The story of Bob Dylan

Iron range beginnings

The story begins on the twenty fourth of May 1941, at St. Mary's Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota, with the birth of Robert Allen Zimmerman. His father's parents had fled Odessa after the pogroms of 1905, and his mother's family were Lithuanian Jews who had arrived in 1902. When Bobby was six, his father Abram caught polio, and the family moved to his mother Beatty's hometown of Hibbing, an iron ore town up north. There his father and uncles ran a furniture and appliance store. The Zimmermans were part of a small, close knit Jewish community, and Bob had his bar mitzvah in May 1954. At night, though, his real education came through the radio, from faraway stations in Shreveport and Little Rock playing rock and roll.[1] [2] [3]

At Hibbing High School he formed a string of bands. One of them, the Golden Chords, played Little Richard and Elvis songs, and their version of Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay at a school talent show was so loud the principal cut the microphone. His girlfriend Echo Helstrom listened to rhythm and blues with him, and her family owned old Jimmie Rodgers records on seventy eights. On the thirty first of January 1959, a seventeen year old Bob saw Buddy Holly play the Duluth Armory, four days before Holly died in a plane crash. Decades later, in his Nobel lecture, he called Holly the archetype, everything he was not and wanted to be. His yearbook that year said his ambition was to join Little Richard.[1] [2]

In 1959, calling himself Elston Gunnn with three letter n's, he played piano and clapped along in two shows with the pop singer Bobby Vee. That September he enrolled at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and started playing at a coffeehouse called the Ten O'Clock Scholar in the Dinkytown neighbourhood. Rock and roll began to feel thin to him. He later explained that folk songs carried more despair, more sadness, more triumph and deeper feeling. Around this time he began introducing himself as Bob Dylan. Asked about the change years later, he said people are born with the wrong names and the wrong parents sometimes, and in this land of the free you can call yourself whatever you want. In May 1960 he dropped out of college.[1]

The hero who pulled him east was Woody Guthrie, the Dust Bowl balladeer. Dylan wrote that Guthrie's songs had the infinite sweep of humanity in them, and he vowed to become Guthrie's greatest disciple. By then Guthrie was dying of Huntington's disease, the inherited illness that had killed his mother, and he was a patient at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey. In January 1961 Dylan travelled to New York to perform and to meet him. He kept visiting, bringing his guitar, and wrote Song to Woody for him. Some of the Guthrie style he absorbed came secondhand, through Ramblin' Jack Elliott, who had studied at Woody's side. Elliott shrugged that Dylan learned from him the same way he had learned from Woody.[1] [2] [3]

Greenwich Village

From February 1961 Dylan was a fixture in the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village, soaking up songs from Dave Van Ronk, Odetta and the Clancy Brothers. In April he met Joan Baez at Gerde's Folk City. She was already famous as the queen of folk, and she was not impressed by the scruffy newcomer at first, though she liked Song to Woody. That July, at a folk concert at Riverside Church, he met a seventeen year old named Suze Rotolo, introduced by her sister Carla. Suze was the daughter of Communist Party members and worked for civil rights and anti nuclear groups. Dylan later wrote that when he saw her, the air filled with banana leaves and Cupid's arrow finally hit him in the heart.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In September 1961 the New York Times critic Robert Shelton wrote a glowing review of Dylan at Gerde's Folk City. That same month Dylan played harmonica on an album by the folk singer Carolyn Hester, and the session's producer, the legendary John Hammond, signed him to Columbia Records. Some executives at the label mocked the signing as Hammond's folly, but Hammond stood firm. The debut album, simply called Bob Dylan, came out on the nineteenth of March 1962. It was mostly traditional folk and blues, with only two original songs, Talkin' New York and Song to Woody. It sold about five thousand copies in its first year, just enough to break even.[1] [2] [3]

On the sixteenth of April 1962, at Gerde's, Dylan first performed a short new song called Blowin' in the Wind. It had just two verses, and he added the middle one soon after. The melody borrowed from an old spiritual, No More Auction Block, sung by former slaves. On the ninth of August 1962 he legally became Robert Dylan, with his father as witness, and that month he signed with the manager Albert Grossman. Grossman passed Blowin' in the Wind to another of his acts, Peter, Paul and Mary, and their version reached number two in America in 1963, selling over a million copies. When Peter Yarrow told Dylan he would earn more than five thousand dollars in publishing, Dylan was speechless.[1] [2] [3]

In June 1962 Suze Rotolo left for six months to study art in Perugia, Italy, and Dylan missed her badly. That longing ran through songs like Don't Think Twice, It's All Right and Boots of Spanish Leather. He began performing A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall about a month before the Cuban Missile Crisis, which gave its visions of doom an eerie timing. In December he made his first trip to England, to act in a BBC television play called Madhouse on Castle Street, where he sang Blowin' in the Wind at the end. Back home, a power struggle between Grossman and Hammond ended with the jazz producer Tom Wilson, an African American, taking over the producer's chair.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The voice of a generation

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan came out in May 1963, and it made his name. On the cover, photographed by Don Hunstein, Dylan and Suze Rotolo walk arm in arm down a snowy Jones Street in the Village. Inside were Blowin' in the Wind, Masters of War, A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall and Oxford Town, about James Meredith, the first Black student at the University of Mississippi. George Harrison later said the Beatles played it until they wore it out. That May, Dylan was booked on The Ed Sullivan Show, but CBS told him that Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues might be libellous to the John Birch Society. Rather than accept censorship, he walked out and never appeared.[1] [2] [3]

In July 1963 Joan Baez invited Dylan onto the stage at the Newport Folk Festival, and their duets over the next two years made him a star to her large audience. They also became lovers. On the twenty eighth of August 1963 they both sang at the March on Washington, where Dylan performed Only a Pawn in Their Game and When the Ship Comes In. His private life was more painful. Suze Rotolo became pregnant by him in 1963 and had an abortion. The relationship did not survive that, his affair with Baez and her family's hostility. They split in 1964, and he wrote about the breakup in Ballad in Plain D, a song he later said he wished he had left alone.[1] [2] [3]

His third album, The Times They Are a-Changin', was his most political. Only a Pawn in Their Game dealt with the murder of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers, and The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll told of a Black barmaid killed by a young white socialite named William Zantzinger. Then Newsweek ran a hostile profile revealing his real name and his middle class family, whom he had claimed to be estranged from. He answered the next day by recording Restless Farewell. By December 1963, weeks after President Kennedy's assassination, he was chafing at the protest role. Accepting a civil liberties award while drunk, he mocked the committee as old and balding and said he saw something of himself in the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.[1] [2]

Not everyone wanted him to stay in his lane. In March 1964 Johnny Cash wrote to the folk magazine Broadside praising Dylan and telling his critics to shut up and let him sing. Dylan kept that magazine for the rest of his life, and the two met at Newport that July. On the ninth of June 1964 he recorded the whole of Another Side of Bob Dylan in one evening, with songs like My Back Pages and It Ain't Me Babe, which many heard as him refusing the spokesman's role. His look changed too, with sharp Carnaby Street clothes and sunglasses day and night. Asked on a television show whether he would play the cowboy in a planned cowboy horror movie, he answered that no, he would play his mother.[1] [2] [3]

Going electric

Bringing It All Back Home arrived in March 1965 with a rock band on side one, led by the racing Subterranean Homesick Blues. The acoustic side included Mr. Tambourine Man, and the Byrds' electric version of it went to number one in both America and Britain. The title figure was probably inspired by the session guitarist Bruce Langhorne, who played a big Turkish frame drum with jingling bells. That spring Dylan toured England, filmed by D. A. Pennebaker for the documentary Dont Look Back. It opens with Dylan flipping cue cards with the words of Subterranean Homesick Blues, an idea later copied by countless videos. The film also caught his romance with Joan Baez quietly coming apart.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Back from England, drained and thinking of quitting, Dylan wrote what he called a long piece of vomit, ten or twenty pages depending on which interview you read. Out of it came Like a Rolling Stone. At the session on the sixteenth of June 1965, a twenty one year old named Al Kooper was only there as a guest. When producer Tom Wilson stepped out, Kooper sat down at a Hammond organ he barely knew how to play and made up the famous riff. Wilson protested that Kooper was not an organ player, but Dylan told him to turn it up. Columbia hesitated over a six minute single, until an acetate played at a New York club called Arthur set off demand. It reached number two, held off only by the Beatles' Help![1] [2]

On the twenty fifth of July 1965 Dylan headlined the Newport Folk Festival with an electric pickup band, including Mike Bloomfield on guitar and Al Kooper on organ. They played Maggie's Farm, Like a Rolling Stone and an early take of It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, and left after about fifteen minutes to a noise of boos and cheers. Coaxed back alone, Dylan found he had the wrong harmonica and asked the crowd for one in E. Harmonicas clattered onto the stage, and he sang It's All Over Now, Baby Blue. The folk establishment was furious. Ewan MacColl called his new work tenth rate drivel. Dylan did not return to Newport for thirty seven years.[1] [2] [3]

Four days after Newport he recorded Positively 4th Street, widely heard as a put down of his old folk friends. Highway 61 Revisited followed in August, named for the road running from his Minnesota to New Orleans, and ending with the eleven minute Desolation Row. For the road he hired a Canadian bar band called Levon and the Hawks, but crowds booed so hard that drummer Levon Helm quit in November. On the twenty second of November 1965 Dylan quietly married Sara Lownds, a former model, with his manager Albert Grossman among the few present. Friends say he denied being married afterwards. The news broke in February 1966 in the New York Post, in a story by Nora Ephron headlined Hush, Bob Dylan is wed.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In February 1966 producer Bob Johnston took Dylan to Nashville, where top session men made Blonde on Blonde, one of rock's first double albums. Dylan called it that thin wild mercury sound. Then came the 1966 world tour, each show split into a solo acoustic half and a loud electric half with the Hawks. Fans jeered and slow clapped. On the seventeenth of May at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, someone yelled Judas. Dylan answered, I don't believe you, you're a liar, and told the band, in stronger words, to play it loud. Pennebaker later said Dylan was taking a lot of amphetamine, and Dylan himself admitted he was on drugs just to keep going. The tour ended at the Royal Albert Hall on the twenty seventh of May.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The crash and the quiet years

On the twenty ninth of July 1966 Dylan crashed his Triumph Tiger 100 motorcycle near his home in Woodstock, New York, riding back from Albert Grossman's house in Bearsville. He said he broke vertebrae in his neck. The details remain hazy, since no ambulance was called and he was not taken to hospital. What is clear is that he vanished from the stage. He later admitted he had been hurt, but that the real truth was he wanted out of the rat race. He did not tour again for nearly eight years. Instead he raised a young family in Woodstock with Sara. Their children were Jesse, born in January 1966, Anna, Samuel and Jakob, and he adopted Sara's daughter Maria.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1967 Dylan and the Hawks gathered almost daily in the basement of a pink house in West Saugerties that everyone called Big Pink. Over a hundred songs were taped, loose and funny and strange, meant as demos for other singers. Manfred Mann, the Byrds and Julie Driscoll all had hits with them. In July 1969 a record called Great White Wonder appeared in West Coast shops with some of these songs on it. It is known as the first rock bootleg, and it launched a whole underground industry. Columbia finally issued a selection as The Basement Tapes in 1975, and in 2014 a complete edition of one hundred and thirty eight tracks won a Grammy.[1] [2] [3]

In late 1967 Dylan went back to Nashville for John Wesley Harding, a sparse record of short songs steeped in the Bible and the Old West. It included All Along the Watchtower, soon transformed by Jimi Hendrix. On the third of October 1967 Woody Guthrie died. On the twentieth of January 1968 Dylan made his first public appearance in twenty months at a Guthrie tribute at Carnegie Hall, backed by the Band. Then Nashville Skyline in 1969 revealed a smooth crooning voice nobody expected. Variety joked that he had somehow added an octave to his range. It gave him the hit Lay Lady Lay and a duet with Johnny Cash on Girl from the North Country, and Cash wrote the liner notes.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Dylan turned down the Woodstock festival on his doorstep and chose England's Isle of Wight instead, on the last day of August 1969. The trip nearly fell apart when his son Jesse was hit by a cabin door on the ocean liner and needed hospital care, and Dylan flew in at the last minute. John Lennon, Ringo Starr, George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards were in the crowd of about one hundred and fifty thousand. On the seventeenth of July 1970 his contracts with Grossman were dissolved, after Dylan realised his manager had been taking half his song publishing. That June the double album Self Portrait had baffled critics, but New Morning in October was hailed as a return to form.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Blood on the tracks

The early seventies were scattered. On the first of August 1971 Dylan made a surprise appearance at George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh, and that November he released George Jackson, a protest single mourning a Black Panther killed in San Quentin prison. Around his thirtieth birthday he visited Israel. In 1972 he joined Sam Peckinpah's western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, writing the score and playing a gang member called Alias. The film flopped, but Knockin' on Heaven's Door became one of his most covered songs. His long shelved book of prose poetry, Tarantula, finally came out in 1971 to poor reviews.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1973 his Columbia contract ran out, and he signed with David Geffen's Asylum Records. Planet Waves, recorded with the Band, included Forever Young, which he said he wrote thinking about one of his boys. Columbia meanwhile put out an album of his studio leftovers, which many saw as spite. In January 1974 Dylan and the Band launched a forty date North American tour, his first in about eight years, with millions of ticket requests. It produced the live album Before the Flood. But Planet Waves sold only around six hundred thousand copies, and Dylan was unhappy. Columbia promised to spare nothing to bring him home, and he went back.[1] [2] [3]

Behind the scenes his marriage was cracking. The family had moved to Malibu and were building a huge house. In spring 1974 Dylan took painting classes in New York with an artist named Norman Raeben, and he later said his wife never understood him again from that first day. He filled notebooks with songs of love and rupture and recorded Blood on the Tracks in New York that September. Then his brother David heard the test pressing and warned it was too stark to sell. So in December Dylan recut five songs in Minneapolis with local players. Released in January 1975, the album got mixed reviews and is now seen as a masterpiece. Dylan denied it was autobiography, but his son Jakob said it was his parents talking.[1] [2] [3]

In 1975 Dylan took up the cause of the boxer Rubin Hurricane Carter. Carter and John Artis had been convicted of a 1966 triple murder at the Lafayette Grill in Paterson, New Jersey, where three people were shot dead. After reading Carter's memoir, Dylan visited him in prison and wrote Hurricane with Jacques Levy. Columbia's lawyers made him recut it because some lines about witnesses risked a lawsuit, and one witness, Patty Valentine, sued anyway and lost. The song reached number thirty three. A benefit at Madison Square Garden raised one hundred thousand dollars. Carter was convicted again in 1976. In 1985 a federal judge overturned the verdict, saying the prosecution rested on racism rather than reason, and Carter walked free.[1] [2] [3]

That autumn the Rolling Thunder Revue took a carnival of old Village friends on the road, among them Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Roger McGuinn and the violinist Scarlet Rivera, whom Dylan had spotted walking down the street with her violin case. Desire came out in January 1976 and went to number one. Its song Sara was a plea to his wife, and Jacques Levy remembered Dylan singing it to her through the studio glass while she stood stunned. It did not save the marriage. They divorced on the twenty ninth of June 1977. Sara's lawyer later put her settlement at about thirty six million dollars. His film Renaldo and Clara was savaged in 1978, and a big world tour that year helped pay the bills.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Faith and the wilderness years

On the seventeenth of November 1978, at a concert in San Diego, someone threw a small silver cross onto the stage. Dylan, feeling ill, picked it up and kept it in his pocket. Soon after, he said, he felt Jesus put his hand on him. Guided by his girlfriend Mary Alice Artes, he joined the Vineyard Christian Fellowship and spent early 1979 in Bible classes in Reseda, California. Then he went to Muscle Shoals, Alabama to record Slow Train Coming with Mark Knopfler on guitar and Jerry Wexler producing. When Dylan tried to convert him, Wexler replied that he was dealing with a sixty two year old Jewish atheist, so let's just make an album. Gotta Serve Somebody won Dylan his first Grammy for a vocal performance.[1] [2] [3]

From the first of November 1979 Dylan played fourteen nights at the Fox Warfield Theatre in San Francisco, opening a gospel tour where he preached from the stage and filled the set with his new Christian songs. Many fans were bewildered, and John Lennon, shortly before his death, recorded a sharp reply called Serve Yourself. The albums Saved in 1980 and Shot of Love in 1981 followed, the latter holding Every Grain of Sand, a song Elvis Costello thought might be his best. By 1984 Dylan was waving off the born again label as a media term. He later took part in Jewish life too, attending his sons' bar mitzvahs and appearing on a Chabad telethon.[1] [2] [3]

The eighties were bumpy. Infidels in 1983 was solid, yet Dylan left off one of his greatest songs, Blind Willie McTell. In 1985 he sang on We Are the World and appeared at Live Aid in Philadelphia with Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, where he suggested a little of the money might help American farmers pay their mortgages. Critics called it tactless, but Willie Nelson answered by starting Farm Aid. There were losses. Albert Grossman died of a heart attack on a Concorde flight in January 1986. On the fourth of March 1986 Richard Manuel of the Band, his old Big Pink companion, died by suicide after a gig in Winter Park, Florida. He had battled alcohol and cocaine for years.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Dylan's personal life stayed hidden. On the thirty first of January 1986 his backing singer Carolyn Dennis gave birth to their daughter, Desiree Gabrielle, and the couple married that June. They divorced in 1992, and the world only learned of the marriage from Howard Sounes's biography in 2001. Musically he was adrift. Knocked Out Loaded in 1986 was his first album since his debut to miss the American top fifty, and the 1987 film Hearts of Fire, with Dylan as a washed up rock star, flopped. Its director, Richard Marquand, died of a stroke later that year. Even Dylan and the Dead, a live album with the Grateful Dead, was branded perhaps the worst record by either act.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The tide turned in 1988. Inducting him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that January, Bruce Springsteen said Bob freed your mind the way Elvis freed your body. On the seventh of June 1988 Dylan started what fans came to call the Never Ending Tour. That April, George Harrison needed a quick B side and gathered Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty at Dylan's garage studio in Malibu. They named the song Handle with Care after a label on a box in the garage, and it was too good to waste. The Traveling Wilburys were born, and their first album reached number three. Orbison died that December. In 1989 Dylan closed the decade strongly with Oh Mercy, produced by Daniel Lanois.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The late renaissance

The nineties opened poorly. Under the Red Sky in 1990 was dedicated to Gabby Goo Goo, the nickname of his four year old daughter, and it sold badly. Biographers describe Dylan drinking heavily in 1990 and 1991, though he denied it affected his work. Accepting a lifetime Grammy in February 1991, as the Gulf War began, he played Masters of War and quoted his father saying a man could become so defiled that his parents abandon him, yet God would believe in his ability to mend his ways. Then he went back to his roots with two albums of old folk and blues played alone, Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, and an MTV Unplugged show in 1994.[1] [2] [3]

In the winter of 1996 Dylan wrote a batch of songs while snowed in on his Minnesota farm, and in January 1997 he took them to Miami's Criteria Studios with Daniel Lanois. The sessions were tense. Before the album came out, he was rushed to hospital with pericarditis, a dangerous heart infection caused by a fungal disease called histoplasmosis. He recovered quickly and joked that he thought he would be seeing Elvis soon. That autumn he sang for Pope John Paul Two in Bologna, who built a sermon around Blowin' in the Wind. Time Out of Mind arrived in September 1997, dark and brooding, and won three Grammys including Album of the Year. Its song Make You Feel My Love later became a hit for Adele.[1] [2] [3]

In March 2001 Things Have Changed, written for the film Wonder Boys, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Dylan was touring Australia, so he performed it by satellite from Sydney. His next album, Love and Theft, which he produced under the alias Jack Frost, came out on the eleventh of September 2001, the day of the attacks on New York and Washington. Reporters later found lines echoing a Japanese memoir, Confessions of a Yakuza. Its author, Junichi Saga, said he was flattered. In 2004 Dylan published Chronicles: Volume One, a memoir that skipped most of his famous sixties years. It reached number two on the New York Times bestseller list. Martin Scorsese's documentary No Direction Home followed in 2005.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In May 2006 Dylan became a radio host. Theme Time Radio Hour on XM Satellite Radio built each show around a theme like weather, money or dreams, playing everything from Muddy Waters to Prince with jokes, recipes and old jingles in between. After one hundred episodes he signed off in April 2009 with Woody Guthrie's So Long, It's Been Good to Know Yuh. Modern Times in 2006 was his first American number one album since Desire thirty years earlier, though critics noticed borrowings from the Civil War poet Henry Timrod. In 2008 he received a special Pulitzer citation, and in 2009 Together Through Life made him, at sixty seven, the oldest artist ever to debut at number one on the Billboard album chart.[1] [2] [3]

In 2010 Joni Mitchell called Dylan a plagiarist in an interview. He answered in 2012 that quoting and borrowing was part of the tradition, and bitterly compared the charge to being called Judas in 1966 for playing an electric guitar. That year also brought loss, when Levon Helm, his old drummer from the Hawks, died of cancer on the nineteenth of April. In May President Barack Obama gave Dylan the Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying there was no bigger giant in the history of American music. Tempest came out on the eleventh of September 2012. It included Roll On John, a tribute to John Lennon, and a fourteen minute title song about the sinking of the Titanic.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Nobel laureate and elder statesman

In his seventies Dylan turned crooner again. Shadows in the Night in 2015 held ten songs Frank Sinatra had sung, and Dylan insisted he was not covering them but uncovering them, lifting them out of the grave. It went to number one in Britain. Fallen Angels and a triple album, Triplicate, followed. He also went public as a visual artist, with gallery shows of paintings and welded iron gates made from old farm tools and chains, which he said reflected growing up in iron ore country. In March 2016 his archive of about six thousand items was sold to Tulsa, Oklahoma, for an estimated fifteen to twenty million dollars. The Bob Dylan Center there opened on the tenth of May 2022.[1] [2] [3]

On the thirteenth of October 2016 the Swedish Academy gave Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature, for creating new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition. He was the first musician ever to win it. Then he went silent for days, before calling it amazing and incredible. He skipped the December ceremony, citing prior commitments, and Patti Smith sang A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall in his place. In April 2017 he quietly collected the medal in Stockholm at a private meeting with champagne. His Nobel lecture, about Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and the Odyssey, was posted in June 2017, just before a deadline tied to the prize money. Critics noted passages resembling the study guide website SparkNotes.[1] [2]

On the twenty sixth of March 2020, as the pandemic locked the world down, Dylan released Murder Most Foul without warning. A seventeen minute meditation on the Kennedy assassination, it became his first song to top a Billboard chart. Rough and Rowdy Ways followed on the nineteenth of June 2020 to some of the best reviews of his life, and it went to number one in Britain, making him the oldest artist to top the chart with new original material. That December he sold his entire song catalogue to Universal Music Publishing Group, for a price estimated at over three hundred million dollars. In August 2023 Robbie Robertson, his guitarist from the Hawks days, died of prostate cancer at eighty.[1] [2] [3]

In August 2021 a woman identified only as J.C. sued Dylan, alleging that he had befriended her and sexually abused her over several weeks in April and May 1965 at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, when she was twelve, using drugs, alcohol and threats. Dylan's representatives called the claim untrue and vowed to fight it. In July 2022, after Dylan's lawyers accused the plaintiff of deleting key messages, she dropped the case, and Judge Katherine Polk Failla dismissed it with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled. Dylan's lawyer called the case a sham. Later in 2022 Dylan published The Philosophy of Modern Song, sixty six essays on other people's songs, and apologised for using an autopen on books sold as hand signed.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On Christmas Day 2024 the film A Complete Unknown opened, with Timothée Chalamet as the young Dylan from his arrival in New York to Newport in 1965. It earned eight Oscar nominations and grossed over one hundred and forty million dollars. At Dylan's request, the character based on Suze Rotolo was given a different name, Sylvie Russo. In October 2025 the eighteenth volume of his Bootleg Series, Through the Open Window, traced his growth from a fifteen year old in Hibbing to Carnegie Hall in 1963. Dylan turned eighty five on the twenty fourth of May 2026 and, as of 2026, was still on the road, with a summer tour of America and European dates running into December.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie. Guthrie was the idol who pulled a teenage Dylan to New York. Dylan vowed to be his greatest disciple and visited him often as Guthrie lay dying of Huntington's disease in New Jersey hospitals. He wrote Song to Woody for him, and after Guthrie died in 1967, Dylan chose a Guthrie tribute at Carnegie Hall for his first concert in twenty months.[1] [2]

Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo. Suze Rotolo was his first serious love, from 1961 to 1964, and the woman on the Freewheelin' cover. She opened his world to civil rights politics, Brecht and Rimbaud. Her months in Italy inspired his most aching love songs. A pregnancy ended in abortion, and the relationship collapsed. She later wrote a memoir and died of lung cancer in 2011.[1]

Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Baez was the queen of folk when she first heard him, and she brought him on stage at Newport in 1963, which made him a star to her fans. They became lovers, but the romance faded on his 1965 English tour. They reunited on the Rolling Thunder Revue, and her song Diamonds and Rust is often called a sharp portrait of him.[1] [2]

Bob Dylan and Sara Dylan. Sara Lownds, a former model, married Dylan secretly in November 1965. They raised five children in Woodstock and Malibu. He wrote Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands and Sara for her, and Blood on the Tracks is often heard as the sound of their marriage failing. They divorced in 1977, and she has kept silent about their life ever since.[1]

Bob Dylan and Carolyn Dennis. Carolyn Dennis sang backup on most of his records from Street-Legal to the late eighties. Their daughter Desiree was born in January 1986, and they married that June. They divorced in 1992. The marriage and the child stayed a secret until Howard Sounes revealed them in his 2001 biography.[1] [2]

Bob Dylan and Albert Grossman. Grossman managed Dylan from 1962 to 1970 and fought fiercely for him, famously bullying a hotel manager in Dont Look Back. He took a twenty five percent commission, well above the usual rate. The partnership ended bitterly when Dylan discovered Grossman held half his publishing, and Dylan compared him to Elvis's manager, Colonel Tom Parker.[1] [2]

Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. Cash defended Dylan in a 1964 letter telling critics to shut up and let him sing, before they had even met. They became friends at Newport that summer, later neighbours in Woodstock, and sang Girl from the North Country together on Nashville Skyline. When Cash died, Dylan called him the North Star you could guide your ship by.[1] [2] [3]

Bob Dylan and The Band. As the Hawks, they were his electric band on the stormy 1965 and 1966 tours, and they shared the booing. After his crash they followed him to Woodstock and made the Basement Tapes with him at Big Pink. They backed him on his 1974 comeback tour and at Guthrie's tribute concert. Their drummer Levon Helm quit the first tour because of the hostility.[1] [2] [3]

Bob Dylan and George Harrison. Harrison said the Beatles wore out Freewheelin'. He was the only outsider to visit Dylan's Woodstock retreat, persuaded him onto the stage at the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971, and in 1988 brought him into the Traveling Wilburys, recorded at first in Dylan's own garage studio in Malibu.[1] [2] [3]

Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger. Seeger was the elder statesman of folk who championed Dylan's topical songs and first identified the old spiritual behind Blowin' in the Wind. At Newport in 1965 Seeger hated the distorted electric sound, and Dylan said Seeger's reaction felt like a dagger in his heart. The two reconciled, singing together again by 1968.[1] [2] [3]

Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs. Ochs and Dylan were friendly rivals in the Village protest scene, and Dylan once said he could not keep up with Phil. When Ochs criticised one of his new singles, Dylan threw him out of his limousine, telling him he was not a folk singer but a journalist. Their talk of a joint club tour in 1974 later grew into the Rolling Thunder Revue.[1]

Rare facts about Bob Dylan

• In 1959 Dylan played piano with the pop star Bobby Vee under the stage name Elston Gunnn, spelled with three n's. The teenage Robert Zimmerman performed twice with Vee, playing piano and clapping. It came shortly before he enrolled at the University of Minnesota.[1]
• Dylan's high school band played Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay so loudly that the principal cut the microphone. The band was the Golden Chords, playing a talent show at Hibbing High School. They covered Little Richard and Elvis Presley songs.[1]
• Dylan saw Buddy Holly play in Duluth just four days before Holly died in a plane crash. The show was at the Duluth Armory on the thirty first of January 1959. In his Nobel lecture Dylan described Holly as everything he was not and wanted to be.[1]
• Dylan's 1959 high school yearbook said his ambition was to join Little Richard. The caption next to Robert Zimmerman's name read, to join Little Richard. Rock and roll was his first love before folk music took over.[1]
• Dylan's Hebrew name is Shabtai Zisl ben Avraham. He was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth in 1941 and had his bar mitzvah in Hibbing in May 1954. He legally became Robert Dylan in August 1962.[1]
• Columbia executives nicknamed Dylan's signing Hammond's folly. John Hammond signed the young folk singer in 1961 after hearing him play harmonica on a Carolyn Hester session. His debut album sold only about five thousand copies in its first year.[1] [2]
• Dylan's first television performance of Blowin' in the Wind was in a BBC play in which he acted. In early 1963 he appeared in Madhouse on Castle Street, directed by Philip Saville for BBC television. He sang the song at the end of the play.[1] [2]
• Suze Rotolo registered at an Italian university as S. Justine Rotolo, inventing a middle name. She studied art in Perugia for six months in 1962 and was known there as Justine. Dylan's longing for her inspired Don't Think Twice, It's All Right.[1]
• Sam Cooke was so moved by Blowin' in the Wind that it inspired him to write A Change Is Gonna Come. Cooke added Dylan's song to his own shows soon after it came out. Mavis Staples said she could not understand how a young white man had captured Black frustration so powerfully.[1]
• Another Side of Bob Dylan was recorded in a single evening. The session took place on the ninth of June 1964. It produced songs such as It Ain't Me Babe, My Back Pages and Chimes of Freedom.[1]
• The real Mr. Tambourine Man was probably the guitarist Bruce Langhorne, who played a giant Turkish frame drum with bells. Langhorne played on Bringing It All Back Home. He had lost most of three fingers as a boy while lighting a homemade rocket, and his drum is now at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa.[1]
• Al Kooper was not supposed to play on Like a Rolling Stone at all. He came to the session as a guest, slipped behind a Hammond organ while the producer was out, and improvised the riff. Dylan insisted it be turned up in the mix.[1]
• Like a Rolling Stone was held off the top of the American chart by the Beatles' Help! It stalled at number two in 1965, although it reached number one on the Cash Box chart. Radio promo copies split the song across both sides of the disc.[1]
• Dylan's handwritten lyrics to Like a Rolling Stone sold for two million dollars in 2014. It was a record for a popular music manuscript. The draft shows he considered rhyming lines with Al Capone before settling on the final words.[1] [2]
• The official video for Like a Rolling Stone arrived forty eight years after the song. Released in 2013, it let viewers flip through sixteen fake television channels with people lip syncing the lyrics. Guinness recorded it as the longest wait for an official music video.[1]
• When Dylan returned to Newport in 2002, thirty seven years after going electric, he wore a wig and a fake beard. He had not played the festival since the 1965 uproar. Nobody has ever fully explained the disguise.[1]
• The Stratocaster Dylan played at Newport in 1965 sold for 965 thousand dollars. It turned up with a New Jersey family whose father had flown Dylan's plane. After a legal settlement, Christie's sold it in 2013, and it was played again at Newport in 2015.[1]
• Al Kooper quit Dylan's touring band partly because the itinerary went through Dallas, so soon after Kennedy's assassination. He reasoned that if Dallas had not liked Kennedy, it might like Dylan even less. Kooper had played all three of Dylan's first electric concerts in 1965.[1]
• On the night Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands was recorded, the Nashville musicians waited from six in the evening until four in the morning. Dylan sat writing lyrics while they played cards and napped. The finished song ran over eleven minutes and filled a whole side of Blonde on Blonde.[1]
• Rainy Day Women got its brass band sound after the producer joked it sounded like the Salvation Army. Dylan asked if he could get one. Bob Johnston phoned a trombonist, and the giddy late night take became a number two hit in 1966.[1]
• Dylan walked off with an Andy Warhol Double Elvis painting after sitting for a Warhol Screen Test. The filming was arranged in early 1966 by his friend Barbara Rubin during a break from touring.[1]
• Dylan's first wife Sara was born Shirley Noznisky, and changed her name because her first husband's previous wife was also called Shirley. Her first husband, the photographer Hans Lownds, did not want to be reminded of his earlier marriage. Dylan's film company was named after the Wilmington street where she was born.[1]
• Dylan painted the cover of the Band's debut album, Music from Big Pink. It was the public's first look at his visual art in 1968. His paintings later appeared on Self Portrait and Planet Waves, and he has published ten books of art.[1]
• Great White Wonder, packed with Dylan recordings, is known as the first rock bootleg. It appeared in West Coast shops in July 1969 with basement tape songs and early Minneapolis recordings. It started an underground industry that spread to many major artists.[1] [2]
• Dylan's comeback at the Isle of Wight was sold to him with a short film about the island's poet Tennyson. The organisers showed him the island's literary heritage to win him over. He turned down the Woodstock festival near his own home.[1]
• Dylan's song Day of the Locusts describes receiving an honorary degree from Princeton in 1970. The ceremony took place on the ninth of June 1970, and the song appeared on New Morning that October.[1]
• Scarlet Rivera joined the Rolling Thunder Revue after Dylan spotted her walking down a New York street with her violin case. Her violin became a signature sound on Desire and Hurricane in 1975 and 1976.[1] [2]
• Dylan's gospel conversion began when a fan threw a small silver cross onto the stage in San Diego. It happened on the seventeenth of November 1978. Dylan, feeling unwell, pocketed it, and days later found it again when he needed something he had never had before.[1]
• Dylan first wrote his gospel songs intending another singer to record them anonymously. He planned to give them to Carolyn Dennis, fearing how the public would react if they came from him. He ended up recording Slow Train Coming himself.[1]
• In 1986 Dylan rapped the opening verse of Street Rock on a Kurtis Blow album. The track appeared on Blow's album Kingdom Blow. That same year Dylan toured with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.[1]
• The Traveling Wilburys took their first song title from a label on a box in Dylan's garage. The label read Handle with Care. The song was meant as a throwaway B side for George Harrison, until Warner Bros. said it was too good to waste.[1]
• For about eighteen years Dylan's Oscar statuette stood on an amplifier at his concerts. It appeared on stage from spring 2001 until around 2018. One account claims the stage figure was a toy store copy rather than the real award.[1] [2]
• In 2009 a young police officer in New Jersey refused to believe a soaked old man in the rain was Bob Dylan. Residents in Long Branch reported a suspicious man peering at a house. Dylan had no ID, and only his tour staff convinced the twenty four year old officer.[1] [2]
• Dylan once took a public minibus tour of John Lennon's childhood home in Liverpool, unrecognised by the other tourists. He paid sixteen pounds in 2009 to see Mendips with about a dozen others. The National Trust said he appeared to enjoy himself.[1] [2]
• Dylan's royalties from his Christmas album went to charities fighting hunger. Christmas in the Heart came out in 2009, with money going to Feeding America, Crisis in Britain and the World Food Programme.[1]
• Philip Roth reacted to Dylan's Nobel by saying he hoped Peter, Paul and Mary would win next year. The award divided writers. Leonard Cohen said honouring Dylan was like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.[1]
• In 2022 a single newly recorded copy of Blowin' in the Wind sold at auction for about 1.8 million dollars. It was cut on a one of a kind disc format produced with T Bone Burnett, and sold at Christie's in London.[1] [2]
• Dylan is also a sculptor who welds iron gates out of farm tools, chains and old firearms. He made them privately for thirty years before showing them in London in 2013. He links the work to growing up in iron ore country.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.