Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan (1941) is an American singer-songwriter, author, visual artist and incidental actor who has been a major figure in popular culture for more than fifty years. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when songs such as 'Blowin' in the Wind' (1963) and 'The Times They Are a-Changin'' (1964) became anthems for the civil rights movement and anti-war movement. His lyrics during this period incorporated a wide range of political, social, philosophical, and literary influences, defied pop-music conventions, and appealed to the burgeoning counterculture. Dylan has sold more than 100 million records, making him one of the best-selling music artists of all time. He received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, ten Grammy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and an Academy Award. Dylan has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the Songwriters Hall of Fame.


French postcard by Publistar, Marseille, no. 1266A. Photo: CBS.


German postcard by Sony Music. Photo: Elliott Landy.

Like a Rolling Stone

Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota. Dylan's father was Abram Zimmerman, who was an electric-appliance shop owner (Wikipedia) or worked for the Standard Oil Co. (IMDb) and his mother was Beatrice 'Beatty' Stone. He has a brother named David Zimmerman. The family was part of a small, close-knit Jewish community. They lived in Duluth until Dylan was six when his father had polio. The family returned to his mother's hometown, Hibbing, often called the coldest place in the US. There they lived for the rest of Dylan's childhood. Bob taught himself piano and guitar. In his early years he listened to the radio—first to blues and country stations from Shreveport, Louisiana, and later, when he was a teenager, to rock and roll. Dylan formed several bands while attending Hibbing High School. In the Golden Chords, he performed covers of songs by Little Richard and Elvis Presley.

In 1959, Dylan moved to Minneapolis and enrolled at the University of Minnesota. His focus on rock and roll gave way to American folk music. Dylan began to perform at the Ten O'Clock Scholar, a coffeehouse a few blocks from campus and became involved in the Dinkytown folk music circuit. In 1961, he travelled to New York City to perform there and visit his musical hero Woody Guthrie, who was ill and in hospital. In clubs around Greenwich Village, he befriended folk singers and picked up material from them. Producer John Hammond signed Dylan to Columbia Records. His debut album 'Bob Dylan' (1962) mainly comprised traditional folk songs. The following year, Dylan made his breakthrough as a singer-songwriter with the release of 'The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan' (1963). The album featured 'Blowin' in the Wind' and the thematically complex 'A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall'. For many of these songs, he adapted the tunes and phraseology of older folk songs. He went on to release the politically charged 'The Times They Are a-Changin'' and the more lyrically abstract and introspective 'Another Side of Bob Dylan' (1964).

In the following years, Dylan toured with singer Joan Baez and encountered controversy when he adopted electrically amplified rock instrumentation. In the space of 15 months, he recorded three of the most important and influential rock albums of the 1960s: 'Bringing It All Back Home' (1965), 'Highway 61 Revisited' (1965) and 'Blonde on Blonde' (1966). The six-minute single 'Like a Rolling Stone' (1965), peaked at number two in the U.S. chart. Magazine Rolling Stone: "No other pop song has so thoroughly challenged and transformed the commercial laws and artistic conventions of its time, for all time." In July 1966, Bob Dylan withdrew from touring after being injured in a motorcycle accident. Dylan later in his autobiography: "I had been in a motorcycle accident and I'd been hurt, but I recovered. The truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race." Dylan withdrew from public and, apart from a few appearances, did not tour again for almost eight years. Once Dylan was well enough to resume creative work, he began to edit D. A. Pennebaker's film of his 1966 tour. A rough cut was shown to ABC Television, which rejected it as incomprehensible to a mainstream audience. The film was subsequently titled Eat the Document on bootleg copies, and it has been screened at a handful of film festivals.

During this period, he recorded a large body of songs with members of The Band, who had previously backed him on tour. These recordings were released as the collaborative album 'The Basement Tapes' in 1975. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dylan explored country music and rural themes in 'John Wesley Harding' (1967), 'Nashville Skyline' (1969), and 'New Morning' (1970). Critics charged that Dylan's output was varied and unpredictable. In 1972, Dylan worked on the Western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973) starring James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson. He provided songs and backing music and played Alias, a member of Billy's gang with some historical basis. Despite the film's failure at the box office, the song 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door' became one of Dylan's most covered songs. In 1975, he released 'Blood on the Tracks', which many saw as a return to form. Dylan wrote a ballad championing boxer Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter, imprisoned for a triple murder in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1966. After visiting Carter in jail, Dylan wrote 'Hurricane', presenting the case for Carter's innocence. Despite its length - over eight minutes - the song was released as a single, peaking at 33 on the U.S. Billboard chart, and performed at every 1975 date of Dylan's tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue.

The Rolling Thunder Revue provided the backdrop to Dylan's nearly four-hour film Renaldo and Clara (Bob Dylan, 1978), a mix of concert footage, documentary interviews and bizarre improvised character scenes. After poor reviews, a two-hour edit, dominated by the concert performances, was more widely released. In November 1976, Dylan appeared at The Band's 'farewell' concert. Martin Scorsese's documentary, The Last Waltz (1978), included about half of Dylan's set. In the late 1970s, Bob Dylan became a born-again Christian and released a series of albums of contemporary gospel music before returning to his more familiar rock-based idiom in the early 1980s. In 1985 Dylan sang on USA for Africa's famine relief single 'We Are the World.' He also joined Artists United Against Apartheid providing vocals for their single 'Sun City'. In 1987, Dylan starred in the film Hearts of Fire (Richard Marquand, 1987), in which he played Billy Parker, a washed-up rock star turned chicken farmer whose teenage lover (Fiona) leaves him for a jaded English synth-pop sensation played by Rupert Everett. Dylan also contributed two original songs to the soundtrack, 'Night After Night', and 'I Had a Dream About You, Baby', as well as a cover of John Hiatt's 'The Usual.' The film was a critical and commercial flop.


American postcard by Fotofolio, N.Y., N.Y., no. Z308. Photo: Elliott Landy. Caption: Bob Dylan, Woodstock, New York, 1968. He turned down an offer to headline the legendary Woodstock Festival in 1969 (Jimi Hendrix ultimately headlined), even though he had been living on a farm in Woodstock for many years at that point.


American postcard by Fotofolio. Photo: Elliott Landy. Caption: Bob Dylan, 1969.

No Direction Home

Since the late 1980s, Bob Dylan and a changing lineup of musicians toured steadily on what has been dubbed the Never Ending Tour. Major works of his later career include 'Time Out of Mind' (1997), 'Love and Theft' (2001), 'Modern Times' (2006) and 'Tempest' (2012). In 2001, Dylan won his first Oscar for his song 'Things Have Changed', written for the film Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson, 2000) starring Michael Douglas. Dylan's most recent recordings have comprised versions of traditional American standards, especially songs recorded by Frank Sinatra.

The cover of Dylan's album 'Self Portrait' (1970) was a reproduction of a painting by Dylan. Another of his paintings was reproduced on the cover of the 1974 album 'Planet Waves'. In 1994, Random House published 'Drawn Blank', a book of Dylan's drawings. Since then, Bob Dylan has published eight books of drawings and paintings, and his work has been exhibited in major art galleries. In 2007, the first public exhibition of Dylan's paintings, 'The Drawn Blank Series', opened at the Kunstsammlungen in Chemnitz, Germany. It showcased more than 200 watercolours and gouaches made from the original drawings. The exhibition coincided with the publication of 'Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series', which included 170 reproductions from the series. From September 2010 until April 2011, the National Gallery of Denmark exhibited 40 large-scale acrylic paintings by Dylan, 'The Brazil Series'.

In 2004, Dylan published the first part of his autobiography, 'Chronicles: Volume One'. The book reached number two on The New York Times' Hardcover Non-Fiction best seller list in December 2004 and was nominated for a National Book Award. No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese's acclaimed film biography of Dylan was first broadcast in 2005. The documentary focuses on the period from Dylan's arrival in New York in 1961 to his motorcycle crash in 1966, featuring interviews with Suze Rotolo, Liam Clancy, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Pete Seeger, Mavis Staples, and Dylan himself.

Dylan's career as a radio presenter commenced in 2006, with his weekly radio program, 'Theme Time Radio Hour' for XM Satellite Radio, with song selections revolving around chosen themes. In 2007, the award-winning film biography of Dylan, I'm Not There, written and directed by Todd Haynes, was released. The film used six different actors to represent different aspects of Dylan's life: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw. The Pulitzer Prize Board in 2008 awarded him a special citation for "his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power." In 2012, U.S. President Barack Obama awarded Dylan a Presidential Medal of Freedom in the White House. At the ceremony, Obama praised Dylan's voice for its "unique gravelly power that redefined not just what music sounded like but the message it carried and how it made people feel". In 2016, Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."

Netflix released Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (Martin Scorsese, 2019), describing the film as "part documentary, part concert film, part fever dream". Bob Dylan had romantic relationships with artist Suze Rotolo and singer Joan Baez. He was married twice. In 1965 he married model and secretary Sara Lownds, with whom he had four children, Jesse Byron Dylan (1966), Anna Lea (1967), Samuel Isaac Abram (1968), and Jakob Luke (1969). Jakob Dylan became well known as the lead singer of the band the Wallflowers in the 1990s. Dylan also adopted Sara's daughter from a prior marriage, Maria Lownds (later Maria Dylan, 1961). Bob and Sara Dylan were divorced in 1977. In 1986, Dylan married his backup singer Carolyn Dennis. Their daughter Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan was born in 1986. The couple divorced in 1992. Their marriage and child remained a closely guarded secret until the publication of Howard Sounes' biography 'Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan' (2001). When not touring, Bob Dylan is believed to live primarily in Point Dume, a promontory on the coast of Malibu, California, though he also owns property around the world.


French collector card by Panini, no. 97. Photo: CBS.


French postcard by PSG, no. 1266 A, offered by Corvisart, Epinal. Photo: CBS.

Sources: Ed Stephan (IMDb), Wikipedia and IMDb.