Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman May 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and poet. He is one of America's great popular songwriters, and his enduring contributions to the American oeuvre are comparable to those of Stephen Foster, Irving Berlin, Woody Guthrie, and Hank Williams.

Musical career and personal life

Beginnings

Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota. His grandparents were Jewish emigrants from Lithuania, Russia and the Ukraine, and his parents were part of the area's small but close-knit Jewish community. He lived in Duluth until age six, when his father Abraham was stricken with polio. The family returned to nearby Hibbing, his mother Beatty's home town, where he spent the rest of his childhood. (Shortly after he became famous, he claimed he was raised in Gallup, New Mexico, and other towns where he had never lived.)

Related Topics:
Duluth, Minnesota - Jewish - Lithuania - Russia - Ukraine - Hibbing

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Dylan spent much of his youth listening to the radio, at first the powerful blues and country music stations beamed all the way from New Orleans and, later, early rock and roll. He made his earliest known recordings (with two friends) on Christmas Eve 1956, in a department store booth, singing verses of songs by Carl Perkins, Little Richard, Lloyd Price, The Penguins, and others. Dylan formed several bands while in high school; the first, The Shadow Blasters, was short-lived, but the second, the Golden Chords, proved more durable and more successful. They played covers and the Dylan-penned tune "Little Richard" at their high-school talent show. In 1959 he toured briefly, under the name of Elston Gunn with Bobby Vee, playing piano and supplying handclaps.

Related Topics:
Blues - Country music - New Orleans - Rock and roll - Carl Perkins - Little Richard - Lloyd Price - The Penguins - Bobby Vee

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An able but not outstanding student, he moved to Minneapolis in 1959 and enrolled at the University of Minnesota. He soon became actively involved in the local Dinkytown folk music circuit. During his Dinkytown days Zimmerman began introducing himself as Bob Dylan (or Dillon). Dylan has never explained the exact source for the pseudonym, sometimes alluding to an apparently mythical uncle, sometimes to the hero of Gunsmoke, to its similarity to his middle name, and occasionally acknowledging some reference to the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

Related Topics:
Minneapolis - University of Minnesota - Dinkytown - Folk music - Gunsmoke - Dylan Thomas

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Dylan quit college at the end of his freshman year but stayed in Minneapolis, working the folk circuit there with temporary sojourns in Denver, Colorado, and Chicago, Illinois. In January 1961, en route to Minneapolis from Chicago, he changed course and headed to New York City to perform and to visit his ailing idol Woody Guthrie. Initially playing mostly in small "basket" clubs for little pay, he soon gained some public recognition after a review in the New York Times (September 29, 1961) by critic Robert Shelton, while John Hammond, a legendary music business figure, signed him to Columbia Records.

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At the time his voice, musicianship and songwriting were still raw. His performances, like his first Columbia album (1962's Bob Dylan), consisted of familiar folk, blues and gospel material seasoned with a few of his own songs. As he continued to record for Columbia, 1962 also saw Dylan recording some of his lesser songs for Broadside (a folk music magazine and record label), under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt. By the time his next record, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, in which his girlfriend Suze Rotolo appeared on the cover, was released in 1963, he had begun to make his name as both a singer and composer, specializing in protest songs, initially in the style of Guthrie and soon practically developing his own genre.

Related Topics:
1962 - Bob Dylan - The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan - Suze Rotolo - 1963 - Protest song

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His most famous songs of the time are typified by "Blowin' In The Wind", its melody partially derived from the traditional slave song "No More Auction Block", coupled with lyrics challenging the social and political status quo. In hindsight, the lyrics to some of these songs may appear unsophisticated ("How many times must the cannonballs fly before they are forever banned"), but compared to the largely anemic popular culture of the 1950s they were a breath of fresh air, and the songs fueled the zeitgeist of the 1960s. "Blowin' In The Wind" itself was widely recorded, an international hit for Peter, Paul and Mary, setting an enduring precedent for other artists to cover Dylan's songs. While Dylan's topical songs made his early reputation, Freewheelin also mixed in finely crafted bittersweet love songs ("Don't Think Twice, It's Alright", "Girl From the North Country") and jokey, frequently surreal talking blues ("Talking World War III Blues", "I Shall Be Free"). The song "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall", a reworking of the folk ballad Lord Randall with references to nuclear apocalypse, gained even more resonance as the Cuban missile crisis developed only a few weeks after Dylan began performing it.

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While undeniably a fine interpreter of traditional songs, Dylan was hardly a "good" singer under the narrow strictures of American popular-commercial music; many of his songs first reached the public through versions by other artists. Joan Baez, a friend and sometime lover, took it upon herself to record and perform his early material regularly; others who covered his songs included The Byrds, Sonny and Cher, The Hollies, Manfred Mann and Herman's Hermits. So ubiquitous were these covers by the mid-1960s that CBS started to promote him with the tag: "Nobody Sings Dylan Like Dylan". Whoever sang his songs, they were immediately recognizable as his, and a good part of his fame rested not only on his lyrical excellence but on the underlying attitude?a sort of "po' boy adrift in the wide world" posture that rapidly changed to hipster arbiter of all things cool.

Related Topics:
Joan Baez - The Byrds - Sonny and Cher - The Hollies - Manfred Mann - Herman's Hermits - CBS

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Protest and another side

By 1963, Dylan was becoming increasingly prominent in the civil rights movement, singing at rallies including the March on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his "I have a dream" speech. In January, he appeared on British television in the BBC play The Madhouse on Castle Street, featuring as a Greek chorus-type figure. Dylan's next album, The Times They Are A-Changin', reflected a more sophisticated, politicized and cynical Dylan. This bleak material, concerned with such subjects as the murder of civil rights worker Medgar Evers and the despair engendered by the breakdown of farming and mining communities ("Ballad of Hollis Brown", "North Country Blues"), was tempered by two love songs, "Boots of Spanish Leather" and "One Too Many Mornings", and the epic renunciation of "Restless Farewell". The Brechtian-influenced "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll", a highlight of the album, describes a young socialite's killing of a hotel maid. Never explicitly mentioning race, the song leaves no doubt that the killer is white, the victim black.

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As a sign of the political influence of Dylan's lyrics, the violent Weathermen radical group even named themselves after a lyric in his "Subterranean Homesick Blues" ("You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows").

Related Topics:
Weathermen - Subterranean Homesick Blues

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By the end of the year, however, Dylan felt both manipulated and constrained by the folk-protest movement. Accepting the "Tom Paine Award" from the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee at a ceremony shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a drunken, rambling Dylan questioned the role of the committee, insulted its members as old and balding, and claimed to see something of himself (and of every man) in assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

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Perhaps inevitably then, his next album, the accurately but prosaically titled Another Side Of Bob Dylan, recorded on a single June evening in 1964, had a lighter mood than its predecessor. The surreal Dylan reemerged on "I Shall Be Free #10" and "Motorpsycho Nightmare" employing a sense of humor which would persist throughout his career. "Spanish Harlem Incident" and "To Ramona" were touching love songs, "I Don't Believe You", a prototypical rock and roll song played on acoustic guitar, and "It Ain't Me Babe", a romping rejection of the role his reputation thrust at him. His newest direction was signaled by three songs: "Chimes of Freedom", long and impressionistic, sets elements of social commentary against a denser metaphorical landscape in a style later characterized by Allen Ginsberg as "chains of flashing images"; "My Back Pages" even more personally attacks the simplistic and arch seriousness of his own earlier topical songs; and a musically undeveloped "Mr. Tambourine Man", recorded that night but fortunately left off the album.

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In the early 1960s, Dylan had adopted a sort of Huckleberry Finn persona and told picaresque tales of knocking around, hopping freights, and working at folksy jobs. In that phase, lasting a few years, he sang and wrote somewhat like the Woody Guthrie of 25 or 30 years earlier. However, as he ?brought it all back home? (the result of psychedelic drug experiences, or so some who knew him have claimed), Dylan?s point of view as a writer became at once more thoroughly contemporary and more surrealistic, and probably more honest.

Related Topics:
Huckleberry Finn - Psychedelic

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Throughout this time Dylan's artistic development moved so fast that he frequently left both critics and fans behind. His March 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home was a further stylistic leap. Influenced by The Beatles (whose artistic development had already been enhanced by Dylan's influence) and the rock and roll of his youth, the first side contained his first significant original up-tempo rock songs. Lyrically, however, the songs were pure Dylan, exhibiting his dry wit and inhabited by a sequence of grotesque, metaphorical characters. The raucous first single, "Subterranean Homesick Blues", owed much to Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business" and was provided with an early music video courtesy of D. A. Pennebaker's cinema verite presentation of Dylan's 1965 tour, Don't Look Back.

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Side 2 of the album was a different matter, including four lengthy acoustic songs whose undogmatic political, social and personal concerns are illuminated with the rich poetic imagery that would become another trademark. One of these songs, "Mr. Tambourine Man", had already been a hit for The Byrds, albeit in a truncated form, and would remain one of Dylan's most enduring compositions, while "Gates Of Eden", "It's All Over Now Baby Blue", and "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" have justifiably been fixtures in Dylan's live performances for most of his career.

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That summer, Bob Dylan stoked the drama of his legacy by performing his first electric set (since his high school days) with a pickup group drawn mostly from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at the Newport Folk Festival. Dylan had appeared at Newport twice before in 1963 and 1964. Two wildly divergent accounts of the crowd's response in 1965 survive to this day. The settled fact is that Dylan, met with a mix of cheering and booing, left the stage after only three songs. As one version of the legend has it, the boos were from the outraged folk fans Dylan alienated with his electric guitar. An alternative account has it that audience members were upset by poor sound quality and a surprisingly short set. Whatever sparked the crowd's disfavor, Dylan soon reemerged and sang two much better received solo acoustic numbers. Nevertheless, the import of the appearance at Newport worked its way into the awareness of this restless generation: thoughtful acoustic music was no longer enough even for tradition-aware singers like Dylan; times were indeed "a changin" and electricity was needed to express those changes.

Related Topics:
Paul Butterfield Blues Band - Newport Folk Festival

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Creative height, motorcycle crash

The single "Like a Rolling Stone" was a U.S. hit, cementing his reputation as a lyricist; at over six minutes, devoid of a bridge, the song also helped to expand the limits of hit radio. Its signature sound, with a full, jangling band and a simple organ riff, would characterize his next album, Highway 61 Revisited (titled after the road that led from his native Minnesota to the musical hotbed of New Orleans; and referencing any number of blues songs; e.g., Mississippi Fred McDowell's "61 Highway"). The songs were in the same vein as the hit single, surreal litanies of the grotesque flavored by Mike Bloomfield's blues guitar, a tight rhythm section and Dylan's obvious enjoyment of the sessions. Electric amplification and the blues-rock backbeat ruled this album, and all thought of Dylan remaining exclusively in the "new folk" category should have been abandoned. The closing song, "Desolation Row", is a lengthy apocalyptic vision with references to many figures of Western culture.

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In support of the record, Dylan was booked for two U.S. concerts and set about assembling a band. Bloomfield was unwilling to leave the Butterfield Band, so Dylan mixed Al Kooper and Harvey Brooks from his studio crew with bar-band stalwarts Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm, best known for backing Ronnie Hawkins. In August 1965 at Forest Hills Auditorium, the group were heckled from an audience who, Newport notwithstanding, still demanded the acoustic troubadour of previous years; their reception on the 3rd of September at the Hollywood Bowl was more uniformly favorable.

Related Topics:
Al Kooper - Harvey Brooks - Robbie Robertson - Levon Helm - Ronnie Hawkins - 1965

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Neither Kooper nor Brooks wanted to go on the road steadily with Dylan, and he was unable to lure his preferred band, a crew of west coast musicians best known for backing Johnny Rivers, featuring guitarist James Burton and drummer Mickey Jones, away from their regular commitments. Dylan then hired Robertson and Helm's full band, The Hawks, for his tour group, and began a string of studio sessions with them in an effort to record the follow-up to Highway 61 Revisited.

Related Topics:
Johnny Rivers - James Burton - Mickey Jones - The Hawks

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Dylan secretly married Sara Lownds on November 22, 1965; their first child, Jesse Byron Dylan, was born in January 1966. Dylan and Lownds had four children in total: Jesse, Anna, Samuel, and Jakob (born December 9, 1969). Dylan also adopted Sara Lownds' first daughter Maria Lownds (born in 1961 or 62) from a prior marriage. In the 1990's, the youngest of the pair's children, Jakob Dylan, became well known as the lead singer of the band The Wallflowers.

Related Topics:
Sara Lownds - November 22 - 1965 - December 9 - 1969 - Maria Lownds - Jakob Dylan - The Wallflowers

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Dylan and Lownds divorced in July 1977, though they reportedly remained in regular contact, for many years and, by some accounts, even to the present day.

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While Dylan and the Hawks met increasingly receptive audiences on tour (though not before the audience reaction led Helm to leave the group late in 1965), their studio efforts foundered. At John Hammond's suggestion, producer Bob Johnston brought Dylan to Nashville to record, surrounding him with a cadre of top-notch session men, with only Robertson and Kooper brought down from New York to play more limited roles. The Nashville sessions brought out what Dylan would later call "that thin wild mercury sound" and a classic record often viewed as one of the greatest in American popular music, Blonde on Blonde.

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Dylan undertook an ambitious "world tour" of Australia and Europe in the spring of 1966. The first half of these concerts were solo acoustic. The second half, backed by the Hawks, provoked much jeering and slow handclapping. The tour culminated in a famously raucous confrontation with his audience at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in England. Immortalized mistakenly as the "Royal Albert Hall" concert, the recording was officially released in 1998. At the climax of the concert, a folk fan (John Cordwell), angry that Dylan had adopted an electric sound, shouted "Judas!" from the audience, and Dylan responded, "I don't believe you! You're a liar!" before turning to the band and exhorting them to "Play it fuckin' loud!" as they launched into the last song of the night?"Like a Rolling Stone".

Related Topics:
1966 - Free Trade Hall - John Cordwell - Judas

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After his European tour, Dylan returned to New York, but the pressures on him continued to increase: his publisher was demanding a finished manuscript of the poem/novel Tarantula and manager Albert Grossman had already scheduled a grueling summer/fall concert tour. The pace of his private and professional life seemed unsustainable. On July 29 1966, near his home in Woodstock, New York, the brakes of his Triumph 500 motorcycle locked, throwing him to the ground. The extent of his injuries was never fully disclosed, and whether through necessity or opportunism, Dylan used an extended convalescence to escape the pressures of stardom.

Related Topics:
Tarantula - July 29 - 1966

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Once Dylan was well enough to resume creative work, he began editing footage into Eat the Document, a rarely exhibited follow-up to Don't Look Back. In 1967 he began recording music with the Hawks at his home and, legendarily, the basement of the Hawks' nearby "Big Pink". The relaxed atmosphere yielded renditions of many of Dylan's favored old and new songs and some newly written pieces. These originals, at first compiled as demos for other artists to record, began to circulate on their own merits. Columbia belatedly released selections from them in 1975 as The Basement Tapes. Later in 1967, the Hawks?soon to be rechristened as The Band?independently recorded the album Music From Big Pink, thus beginning a long and successful recording and performing career of their own.

Related Topics:
Eat the Document - 1967 - The Basement Tapes - The Band - Music From Big Pink

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Unsurprisingly, Dylan's official output appeared strongly influenced by his changed lifestyle. In December 1967 he released his first official album since the accident, John Wesley Harding, a contemplative record set in a landscape which drew on both the American West and the Old Testament. It included "All Along The Watchtower" with lyrics derived from the Book of Isaiah (21:5–9). The song was later immortalized by Jimi Hendrix in a version that Dylan himself has acknowledged as definitive. The sparse structure and instrumentation, coupled with lyrics which took the Judeo-Christian tradition seriously, marked a departure not only from Dylan's own work but from the escalating psychedelic fervor of the 1960s musical culture.

Related Topics:
John Wesley Harding - All Along The Watchtower - Jimi Hendrix

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Woody Guthrie died in October 1967, and Dylan made his first public appearances in 18 months at a pair of Guthrie memorial concerts in January 1968.

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Dylan's next release, Nashville Skyline (1969), was virtually a mainstream country record featuring instrumental backing by Nashville musicians, a mellow-voiced, contented Dylan, a duet with Johnny Cash, and the hit single "Lay Lady Lay". Dylan appeared on Cash's new television show and then gave a high-profile performance at the Isle of Wight rock festival (after rejecting overtures to appear at the Woodstock event far closer to his home).

Related Topics:
Nashville Skyline - 1969 - Johnny Cash - Isle of Wight - Woodstock

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The 1970s

In the early 1970s, Dylan's output was of varied and unpredictable quality. "What is this shit?" notoriously asked Greil Marcus, Rolling Stone magazine writer and Dylan loyalist, about 1970's Self Portrait. In general, Self Portrait, a double LP including few original songs, was poorly received. Later that year, Dylan released New Morning, something of a return to form. His unannounced appearance at George Harrison's 1971 Concert for Bangladesh was widely praised, but reports of a new album, a television special, and a return to touring came to nothing.

Related Topics:
1970s - Greil Marcus - Rolling Stone - 1970 - Self Portrait - New Morning - George Harrison's - 1971 - Concert for Bangladesh

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In 1972, Dylan signed onto Sam Peckinpah's film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, providing the songs and taking a minor role as "Alias", a minor member of Billy's gang. "Knockin' on Heaven's Door", among Dylan's most covered songs, has proved much more durable than the film itself.

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In 1973, after his contract with Columbia ran out, Dylan signed with David Geffen's new Asylum label. He recorded Planet Waves with the Band; like New Morning, Planet Waves was initially viewed as a return to peak form, but in retrospect appears less substantial (although "Forever Young" has proved to be one of Dylan's most lasting songs). Columbia almost simultaneously released Dylan, a haphazard collection of studio outtakes often termed a "revenge" release.

Related Topics:
1973 - David Geffen - Planet Waves - Dylan

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In early 1974, Dylan and the Band staged a high-profile, coast-to-coast tour of North America; promoter Bill Graham claimed he received more ticket purchase requests than any prior tour by any artist. The tour is documented on the Before the Flood album, but Dylan refused to allow a tour film to be made.

Related Topics:
1974 - Bill Graham - Before the Flood

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After the tour, Dylan and his wife became publicly estranged. He filled a small, red notebook with songs springing from the breakup and in September, with the help of John Hammond, quickly recorded the album Blood on the Tracks in the New York City studio where his recording career began. Word of Dylan's efforts soon leaked out, and expectations were high, but Dylan delayed the album's release, then rerecorded half the songs in Minneapolis at year's end. Released early in 1975, BOTT was critically acclaimed and commercially successful, although Dylan's fans still debate the relative merits of the ultimate release and the original recordings.

Related Topics:
Blood on the Tracks - 1975

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That summer, Dylan wrote his first successful "protest" song in 12 years, championing the cause of boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter who he believed had been wrongfully imprisoned for a triple homicide in Paterson, New Jersey (an eponymous 1971 tribute to George Jackson, a Black Panther who was killed in prison, sank almost unnoticed).

Related Topics:
Rubin "Hurricane" Carter - George Jackson - Black Panther

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Carter was retried and reconvicted in the mid-1970s; he was released in 1985 when that conviction was overturned. After visiting Carter in jail, Dylan wrote "Hurricane", a sympathetic presentation of Carter's situation. Despite its length, the song was released as a single and performed at every 1975 date of Dylan's next tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue. The tour was something different: a varied evening of entertainment featuring many performers drawn mostly from the resurgent Greenwich Village folk scene, including T-Bone Burnett; Steven Soles; David Mansfield; former Byrds frontman Roger McGuinn; Scarlet Rivera, a violin player Dylan discovered while she was walking down the street to a rehearsal, her violin case hanging on her back; and a reunion with Joan Baez. Joni Mitchell added herself to the Revue in November, and poet Allen Ginsberg accompanied the troupe, staging scenes for the film Dylan was simultaneously shooting.

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Running through the fall of 1975 and again through the spring of 1976, the tour also encompassed the release of the album Desire (1976), with many of Dylan's new songs featuring an almost travelogue-like narrative style, showing the influence of his new collaborator, playwright Jacques Levy. The spring 1976 half of the tour was documented by a TV concert special, Hard Rain, and an LP of the same title; no concert album from the better-received and better-known opening half of the tour would be released until 2002, when ' appeared as the fifth volume of Dylan's Bootleg Series.

Related Topics:
Desire - 1976 - Travelogue - Jacques Levy

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The fall 1975 tour with the Revue also provided the backdrop to Dylan's three hour and fifty-five minute film Renaldo and Clara, its sprawling, improvised and frequently baffling narrative mixed with striking concert footage and reminiscences. Released in 1978, the movie received generally poor, sometimes scathing, reviews and had a very brief theatrical run. Later in that year, Dylan allowed a two-hour edit, dominated by the concert performances, to be more widely released.

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In November 1976, Dylan appeared at The Band's "farewell" concert, along with other guests including Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Van Morrison, and Neil Young. Martin Scorsese's concert film The Last Waltz, including about half of Dylan's set, was released in 1978.

Related Topics:
Joni Mitchell - Muddy Waters - Van Morrison - Neil Young - The Last Waltz

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Dylan's 1978 album Street-Legal was generally well reviewed. Lyrically one of his more complex and absorbing, it suffered, however, from a poor sound mix (attributed to his studio recording practices), submerging much of its instrumentation in the sonic equivalent of cotton wadding until its remastered CD release nearly a quarter century later.

Related Topics:
1978 - Street-Legal

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Dylan's work in the late 1970s and early 1980s was dominated by his becoming, in 1979, a born-again Christian. He released two albums of exclusively religious material and a third that seemed mostly so; of these, the first, Slow Train Coming (1979), is generally regarded as the most accomplished. The second album was Saved (1980). When touring from the fall of 1979 through the spring of 1980, Dylan played mostly Christian music, delivered sermonettes on stage, and often discussed the apocalyptic predictions of Hal Lindsey.

Related Topics:
1980 - Born-again Christian - Slow Train Coming - 1979 - Saved - Hal Lindsey

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Hard-working elder statesman

1980s

In the fall of 1980, Dylan briefly resumed touring, restoring songs that were popular before his Christian trilogy to his repertoire, for a series of concerts billed as "A Musical Retrospective". Shot of Love, recorded the next spring, featured Dylan's first secular compositions in more than two years, mixed with explicitly Christian songs and material that resisted pigeonholing.

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After composing and recording evangelical Christian songs over the course of his prior three albums, on 1983's well-received Infidels Dylan began his return to writing secular songs. Over his next several albums after Infidels, Dylan's lyrics became consistently secular, culminating in the album Empire Burlesque. Some commentators feel that some subsequent songs subtly suggest Christian themes.

Related Topics:
Infidels - Empire Burlesque

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In the 1980s, his work varied from the well-regarded Infidels to the poorly received 1988 Down in the Groove. The Infidels recording session included "Blind Willie McTell", as well as "Foot of Pride", "Someone's Got a Hold of My Heart" and "Lord Protect My Child", which were later released on the boxed set The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991. An early version of Infidels prepared by producer/guitarist Mark Knopfler with differing arrangments and song selection was not released.

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Dylan made a number of music videos during this period, but only "Political World" found any regular airtime on MTV.

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In late 1985, Dylan married his longtime backup singer Carolyn Dennis (often professionally known as Carol Dennis). Their daughter, Desiree, was born early in 1986. The couple divorced in the early 1990s.

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In 1987 he starred in Richard Marquand's movie Hearts of Fire, in which he played a washed up rock star turned chicken farmer whose teenage lover (Fiona) leaves him for a jaded English synth-pop sensation (Rupert Everett). The film was a critical and commercial dud. When asked in a press conference if he had anything to do with writing this movie Dylan replied, attempting to stifle his laughter, "I couldn't have possibly written anything like that."

Related Topics:
Richard Marquand - Hearts of Fire

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Dylan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. Later that spring, he took part in the first Traveling Wilburys album project, working with Roy Orbison, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, and his good friend George Harrison on lighthearted, well-selling fare. Despite Orbison's death, the other four Wilburys issued a sequel in 1990.

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Dylan finished the decade on a critical high note with the Daniel Lanois-produced Oh Mercy (1989). Lanois's influence is audible throughout Oh Mercy, especially in the ambience provided by reverb-heavy guitar tracks. "Ring Them Bells" seems to call for Christians to maintain a visible presence in the world, perhaps adding fuel to the debate over Dylan's religious orientation. The track "Most of the Time", a ruminative lost love composition, was later prominently featured in the film High Fidelity while "What Was It You Wanted?" was a love song that doubled as a dry comment on the expectations of fans.

Related Topics:
Daniel Lanois - Oh Mercy - 1989 - High Fidelity

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1990s and beyond

Dylan's 1990s began with Under the Red Sky (1990), an odd about-face from the serious Oh Mercy. This album, dedicated to Gabby Goo Goo, puzzlingly included several apparently childish songs, including "Under the Red Sky" and "Wiggle Wiggle", all recorded straight-on without any of the studio wizardry of "Oh Mercy". The dedication can be explained as a nickname for Dylan's four-year-old daughter, but the story that the album's songs were written for her entertainment is plainly apocryphal. Guests on the album included George Harrison, Slash from Guns 'N' Roses, David Crosby, Bruce Hornsby, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Elton John.

Related Topics:
1990s - Under the Red Sky - 1990 - Slash - Guns 'N' Roses - David Crosby - Bruce Hornsby - Stevie Ray Vaughan - Elton John

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The next few years saw Dylan returning to his folk roots with two albums covering old folk and blues numbers: Good As I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993), featuring nuanced interpretations and ragged but highly original acoustic guitar work. His 1995 concert on MTV Unplugged, and the album culled from it, marked Dylan's only newly recorded output during the mid-1990s. Essentially a greatest hits collection, it also included "John Brown", an unreleased 1963 song detailing the ravages of both war and jingoism.

Related Topics:
Good As I Been to You - 1992 - World Gone Wrong - 1993 - 1995 - MTV Unplugged - Greatest hits - Jingoism

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With the quality of his output taking a turn for the better, and a stack of songs reportedly begun while snowed-in on his Minnesota ranch, Dylan returned to the recording studio with Lanois in January 1997. That spring, before the album's release, Dylan was hospitalized with a life-threatening heart infection, pericarditis, brought on by histoplasmosis. His scheduled European tour was cancelled, but Dylan made a speedy recovery and left the hospital saying, "I really thought I'd be seeing Elvis soon." He was back on the road by midsummer, and in early fall performed before the Pope at the World Eucharistic Conference in Bologna, Italy.

Related Topics:
1997 - Pericarditis - Histoplasmosis - Elvis - Bologna - Italy

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September saw the release of the new Lanois-produced album, Dylan's first collection of original songs in seven years. Time Out of Mind, with its bitter assessment of love and morbid ruminations, was highly acclaimed and achieved an unforeseen popularity among young listeners, particularly the song "Love Sick", later covered by The White Stripes (who also covered Dylan's "One More Cup of Coffee"). This collection of complex songs won him his first solo Album of the Year Grammy Award (he was one of numerous performers on The Concert for Bangladesh, the 1972 winner). The ballad "To Make You Feel My Love", covered by both Garth Brooks and Billy Joel, generated more royalties than any song he had written since the 1960s. Black humor is present throughout Time Out of Mind but comes out most on the 16-minute blues "Highlands", his longest track to date.

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In 2001, his song "Things Have Changed", penned for the movie Wonder Boys, won an Academy Award for Best Song. For reasons unannounced, the Oscar (by some reports a facsimile) tours with him, presiding over shows perched atop an amplifier.

Related Topics:
2001 - Wonder Boys - Academy Award for Best Song

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Love and Theft, an album that explores divergent styles of American music and revisits Dylan's own creative roots, is described by some as an uplifting piece of art amidst a great tragedy, due to the coincidence of having been released on September 11, 2001. Others compare the album to weaker works such as Self Portrait and New Morning. Proponents descibe the album as lyrically adventurous and musically unprecedented in his long career. Love and Theft, by many accounts, stands among the greatest of his work. Even those quite familiar with his earlier work may have trouble imagining Bob Dylan crooning, as he does on "Bye and Bye" and "Moonlight". Many believe the album's lyrical strengths are as pronounced as in his most famous earlier work. Though Dylan produced the record himself under the pseudonym Jack Frost, the record's fresh sound is owed in part to the accompanists. Tony Garnier, bassist and bandleader, had played with Dylan for 12 years, longer than any other musician. Larry Campbellhttp://www.members.cox.net/larrycampbell2000, one of the most accomplished American guitarists of the last two decades, played on the road with Dylan from 1997 through 2004. Guitarist Charlie Sexton and drummer David Kemper had also toured with Dylan for years. Keyboard player Augie Meyers, the only musician not part of Dylan's touring band, had also played on Time Out of Mind. Naysayers find it, like Under the Red Sky, an unlistenable attempt to build on the critical and public acclaim of Time Out of Mind.

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2003 saw the release of the film Masked & Anonymous, largely a joint creative venture with television producer Larry Charles, featuring one of the largest ever assemblages of top Hollywood stars in a single film. Dylan and Charles cowrote the film under the pseudonyms Rene Fontaine and Sergei Petrov. As difficult to decipher as some of his songs, Masked & Anonymous was panned by most major critics and had a limited run in theaters.

Related Topics:
Masked & Anonymous - Larry Charles

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In 2005 preproduction began on a film entitled I'm Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368794/. The movie makes use of seven characters to represent the different aspects of Dylan's life. The movie is to be directed by Todd Haynes, and the cast currently includes Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale and Richard Gere.

Related Topics:
Todd Haynes - Cate Blanchett - Christian Bale - Richard Gere

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Martin Scorsese's film biography No Direction Home was shown on September 26 and September 27 2005 on the BBC in the United Kingdom and PBS in the United States. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/dylan/ A DVD of this film was released on September 20, with an accompanying soundtrack released on August 20, 2005.

Related Topics:
Martin Scorsese - No Direction Home - September 26 - September 27 - 2005 - BBC - PBS - September 20 - August 20

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Recent live performances

Dylan has played over 100 dates a year for the entirety of the 1990s and the 2000s, a far heavier schedule than most performers who started out in the 1960s. The "Never Ending Tour" continues, anchored by longtime bassist Tony Garnier and filled out with talented musicians better known to their peers than to their audiences. To the dismay of some fans Dylan refuses to be a nostalgia act; his reworked arrangements, evolving bands and experimental vocal approaches keep the music unpredictable night after night.

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Dylan, once famous as a guitar player, has not been playing guitar in live performance since 2002 (with very rare exceptions). Instead he chooses to play on the keyboard, with the occasional harmonica solo. Various rumors have circulated as to why Dylan gave up his guitar, none terribly reliable.

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Dylan chooses songs from throughout his 40-year career, seldom playing the same set twice. While his chief place in posterity will be as the preeminent songwriter of latter 20th-century America, his roles as recording artist and performer are cherished just as highly by his contemporaries.

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◄ Bob Dylan: Introduction

Bob Dylan: Fan base ►

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