Some people, talented or not, have that “star quality” that grants them access to millions of fans, fame, and fortune. Some people have great talent and have to work hard, struggle, and fight to get to the top. Then there are those who have talent beyond measure, but for some reason just can’t grab hold of their piece of the spotlight. In these cases there are few options; keep on fighting, settle for smaller victories, or give up and pursue other aspirations. But what if there were another option?
On May 24, 1941 a boy was born to Abram Zimmerman and Beatrice “Beatty” Stone. They were part of a small, close-knit Jewish community in Duluth Minnesota where the family remained until the boy was six years old, and they picked up and moved to Hibbing, Beatty’s hometown.
The boy enjoyed listening to the radio, first tuning in to blues and country music stations out of Shreveport, Louisiana, then as he became a teenager, he developed a taste for rock and roll. While in high school, he started several bands, performing covers of popular songs by Little Richard and Elvis Presley. He was destined for greatness, and his high school yearbook photo even said he would, “join ‘Little Richard’.”
After graduation, in September 1959, he moved to Minneapolis and enrolled in the University of Minnesota. He lived at the Jewish-centric Sigma Alpha Mu house and began to perform at the Ten O’Clock Scholar, a coffeehouse a few blocks from campus. He became involved in the folk music circuit, and took the name Bob Dylan.
In a 2004 interview, regarding changing his name from Robert Zimmermann, he said, “You’re born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.”
He dropped out of college in May 1960 and focused solely on his music. He went to New York City to perform where he was also able to visit his musical idol, Woody Guthrie at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital (he was seriously ill with Huntington’s disease). He was determined to be Guthrie’s “greatest disciple.” It was through him that Dylan became friends with Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, who happened to be his protégé. When describing Guthrie’s impact, Dylan said, “The songs themselves had the infinite sweep of humanity in them… [He] was the true voice of the American spirit.”
He began playing at clubs around Greenwich VIllage where he befriended folk singers and even picked up material from artists such as Dave Van Ronk, Odetta, and the Clancy Brothers. In September he was given an enthusiastic review of his performance at Gerde’s Folk City where he had spent two weeks supporting John Lee Hooker. “Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Folk-Song Stylist.” Playing harmonica for folk singer Carolyn Hester’s third album garnered him attention from the album’s producer John Hammond, who then signed him to Columbia Records.
He released his first album on March 19, 1962, which consisted of familiar folk, blues, and gospel songs with two original compositions. He sold enough copies the first year to just break even. People within the company began to refer to Dylan as “Hammond’s Folly” and even suggested dropping his contract. Fortunately for Dylan, he retained the support of Hammond, as well as receiving support from Johnny Cash.
He began recording under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt for Broadside, a folk magazine and record label. He used the pseudonym Bob Landy to record as a piano player on The Blues Project. He played harmonica on Ramblin’ Jack Elliot’s 1964 album, Jack Elliot, as Tedham Porterhouse. He traveled to the United Kingdom in December 1962 to appear in a drama, Madhouse on Castle Street, at the invitation of television Director Philip Saville. That film was later discarded.
He continued playing clubs, and his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, saw him making a name for himself as a singer-songwriter. Many of the songs were labeled protest songs, inspired by Guthrie and Pete Seeger, who had a passion for topical songs. According to Janet Maslin, in regards to the album, “These were the songs that established [Dylan] as the voice of his generation – someone who implicitly understood how concerned young Americans felt about nuclear disarmament and the growing Civil Rights Movement…”
While recording Freewheelin’, he recorded “Mixed-Up Confusion” with a backing band, and released it as his first ever single in 1962, but it was quickly withdrawn.
He was invited to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show in May 1963, but he walked out of rehearsals when he was told. by CBS television’s head of program practices, that “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” was potentially libelous to the John Birch Society. Rather than comply with censorship, he refused to appear. He became prominent in the civil rights movement, but by the end of 1963 he had begun to feel manipulated as well as constrained by the folk and protest movements. After he the assassination of president John F. Kennedy, Dylan was awarded the “Tom Paine Award” from the National EMergency Civil Liberties Committee, leading him to question the role of the committee. He characterized the members as old and balding, and even claimed to see a piece of himself, and every man, in Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK’s assassin.
It was time for him to move on.
Bob Dylan became a folk-rock-pop music star. He changed his hair, his wardrobe, and took to wearing sunglasses day and night. He donned pointed “Beatle Boots” and a was described by a London reporter as having, “Hair that would set the teeth of a comb on edge. A loud shirt that would dim the neon lights of Leicester Square. He looks like an undernourished cockatoo.”
In interviews he would squabble with his interviewer, for example, during an interview on the Les Crane show, he told Crane about a movie he planned. He said it would be a cowboy horror movie. When asked if he would be playing the cowboy, he replied, “No, I play my mother.”
In 1965 he released Bringing It All Back Home, ditching the music he had become known for, backed by an electric rock and roll band, and favoring more complex and surreal lyrics. This album reached No. 6 on Billboard’s Pop Albums chart, and was the first of his LPs to break into the US top 10. Later that spring it even topped the UK charts. His track, “Subterranean Homesick Blues” became his first single to chart in the US, peaking at No. 39.
He headlined the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, where he was met with both cheers and boos from the audience. After only 3 songs, he left the stage. The boos provoked a hostile response from the folk music establishment, and in the September issue of Sing Out!, Ewan MacColl wrote “Our traditional songs and ballads are the creations of extraordinarily talented artists working inside disciplines formulated over time… ‘But what of Bobby Dylan?’ scream the outraged teenagers… Only a completely non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music, could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel.” He had successfully alienated himself from his former scene. But did it matter?
On August 30, 1965, he released his sixth studio album, Highway 61 Revisited. The album peaked at No. 3 on the US Billboard 200, and No. 4 on the UK Albums Chart. The album has been described as one of his best works, and among the greatest albums of all time. It came in at No. 4 on Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” and was voted No. 26 in the third edition of Colin Larkin’s All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000). The album was featured in Robert Dimery’s 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (2010) and his single, “Like a Rolling Stone” was given the top spot, listed at No. 1 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list.
After 5 long years of touring, he was drained, and on July 29, 1966 he crashed his 500 cc Triumph Tiger 100 motorcycle near his home in Woodstock, New York. The extent of his injuries was never disclosed to the public, but he reportedly broke several vertebrae in his neck. The circumstances of this accident still surrounds, as no ambulance was ever called to the scene, and he wasn’t hospitalized. “I had been in a motorcycle accident and I’d been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race.”
Over the years he traversed several different musical styles, traveling to Nashville and turning out music in the style of the American west and the Bible. His lyrics were serious in the Judeo-Christian tradition, worlds apart from his previous music and the style of the time (the psychedelic 60’s). His song, “All Along the Watchtower” contained lyrics derived from the Book of Isaiah, a song later recorded by Jimi Hendrix.
He moved to mainstream country, releasing Nashville Skyline (1969). He released Self Portrait in June 1970, which was not well received. Greil Marcus, writer for Rolling Stone asked, “What is this shit?”
After his contract with Columbia Records expired in 1973, he signed with Asylum Records where he released Planet Waves that fall. The album included two versions of “Forever Young,” which became one of his most popular songs. He embarked on a North American tour, 40 concerts. A live double album, Before the Flood was released, yet during that time he had only sold 600,000 copies of Planet Waves despite the tour. Columbia Records sent word to Asylum Records that they “will spare nothing to bring Dylan back into the fold.” Sure enough, he moved back to Columbia Records.
After he became estranged from his wife, he recorded an album entitled Blood on the Tracks, which was released in early 1975. The album received mixed reviews, Nick Kent describing “the accompaniments [as] often so trashy they sound like mere practice takes. Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau wrote that “the record has been made with typical shoddiness.”
He converted to Christianity in the late 1970’s, and made contact with the Vineyard School of Discipleship. Pastor Kenn Gulliksen has recalled, “Larry Myers and Paul Emond went over to Bob’s house and ministered to him. He responded by saying, ‘Yes he did in fact want Christ in his life.’ And he prayed that day and received the Lord.” He released three albums of contemporary gospel music, Slow Train Coming (1979), Saved (1980), and Shot of Love (1981).
He went on tour again, the 1976 half being documented by a TV concert special, Hard Rain. The trout provided the backdrop to his nearly four-hour film Renaldo and Clara, a narrative of mixed concert footage and reminisces. It was released in 1978, and received poor, even scathing reviews. Touring in late 1979 and early 1980, he would not play any of his older, secular works, and even delivered declarations of his faith from the stage, such as:, “Years ago they … said I was a prophet. I used to say, ‘No I’m not a prophet’, they say ‘Yes you are, you’re a prophet.’ I said, ‘No it’s not me.’ They used to say ‘You sure are a prophet.’ They used to convince me I was a prophet. Now I come out and say Jesus Christ is the answer. They say, ‘Bob Dylan’s no prophet.’ They just can’t handle it.”
His concerts in Tokyo that February and March were released as the live double album, Bob Dylan At Budokan. Robert Christgau awarded the album a C+ rating, and gave the album a negligible review.
By 1984, he moved to distance himself from the “born again” label, telling Kurt Loder of Rolling Stone magazine, I’ve never said I’m born again. That’s just a media term. I don’t think I’ve been an agnostic. I’ve always thought there’s a superior power, that this is not the real world, and there’s a world to come.” In 1997 he told David Gates of Newsweek “Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else. Songs like “Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain” or “I Saw the Light” – That’s my religion. I don’t adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I’ve learned more from the songs than I’ve learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.” September 1997, a published interview in the New York Times reported that “Dylan says he now subscribes to no organized religion.”
Since then he has released 18 albums, and has secured his legacy as one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. In 2012, Former President Barack Obama said, “There is not a bigger giant in the history of American music.” He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, the first musician to ever be awarded the Literature Prize. Horace Engdahl, a member of the Nobel Committee described his place in literary history, “… a singer worthy of a place beside the Greek bards, beside Ovid, beside the Romantic visionaries, beside the kings and queens of the blues, beside the forgotten masters of brilliant standards.”
How did Bob Dylan break from his roots in the folk music circuit and make it big as a pop-rock star? How did he survive a motorcycle accident in which he broke several vertebrae in his neck? How was it that he was able to come back after falling off the “so-called” map? Some believe he sold his soul to the devil.
In 1999, at one of Eric Clapton’s all-star benefits, held every year to support his rehabilitation clinic in Antigua called Crossroads, Bob Dylan joined Clapton on stage where they perform “Crossroads.” Crossroads, written by Robert Johnson, famed member of the “27 Club.” This song talks of going down to the crossroads and making a deal with the devil.
But is it enough for him to sing a song to prove he made a deal? Honestly, no. By that logic, you could say that any of Robert Johnson’s fans who sang that song made a deal. In the case of Bob Dylan, we have to move to an interview he gave, for further evidence.
D: It goes back to that destiny thing. I made a bargain with… it… a long time ago, and I’m holding up my end.
I: What was your bargain?
D: To get where I am now.
I: Should I ask who you made the bargain with?
D: Ha, you know. With the- the- the y’know, with the Chief Commander.
I: On this Earth?
D: On this Earth, and in the world we can’t see.