DYLAN, Bob

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Nationality: American. Born: Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, 24 May 1941. Education: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1959–60. Family: Married Sara Lowndes in 1965 (divorced 1977), three sons and two daughters. Career: Composer and performer. Awards: Emergency Civil Liberties Committee Tom Paine award, 1963; Grammy award, 1980, 1993; American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers Founder's award, 1986; Légion de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres (France), 1990; Lifetime Achievement award, National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, 1991; Arts award, Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize Trust, 1997; Lifetime Achievement award, John F. Kennedy Center honors, 1997; 3 Grammy awards, National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, for Album of the Year, Best Male Rock Performance, and Best Contemporary Folk Album, 1998, for Time out of Mind. Named to the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, Ohio, 1988. D. Mus.: Princeton University, New Jersey, 1970. Address: c/o Jeff Rosen, P.O. Box 870, Cooper Station, New York, New York 10276, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Tarantula. New York, Macmillan, 1966.

Approximately Complete Works. Amsterdam, De Bezige Bij-Thomas Rap, 1970.

Poem to Joanie. London, Aloes Press, 1972.

Words. London, Cape, 1973.

Writings and Drawings. New York, Knopf, and London, Cape, 1973.

The Songs of Bob Dylan 1966–1975. New York, Knopf, 1976.

XI Outlined Epitaphs, and Off the Top of My Head. London, Aloes Seola, 1981 (?). Lyrics 1962–1985. New York, Knopf, 1985; London, Cape, 1986.

Scores: Oh Mercy, New York, Amsco, 1989; Fingerpicking Dylan, London and New York, Amsco, 1990; Bob Dylan Anthology, New York, Amsco, 1990; Bob Dylan Rock Score, London and New York, Wise, 1990; Under the Red Sky, New York, Amsco, 1990; Classic Dylan, New York, Amsco, 1991; The Harp Styles of Bob Dylan, London and New York, Amsco, 1992; Bob Dylan, New York, Amsco, 1993; The Very Best, New York, Amsco, 1993; The Songs of Bob Dylan: From 1966 through 1975, New York, Knopf/ Cherry Lane, 1994; Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, New York, Amsco, 1994; World Gone Wrong, New York, Amsco, 1994; Greatest Hits, Songtab Edition, Volume 2, New York, Amsco, 1999.

Recordings: Bob Dylan, Columbia, 1962; The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Columbia, 1963; The Times They Are A-Changin', Columbia, 1964; Another Side of Bob Dylan, Columbia, 1964; Bringing It All Back Home, Columbia, 1965; Highway 61 Revisited, Columbia, 1965; Blonde on Blonde, Columbia, 1966; Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, Columbia, 1967; John Wesley Harding, Columbia, 1968; Nashville Skyline, Columbia, 1969; Self Portrait, Columbia, 1970; New Morning, Columbia, 1970; Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, vol. 2, Columbia, 1971; Dylan, Columbia, 1973; incidental music for the film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, 1973; Planet Waves, Asylum, 1974; Before the Flood, Asylum, 1974; Blood on the Tracks, Columbia, 1975; The Basement Tapes, CBS, 1975; Desire, Columbia, 1976; Hard Rain, CBS, 1976; Masterpieces, CBS/ Sony, 1978; Street Legal, CBS, 1978; Bob Dylan at Budokan, Columbia, 1979; Slow Train Coming, Columbia, 1979; Saved, Columbia, 1980; Shot of Love, Columbia, 1981; Infidels, Columbia, 1983; Real Live, Columbia, 1984; Empire Burlesque, Columbia, 1985; Biograph, Columbia, 1985; Knocked Out Loaded, Columbia, 1986; Dylan & The Dead, Columbia, 1987; Hearts of Fire, Columbia, 1987; Down in the Groove, Columbia, 1988; Emotionally Yours, EMI, 1988; Oh Mercy, Columbia, 1989; The Songs of Bob Dylan, Start, 1989; All the Way Down to Italy, Templar, 1991; The Bootleg Series, vols. 1–3, Columbia, 1991; Good As I Been to You, Columbia, 1992; Hammersmith Highlights, One Over the Gate, 1993; Oh Mercy, Columbia, 1989; Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, Yellow Dog, 1994; Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, vol. 3, Columbia, 1994; MTV Unplugged, Columbia, 1995; Time out of Mind, Columbia, 1997; Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, vol. 2, Columbia, 1999.

Other

Bob Dylan in His Own Words, compiled by Miles, edited by Pearce Marchbank. London, Omnibus Press, and New York, Quick Fox, 1978.

Save!: The Gospel Speeches of Bob Dylan. Madras and New York, Hanuman Books, 1990.

Drawn Blank. New York, Random House, 1994.

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Bibliography: Bob Dylan, American Poet and Singer: An Annotated Bibliography and Study Guide of Sources and Background Materials, 1961–1991, Greenburg, Pennsylvania, Eadmer Press, 1991; Bob Dylan: A Bio-Bibliography by William McKeen, Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1993; Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography, 1961–1993 by John Nogowski, Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland, 1995.

Critical Studies: Bob Dylan: A Retrospective edited by Craig McGregor, New York, Morrow, 1972, revised edition, London, Angus and Robertson, 1980; Bob Dylan by Anthony Scaduto, New York, New American Library, 1973; Rolling Thunder Logbook by Sam Shepard, New York, Viking Press, 1977, London, Penguin, 1978; Bob Dylan: An Illustrated History by Robert Alexander, London, Elm Tree, 1978; Bob Dylan: His Unreleased Works by Paul Cable, London, Scorpion-Dark Star, 1978, New York, Associated Music, 1980; The Art of Bob Dylan, Song and Dance Man by Michael Gray, London, Hamlyn, and New York, St. Martin's Press, 1981; Twenty Years of Recording: The Bob Dylan Reference Book by Michael Korgsgaard, Copenhagen, Scandinavian Institute for Rock Research, 1981; Bob Dylan: From a Hard Rain to a Slow Train by Tim Dowley, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, Midas, 1982; Voice without Restraint: A Study of Bob Dylan's Lyrics and Their Background by John Herdman, Edinburgh, Harris, and New York, Delilah, 1982; Performed Literature: Words and Music by Bob Dylan by Betsy Bowden, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1982; Blood on the Tracks: The Story of Bob Dylan by Chris Rowley, New York, Proteus, 1983; A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan by Wilfrid Mellers, London, Faber, 1984, New York, Oxford University Press, 1985; Dylan by Jonathan Cott, New York, Doubleday, and London, Vermilion, 1984; Bob Dylan: Escaping on the Run by Aidan Day, Bury, Wanted Man, 1984, and Jokerman: Reading the Lyrics of Bob Dylan by Day, Oxford and New York, Blackwell, 1988; The Bible in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan by Bert Cartwright, Bury, Wanted Man, 1985; No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan by Robert Shelton, London, New English Library, 1986; Jokermen and Thieves: Bob Dylan and the Ballad Tradition by Nick De Somogyi, Bury, Wanted Man, 1986; Dylan: A Biography by Bob Spitz, New York, McGraw Hill, 1988; Dylan: Stolen Moments, Romford, Wanted Man, 1988, and Dylan: Behind the Shades, London, Penguin, 1992, both by Clinton Heylin; Performing Artist: The Music of Bob Dylan 1960–1973 (vol. 1) by Paul Williams, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Underwood Miller, 1990; The Dylan Companion edited by Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman, London, Macmillan, 1990; Bob Dylan: Performing Artist by Paul Williams, London, Omnibus, 1990; Oh No! Not Another Bob Dylan Book by Patrick Humphries, Brentwood, Square One, 1991; Bob Dylan: A Portrait of the Artist's Early Years by Daniel Kramer, N.p., Plexus, 1991; Bob Dylan: Performing Artist: The Middle Years, 1974–1986, Novato, California, Underwood-Miller, 1992; Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary by Tim Riley, New York, Vintage Books, 1992; Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan by John Bauldie, London, Penguin, 1992; The Bob Dylan Concordance by Steve Michel, Grand Junction, Colorado, Rolling Tomes, 1992; Bob Dylan by Jay Allen Sanford, San Diego, California, Revolutionary Comics, 1992; Dylan: A Man Called Alias by Richard Williams, London, Bloomsbury, 1992; Jewels & Binoculars by Phil Bowen, Exeter, Stride/Westwords, 1993; The Cracked Bells: A Guide to Tarantula by Robin Witting, Scunthorpe, Exploding Rooster Books, 1993; Bob Dylan by Susan Richardson, New York, Chelsea House, 1995; "Methane Emissions" by David Partenheimer, in McNeese Review (Lake Charles, Louisiana), 34, 1995–96; "'Read Books, Repeat Quotations': A Note on Possible Conradian Influences on Bob Dylan's 'Black Diamond Bay'" by Allan H. Simmons, in The Conradian (London), 20(1–2), spring-autumn 1995; "Synergies and Reciprocities: The Dynamics of Musical and Professional Interaction between the Beatles and Bob Dylan" by Ian Inglis, in Popular Music and Society, 20(4), winter 1996; "(Pass through) The Mirror Moment and Don't Look Back: Music and Gender in a Rockumentary" by Susan Knobloch, in Feminism and Documentary, edited by Diane Waldman and Janet Walker, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Theatrical Activities: Actor: Films— Don't Look Back, 1965; Eat the Document, 1966; Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, 1973; Renaldo and Clara, 1978; Hearts of Fire, 1987.

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Bob Dylan's lyrics show the influence of a remarkably eclectic range of styles, from the blues, folk songs, and the American popular song to the Bible and symbolist and modernist poetry. His integration of these influences is unparalleled. Dylan has never sacrificed the musical side of his inspiration; his is a song-poetry and is written not to an accentual syllabic but to a strongly accentual meter, supported by a sophisticated sense of rhyme. At the same time he has repeatedly demonstrated that songs may bear the same load of meaning as conventional poetry. His career has been marked by the relentless adoption and abandonment of different lyrical and musical stances, so that looking back over his career one sees a bewildering series of lyric identities. As far as it is possible to distinguish them, his main themes—often overlapping in the same song—are social and political commentary, love, religion, and the nature of personal identity.

First there was the Dylan whose political lyrics helped galvanize the New Left in the early 1960s. This was the Dylan who extended the ironic wit and gravity of the talking blues form in "Talkin' World War III Blues" (The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan) or who wrote a finely constructed piece on the murder of a Baltimore waitress in "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" (The Times They Are A-Changin'). In songs on his second album of 1964 (Another Side of Bob Dylan) he began to show a distinct unease with direct social and political statement, and the 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home— which includes "Mr. Tambourine Man," an excellent piece on the nature of poetic inspiration—marks Dylan's decisive movement into a lyric mode characterized by indirection and obscurity. This was a mode also dominating, in different forms, Highway 61 Revisited, which includes "Desolation Row," a highly allusive reading of personal and cultural identity; Blonde on Blonde, which has "Visions of Johanna," one of Dylan's most surrealistic lyrics, dealing with the question of subjectivity; and John Wesley Harding, which reveals Dylan concentrating on vividly drawn and peculiarly compact narratives.

After these four, frequently lyrically recondite albums Dylan reemphasized, as he was to do at periodic intervals, his place within the tradition of American popular music by recording a set of almost sublimely banal country songs (Nashville Skyline) and a group of cover versions of other people's songs on an album ironically titled Self Portrait. He then just kept on changing. By 1975 he had released Blood on the Tracks, which investigates love and personal identity in a series of complex and elusive narratives distinguished as much by what they leave out as by what they contain. Two more albums, Desire and Street Legal, show him experimenting further with modernist effects, particularly in "Isis" on Desire and "Changing of the Guards" on Street Legal. By the end of the 1970s, however, Dylan was to adopt yet another verbal register when he began recording three explicitly Christian albums(from Slow Train Coming to Shot of Love), all of which are charged by insecurity as much as by a security of vision.

Along with shifting personae, themes, and tones there are, of course, reinterpreted consistencies in Dylan's lyric concerns. There is the reiterated acuity and severity of his writing about love and relationships, for instance, from the sharply straightforward "Positively 4th Street" to the sharp but more arcane manner of the dramatic monologue "Idiot Wind" from Blood on the Tracks. Another of Dylan's recurrent themes is his uneasy preoccupation with apocalypse. Even his work of the early 1960s distanced itself from the naively optimistic millenarianism of the times. In "A Hard Rain's AGonna Fall" (The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan), for example, he drew simultaneously on both the ballad tradition and the Bible to compose a picture of a world on the verge of Armageddon. But the song merely warns of the "hard rain" that will fall like the pestilences in Revelation. Unlike Revelation, however, there is no machinery of renovation to offset the doom. A comparable kind of darkness underlies many of Dylan's more complicated songs of the mid-1960s. In "Desolation Row" the state of Western culture is envisaged in terms of the voyage of the Titanic: "Praise be to Nero's Neptune / The Titanic sails at dawn." Here the Neptune belonging to the drowned passengers of the Titanic also belongs to Nero, who presided over Rome while it burned. The end of an overproud culture is to come to an apocalyptic conflux of water and fire.

The dominant tendency of Dylan's use of apocalyptic imagery in the 1960s—to express apocalyptic despair—shadows his use of similar imagery in his later songs. The religious lyrics identify the possibility of an ultimate hope, but the Christian lyrics never hold such perspectives simply or easily. The closing lines of "Jokerman," from Infidels, again recall Revelation ("a woman … upon a scarlet colored beast") as they picture the birth of an Antichrist. But in the final verse ultimate outcomes are left radically uncertain as the figure of the Jokerman, the questionable spirit of human nature, responds with an ambiguous lack of response:

   It's a shadowy world, skies are slippery gray,
   A woman just gave birth to a prince today and dressed him in scarlet.
   He'll put the priest in his pocket, put the blade to the heat,
   Take the motherless children off the street
   And place them at the feet of a harlot.
       Oh, Jokerman, you know what he wants,
   Oh, Jokerman, you don't show any response.

Apocalyptic tonalities reappear on Dylan's 1989 album Oh Mercy in a song of reflection on past life and present circumstance: "It's the last temptation, the last account, / The last time you might hear the Sermon on the Mount, / The last radio is playing …" It is a sense of urgency like this that fires Dylan's best lyrics, whatever their subject.

One of the greatest of Dylan's albums, the 1997 Time out of Mind explores the experience of aging, the experience of no longer being young and of yet still being driven by the harrowing energies of love. The urgency of the album is founded in a very personal sense of death bearing down ("It's not dark yet, but it's getting there"). But despair is not given free rein. The last song of the collection, "Highlands," alludes to and massively elaborates and complicates Robert Burns's "My Heart's in the Highlands." Whereas Burns looks back nostalgically to a lost ideal, Dylan's future-oriented lyric uses the image of the Highlands to suggest a condition yet to be achieved: "There's a way to get there, and I'll figure it out somehow / But I'm already there in my mind / And that's good enough for now."

—Aidan Day