Bob Dylan

• 1. Introduction

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  Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on the 24th of May, 1941, at St. Mary's Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota. His Hebrew name was Shabtai Zisl ben Avraham. He grew up in a small, close-knit Jewish community, and by the time he reached his twenties he had sold an estimated 125 million records worldwide. The name Dylan itself has a story. As a college student, he considered the surname Dillon before unexpectedly coming across poems by Dylan Thomas and deciding to spell it that way instead. In a 2004 interview, he put it plainly: "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 legally changed his name to Robert Dylan in the St. Louis County Court in Hibbing on the 9th of August, 1962, with his father Abraham Zimmerman as witness.

  What compelled a teenager from a small Minnesota town to reinvent himself and head for New York? What made his voice, raw and nasal, matter so profoundly to so many? And how did a man who wrote protest anthems for the civil rights movement eventually stand on a Manchester stage and dare his audience to call him a traitor? This documentary follows the arc of a career that defied every expectation placed on it, right up to the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, awarded for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.

• 2. Roots and Early Influences

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  Dylan's paternal grandparents, Anna Kirghiz and Zigman Zimmerman, fled Odessa in the Russian Empire after the 1905 pogroms against Jews and made their way to the United States. On his mother's side, Florence and Ben Stone were Lithuanian Jews who had arrived in the US in 1902. Dylan himself later wrote that his paternal grandmother's family originally came from the Kağızman District of Kars Province in northeastern Turkey. The family settled in Duluth until Dylan was six, when his father contracted polio and they relocated to his mother's hometown of Hibbing, where the family would remain through his childhood.

  In the early 1950s, the young Dylan listened to the Grand Ole Opry radio show and discovered Hank Williams. He later wrote: "The sound of his voice went through me like an electric rod." He was equally struck by Johnnie Ray, saying of him: "He was the first singer whose voice and style, I guess, I totally fell in love with." As a teenager, he picked up rock and roll from radio stations broadcasting out of Shreveport and Little Rock. He formed several bands at Hibbing High School, including the Golden Chords, who played covers of Little Richard and Elvis Presley so loudly at a school talent show that the principal cut the microphone.

  On the 31st of January, 1959, seventeen-year-old Dylan saw Buddy Holly perform at the Duluth Armory, just four days before Holly died in a plane crash. In his Nobel Prize lecture, Dylan explained what he saw in Holly: "Buddy wrote songs, songs that had beautiful melodies and imaginative verses. And he sang great, sang in more than a few voices. He was the archetype. Everything I wasn't and wanted to be." That encounter quietly shaped what he was reaching for.

• 3. New York and the Protest Years

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  In September 1959, Dylan enrolled at the University of Minnesota, living at the Jewish-centric fraternity Sigma Alpha Mu and performing at the Ten O'Clock Scholar coffeehouse near campus. He dropped out in May 1960 at the end of his first year. The following January, he traveled to New York City to visit his musical idol Woody Guthrie at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey. In Chronicles: Volume One, his 2004 memoir, Dylan wrote that Guthrie "was the true voice of the American spirit" and vowed to become his greatest disciple.

  From February 1961, Dylan played clubs around Greenwich Village, picking up material from folk singers including Dave Van Ronk, Odetta, the New Lost City Ramblers and the Clancy Brothers. In September that year, New York Times critic Robert Shelton gave him an enthusiastic review headlined "Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Folk-Song Stylist" after a performance at Gerde's Folk City. That same month, Dylan played harmonica on folk singer Carolyn Hester's third album, bringing him to the attention of producer John Hammond, who signed him to Columbia Records.

  Dylan's debut album, released on the 19th of March, 1962, contained traditional folk, blues and gospel material with only two original compositions. It sold just 5,000 copies in its first year, barely breaking even. The follow-up, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, released in May 1963, changed everything. Janet Maslin wrote of that album that Dylan's songs established him as "the voice of his generation, someone who implicitly understood how concerned young Americans felt about nuclear disarmament and the growing civil rights movement." Author Joyce Carol Oates described his voice as sounding "frankly nasal, as if sandpaper could sing"; the effect, she said, was "dramatic and electrifying."

  "Blowin' in the Wind" partly drew its melody from the traditional slave song "No More Auction Block". "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" was based on the folk ballad "Lord Randall" and gained resonance when the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted a month after Dylan began performing it. George Harrison said of Freewheelin': "We just played it, just wore it out. The content of the song lyrics and just the attitude, it was incredibly original and wonderful." Joan Baez, who became Dylan's advocate and lover, helped bring him to prominence by recording his early songs and inviting him on stage. In May 1963, Dylan's profile rose further when he walked off The Ed Sullivan Show rather than drop "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" at the request of CBS's program practices department. On the 28th of August, 1963, Dylan and Baez stood together at the March on Washington and sang.

• 4. Going Electric

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  Dylan's late March 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home was his first to feature electric instruments, produced by Tom Wilson. The opening single, "Subterranean Homesick Blues", owed much to Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business"; its free-association lyrics were described as a forerunner of rap and hip-hop. "Mr. Tambourine Man" became one of his best-known songs when the Byrds recorded an electric version that reached number one in both the US and UK.

  On the 25th of July, 1965, headlining the Newport Folk Festival, Dylan performed his first electric set since high school with a pickup group that included Mike Bloomfield on guitar and Al Kooper on organ. He had appeared at Newport in 1963 and 1964; in 1965 he was met with both cheering and booing and left the stage after three songs. Murray Lerner, who filmed the performance, said plainly: "I absolutely think that they were booing Dylan going electric." In the September issue of Sing Out!, Ewan MacColl dismissed Dylan's work as "tenth-rate drivel" fit only for what he called a "completely non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music."

  In July 1965, the six-minute single "Like a Rolling Stone" peaked at number two on the US chart. Rolling Stone magazine listed it as number one on "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time" in both 2004 and 2011. Bruce Springsteen recalled hearing it for the first time: "that snare shot sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind." From September 1965 in Austin, Texas, Dylan toured the US and Canada for six months backed by the five musicians from the Hawks, who would become known as the Band.

  The double album Blonde on Blonde, recorded partly in Nashville in early 1966, featured what Dylan called "that thin wild mercury sound". Al Kooper described the Nashville sessions as "taking two cultures and smashing them together with a huge explosion." The 1966 European and Australian tour climaxed on the 17th of May at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, where a member of the audience shouted "Judas!" at Dylan. He replied: "I don't believe you. You're a liar!" Then he turned to his band and said, "Play it fucking loud!" A recording of that concert was released in 1998 as The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966.

• 5. The Crash and the Years After

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  On the 29th of July, 1966, Dylan crashed his motorcycle, a Triumph Tiger 100, near his home in Woodstock, New York. He said he broke several vertebrae in his neck. No ambulance was called and he was not hospitalized. His biographers have written that the accident gave him a reason to escape the pressures that had been mounting around him. Dylan himself concurred: "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."

  During the seven years he stayed off the road, Dylan recorded over 100 songs at his Woodstock home and in the basement of the Hawks' nearby house called Big Pink. These recordings were initially circulated as demos for other artists to record, becoming hits for Julie Driscoll, the Byrds and Manfred Mann. The wider public first heard them when Great White Wonder, the first bootleg record, appeared in West Coast shops in July 1969. Columbia released a selection from those sessions in 1975 as The Basement Tapes.

  In late 1967, Dylan returned to the studio in Nashville and made John Wesley Harding, a record of short songs thematically grounded in the American West and the Bible. It included "All Along the Watchtower", later covered famously by Jimi Hendrix. Woody Guthrie died in October 1967, and Dylan made his first live appearance in twenty months at a memorial concert at Carnegie Hall on the 20th of January, 1968, backed by the Band. The following year's Nashville Skyline featured a duet with Johnny Cash; only their version of "Girl from the North Country" made the final album, though they recorded many more. When Cash died in 2003, Dylan remembered a letter Cash had written to Broadside magazine back in March 1964, before the two had even met, defending Dylan with the words: "Shut up! And let him sing!" Dylan said: "The letter meant the world to me."

• 6. Blood, Thunder, and Conversion

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  After the tour and the motorcycle years, Dylan's personal life shifted. He and his wife became estranged after a 1974 North American tour of 40 concerts backed by the Band, his first major tour in seven years. He filled three small notebooks with songs about relationships and ruptures. Blood on the Tracks, recorded in September 1974 and re-recorded partly at Sound 80 Studios in Minneapolis with production help from his brother David Zimmerman, was released in early 1975. Initial reviews were poor; Nick Kent in NME called the accompaniments "often so trashy they sound like mere practice takes." Jon Landau in Rolling Stone said it had been "made with typical shoddiness." Years later, critics reversed that verdict entirely. Bill Wyman in Salon called it "his only flawless album and his best produced."

  In the middle of 1975, Dylan championed boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, imprisoned for triple murder, with his ballad "Hurricane." Despite running over eight minutes, the song was released as a single and peaked at 33 on the US Billboard chart. The Rolling Thunder Revue, running through late 1975 and again through early 1976, featured around a hundred performers from the Greenwich Village folk scene, among them Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Scarlet Rivera, whom Dylan reportedly discovered walking down a street with her violin case on her back.

  In the late 1970s, Dylan converted to Evangelical Christianity after a three-month discipleship course with the Association of Vineyard Churches. Slow Train Coming (1979), which featured Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler and was produced by Jerry Wexler, earned Dylan the Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for "Gotta Serve Somebody." Wexler, then 62, told Dylan during recording: "Bob, you're dealing with a 62-year-old Jewish atheist. Let's just make an album." When touring in late 1979 and early 1980, Dylan refused to play his older secular material. John Lennon, shortly before his death, recorded "Serve Yourself" as a direct response. The third Christian album, Shot of Love (1981), prompted Elvis Costello to write: "Shot of Love may not be your favorite Bob Dylan record, but it might contain his best song: 'Every Grain of Sand'."

• 7. Never Ending and Nobel

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  Dylan initiated what became known as the Never Ending Tour on the 7th of June, 1988, performing with a backup band featuring guitarist G. E. Smith. He would continue touring with a small, changing band for the next 30 years. That same year, Bruce Springsteen inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, declaring: "Bob freed your mind the way Elvis freed your body. He showed us that just because music was innately physical did not mean that it was anti-intellectual."

  In the 1990s, Dylan recorded two albums of traditional folk and blues songs, backed solely by his acoustic guitar, before returning to original material with Time Out of Mind (1997), produced by Daniel Lanois at Miami's Criteria Studios. Before the album's release, Dylan was hospitalized with life-threatening pericarditis brought on by histoplasmosis. He left the hospital saying, "I really thought I'd be seeing Elvis soon." He recovered quickly, and later that year performed before Pope John Paul II at the World Eucharistic Conference in Bologna, Italy, before an audience of 200,000; the Pope based his homily on "Blowin' in the Wind." Time Out of Mind won Dylan his first Grammy Award for Album of the Year.

  In 2001, Dylan won an Academy Award for Best Original Song for "Things Have Changed", written for the film Wonder Boys. In 2004, he published Chronicles: Volume One, his memoir, which reached number two on The New York Times' Hardcover Non-Fiction bestseller list. In 2006, he launched the weekly program Theme Time Radio Hour on XM Satellite Radio, playing songs organized around a common theme; the 100th episode aired in April 2009 with the theme "Goodbye." Modern Times (2006) debuted at number one on the US charts, Dylan's first album to reach that position since Desire in 1976.

  In 2016, the Nobel Committee awarded Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition." The award was accompanied by the honor of a Pulitzer Prize special citation in 2008, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, and Kennedy Center Honors in 1997. By 2024, his life had been the subject of the Oscar-nominated biopic A Complete Unknown. Since 1994, Dylan has published ten books of paintings and drawings, with his work shown in major art galleries. The same restless energy that made a 17-year-old from Hibbing electrified by Buddy Holly has never quite settled.