers because it’s the one that has the greatest distance between its emotional impact and its actual words. How does he make those silly words so affecting? ‘Time is a jet plane, it moves too fast.’ Where is the poetry in that? The metaphor is obvious and the observation commonplace. But in the song it breaks your heart. I think maybe it’s something about both his openness and the way his mind skips around in his condition, somehow indicating the shape of everything, and I mean everything. It’s how the lines turn into each other. For instance, the whole beginning of that stanza goes, ‘Time is a jet plane, it moves too fast/Oh, but what a shame if all we’ve shared can’t last/I can change, I swear.’ No one line is much more than banal, but it’s how they follow from each other that makes that ‘I can change, I swear’ choke me up every time. Or is it his delivery? Or the melody? Or the weird way saying ‘You’re a big girl now’ is inherently sarcastic, when obviously what’s going on is he wants her more than anything? It’s all the currents, in something apparently so simple and ordinary. There’s no explaining it.”

( Desire , 1976)

As selected by Johnny Marr

"I could choose almost anything off Desire , an amazing album with an atmosphere that was unique at the time; classic and offhand at the same time. My favourite track from it is Isis. Brilliant imagery as always and evidence of Bob Dylan as an ace vocalist. The live versions of Isis from this time are great too, as can be seen on the Rolling Thunder Review documentary. Who writes songs like these ? So many tried but just couldn’t do it.”

Talkin’ World War III Blues

( The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan , 1963)

As selected by Robert Plant

“‘Some time ago a crazy dream came to me /dreamt I was walkin’ into World War Three.’ I love where he goes - ‘And I drove 42nd Street in my Cadillac / Good car to drive after a war’. For a guy who wanted to be in The Teddy Bears with Phil Spector, he’s certainly moved some minds and mountains, hasn’t he? I’ve got his autobiography [Chronicles Vol.1], but I don’t want to read it. I read something about him being a piece of work who lied and danced with Mimi Farina a bit too often. I thought, I don’t need to know this; I just need to know A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”

I’ll Keep It With Mine

( Rare And Unreleased: The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3 , 1991)

As selected by Devendra Banhart

“To me, the folk scene immediately after Bob Dylan was a lot of Bob Dylan impersonators, impersonating someone who was already impersonating someone else. Then, immediately after that, Bob became Bob and did something so completely Bob that no-one could imitate him. I got The Witmark Demos bootleg from Currituck Co.’s Kevin Barker and I love the sound of that version [from June, 1964] too. It sounds like it was recorded on a Radio Shack hand-held tape recorder. They were recorded for Witmark Publishing, not for Dylan to release but for other people to listen to and hopefully record. I’ll Keep It With Mine was written for Nico and like all of Dylan’s tunes it’s perfect. To go with the song, Kevin, a musicologist extraordinaire, also showed me some footage of a party where The Byrds are doing keg stands and, over there in the corner, you can see Dylan and Nico making out.”

Not Dark Yet

As selected by Gang Of Four ’s Andy Gill *

“I first heard Not Dark Yet on holiday in Sri Lanka at Christmas. Somebody had the album and I just got obsessed with that track. In some respects, it’s not as brilliant lyrically as some earlier songs, but those have an air of pretentiousness to them. Like on Blonde On Blonde , you think, is that exactly what Dylan wanted to say? I don’t think he needs allusions to intellectual content to convince us he’s clever. But the lyrics to Not Dark Yet are really simple. It’s exactly what he is: an old man and he’s tired. It’s Dylan speaking authentically from where he is now, in this time of life, looking at what he’s been and seeing where he is at, and expressing it in terms which resonate with many people: ‘Shadows are falling and I’ve been here all day / It’s too hot to sleep, time is running away’. I don’t think I’ve ever heard music quite as languorous. It feels very big-old-river, moving very slowly, like the Mississippi when it gets very close to the sea, edging along. It’s very Louisiana, hot and sweaty. It’s the most incredible atmosphere that you get drawn into. You absolutely sense that the sun is just beyond the horizon, it’s not quite dark, but it’s just going down and he’s sitting there, hot as fuck, and it’s the end of his life.”

Knockin On Heaven’s Door

(Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid, 1973)

As selected by Dylan’s then drummer Jim Keltner

“When we did Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, that was such a moment. We were in the dark, looking at a big screen with the film showing, and Bob’s playing this song, with these changes, and those words. My God! Then, the fact that Katy Jurado, the Mexican actress, she’s got these big ole eyes like my mom, and her husband is this white guy, this sheriff, and he’s dying at the edge of the river. And Bob’s singing... and, man, I just started crying. I’m playing, but I’m crying hard. And I’m thinking, Don’t blow it, don’t blow the take! A few years later, I did Short People with Randy Newman. And I was in the same situation, but I was laughing instead of crying. I was hearing Randy say these words that had me cracking up, and I’m thinking, Don’t ruin it, this is a good take!”

Tombstone Blues

( Highway 61 Revisited , 1965)

As selected by Teenage Fanclub ’s Norman Blake

“It’s just relentless, as a six-minute torrent of surrealistic images. You can tell it was written at the height of Pop Art, with these incredible iconic characters: Galileo, Cecil B. DeMille, Beethoven all thrown together. And there’s a lot of humour in it – all that stuff about knitting a bald wig for Jack The Ripper. There’s a real punk quality to it too – Dylan had youthful energy pouring out of him and the band are missing cues. I was listening to it and it struck me how much Dylan influenced the early Velvet Underground. There’s a really similar sound and intensity.”

Brownsville Girl

( Knocked Out Loaded , 1986)

As selected by Bono

“Brownsville Girl, I would suggest, is a song that altered songwriting. It’s a completely new kind of song and also has this spectacular line, because he can always make you burst out laughing: ‘If there’s an original thought out there, I could use it right now.’ Brownsville Girl is a beautiful rhapsody about this Hispanic woman with her teeth like pearls, and then, in the middle of the song he says, ‘She ain’t you, but she’s here and she’s got that dark rhythm in her soul.’ So this song is not really about the Brownsville Girl, but rather it’s addressed to this other woman who seems to be his muse. And his muse, of course, he refers to obliquely in Tangled Up In Blue, where he talks about the Italian poet whose every word came off the pages like burning coals. And at some point you realise that – of course!- this Italian poet is Dante. Every word that Dante wrote was for his muse, Beatrice, and there’s a Beatrice there in most Bob Dylan songs. Whether she’s real or imagined isn’t important to me, but it’s extraordinary. In your twenties you’re not so much interested in ideas like that: you’re more interested in The Times They Are A-Changin’. But Bob Dylan is there for you at every stage of your life.”

Romance in Durango

As selected by John Cooper Clarke

“It’s a movie isn’t it? The mariachi accompaniment and even the way he pitches his voice, a bit like Alfonso Bedoya, the leader of the bandits in Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, conjures the Mexican desert - ‘Hot chilli peppers in the blistering sun’ - you’re straight there! The picture of him and that girl on the one horse makes me think of Marlon Brando and Pina Pellicer in One Eyed Jacks. I wonder if the whole Spanish milieu that he likes could be a device by which Dylan can leave the patrician world of North America with its Judeo-Protestant values and enter the more elemental Catholic-Latin world where he’s the impulsive doomed hero, in trouble by his own actions. He’s obviously shot her husband or something and although he’s made it across the desert he’s clearly about to die but he’s blinded by love and optimism, and shit frightened underneath it all and the present tense is shot through with both this beautiful regret and projections into the future. He’s dying not only of a fatal gunshot wound but with the mortal sin of murder on his soul, the face of God with his serpent eyes of obsidian. In Romance In Durango, like all the best westerns, the people are complex, but the morality of the Old World they inhabit is clearly defined.”

Blowing In The Wind

As selected by Mavis Staples

“Blowin’ In The Wind was the first song I heard from Bobby. I fell in love with it because of the message. We could really relate to that, especially my father [Pops Staples]. Pops couldn’t understand how someone like Bobby could write such heavy songs as such a young man. He’d say, ‘Where did this little guy come from writing a message like that?’ But that song had an effect on a lot of people. When Sam Cooke heard Blowin’ In The Wind he said, ‘Now if a young white guy can write a song like that then I got to get my pen in hand.’ And that’s when he wrote A Change Is Gonna Come.”

You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go

As selected by Madeleine Peyroux

“Bob Dylan is someone I grew up with. I used to sing his songs when busking on the Metro in Paris and I always had a huge aspiration to record something of his one day. I chose You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome… because it’s a love song and Dylan’s love songs are special because there’s ofren a twist of bitterness. On this one he admits that things are not going to be perfect either now or any time. It’s amazing the was Dylan can take something very simple and turn it into something very important. I love the melody too. I think Dylan doesn’t often get enough credit for his melodic strength.”

Stuck Inside The Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again

( Blonde On Blonde , 1966)

As selected by Frank Black

“There’s a lot of beauty in this song. I don’t know what it’s about, and I’ve never bothered to work it out, but even though it’s about being stuck somewhere with the blues, it’s a triumphant song, with a really powerful chord progression. So when you’ve got that going for you, with the killer lyrics and the band going for it, it’s defiant blues, very exhilarating. At the moment, I’m so in love with the drummer: Kenny Buttrey. Sometimes get choked up, literally, just listening to the drummer, the way he does a little snare roll, or something. I know it sounds silly, but I love that song and how it pulls me in, but once I’m in there I always focus on the drummer. It’s a song with so much soul, but the more I listen, I always go back to those killer drums.”

Man In The Long Black Coat

As selected by  Oh Mercy / Time Out Of Mind  producer Daniel Lanois

“We spent a lot of time getting the ambience right, recording the neighbourhood crickets - the genuine sound of the New Orleans night. It’s a song that was directly inspired by the environment and mood of the city. Bob came to the recording of  Oh Mercy  with a number of songs fully written but Man In The Long Black Coat was composed entirely in the studio. It was a hot steamy time down there - and that’s exactly how the song sounds. On  Oh Mercy  Bob is generally standing inside the songs but on this one he’s standing outside, observing.

It’s a fascinating subject for a song, the idea that someone might escape the confines of the ordinary world by a sudden impulsive act. It’s a song about a turning point, one moment that might change a life forever- like running away to join the circus.”

She Belongs To Me

( Bringing It All Back Home , 1965)

As selected by The Beach Boys ’ Bruce Johnston

“I heard about Dylan from Jack Nitzsche’s wife Grazia who made me listen to  Freewheelin’ . It wasn’t his voice, which was difficult to get comfortable with, it was his songs. What we were hearing on the radio at that time was great, highly-polished pop, like Goffin-King kind of songs, but Dylan was 180 degrees in the other direction. Then, when I heard She Belongs To Me, I was struck by the fact that it has such a natural groove. To me, a natural groove record would be something like Little Richard, R&B stuff, but here’s this Greenwich Village folkie, who has turned the lyric-writing thought process upside down, and suddenly he’s making songs with a natural groove. You could finger-pop to this track. Dylan’s melodies can be difficult to digest sometimes, because he’s not a singer who writes, he’s a writer who sings, but this is a great tne. Carl Wilson and I really loved Belong To Me. I remember in the Hilton Hawaiian Village hotel when we were playing Hawaii, and we had a record player in our suite and just played it and over and over.”

Girl From The North Country

As selected by The Blue Nile ’s Paul Buchanan

“I must have heard it at a time when I dressed like he does on the cover of the Freewheelin’ album. I wanted my life to be like that cover. There is something of the same romance about the song; a straightforward enough reminiscence of a lost love, without any cynicism or defeatism. I like the mentions of the girl’s hair and coat and, I guess, the third person thing works nicely because it’s all kept so simple and defenceless.”

I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)

( Another Side Of Bob Dylan , 1964)

As selected by The Lovin' Spoonful 's John Sebastian

“I’d already had my world as a songwriter completely rearranged by Masters Of War and Chimes Of Freedom.. But with I Don’t Believe You, Dylan established an unprecedented relationship between man and woman in song. Before Bob, things had been pretty benign, often one-dimensional, between the sexes. It was absolute love or utter heartbreak. What little shading there was usually came from the woman’s point of view, laying out the case against her man. Dylan turned the tables in this sense, offering romantic critiques of women, and he did it with a degree of emotional awareness and insight. He made it more real, and opened up vast new territories for songs to explore.”

All Along The Watchtower

( John Wesley Harding , 1967)

As selected by Terry Callier

To write songs about things that are close or painful, you have to be at a level where you can say something about it that everybody will be able to identify with. You can’t always take your most personal experiences and do that, but Bob Dylan was good at it. As a matter of fact, he was the one that showed us that your personal ruminations and experiences, if put in a vibrant enough context, were valuable. Because people hadn’t been doing that before: people had been saying ‘Yes, I love you, you love me, we will be together, 1, 2, 3.’ But you start talking about There must be some kind of way out of here, said the Joker to the Thief... Well! Now we’re getting down! We’re talking about neuroses, psychoses, and other ‘oses! He showed us that if you put these things in the right context, in the right emotional patterns and the right combinations of words, this is as valuable as anything else on this earth.”

Every Grain Of Sand

( Shot Of Love , 1981)

As selected by Sheryl Crowe

Every Grain Of Sand was the first religious song I’d heard which transcended all religions. It asks the universal questions that lead all people into exploring God, eternity, mortality. I first heard it when  Shot Of Love  came out and I loved it right away, but then I sang it at Johnny Cash’s funeral so it has a special meaning for me. It was my choise, but his family wrote to me to tell me how important that song was to Johnny. It’s always been interesting to me to think of Dylan’s Christian phase. I’d done the born-again thing when I was 17. There was a youth movement I got wound up in until it started to really bug me that some of my friends were going to heaven and some weren’t. I became what they call a backslider pretty quick. The music on every Grain of Sand ebbs back and fourth – it’s almost a waltz – but the song’s great strength is the text: ‘Like criminals, they have choked the breath of conscience and good cheer’ – it’s almost Dickensian. I’ve called him on a couple of occasion to talk about songwriting and he’s been amazing. It’s like playing tennis with someone who’s better than you, it brings your game up.”

As selected by Lucinda Williams

“The first time I heard Bob Dylan - it was 1965, and a young poet, a student of my dad’s, came over to the house with a Dylan record - it changed my life. Here was someone who had taken both of the worlds I was from - the traditional folk music world and the creative writing world - and put them together and made it work. From that moment on, I decided I wanted to write songs like that. I’m still working at it. To Ramona is just a love song, not one of those inte3nsely heavy, metaphorical songs, but it’s the ultimate love song. And there’s just something about it – the rhyming, the imagery, everything is wonderful. That was Dylan at his inimitable, quintessential best, right there. Awesome and beautiful."

Buckets Of Rain

As selected by Chris Martin

“It was the moment I fell in love with Bob Dylan’s music. I was on a tour bus leaving Reading Festival, the first time we played it in 1999, and I woke up suddenly with that song playing in my ears. And I was suddenly there. Completely in it. Dylan keeps on writing, keeps on playing, because ultimately, that’s all there is… That’s the truth. That’s what you are. Doing this is not a ladder to anything else, if you love it. Often I’m asked, “What are you going to do next, what else do you have going on?” I have friends who do a lot of things, and sometimes I think to myself, “Oh man, should I, like, open a… hat shop as well?” But I need to write music, and sometimes I feel like a loser ’cos that’s all I want to do. But you know, there’s no Bob Dylan hat shop…"

A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

As selected by Tom Paxton

“[In Greenwich Village] me and Bob were friendly but I don’t think anyone’s close to Bob. One night I went to the Gaslight and he pulled paper out of the typewriter and gave me five typed pages and asked what I thought. I said, ‘This is fabulous – it’s like you have written [Anglo-Scottish ballad] Lord Randall for 1962’ and he had. He asked what he should do with it and I said, ‘Put a tune to it.’ Two nights later he got up at the Gaslight at one in the morning and sang it for the first time – A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall. It was clear where he was heading.”

The Times They Are A-Changin’

As selected by Nas

“I first heard The Times They Are A-Changin’ in a movie called The Wanderers, which I saw when I was about 14-years-old. The song came at a very important point of the movie, where the characters had been running the streets forever, and had gotten old. It had come full circle with their lives, so they had to make a change. The verse that blew me away was: ‘Come senators, congressmen/Please heed the call/Don’t stand in the doorway/Don’t block up the hall/For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled.” The words he’s saying are words of awakening, but when you add that to the conviction in his voice, you can hear that this is a man fighting to get the truth out. To make a record like that, you have to genuinely have it in your heart to not just love your music and your cause, but to be a part of it, and that’s what he does. You can’t fake that record.”

Visions Of Johanna

As selected by Steve Harley *

“This sparkles with that dreadful mystery that’s Dylan’s own. Hearing it for the first time has never left my mind. Suddenly I wasn’t a 15-year-old listening to music anymore: I was hearing poetry. ‘Lights flicker from the opposite loft/in this room the heat pipes just cough/The country music station plays soft.’ And there’s a pay-off line with Dylan. He says: ‘But there’s nothing, really noting to turn off.’ You listen and think, What the fuck was that? All the time, this young man of 24 was thinking of a lost love. Maybe apocryphal, maybe genuine - but he’s a poet and he has licence to create. Every pay-off at the end of every verse just says there’s nothing here. Nothing exists. It’s all fantasy. Am I awake? Am I asleep? All I’ve got is visions of Johanna, which keep me up past dawn. The man can’t sleep! He’s lovesick. But is he really? Or is this poetry? This isn’t Wordsworth or Keats. Dylan is beyond them.”

Ballad Of A Thin Man

As selected by Al Stewart

“You walk into the room/With your pencil in your hand/You see somebody naked/And you say Who is that man?/You try so hard/But you just don’t understand/Just what you’ll say/When you get home...” I haven’t played it in years but I can still remember the words. At the time, all us London hipsters assumed it was about the Melody Makers’ Max Jones. It’s an unspoken rule that the trade-off for fame and fortune in the music business is that you have to be able to accept criticism, but not every artist subscribes to that, and Dylan obviously didn’t. With Positively 4th Street around the same time, it was clear Dylan was pissed off about a lot of things- and he was writing like a maniac. Musically it’s beautiful. I love the skinny sound of the record - it suits the title. When I saw Dylan the Albert Hall in 1966 he played it, and I think it was the only song that he played on piano. There’s this old-fashioned barrelhouse feel, which works really well with the words. And when the organ comes in on top... that’s wonderful.”

As selected by Blood On The Tracks engineer Glenn Berger

“Dylan was recording Idiot Wind and I thought this is so powerful. When has Dylan ever been this  raw ? The amount of rage coming out of him was so powerful. And when you hear something being cut in the studio where it’s directly from his mouth into that beautiful microphone and coming out of those huge speakers – you never hear it like that again. The power was overwhelming. And he gets to the end of the song and waits a few seconds and then turns to us in the control room and sarcastically says: ‘Was that since-e-e-re enough?’” Maybe it had been so powerful for him emotionally that he had to take away some of that intensity.”

Subterranean Homesick Blues

As selected by The Doors ’ Robby Krieger

“ Bringing It All Back Home  just might be my favourite album of all time. I discovered him whilst at private school as a teenager. A lot of people hated it when he went electric, but I liked it. I saw him at Long Beach with his electric band whilst on acid, and I really dug it. I know he must’ve been on acid when he wrote Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

Masters Of War

As selected by Loudon Wainwright III

“Writing protest songs is difficult because they often have a very limited life-span. But when Dylan sings ‘you can hide behind walls, you can hide behind desks, I just want you to know, I can se through your masks’, you instantly think of The White House and Downing Street today. He attacks the biggest targets going, and there’s nothing polite about it. It’s a young man’s rage - outrage really - not Where Have All The Flowers Gone? There’s no choruses, and the guitar playing is unrelenting. His guitar playing swings and rocks really hard. The writing itself is great. He’ll take a word like ‘word’ which from the perspective of someone who writes songs is a very hard word to rhyme, but he rhymes it with ‘hurled’, and that’s a way around the problem, and its not just a way around the problem, but is a great couplet too. I remember seeing him for the first time at the Newport Folk festival at about the time this song came out. He was just this young guy stood on stage with a guitar, but he had balls, and any young person will admire someone who has balls. Let’s hope so anyway.”

I Threw It All Away

(Nashville Skyline, 1969)

As selected by Nick Cave

“This is my favourite Dylan song. The production is so clean, fluid and uncluttered, and there is an ease and innocence to Dylan’s voice in its phrasing, in its tone that is in no Dylan recording before or after. There is a perfectly measured emotional pull to the singing. This is a guy doing the job God put him on Earth to do, and doing it well. This song is about craft; Dylan removes himself, the burden of his hisyory, his myth, from the process of songwriting to craft a song unparalleled in its gorgeousness. It’s mathematics, music by numbers, and all the more affecting for it. It’s Mozart man up against the wracked Beethoven of his other work. Nashville Skyline was an audacious record, lyrically and musically, flying in the face of those who thought it was Dylan’s moral duty to be the drum major of his generation. I can put this song on first thing in the morning or the middle of a dark night and it will make me feel better, make me want to carry on. The song serves the listener as it should and that’s its genius.”

Tangled Up In Blue

( More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series Vol.14, 2018 )

As selected by Gaz Coombes

“I have to say, I prefer the demo versions that are out there to the one on  Blood On The Tracks . They’re quite slow, down-beat versions of the song and that’s what I love about them. They’re just acoustic guitar, bass and vocals, and they’re just beautiful. They Sound more emotional, more contemplative whereas the version on  Blood On The Tracks  is quite bouncy. He changed a lot of the lyrics after this version. The demos are written in the third person, like he’s telling a story about someone else, then when you hear it on  Blood On the Tracks  he uses ‘I’, which makes you wonder whether it was actually about him all along.”

As selected by Marianne Faithful

“I heard  Time Out Of Mind  pretty much as soon as it came out; I’m a ‘rush out and buy Bob’ kind of person. I love the whole record, but Love Sick is my favourite. Beautiful. Everything. The words, the melody, the passion in the singing. I loved it immediately. For the longest time I thought it was called I’m Sick Of Love, because that’s what he sings. But being love sick and being sick of love are two entirely different things. And yet obviously the same to an old romantic like Mr D. And that is such a brilliant writer’s thing to do. Love is hard for all of us but it’s very, very hard for an artist. He talks about being tired and hearing the clock tick - this is someone with lots to do, lots of work, he’s got no time for anything and on top of that there’s this  love , and he can’t do a thing about it. The lyrics are actually very straightforward. Someone else singing it might make them sound sappy, but the way Dylan sings - very intense and strong and not at all detached - it’s a statement, and a great one, about love.”

Highway 61 Revisited

As selected by Gang Of Four ’s Jon King

“When I was 11, at Sevenoaks school, the A level boys in the art classes were allowed to play whatever music they liked, which was  Highway 61 Revisited  and  Blonde On Blonde . We didn’t have a record player at home, and I’d never heard anything like it. It led me to being absolutely focused on art and music. What got me was the sound of his voice: suddenly you had someone who put songs together that played with words-I wasn’t sure what he was saying, but I knew he was being brilliantly sarcastic and clever, and sneering at the people who were boring, and I loved it. Highway 61 Revisited itself was just so funny. Highway 61 bisects the American North and South, and represents an escape, particularly from where Dylan lived, the tedium of living a constrained, pre-defined life. But in that context, I saw so much. Like the way he plays with the story, and the whole issue of race. And how he was embracing rock’n’roll, when he was being accused of being a Judas - what was that all about? It was almost segregationism in the folk scene. With my Gang Of Four lyrics, I’d always try and make something internally contradictory, constructing narratives out of words that seem to be logically inconsistent, which is what Dylan so cleverly did. He wasn’t trying to be obvious, which is easy. He was being complicated without being necessarily vague. There was this sense that you were involved in a cultural conversation. Dylan created the conversations to beat all conversations.”

Just Like A Woman

As selected by Jimmy Webb

“This was when I understood how deep Dylan’s well really was. It wasn’t a folk song, it wasn’t protest, it was just a great love song, which of course had an immediate impact on me. I had just dropped out of college to commit to what I hoped would be the life of a songwriter. I was very much in love with a girl who was inspiring a lot of the music I was writing, and this song seemed to cut right to the heart of what I was feeling emotionally at the time. All these years later I still marvel at what an absolutely stunning piece of writing it is. What a fortuitous nexus of rhyme and purpose is the chorus: She takes just like a woman/She makes love just like a woman /Then she aches just like a woman / But she breaks just like a little girl.’ As songwriters we live for the moment when words to fall together like that, as if they’ve been waiting for just that arrangement. The way everything leads toward that last line is masterful. That would be enough for most writers, but the third verse reveals Dylan’s strategy to be much larger. When he says ‘Please don’t let on that you knew me when /l was hungry and it was your wold,’ he steps on-camera and addresses this person directly to deliver one final twist. There’s a lifetime of listening in these details and layered subtleties. Any serious student of songwriting will find a complete education in this one composition.”

The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll

As selected by Bill Fay

“Just before I started writing, in 1964, I started playing the guitar to myself by practising The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll.I heard it purely by chance up in Bangor as a student, we played him all the time, listening to early Dylan before he’s really filtered into the mainstream. He was so powerful melodically. His voice was amazingly mature for such a young man but with tracks like like Hattie Carroll he was trying to say something with lovely tunes and a great vocal sound. Before the protest they were actual songs that you could get lost in. Take away Dylan’s persona and they still stood out. Over the years I’ve come to realise that his music is about access. Hattie Carroll? It’s five chords. Even in 1964 I knew four of them. When you first start out, you can play Dylan. His songs are about the people and for the people so it makes sense that they’re accessible, that they’re easy to play. Even a more recent track like Mississippi [from 2001’s  Love And Theft ] you can climb inside. There are gems scattered throughout.”

Murder Most Foul

( Rough And Rowdy Ways , 2020)

As selected by Villagers ’ Conor O’Brien

“It’s almost like a sister song to songs like It’s Alright Ma and Desolation Row, those patchwork quilt songs where it’s about trying to find meaning in a fragmented world. For me he’s continuing that journey that he started so long ago and he gets better and better at it the older he gets. He’s clearly someone who is very moved by things, despite his exterior, and it kind of feels like a prayer - it’s redemptive. Like with his best songs, it’s about how we all share these scars. I feel like the assassination of JFK in this is more like a symbol, a shared trauma, in a way he could have chosen any collective shared trauma. I like the way he takes about the things that loomed large in his own life in terms of pop culture and mixes it with the politics. Right after the assassination he goes straight into Bealtemania. It’s the thing that Dylan does so well, where high art and low are all one thing. He might reference Greek mythology right after The Beatles – he’s saying it’s all part of the same thing, the human spirit transcending this crazy fragmented world we live in.”

Mr Tambourine Man

As selected by Paul McCartney

“I know it’s corny, but I heard him do it at the Albert Hall [May 9, 1965], and I was aching for him to do it and knowing Dylan I thought he might not do it. Just to be awkward, just to be perverse. It was the infamous show where all the folkies thought he’d sold out. How crap is that? It was fantastic. First half is folky, and then the second half was electric with The Band - it was the all-time concert. But then of course, somebody starts going, He’s deserted the folk world! Yeah, no wonder, look at you mate. So he did it there, the first time I’d ever heard it live. A really good song, very much of the period. Totally nailed that year. I was lucky to be there.”

It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)

As selected by David Crosby *

“When I first heard Dylan in New York didn’t like his singing. I thought, Why doesn’t everybody like me more? But then I went to see him perform and I got it... his songs! They were so good and there was one after another after another. Asking for a favourite is like asking a parent, Hey, which is your favourite child? Bob Dylan a good three dozen flat-out sterling pieces of material that we can safely refer to as classics. But when I first heard It’s Alright, Ma it really was such a knockout. ‘Darkness at the break of noon /Shadows even the silver spoon’- hey, that’s the apocalypse coming, nothing less.”

It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

As selected by Richard Thompson

“Sounds like it’s curtains for Baby Blue, which has led some to speculate that this is an updating of the story of Mary, Queen Of Scots; Bob may have heard ‘Mary Queen Of Scots’ Lament’ on his visit to England in the winter of 1962, or perhaps he’s just a history buff. She was fond of blue stockings – indeed, she was wearing sky-blue hose with an inter-woven silver thread when she was beheaded in1587. The orphan (or soon to be) ‘crying like a fire in the sun’ might be her son, and the ‘empty-handed painter’ her secretary-lover David Rizzio, also a fine musician, and composer of outstanding ballad tunes. One might also speculate about the presence of the Earl of Bothwell and her husband, Lord Darnley. The action, we imagine, is shifted to Greenwich Village, and is beautifully and skilfully updated and made immediate by imagery and street language. A great song by someone who knows the tradition, innovates in it, and builds on it.”

It Ain’t Me Babe

As selected by Dylan sideman Charlie Sexton .

“In the past when I’ve seen Dylan do a show or when I played with him, at times it seems as if there was a circle of light surrounding him regardless of what the lights in the show are doing. Everything just goes away and you just sit there, taking in everything he says. Certain songs really bring out that kind of focus and this is one of those songs. I played it a lot when I was out with him, and while some songs would go through changes and various arrangements, this one changed very little. Except there was always something new from Bob vocally, in phrasing, phrasing that could dazzle Miles Davis... But all in all, It Ain’t Me, Babe stayed pretty much the same, and I was always happy to listen. Often when it was played there would be the same reaction from some of the fans, a sort of celebration - which is interesting when you listen to the words. It’s shadow and light.”

Blind Willie McTell

( Rare And Unreleased   The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3, 1991 )

As selected by Martin Carthy

“It blows this massive hole through the romantic notion of the South. It’s about corruptibility. And it has an amazing emotional impact, which counts for everything. When he sang Hard Rain in The Troubadour in London in 1962 the audience was fucking thunderstruck. They’d never heard anything like that in their lives. To take a songwriting idea like you find in Nottamun Town -a ‘song of life’ in the folk lingo - and to develop it like he did in Hard Rain was absolutely awe inspiring. I was absolutely stunned. And Blind Wille McTell had the same effect on me. It’s everything a song should be. It’s concise, it’s eloquent and it also happens to be a beautiful piece of music. I love the position of the narrator in the song - sitting in a New Orleans hotel room contemplating the whole history of the south, the murder amid the magnolias, but not with anger for a change. It’s a... rumination. A great word for a great song.”

Desolation Row

As selected by Roy Harper

“Desolation Row, I thought when I first got hold of the record, That’s exactly where we’re at. It contained all the elements of where we’d felt civilisation had been for years. But it wasn’t delivered with the overt sense of humour of his more accessible earlier songs. Times had changed for Dylan. He was no longer the carefree young vibe thief of the freewheelin’ age. He was now expected by everyone under 20 to become the next messiah, just as he was becoming more human. There were rumours of hard drugs and self-examination. Like a lot of us, he was on the verge of floundering. There were no easy solutions anymore. The more I thought about it, the more Desolation Row appeared as a collection of impressions thrown at a page. It was riveting, it was desperate. I could very readily identify with that. It called the world to account, but it wasn’t bold, the humour was almost hidden. The song was a delineation. Like a final notice of departure. We all know the characters the song describes. The Millais painting of the drowned Ophelia lingers in my mind, dead in the head at 22, living vicariously, peeping into Desolation Row for moments of delicious embarrassment, only to resume her role in some Salvation Army equivalent. Robin Hood, Cinderella, Bette Davis etc, they’re all there along with a million inferences about the humdrum of seedy human life, usually set at mid-night and beyond, while daytime insurance men check that no one escapes to Desolation Row. And then there’s the last verse written by someone on the outside. A token note from someone who’s no longer part of the scene, who misses the freedom, but who perhaps couldn’t handle the hand-to-mouth abandonment, or perhaps the grime. We never get to find out. And it doesn’t matter. It never did and it never will.”

Sad Eyed Lady Of the Lowlands

As selected by Robert Wyatt

“One of the things I like about jazz is that jazz goes on and on and on. This song has got that kind of momentum. It builds and grows, builds and grows, and it’s a simple structure. Another thing that’s so great about it is the band playing on it, Al Kooper’s on Hammond, and they roll along beautifully. I read somewhere that he didn’t tell them how long the song was going to be, so they keep thinking they’re coming to the ending, surging towards an end, which is brilliant, Miles Davis-like in its wickedness. And then he’ll drone away another verse! So they’re playing as if they keep building towards the climax, all the time! I suppose it’s like very clever sex, really.”

Positively 4th Street

( Greatest Hits Vol.1, 1967 )

As selected by Love guitarist Johnny Echols

“It deals with the duplicity of human beingsand the nebulous nature of friendship. It’s an incredibly important thing to cling on to in life, if you can. I knew that even back in 1965 when this came out. I immediately connected with Dylan’s take on humanity and the nature of hypocrisy. He spoke to me. It’s a very New York song but it made perfect sense out on the West Coast. After Dylan went over big you could feel the style of music changing everywhere. Previously, songs sort of went from C to A minor to F to G in a prescribed patter but with Bob coming from folk music, the songs started to follow wherever the vocal melody went. That had a huge effect on everybody.”

Like A Rolling Stone

( Highway 61 Revisited, 1965 )

Al Kooper on how he hustled his way into the making of Dylan’s cryptic fairy tale and all-time greatest song.

“I began my professional music career as a member of The Royal Teens in 1959, becoming a professional songwriter shortly thereafter and teaming up with lyricists Bob Brass & Irwin Levine. By 1965 I’d befriended producer Tom Wilson at Columbia Records at 799 7th Avenue in New York City. Tom was riding high as the producer of Bob Dylan, of whom I was a big fan. After a while, the others that worked on his floor got used to me coming and going whether Tom was there or not. Occasionally I’d “borrow” unreleased acetates of Dylan’s albums in progress and take them home overnight and make a tape copy for my own enjoyment. Tom would also invite me on occasion to the New York Giants football team’s Sunday games, where he had excellent seats. I was about 21-years-old but I knew when to speak and when not to.

Then one day, out of the freakin’ blue, Tom invites me to an afternoon Dylan session. It’s Wednesday June 16 and they’ve already done a day’s work on a handful of songs – one they’ve been calling Phantom Engineer but will turn into It Takes a Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry; another they’ve started and have all of today to get right. I’m carefully instructed to sit in the control room and be as invisible as possible.

The session is to begin at 2pm. So I get there at 12.30pm with my electric guitar and amp and begin to warm up like I truly belong there. After about ten minutes, Dylan comes blasting in the door along with a guitarist who has his guitar on his shoulder like a rifle. Only it’s raining outside and the caseless guitar is as wet as can be.

The guitarist is Mike Bloomfield. I’ve read about him in Sing Out! magazine – he is in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, whatever that is. The other musicians are mostly a crew of dependable guys that do this for a living: among them, drummer Bobby Gregg, pianist Paul Griffin and bassist Joe Macho Jr. The only one I know by sight is Griffin. I had hired him a few times for songwriting demos. An excellent player and a really nice guy.

Bloomfield comes over to where I’m sitting with my guitar and says hello – he wipes the rain off his guitar with a rag and plugs into a Fender amp and starts warming up. This shocks me as I have never heard someone my age play with the skill and tone he has. I quickly put my guitar in its case, slide it under a bench, and get my ass into the control room where I actually belong (and just in time as Tom Wilson enters five minutes later).

The band begins to rehearse the song Dylan wants to start off with. Wilson begins getting sounds on each instrument. Paul Griffin is playing organ and Dylan is playing an electric Fender Stratocaster! This blows my mind - acoustic Bob goes electric! The song is over six minutes long and Bloomfield is instantly mesmerizing. After three takes Wilson moves Paul Griffin from organ to piano.

Tom says, 'You know that guy’s not an organ player, right?' Bob says, 'I don’t care – just turn it up in the mix!' Al Cooper

While they are moving the piano around and miking it. Everyone takes a break. I go out to the studio and sit at the organ which is fortunately still plugged in and turned on. It’s very complicated to turn an organ on and I haven’t acquired that knowledge yet. The piano is tuned. Wilson starts over the talkback: 'This is Like A Rolling Stone Take 4.' He pauses and sees me behind the organ. 'What are you doing out there?' he says and the other musicians laugh and, thank God, so does Wilson. He appears to relent and says, 'OK, this is Take 4.'

After the intro, I wait until everyone else plays a chord and then I come in. Pretty quickly I memorize the chords - there’s only five! - and then I begin to play parts. This is the first complete take of the session, so they play back all six minutes of it. Now I go in the booth and sit at the end of a bench. After the first chorus Bob says to Tom Wilson, 'Make the organ louder.' Tom says, 'You know that guy’s not an organ player, right?' Bob says, 'I don’t care – just turn it up in the mix!'

And that my friends, was the beginning of my soon-to-be real career.”

*Speaking to MOJO in 2004

Picture: Getty

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A major voice and arguably the most distinctive of all American artists in the post-Elvis Presley era, Bob Dylan’s work has inspired, delighted, perplexed and divided opinion over six decades of recording and touring.

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A major voice and arguably the most distinctive of all American artists in the post-Elvis Presley era, Bob Dylan’s work has inspired, delighted, perplexed and divided opinion over six decades of recording and touring. Along the way his notable work includes The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan , Bringing It All Back Home , Highway 61 Revisited , the masterpiece double-album Blonde on Blonde , the seminal early 70s album Blood On The Tracks and 1997’s Time Out Of Mind .

A chronicler of civil rights and anti-war protest folk in the early 60s, Dylan assumed the mantle of spokesman for his generation, an accolade he only briefly embraced, preferring to widen his horizons as he moved into electric folk, country music and traditional American music in its broadest sense, be that in the spirit of Hank Williams or Frank Sinatra . Though he doesn’t profess to own the Great American Songbook, Dylan enriches the form.

Often at his best when seemingly being most capricious, this is a man who swum against the tide in the mid-60s when he insisted on his right to work with musicians such as Mike Bloomfield, The Band and the Nashville A-team, as well as side trips with his old friends Grateful Dead, Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers, and George Harrison in The Traveling Wilburys . His Never Ending Tour means that while he’s seldom available to the media, he is often within touching distance of his fans. Among his many accolades are 12 Grammy Awards, one Academy Award and the 2016 Nobel Prize In Literature. Though he refused to accept in person, Dylan sent a gracious speech stating, “I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavours.” Amen to that.

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Born Robert Allen Zimmerman, on 24 May 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, the young Bob was a rock’n’roll fanatic who moved into folk in order to mine deeper, darker moods. After becoming a hit on the coffee house circuit in Minneapolis, he moved to New York City in 1961 and made contact with his idol and early muse Woody Guthrie. Tapping into a scene popularised by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Dylan played the clubs in Greenwich Village and shared digs and stages with Dave Van Ronk, Fred Neil, Karen Dalton, Odetta and the Irish musicians The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem.

Signed to Columbia by John Hammond, who produced his self-titled debut album in 1962, Dylan’s voice was generally heard for the first time on a collection of folk standards with the inclusion of two originals, ‘Talkin’ New York’ and ‘Song To Woody’. That promising start was eclipsed completely by The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan , which was produced by Hammond and Tom Wilson in New York, and released in May 1963. The young talent was beyond precocious: ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, ‘Girl From The North Country’, ‘Masters Of War’, ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ and ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ announced the arrival of a major star. Such was his popularity, Dylan could have stood for President.

The starker The Times They Are A-Changin ’ hinted that he wasn’t going to be pigeonholed for long by the folk purists and Another Side Of Bob Dylan upped his game with a set of songs that reached The Byrds in Los Angeles, who covered ‘All I Really Want To Do’ and used it as the template for their own newly minted jingle-jangle folk-rock.

Feeling empowered by his status, Dylan dropped Bringing It All Back Home in 1965, distanced himself from sheer protest and began his electric odyssey. He was credited with influencing The Beatles , and songs such as ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, ‘Maggie’s Farm’, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and the epic ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ made an amazing difference to the development of popular music on both sides of the Atlantic. The same went for Highway 61 Revisited , whose opening cut, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, and closing magnum opus, ‘Desolation Row’, altered the boundaries of rock forever, often thanks to a cast including Al Kooper on organ and piano, Bloomfield and country master Charlie McCoy on guitar, plus a tough electric rhythm section, all expertly manhandled by Dylan’s new producer, Bob Johnston.

A move to Nashville – with forays back to New York – gave us Blonde On Blonde , whose 14 songs defined the summer of ’66 without paying any lip service to swinging LSD scenes or hippified mantras. Instead, there was a unique blend of everything he could do, from writing hits such as ‘Rainy Day Women #12 and 35’ and ‘I Want You’ to penning more testing work such as the emotionally coruscating ‘Visions Of Johanna’ and the visceral ‘“Just Like A Woman’.

Dylan’s reputation as the bard of beat grew exponentially thereafter when he returned to rootsier fare on John Wesley Harding , a country masterpiece on which ‘All Along The Watchtower’ slipped through like a neutron bomb while ballads and ditties in the old troubadour fashion drew fulsome praise and helped remove the prejudice to country music.

A new-sound crooning Bob popped up on Nashville Skyline : he duetted with Johnny Cash on a revisit to ‘Girl From The North Country’ and opened his heart on the bittersweet ‘I Threw It All Away’. Evidently acutely aware of his own image, Self Portrait (1970) could be construed as a deliberate attempt to loosen the shackles of superstardom with four sides of covers and originals designed to appear like a bootleg recording (this being the heyday of illicit releases). Much of it sallied over the heads of critics but takes on Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘Early Morning Rain’, Paul Simon ’s ‘The Boxer’ and the Bryant Brothers’ ‘Take A Message To Mary’ had serious intent even if the overall mood was deliberately playful.

The excellent New Morning , containing ‘If Not For You’ (which George Harrison covered on All Things Must Pass , though Olivia Newton-John made it a hit single in 1971), prefaced a new chapter. It was followed, three years later, by the soundtrack album Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid , which included the relaxed soon-to-be-standard, ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’.

Dylan then reunited with his Canadian chums The Band for the studio outing Planet Waves and its attendant live album, Before The Flood . Touring with the group that had backed him on his incendiary 1966 live shows rejuvenated Dylan’s live appeal, drew critics back on board and paved the way for 1975’s Blood On The Tracks , his most poetic if not entirely autobiographical work; despite some oddly lukewarm responses at the time, it has become many people’s go-to Bob Dylan album. The writing is so deft and the imagery so lucid that songs such as ‘Tangled Up In Blue’, ‘Simple Twist Of Fate’ and ‘Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts’ stand beyond the remit of lesser mortals. Producing the record himself, Dylan added mandolin and organ to his repertoire and also turned in some of the most unforgettable vocals of his career. Never ceasing to please and amaze, the album now consistently wins five-star plaudits.

The worked-over official release of The Basement Tapes (cherry-picking from a heavily bootlegged set of sessions) captured a narrative strain and a roots-rock sensibility. Good as it was, however, the arrival of Desire , which featured stand-out cuts ‘Hurricane’ and ‘Joey’, plus vocal assists from Emmylou Harris and Ronee Blakley, found the artist back in love with the road, setting out across the States on the Rolling Thunder Revue, and capturing a later show on the Hard Rain album.

1978’s Street-Legal and the following year’s Slow Train Coming found Dylan at a crossroads, depicting a man torn between secular and religious motifs. Born again in 1980, Saved moved into gospel terrain and Old Testament fire-and-brimstone before 1981’s Shot Of Love , which included the superlative ‘Every Grain Of Sand’ and remains one of Dylan’s personal favourites.

Infidels (1983) was less favourably received, but by now Dylan was used to being praised and pilloried by rote, so that when he made Empire Burlesque , which featured various Heartbreakers, reggae stalwarts and rock drum legend Jim Keltner, and was mixed by pioneering hip-hop producer Arthur Baker, one senses he could care less. But the consensus turned back in his favour once the career-spanning box set Biograph reminded us all why we’d loved Dylan in the first place. 1986’s Knocked Out Loaded passed muster with Petty in the mix, but Down In The Groove and Dylan & The Dead were less essential.

Oh Mercy and Under the Red Sky tipped the session player balance without thrilling unduly. However, The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991 got the archivists frothing: there would be more in this vein, but not before 1992’s Good As I Been To You and the following year’s World Gone Wrong revisited the folk originals Dylan had cut his teeth on. 1993 also saw the live 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration, which allowed him to enjoy the limelight on stage with pals Willie Nelson , Eric Clapton , Lou Reed, George Harrison and Neil Young (who dubbed the event “Bobfest”).

If he’d struggled to retain his voice throughout the changing times of the 80s, Dylan quashed doubts with 1997’s Time Out of Mind , on which songs such as ‘Cold Irons Bound’ and ‘Standing In The Doorway’ reminded us of an immense presence. Several archival compilations and box sets in The Bootleg Series followed before  Love And Theft  (produced by Jack “Bob Dylan” Frost) broke the ice and introduced his new touring band, including Larry Campbell, Charlie Sexton, Tony Garnier and David Kemper.

Recorded as he approached 65, Dylan was back in the main news again with 2006’s Modern Times . Closer, ‘Ain’t Talkin’’ was a revelation in terms of spiritual blues-noir. Folks will worry on behalf of a much-loved artist, but Dylan was in form and ready to hit the studio again for 2009’s Together Through Life , on which he collaborated with Jerry Garcia’s old sparring partner Robert Hunter.

After a quick detour into seasonal classics on Christmas In The Heart , Dylan’s magical allure was undimmed on 2012’s Tempest (which included the John Lennon tribute ‘Roll On John’) and emerged brightly again on 2015’s Shadows In The Night , a collection of songs Sinatra had mastered. As Dylan saw it: “I don’t see myself as covering these songs in any way. They’ve been covered enough. Buried, as a matter a fact. What my band and me are basically doing is uncovering them. Lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day.”

Hot on its heels was the similarly focused Fallen Angels , performed in the sentimental mood of the 20th-century American score and libretto chiefs the likes of Jimmy Van Heusen and Harold Arlen. Vastly influenced by his old friend Willie Nelson’s Stardust epic, Dylan wraps up some loose ends as if to say, “I’ve given you many of my best shots, and this is what I love to listen to.”

The revelations keep coming. On 2017’s Triplicate , Dylan casts his net even wider for a triple-disc, 30-song album that takes in little works of art from a variety of American songwriters. Don’t try to guess what comes next. Bob Dylan’s next dream could be a nightmare, maybe a rousing epiphany. He’s one of rock’s stalwarts, but he remains forever young.

August 7, 2022 at 4:24 pm

If not for you was co-written with George Harrison. Their joint recording efforts never came to anything but Harrison’s version on All Things Must Pass is based on the version on their joint session while Bob as usual opted for something entirely different.

Oh Mercy is a wonderful album. Some truly beautiful songs. Arguably it’s his best produced thanks to Daniel Lanois.

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Bob Dylan’s Odyssey: A Deep Dive into the Life of a Music Legend

The famous musician Bob Dylan is the only songwriter in history with a Nobel Prize in Literature.

Fans have been trying to find the right box to place Bob Dylan throughout his career, but he has continuously drifted from one style of music to another. Whether you enjoy his music or not, criticize his singing voice or feel its raw power, whether you see his words as pure poetry or mere lyrics, there is no denying that Dylan is one of the greatest and most influential artists in the world of music.

Who Is Bob Dylan?

While music is his main asset, Bob Dylan also has a fascinating personality and temperament. He seems to fit exactly into that archetype of the solitary wise poet, disappearing for a while and reappearing at the right moment in order to spill some of his wisdom. He is also, by every meaning of the word, hardheaded.

Dylan started off as a folk singer in the early 1960s in New York. Right when his fans started looking at him as a folk singer, he switched to protest songs and before this label could stick, he picked up an electric guitar and sang rock and roll songs. It seems that whatever people thought Bob Dylan was and should be, he disagreed with it and found new identities to embody and new music to make. Let’s dive into Dylan’s colorful discography in an attempt to identify all of the different genres that he tried out.

In the Beginning, There Was a Folk Singer

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Born in 1941 as Robert Allan Zimmerman, Bob Dylan’s name came from his idol, the great poet Dylan Thomas. At the beginning of his career, like other artists, Dylan wasn’t ashamed to borrow from his idols. He was inspired by classic American folk music and his early catalog mostly consisted of the known tunes of this tradition, with Woody Gutherie as his main inspiration.

Bob Dylan arrived in New York in 1961 at the beginning of the folk revival movement, which saw names like Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, and Dave Von Ronk revisit the classics of folk music and breathe new life into them. They held small shows in underground cafes and pubs of the city. Dylan became known for his playing style that combined the acoustic guitar and the harmonica mixed with his raw singing voice. All of this resulted in powerful renditions of already-known songs.

In 1962, he recorded and released his first album. It was a self-titled collection of his renditions of classic folk songs with two original songs as well. The album didn’t do too well, selling only 5000 copies. His second album, however, would change his life forever. He recorded and released The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan the following year. This album contained Dylan’s original compositions exclusively. His song Blowin’ in the Wind became an anthem of the 1960s. It was instantly endorsed by the counterculture movement of the era due to its combination of traditional melodies and socially aware lyrics. Songs like Masters of War and A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall reflected the ideas and hopes of an entire generation protesting against everything they thought was wrong with American society. Dylan’s songs seemed to poetically summarize their feelings.

Once a Protest Singer, Always a Protest Singer?

Bob Dylan has always been reluctant to identify his pieces as protest songs, but fans always saw them as those. While there were a couple of songs in The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan that fans dubbed as protest songs, this status would be radically amplified with the release of his following two albums in 1964. This year, Bob Dylan accepted his duty as the poet of a generation in upheaval, and the songs he released on both albums are the most political of his entire career.

From the true and sad story of The Lonesome Death of Hattie Caroll to the strong criticisms of Only a Pawn in Their Game, Dylan sang about what his generation was fighting for and did it confidently. He traveled all around the USA, playing festivals and concerts for hundreds of thousands of devoted fans who saw him as their God.

In contrast, Dylan would attempt to escape this classification more than any other artist for the rest of his career. But as much as he tried to dodge the label of a protest singer, fans insisted on it and expected him to rise up again and write a song about new issues that came up. When he refused or couldn’t do that, they would be disappointed and call him a traitor. Put simply, Dylan was done with this stage of his career and he wanted to move on to the next one. He was never interested in doing one thing exclusively and he couldn’t care less if that made his fans satisfied or unhappy.

Newport 1965: Dylan Goes Electric

Bob Dylan became the face of the Newport Folk Festival, so when hordes of eager fans went to see him play at the festival in 1965, they were expecting thought-provoking, politically aware protest songs , sung with his wry voice and played on an acoustic guitar with his accompanying harmonica. To everyone’s surprise, Dylan walked onto the stage with a Stratocaster and a band behind him. He went electric.

In a legendary moment that would forever alter music history, Bob Dylan played his song Maggie’s Farm with distortion turned all the way up while the crowd booed him throughout the entire performance. Allegedly, a man even walked up to the stage and tried to cut the cables with an axe.

Still, with the same determination that he has always been known for, Dylan embraced his new identity as a rock and roll musician and released many albums that became landmarks of classic rock. In the same year, Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home were released. Two of his most celebrated works contained songs played on the electric guitar with a full band. Titles like Subterranean Homesick Blues , Like a Rolling Stone , and Ballad of a Thin Man saw Bob Dylan abandon his folk roots in favor of heavier tunes that embraced the psychedelic rock movement of the mid-60s in their lyricism. Lines like The man in the coon-skin cap in a pig pen wants 11 dollars, you only got 10 feel like the ramblings of a mad man, possessed by some magical power, but they earned Dylan a new and much bigger audience.

In the 1965 documentary Don’t Look Back , you can see exactly how Dylan was hailed and perceived. The concert footage from his 1966 tour in England shows hundreds of thousands of fans waiting in long queues to get a chance to see him. Everyone knew Dylan was becoming a legend.

Beyond the Glorious 1960s: Dylan Re-Inventing Himself

In late 1966, Bob Dylan had his famous motorcycle accident. While the crash wasn’t severe, it still made him take a break and focus on his family. When he re-emerged in 1974, he went on a long tour with his band and played huge sold-out arenas. During the period when he was away from the stage, he still managed to release a few albums. Blonde on Blonde is arguably his best, John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline marked the return to his roots, while New Morning and Self Portrait served as attempts at something new and experimental.

His return to the stage was followed by a devastating divorce, which then led to two of the most beautiful but sorrowful albums— Blood on the Tracks and Desire . These albums showed the world a previously hidden side of Dylan that was tragic and vulnerable. Songs like If You See Her, Say Hello and Sara have a soft romantic touch to them but with a generous serving of the spirit of blues. These two great works of art would be followed by a few mediocre ones and a couple of hidden gems as well. In 1989 he released one of his most underrated works called Oh Mercy. 

Collaborating with U2’s producer Daniel Lanois, Dylan recorded and released an album of blues rock that would set the tone for the remainder of his career. He speaks fondly of this period in his memoir Chronicles Vol. 1 and expresses his doubts about the making of this album.

Bob Dylan Today: A Wise, Old Poet Speaking

Bob Dylan’s last few albums have a mature taste to them that is dripping with wisdom. His unofficial trilogy of Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, and Modern Times contains generally slower and longer compositions with a heavy focus on lyricism and story-telling. For example, the song Highlands in the aforementioned Time Out of Mind is a 16-minute-long exploration of many themes and personal issues for Dylan. It plays out more like a short story than a song and features a minimal bluesy guitar-and-drum instrumental and his wry, aged voice.

His latest album Rough and Rowdy Ways was released during the COVID-19 pandemic . Bob Dylan is still touring at the age of 82, and perhaps, we may still get an album or two before he calls it quits. For a man who has done almost everything there is to do in music, one can’t help but wonder what else he still has to offer.

The Counterculture Hippie Movement of the 1960s and 1970s

By Akram Herrak MA Cultural Management and Policy, BA English Literature Akram Herrak is a writer, musician, and photographer from Casablanca, Morocco. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature and a Master’s Degree in Cultural Management and Policy. He has been writing about film and literature for the past five years. His work has appeared in High on Films, A Fistful of Film, Independent Book Review, and Reader’s Digest. In his spare time, he plays chess and competes in tournaments.

Frequently Read Together

An Introduction to Activist Art

Bob Dylan’s Highlands Mansion on Sale for $3.9 Million

How Did Bob Dylan Win the Nobel Prize in Literature?

• BOB DYLAN NEWSLETTER

Bob Dylan to Headline the 2024 Outlaw Music Festival this Summer

The 2024 Outlaw Music Festival Tour features an unprecedented lineup including headliners Willie Nelson & Family, Bob Dylan, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, and John Mellencamp with Brittney Spencer, Celisse, and Southern Avenue. Billy Strings will also join the tour for one special night at The Gorge in Washington.

See the bobdylan.com On Tour page for dates and ticket links.

The Complete Budokan 1978 is Out Now!

A deluxe box set celebrating Bob Dylan’s 1978 world concert tour and the 45th anniversary of the artist’s first concert appearances in Japan, The Complete Budokan 1978 presents two full shows originally recorded on 24-channel multitrack analog tapes at Tokyo’s Nippon Budokan Hall on February 28 and March 1, 1978 and offers fans 36 previously unreleased Dylan performances. The Complete Budokan 1978 is available in 4CD, 8LP (Japan only) and digital configurations.

Order today!

Statement from bob dylan on the passing of robbie robertson.

Statement from Bob Dylan on the passing of Robbie Robertson:

“This is shocking news. Robbie was a lifelong friend. His passing leaves a vacancy in the world.”

Shadow Kingdom Soundtrack Now Available

“The entire show was one jaw-dropping delight after another.” – Rolling Stone

“He hasn’t sounded better in decades.” – Variety

Shadow Kingdom originally aired as an exclusive streaming event in July 2021 and will now be available on vinyl, CD and streaming platforms for the first time.

Shadow Kingdom presents Bob Dylan performing revelatory 21st century versions of songs from his storied back catalog — including fan favorites like “Forever Young” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” and deep catalog gems like “Queen Jane Approximately” and “The Wicked Messenger.”

The full-length Shadow Kingdom feature film will also be available for download and rental on Tuesday, June 6.

In the day of confession; We cannot mock a soul.; Oh, when there's too much of nothing,; No one has control.

Bob Dylan – Not Dark Yet (Version 1)

Watch the video for a previously unreleased version of “Not Dark Yet,” one of the stand-out tracks on the original ‘Time Out Of Mind’ album. Photography in the video is courtesy of renowned photo agency Magnum Photos.

“Not Dark Yet” (Version 1) will be included in the upcoming release of Bob Dylan’s ‘Fragments – Time Out of Mind Sessions (1996-1997): The Bootleg Series Vol. 17.’

Bob Dylan Q&A about “The Philosophy of Modern Song”

Read the complete interview here .

“Fragments: Time Out of Mind Sessions (1996-1997)” now Available!

The latest chapter in Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series takes a fresh look at Time Out of Mind , Dylan’s mid-career masterpiece, celebrating the album and its enduring impact 25 years after its original release on September 30, 1997.

Pre-order Now

Tom Jones – Not Dark Yet

Tina Turner – Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You

Rick Nelson – Just Like a Woman

Interview with steve forbert.

Bob Dylan’s First 60 Years as a Columbia Recording Artist Celebrated

To commemorate Bob Dylan’s 60th Anniversary as a recording artist of immeasurable musical and cultural impact, a new music video, “Subterranean Homesick Blues 2022,”—featuring a kinetic collage of visuals by a diverse array of artists—has launched. Also revealed is an Augmented Reality filter that provides a POV interactive experience.

The Philosophy of Modern Song

Announcing The Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan’s unique reflection on the ideas and philosophy contained in modern popular song. This is the Nobel Prize laureate’s first book of new writing since 2004’s Chronicles: Volume One . Learn more and order your copy today.

Springtime in New York now Available!

Bob Dylan – Springtime In New York (1980-1985) celebrates the rich creative period surrounding Dylan’s albums Shot Of Love , Infidels , and Empire Burlesque with previously unreleased outtakes, alternate takes, rehearsal recordings, live performances and more.

Purchase here

“Bob Dylan – 1970”

‘1970’ is a new 3-disc set, released by popular demand on February 26. It includes previously unreleased outtakes from the sessions that produced ‘Self Portrait’ and ‘New Morning’ plus the complete May 1, 1970 studio recordings with George Harrison, which capture the pair performing together on nine tracks.

PURCHASE Bob Dylan – 1970

Bob Dylan Returns to “Theme Time Radio Hour”

Bob Dylan’s “Theme Time Radio Hour” is back for the first time in over a decade with an exclusive two-hour episode on the theme of whiskey.

Listen Here!

False Prophet

New album ‘Rough And Rowdy Ways’ coming June 19th.

Pre-order now

Listen to “False Prophet” here

False Prophet lyrics

Murder Most Foul

Greetings to my fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty across the years. This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting. Stay safe, stay observant and may God be with you. Bob Dylan

Listen to “Murder Most Foul”

bobdylan.com has published the lyrics to “Murder Most Foul.”

The Story Of Travelin’ Thru, 1967 – 1969

Bob Dylan (Featuring Johnny Cash) – Travelin’ Thru, 1967 – 1969: The Bootleg Series Vol. 15 out now!

New chapter in acclaimed Bootleg Series unveils 47 previously unreleased recordings, including outtakes from John Wesley Harding , Nashville Skyline and Self Portrait plus first release of fabled Bob Dylan-Johnny Cash 1969 Nashville studio sessions

Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash – Wanted Man (Take 1)

Bob dylan – tell me that it isn’t true (take 2).

Lyric video for Bob Dylan’s “Tell Me That It Isn’t True (Take 2)” from Travellin’ Thru, 1967 – 1969: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 15

Listen to Bob Dylan: https://bobdylan.lnk.to/listenYD

Rolling Thunder Apparel Collection has Arrived

The Rolling Thunder Collection is available for purchase now!

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story By Martin Scorsese | Hard Rain | Netflix

Bob Dylan – The Rolling Thunder Revue Box Set Preview

Bob Dylan – The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings Now Available!

Monumental 14CD Box Set Includes 5 Complete Bob Dylan Sets From Rolling Thunder Revue Concerts Spanning October-December First Leg, Rehearsal Performances, Rarities And More

Visit the Bob Dylan Store

Apparel, posters and more at the Bob Dylan Store .

More Blood, More Tracks – The Bootleg Series Vol. 14 Now Available!

Eagerly Anticipated New Chapter in Acclaimed Dylan Bootleg Series Unveils Previously Unreleased Studio Performances from 1974’s Mythic Blood on the Tracks Sessions

Read more Order Now Listen

Missing Notebook Pages

News Flash – we are not perfect! Due to a printing error, four pages were left out of the handwritten lyric notebook included in the Deluxe Edition of ‘More Blood, More Tracks.’

We’re including them here , with our apologies.

Live 1962-1966 – Rare Performances From The Copyright Collections

Bob Dylan’s Live 1962 – 1966: Rare Performances from The Copyright Collections is now available digitally or as a 2-CD set.

Most of the performances on the album have been previously available only on the extremely limited edition “50th Anniversary / Copyright Extension” albums (three highly-collectible compilations–released in 2012, 2013 and 2014–of rare early Dylan recordings).

Across two discs-worth of music, Live 1962 – 1966: Rare Performances from The Copyright Collections chronicles Dylan’s transformation from groundbreaking acoustic “folk” artist to iconic force of pop culture.

The album features seminal recordings from the artist’s coffeehouse era (Gerde’s Folk City, 1962), his mythic 1963 breakout concerts at New York’s Town Hall and Carnegie Hall, a duet with Joan Baez from the historic March on Washington (August 28, 1963), definitive performances from his European and world tours of 1965 and 1966, incandescent moments from the 1964 and 1965 Newport Folk Festivals and more.

Get your copy today!

Heaven’s Door Whiskey Is Here

Heaven’s Door – a collection of American Whiskeys developed in collaboration with Bob Dylan and renowned craft distillers, will be available in May. Years in the making, the inaugural trilogy of expressions includes a Tennessee Straight Bourbon Whiskey, Double Barrel Whiskey and Straight Rye Whiskey finished in oak barrels from Vosges, France, air-dried for 3 years. The perfect blend of art and craft, each bottle showcases Dylan’s distinctive welded iron gates that he created in his metalworking studio, Black Buffalo Ironworks.

Heaven’s Door web site

New York Times article

New York Times taste test

Praise for “Trouble No More”

“Trouble No More – The Bootleg Series Vol. 13 / 1979-1981” has been recommended on many publications’ year-end gift lists. Rolling Stone’s Best Reissue of the Year

It’s one of the most enthusiastically praised Bootleg Series releases. Get your copy today or give it to a Bob Dylan fan in your life!

Order Now: Deluxe Deluxe download Double CD Vinyl Bob Dylan Store

The Nobel Lecture Now Available

Published for the first time in a beautiful collectible edition, the essential lecture delivered by the 2016 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Bob Dylan.

Purchase at Amazon .

New Bob Dylan Books

Check out the bobdylan.com Books page for new titles including The Nobel Lecture and 100 Songs .

Joan Osborne’s “Songs of Bob Dylan”

Joan Osborne’s excellent new album “Songs of Bob Dylan” is out now.

Check it out here: Songs of Bob Dylan

Roland Janes

Bob Dylan remembers a rockabilly legend.

The Night We Called It A Day

Q&a with bill flanagan.

Bob Dylan speaks to Bill Flanagan exclusively for bobdylan.com

Listen to “Stardust”

Listen to “Stardust” off Bob Dylan’s upcoming album  Triplicate !

Listen to “My One and Only Love”

Listen to a newly released track from Bob Dylan’s Triplicate !

The Nobel Award Ceremony Speech

Here is the Presentation Speech by Professor Horace Engdahl, Member of the Swedish Academy, Member of the Nobel Committee for Literature, 10 December 2016.

Bob Dylan’s Nobel Banquet Speech

The Nobel Foundation has posted the Banquet speech by Bob Dylan given by the United States Ambassador to Sweden Azita Raji, at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 2016.

The Lyrics: 1961-2012

Order from Amazon

Out now: : A beautiful, comprehensive volume of Dylan’s lyrics, from the beginning of his career through the present day—with the songwriter’s edits to dozens of songs, appearing here for the first time.

Bob Dylan on Muhammad Ali

“If the measure of greatness is to gladden the heart of every human being on the face of the earth, then he truly was the greatest. In every way he was the bravest, the kindest and the most excellent of men.”

Hear “All the Way” off ‘Fallen Angels’

“All the Way” is the second song released off the album Fallen Angels out May 20. Both “All the Way” and “Melancholy Mood” are available instantly with all digital pre-orders of the album. The track can also be streamed here and on Apple Music.

Visit the Bob Dylan Music Store

Visit the Bob Dylan Studio A Revisited Micro-site

Put yourself in the studio during the 1965-66 sessions by visiting the Studio A Revisited microsite, which gives you an opportunity to play with the four studio “stems” that make up “Like A Rolling Stone” and more.

“The Lyrics: Since 1962” Available Now!

Well, i got a harmonica job, begun to play,; blowin' my lungs out for a dollar a day..

The Story of “The Cutting Edge”

WATCH THE VIDEO

ARTS & CULTURE

The top 10 moments of bob dylan’s career.

We have selected 10 of the many pivotal events that have shaped his tumultuous life

Jim Morrison

Science Correspondent

"I'm a firm believer in the longer you live, the better you get." - Bob Dylan

Dylan said that in 1968, when he was 27. He turns 70 this month, as enigmatic as ever, a traveling troubadour on a self-proclaimed Never Ending Tour that began in 1988 and saw him playing 102 shows last year. He has been the young protest singer claiming he’s unconcerned with politics, the confessional songwriter who has offered as many myths as truths about his personal life, and the aging chronicler of the American folk songbook.

Here are 10 defining Dylan moments.

1. The Teen Rebel With a Cause Growing up in Hibbing, Minnesota, a young Robert Zimmerman, "Zimbo" to his classmates, started playing the piano at 11 before shifting to a cheap acoustic guitar and falling for the songs of Hank Williams, Elvis Presley and Little Richard. As a young teen, Dylan fixated on the actor James Dean, pasting pictures on his bedroom walls. He was a rocker first, though, playing Little Richard tunes with his band, The Shadow Blasters, at a Hibbing High talent show on April 5, 1957.

2. Landing Up on the Downtown Side He arrived in New York on January 24, 1961, after a meandering cross-country journey with two University of Wisconsin students. Depending upon which version you believe, he either headed out the next morning or four mornings later to meet Woody Guthrie, whom he described as “the true voice of the American spirit.” Guthrie, mostly confined to Greystone Park Hospital, was fading away with Huntington’s Disease. They struck up a friendship. Back in Greenwich Village, where he played Woody’s tunes in the coffeehouses, Dylan soon wrote "Song to Woody," one of two originals on his debut, Bob Dylan , recorded for Columbia in just two afternoons for the princely sum of $402. The disc, released in March 1962, sold just 5,000 copies its first year, and there were reports the label might drop Dylan.

3. Pellets of Poison Flooding Their Waters In late September 1962, with the nuclear sword of the Cuban missile crisis hanging over the world, Dylan sat down at an old Remington typewriter and pounded out an apocalyptic poem titled “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” set to the melody of “Lord Randall,” a folk ballad. “The words came fast, very fast. It was a song of terror,” Dylan said later. “Line after line, trying to capture the feeling of nothingness.” Together with “Blowin’ in the Wind," “Masters of War” and “Talking World War III Blues,” “Hard Rain” would establish Dylan as the protest singer for a generation with the release of his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in May 1963.

4. To Be on Your Own  On July 25, 1965, Dylan took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival, where he was an acoustic icon, with members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and famously plugged in. In what may be the most debated 16-minute set in popular music, they played howling versions of “Maggie’s Farm,” “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Phantom Engineeer,” an early draft of “It takes A Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.” Many in the audience booed, labeling him a Judas to his folk followers. “Like a Rolling Stone,” released that week and later the lead track on  Highway 61 Revisited , made Dylan a star, reaching second on the American charts. Depending upon the interpretation, the crowd booed because Dylan had gone electric, the sound was terrible or he played only three songs.

“I had a hit record out so I don’t know how people expected me to do anything different,” Dylan said two decades later.

5. Everybody Must Get Stoned  During the first three months of 1966, Dylan took part in an improbably arranged marriage to a group of good ol’ boys from the Nashville studio set with no idea who he was. Their union created arguably the greatest double album in rock history,  Blonde on Blonde . The sessions produced “Visions of Johanna,” “Sad Eyed Lady of The Lowlands,” “Just Like a Woman” and “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again.” “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 more than a decade later. “It’s that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up.”

6. This Wheel’s On Fire  “It was real early in the morning on top of a hill, near Woodstock,” Dylan said. I was drivin’ right straight up into the sun... I went blind for a second and I kind of panicked or something.” Dylan braked his Triumph 650 Bonneville motorcycle, locking the rear wheel and sending him sailing over the handlebars. The extent of his injuries on July 29, 1966. are foggy, like so many details of his life, although he was later seen wearing a neck brace. No police report was filed. In his autobiography, he barely mentions the accident, confessing: “Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race.” That he did. While he continued his prolific writing, the songs were quieter, more introspective. He hunkered down in Woodstock for a few years raising his family and would not tour again until 1974.

7. A Simple Twist of Fate  Dylan dropped in on a painter and teacher named Norman Raeben, then 73, in New York during the spring of 1974 and spent a few months working with him, along with other students, for eight hours a day, five days a week. To Raeben, Dylan was just another student, one he frequently called an idiot. Raeben, Dylan said a few years later, “looked into you and told you what you were. He taught me how to see in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt.” The first album after the Raeben lessons was  Blood On the Tracks , a masterpiece that reinvented Dylan as an intensely personal songwriter willing to examine the raw, dark side of love, notably on “Tangled Up in Blue.”

8. Gotta Serve Somebody  the end of a San Diego show on November 17, 1978, a fan, perhaps noticing Dylan faltering in poor health, threw a small silver cross on stage. Dylan picked it up. A night later in a Tucson hotel room, he says Jesus appeared and put his hand on him. “I felt it,” he said. “I felt it all over me.” In 1983, after two evangelical albums, Dylan set aside the fire and brimstone. “It’s time for me to do something else,” he said. “Jesus himself only preached for three years.”

9. Walking That Endless Highway  Dylan responded to writer's block and a couple of poorly received albums by beginning the Never Ending Tour. A show in Concord, California, on June 7, 1988, is now considered the first. Over more than two decades since, Dylan has averaged about 100 performances a year, playing more than 450 different songs. “A lot of people don’t like the road, but it’s as natural to me as breathing,” he said in 1997. “It’s the only place you can be who you want to be. I don’t want to put on the mask of celebrity. I’d rather just do my work and see it as a trade.”

10. Not Dark Yet  Just when it seemed like Dylan’s creative fire had waned—he hadn’t released an album of new material in six years—he produced 1997’s  Time Out of Mind , his second collaboration with producer Daniel Lanois. The album, a riveting, unflinching look at lost love and mortality, drew comparisons to “Blood on the Tracks” and earned him three Grammy Awards, including album of the year. His music, Dylan said at the time, endures because it is built on the foundation of folk music of Muddy Waters, Charley Patton, Bill Monroe, Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie. “I really was never any more than what I was—a folk musician who gazed into the grey mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze,” he wrote in  Chronicles , the first volume of his memoir. “I wasn’t a preacher performing miracles.”

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Jim Morrison is a freelance writer whose stories, reported from two dozen countries, have appeared in numerous publications including Smithsonian.com, the New York Times , and National Wildlife.

Bob Dylan Remastered: Drawings from the Road

May 25 – September 15, 2024

Remastered celebrates another impressive aspect of music legend Bob Dylan’s creativity: his talents in visual art.

A dedicated performer, Dylan started what is known as his “Never Ending Tour” in 1988; between 1989 and 1992, as he traveled through North America, Europe, and Asia, he began sketching glimpses of his life on the road. The resultant pencil and charcoal drawings were a way to “refocus a restless mind,” as Dylan claimed, providing him a new outlet to celebrate the comings and goings of everyday life.

Dylan made three different collections out of the original drawings by “remastering” these works, adding vivid watercolor and gouache to digital enlargements of the drawings to create a new, special edition set entitled The Drawn Blank Series, which is the focus of this exhibition.

All three series were first seen in public during an exhibition at the prestigious Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz Museum in Germany in 2007. After one additional show in Helsinki, the works returned to Dylan. Today, The Drawn Blank Series is owned by a private collector while the other two sets were sold to a private gallery. Dylan’s work has been compared to modern masters such as Henri Matisse and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. His skills as a draughtsman, in keeping with his talents as a songwriter, lie with his ability to tell an engrossing tale through the simplest and most evocative means.

Bob Dylan Remastered: Drawings from the Road features ninety-two unique, original signed works.

Sponsored in part by The Clark Foundation and Mr. and Mrs. Thomas O. Putnam.

This exhibition was provided by PAN Art Connections .

Related Programs: “The Spirit in Me Sings”: Luthier Thomas Lieber Explores Bob Dylan & the Creative Spirit Saturday, July 13  • 5:30-7pm $15 members; $17.50 non-members   >>>

Food For Thought: Bob Dylan Remastered: Drawings from the Road Wednesday, July 24  • 12:30pm $25 members; $30 non-members   >>>

Food For Thought: Bob Dylan Remastered: Drawings from the Road Wednesday, August 14  • 12:30pm $25 members; $30 non-members   >>>

Image Credits: 1) Created by Taina Väisänen/TAKT Oy & Janne Alhonpää/Ensemble Oy

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The 9 Most Poetic Songs by Bob Dylan [VIDEOS]

“every one of them words rang true”.

Christian Bertrand / Shutterstock.com

Bob Dylan is one of the greats in the history of American music. The gravelly-voiced folk singer has reinvented himself so often over the span of his decades-long career, it’s sometimes difficult to keep track of. To top off his already impressive and amazing career, Dylan has become the first the first musician to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature. Sara Danius, the Swedish Academy's permanent secretary, said it perfectly when the award was given to Dylan: “Bob Dylan writes poetry for the ear. But it’s perfectly fine to read his works as poetry.” To celebrate Dylan’s achievement, we bring you seven of his most poetic classics, all of which are perfect examples of his amazing ability to play with words.

1. CHIMES OF FREEDOM (1964)

Choice Lyric: "Starry-eyed and laughing as I recall when we were caught /  Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended /  As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look /  Spellbound and swallowed ’til the tolling ended."

2. LIKE A ROLLING STONE (1965)

Choice Lyric: "You used to be so amused / At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used / Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse / When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose / You're invisible now, you've got no secrets to conceal."

3. TANGLED UP IN BLUE (1975)

Choice Lyric: "Then she opened up a book of poems / And handed it to me / Written by an Italian poet / From the thirteenth century / And every one of them words rang true / And glowed like burnin’ coal / Pourin’ off of every page / Like it was written in my soul from me to you / Tangled up in blue."

4. THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN' (1964)

Choice Lyric:  " Come mothers and fathers / Throughout the land / And don't criticize / What you can't understand / Your sons and your daughters / Are beyond your command."

5. I SHALL BE RELEASED (1971)

Choice Lyric: " They say ev’ry man needs protection / They say ev’ry man must fall / Yet I swear I see my reflection / Some place so high above this wall / I see my light come shining."

6. IT'S ALRIGHT MA (I'M ONLY BLEEDING) (1965)

Choice Lyric:  "While preachers preach of evil fates /  Teachers teach that knowledge waits /  Can lead to hundred-dollar plates /  Goodness hides behind its gates /  But even the president of the United States /  Sometimes must have to stand naked."

7. JOKERMAN (1983)

Choice lyric:  "Well, the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy /  The law of the jungle and the sea are your only teachers /  In the smoke of the twilight on a milk-white steed /  Michelangelo indeed could’ve carved out your features."

8. ONLY A PAWN IN THEIR GAME (1964)

Choice lyric: "The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid / And the marshals and cops get the same /  But the poor white man’s used in the hands of them all like a tool."

9. VISIONS OF JOHANNA (1966)

Choice lyric: "Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial /  Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while /  But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues / you can tell by the way she smiles."

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TRUSTING HIMSELF

Bob Dylan 1985

Olof Björner

A summary of recording & concert activities,

releases, tapes & books.

© 2004 by Olof Björner

All Rights Reserved.

This text may be reproduced, re-transmitted, redistributed and

otherwise propagated at will,   provided that this notice remains

intact and in place .

Download this document as a PDF file

in A4 or Letter format.

1              Introduction

Despite the fact that Dylan did not tour 1985 was a year of extreme visibility. At least twelve interviews, a new album, Empire Burlesque , and four charity engagements, the "We Are The World" and " Sun City " recordings, and the Live Aid and Farm Aid concerts. Besides these two public performances Dylan also played at a youth festival in Moscow .

2              1985 At A Glance

3              the 1985 calendar.

4              Empire Burlesque

The recording of Empire Burlesque took place in a number of sessions starting in mid 1984 and ending in the beginning of March 1985. A large number of these were overdub sessions. There are many details missing and the summary below gives only a fragmentary picture. Arthur Baker XE "Arthur Baker"   XE "Baker, Arthur"   did the final overdubs and remixing during February and March 1985. As usual there are a number of songs here that were never used again, and a number of these songs are not circulating. The titles may be just the engineer’s best guess during the recording session. Below (x) stands for “released after later overdubbing”.

Some of the sessions were produced by Bob Dylan. Here's a summary:

Live history

Something's Burning, Baby is the only song from Empire Burlesque that has never been played live .

Officially released live versions

Performances during The Never-Ending Tour

5              Songs 1985

1.      No version is circulating .

2.       Co-written with Carole Bayer Sager.

6              Suggested Readings

6.1        articles.

Dark Eyes – Homer, the Slut #8

Mixed Up Confusion In Biograph's Dates by Clinton Heylin – The Telegraph #23

Movies Inside His Head by John Lindley – The Telegraph #25

The First Live Aid – Isis #21

We Are The World by John Bauldie – The Telegraph #20

6.2        Interviews

20 ABC Interview – Talkin ' Bob Dylan 1984 & 1985

Charles Young Interview – Talkin ' Bob Dylan 1984 & 1985

Mikal Gilmore Interview – Talkin ' Bob Dylan 1984 & 1985

Bob Dylan Interview – by Mikal Gilmore, On The Tracks #11 (Summer 1997)

Old Grey Whistle Test Interview – Talkin ' Bob Dylan 1984 & 1985

Robert Hilburn Interview – Talkin ' Bob Dylan 1984 & 1985

Rockline – Talkin ' Bob Dylan 1984 & 1985

Westwood One: Dylan on Dylan – Talkin ' Bob Dylan 1984 & 1985

6.3        Reviews of Empire Burlesque

Empire Burlesque ... The Reviews – The Telegraph #21

Empire Burlesque by Larry Sloman – The Telegraph #21

7              SOURCES

8              Bibliography

[1] Empire Burlesque

[2] Knocked Out Loaded

[3] The Bootleg Series

[4] traditional song

[5] aborted attempt

[6] as a duet with Patti Smith

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Bob Dylan Stuns Fans With New Set, Surprise Covers on Outlaw Festival Launch

By Andy Greene

Andy Greene

Before Bob Dylan even walked onstage Friday night to kick off the summer Outlaw Music Festival tour at Ameris Bank Amphitheater in Alpharetta, Georgia, word circulated through the fan community that big changes were afoot in Dylan World. Super fan Ray Padgett was on site with early reports that gospel-era drummer Jim Keltner was taking over from Jerry Pentecost, and pedal steel player Donnie Herron was out after a 19-year stint in the band.

But nobody was prepared for the remarkable show that followed, which was one of the most surreal and unpredictable nights in the 36-year history of the Never Ending Tour. After three years of playing a static set built around his 2020 LP, Rough and Rowdy Ways , and select deep cuts from the past, Dylan presented a completely new show heavy on Fifties covers and his original tunes from the past two decades. The only songs recorded prior to the turn of the millennium were 1990’s “Under the Red Sky” and 1975’s “A Simple Twist of Fate.”

There’s no record of him playing any of them throughout the course of his career. There wasn’t a single selection from Rough and Rowdy Ways , but he did break out four songs (“Early Roman Kings,” “Long and Wasted Years,” “Pay in Blood,” and “Scarlet Town”) from 2012’s Tempest.

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When the Outlaw tour heads to the West Coast later in the summer, John Mellencamp and Brittney Spencer are coming onboard, and Plant and Krauss are departing along with Celisse. Dylan and Nelson are on the bill every single night. But in the more immediate future, many questions linger. Will Nelson recover from his mystery ailment in time to join up with the tour next week? Will Dylan stick with this bizarre set every night? Will he throw in more surprises? Might he consider covering a song written after Dwight D. Eisenhower departed the White House? Will venues continue to let fans bring in phones and film/livestream the set? (This was a huge no-no at Dylan shows these past few years.)

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Bob Dylan Set List:

“My Babe” (Willie Dixon) “Beyond Here Lies Nothin'” “Simple Twist of Fate” “Little Queenie” (Chuck Berry) “Mr. Blue” (The Fleetwoods) “Pay in Blood” “Cold, Cold Heart” (Hank Williams) “Early Roman Kings” “Under the Red Sky” “Things Have Changed” “The Fool” (Sanford Clark) “Scarlet Town” “Long and Wasted Years”

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Bob Dylan’s son, Jakob Dylan, performs in Flint this weekend

• Published: Jun. 27, 2024, 10:30 a.m.

The Capitol Theatre in downtown Flint.

• Fuad Shalhout | [email protected]

FLINT, MI - Over the past three decades, the Wallflowers, led by Jakob Dylan, have carved out a reputation as one of rock’s most dynamic and intentional bands.

At 8 p.m. on Saturday, June 29, the band will perform at the Capitol Theatre, 140 E. 2nd St. in Flint.

They’ve continuously refined a unique sound that fuses classic songwriting and narrative depth with a contemporary, impactful musical style.

This distinctive approach shines through in their enduring hits, such as the 1996 album “Bringing Down the Horse” with its Grammy-winning track “One Headlight,” as well as in their more experimental projects like the 2012 album “Glad All Over,” their most recent release.

After nearly a decade of silence, the Wallflowers are silent no more.

“They took a hiatus in the past eight years or so,” said Carly Uhrig, marketing director at the FIM. “So when it was announced they were touring again, we were excited.”

Beyond their strong band name, Dylan’s legacy continues with “Exit Wounds,” the latest studio album from the Wallflowers. This record maintains the band’s signature sound—lean, powerful and captivating. For Dylan, “Exit Wounds” represents the next chapter in his career, one dedicated to pursuing and capturing the unique magic that collaboration brings.

“The Wallflowers is much of my life’s work,” Dylan said in a news release. “Plus, it’s pretty hard to get a good band name. So if you have one, keep it.”

Dylan is the son of legendary musician Bob Dylan, but has carved out a path of his own.

The Wallflowers have achieved significant commercial success with their quadruple-platinum album “Bringing Down the Horse,” won two Grammy Awards for the hit single “One Headlight,” and maintained high popularity over three decades.

“This is part of our Summer in the City concert series,” Uhrig said. “We have a handful of shows happening at the Capitol during the summer. We want to promote that to help downtown Flint.”

Tickets are $50 per person and $35 for Genesee County residents. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.

Detroit-based group Brother Elsey will open the show.

“If you haven’t been to the Capitol, it’s a historic place that was renovated a couple years ago,” Uhrig said. “In a way you step back in time with this old building, but it’s still new and a cool venue.”

Stories by Fuad Shalhout

• This Michigan venue offers multiple food vendors, entertainment for all
• Davison Mexican restaurant abruptly closes its doors
• Flint city attorney stepping down, interim replacement named

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Mavis Staples Is an American Institution. She’s Not Done Singing Yet.

After more than seven decades onstage, the gospel and soul great decided last year that it was time to retire. Then she realized she still had work to do.

By Grayson Haver Currin

Reporting from Chicago and Los Angeles

On a rainy April day in Chicago, Mavis Staples sat in the restaurant of the towering downtown Chicago building where she’s lived for the past four years. For two hours, she talked about the civil rights movement and faith. And finally, she mentioned her old flame Bob Dylan.

The singer-songwriter first proposed to Staples after a kiss at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival; she hid from him during a show at the Apollo decades later, fearing he’d ask again. They’ve remained friends, even taking daily strolls during a 2016 tour together. She’d heard rumors he would soon retire, finally wrapping his fabled Never Ending Tour. Staples knew he would hate it.

“Oh, Bobby : He gotta keep on singing,” Staples said. “I could handle it more than him. I will call him and say, ‘Don’t retire, Bobby. You don’t know what you’re doing.’”

Staples speaks from experience: Late in the summer of 2023, soon after turning 84, she told her manager she was done. She’d been on the road for 76 years, ever since her father, Roebuck Staples, known as Pops, assembled a family band when she was 8. The Staple Singers became a gospel fulcrum of the civil rights movement and, later, a force for bending genres — mixing funk, rock and soul inside their spiritual mission, an all-American alchemy. The band’s mightiest singer and sole survivor since the death of her sister Yvonne in 2018 and brother, Pervis , in 2021, Mavis remained in high demand, a historical treasure commanding a thunderous contralto.

“Being an American and not believing in royalty, meeting her was the closest I’d ever felt,” said Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, who marveled at her while watching “ The Last Waltz ” decades before he produced a string of her poignant albums. “I felt the same way when I met Johnny Cash, like meeting a dollar bill or bald eagle.”

A seemingly indomitable extrovert, Staples had deeply resented being homebound during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. So she returned to the road with gusto, playing more than 50 shows last summer. But in July, she missed the end of a moving walkway in Germany and fell on her face. Was this, she wondered, the life she wanted? She’d previously mentioned retirement, but now she insisted.

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« Previous Continue Here »

Miley Cyrus , “Wrecking Ball”

While Miley doesn’t necessarily hate the song itself, she is having second thoughts about the legacy that now follows her ever since swinging from that wrecking ball in 2013.

“I’m never living that down. I will always be the naked girl on a wrecking ball. No matter how much I just frolic with Emu, I’m always the naked girl on the wrecking ball … I should have thought how long that was going to have to follow me around,” she later reminisced in an interview.

Justin Bieber , “Beauty and a Beat” with Nicki Minaj

Justin doesn’t necessarily regret his hit with Nicki , but it isn’t exactly his favorite song, either. It was just trendy, according to the star himself.

“I never really liked ‘Beauty and a Beat.’ But I understood what it was at the time. And it was music that was popular at that time, as well. But I was never really a huge fan of that song,” he admitted in an interview with The Bert Show .

Led Zeppelin , “Stairway to Heaven”

The band’s Robert Plant notoriously is not a fan of their classic hit.

“I’d break out in hives if I had to sing that song in every show. I wrote those lyrics and found that song to be of some importance and consequence in 1971, but 17 years later, I don’t know,” he said in the ’80s. He also called it “that bloody wedding song” in 2002, and donated to a Portland radio station who announced a ban of the song. His hatred of the song is cited as a major division between him and the band’s guitarist and composer, Jimmy Page .

Neil Young , “Heart of Gold”

The prolific singer-songwriter stopped performing the song by the mid-1970s live, eventually referring to the song as a “bore” on his greatest hits collection, Decade .

“This song put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I met more interesting people there,” he explained of his resentment due to the song’s success.

Bob Dylan , “Ballad in Plain D”

Bob Dylan got very candid about the demise of his relationship with Suze Rotolo in the song, detailing conflicts between himself and her mother and sister.

He later told Bill Flanagan for Written In My Soul that he had regrets for doing that: “Oh yeah, that one! I look back and say ‘I must have been a real schmuck to write that.’ I look back at that particular one and say, of all the songs I’ve written, maybe I could have left that alone.”

Click through to keep reading…

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Russian strikes leave thousands in northern Ukraine without power and water

Associated Press

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Ukrainian servicemen carry the coffin of British combat medic, volunteer, Peter Fouche, 49 who was killed on June 27 during his work in East Ukraine, at the funeral ceremony on the city's main square in Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, July 6, 2024. Peter was founder of a charity organization, which provides vehicles, drones and other needs to Ukrainian servicemen. (AP Photo/Alex Babenko)

KYIV – Russian strikes overnight left over 100,000 households without power in northern Ukraine and cut off the water supply to a regional capital, Ukrainian authorities reported Saturday, while civilian casualties rose sharply in the country's embattled east.

The northern Sumy region, which borders Russia, was plunged into dark after Russian strikes late Friday damaged energy infrastructure, the Ukrainian Energy Ministry said. Hours later, the Ukrainian public broadcaster reported that Russian drones hit the provincial capital, also called Sumy, cutting off water by hitting power lines that feed its system of pumps.

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Russian state agency RIA cited a local pro-Kremlin “underground” leader as saying that Moscow’s forces overnight hit a plant producing rocket ammunition in the city, which had a pre-war population of over 256,000. The report didn’t specify what weapon was used, and the claim could not be independently verified. Explosions rocked the city during an air raid warning early Saturday, according to Ukrainian media reports.

In the Donetsk region in the east, Russian shelling on Friday and overnight killed 11 civilians and wounded 43, local Gov. Vadym Filashkin reported on Saturday. Five people died in the town of Selydove southeast of Pokrovsk, the eastern city that has emerged as a front-line hotspot. The Ukrainian General Staff on Saturday morning said that Ukrainian and Russian forces clashed 45 times near Pokrovsk over the previous day.

According to Filashkin, three more people died in Chasiv Yar, the strategically located town in Donetsk that has been reduced to rubble under a montshlong Russian assault.

A Ukrainian military spokesperson on Thursday told the AP that Ukrainian forces had retreated from a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Chasiv Yar. The town's elevated location gives it strategic importance, and military analysts say its fall would put nearby cities in jeopardy. It could also compromise critical Ukrainian supply routes and bring Russia closer to its stated aim of seizing the entire Donetsk region.

According to the Ukrainian General Staff, Russian forces on Friday and overnight launched six rocket strikes and 55 airstrikes across Ukraine, and used more than 70 “glide bombs” — retrofitted Soviet-era weapons that have wrought devastation in the country in recent weeks.

In Kyiv, Ukrainian service members gathered on Saturday to pay last respects to a British combat medic who set up a charity delivering essential supplies to front-line fighters.

Peter Fouché died “in the battlefield” last Thursday as his unit clashed with Russian troops, according to his colleague at Project Konstantin, the volunteer group that since 2022 has ferried drones, vehicles, uniforms and food to Ukrainian soldiers in the east. According to its website, it has also helped evacuate 219 Ukrainian soldiers from combat zones.

At the funeral ceremony, Ukrainian soldiers carried Fouché's coffin through Kyiv’s landmark Independence Square, the site of mass protests in 2014 that forced out a pro-Russian president. Fouché's comrades held back tears as they lined up to say goodbye. Others read prayers as they held up Ukrainian flags and military insignia. Fouche’s partner, wearing a traditional Ukrainian embroidered shirt, knelt down to embrace the coffin.

A statement released Monday by Halyna Zhuk, Project Konstantin’s Ukrainian co-founder, called Fouché “a hero” and praised his “relentless commitment to Ukraine and her people.”

Fouché, a native of west London who turned 49 this year, helped build a field hospital in Kyiv before he started Project Konstantin, according to the group’s website, and later enlisted in the Ukrainian army. At least five other Britons have been killed while volunteering in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

In Russia, two civilians were wounded after Ukrainian forces overnight shelled a border town in the southern Belgorod region, its Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov reported.

The Russian Defense Ministry said its troops overnight shot down a total of eight drones over the Kursk and Belgorod regions in the south.

In Krasnodar province next to Russia-annexed Crimea, local authorities reported on damage caused during the night by falling drone debris. Debris sparked a fire at an oil depot, set fuel tanks ablaze in a separate location and damaged a cellphone tower, the reports said. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

Full coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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