Bob Dylan: The Postman of Songs……..

INDEX:-

• 1 Biography (Brief):-
o 1.1 Beginnings
o 1.2 Protest and another side
o 1.3 Creative height, motorcycle crash
o 1.4 1970s
o 1.5 Later career
 1.5.1 1980s
 1.5.2 1990s
 1.5.3 2000 and beyond
 1.5.4 Recent live performances and the Never Ending Tour
• 2 Fan base
• 3 Chronicles Vol. 1
• 4 Discography, film, books
• 5 Band
• 6 See also
• 7 Notes
• 8 References
• 9Books
• 10 External Features :-
o 10.1 Standard Sites, Portals
o 10.2 Chords and lyrics
Biography: Brief

Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941) is an American singer-
songwriter, author, musician and poet who has been a major figure in popular music for
five decades. Much of Dylan's best known work is from the 1960s when he became an
informal documentaries and reluctant figurehead of American unrest. Some of his songs,
such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'",became anthems of
the anti-war and civil rights movements. Forty years later, his 2001 album "Love and
Theft", reached the top five on the charts in the U.S. and the UK. His latest studio album,
Modern Times, released on August 29, 2006, became his first US #1 album in thirty
years, making him the oldest living person to top the charts at the age of 65.

Dylan's early lyrics incorporated politics, social commentary, philosophy and literary
influences, defying existing pop music conventions and appealing widely to the
counterculture of the time. While expanding and personalizing musical styles, he has
shown steadfast devotion to many traditions of American song, from folk and
country/blues to rock 'n' roll and rockabilly, to Celtic balladry, even jazz, swing and
Broadway.

Dylan performs with the guitar, keyboard and harmonica. Backed by a changing lineup of
musicians, he has toured steadily since the late 1980s on what has been dubbed the Never
Ending Tour. He has also recently performed alongside other major artists, such as Paul
Simon, Joan Baez, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, Jack White, Eric Clapton, The Band,
Mark Knopfler and the Foo Fighters. Although his contributions as performer and
recording artist have been central to his career, his songwriting is generally held as his
highest accomplishment.

His career accomplishments have been recognized with the Polar Music Prize, the
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, Kennedy Center Honors, and induction into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Nashville Songwriters and Songwriters Hall of Fame. He
has even been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan was listed
as one of TIME Magazine's 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
 Background information

Birth name Robert Allen Zimmerman

Also known as Elston Gunn, Blind Boy Grunt,

Lucky Wilbury, Elmer Johnson,
Sergei Petrov, Jack Frost, et al.

Born May 24, 1941

Duluth, Minnesota, USA

Genre(s) Folk, rock, blues, country

Occupation(s) Singer-songwriter, author, poet,

artist, actor, screenwriter, disc
jockey

Instrument(s) Vocals, guitar, harmonica,

keyboards

Years active 1956-present

Label(s) Columbia

Associated Joan Baez, Paul Butterfield Blues

acts Band, Al Kooper, The Band,
Rolling Thunder Revue, Traveling
Wilburys, The Grateful Dead.

Website www.bobdylan.com

Biography
1.1 Beginnings

Robert Zimmerman was born in Duluth, Minnesota, and was raised there and in Hibbing,
Minnesota, on the Mesabi Iron Range northwest of Lake Superior. His grandparents were
Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, Russia, and Ukraine, and his parents, Abraham
Zimmerman and Beatrice Stone (Beatty), were part of the area's small but close-knit
Jewish community. He lived in Duluth until age seven, when his father was stricken with
polio. The family returned to nearby Hibbing, Beatty's hometown, where Robert
Zimmerman spent the rest of his childhood.

Zimmerman spent much of his youth listening to the radio—first to the powerful blues
and country stations broadcasting from Shreveport and later, to early rock and roll.[6] He
formed several bands while at high school: the first, The Shadow Blasters, was short-
lived; the second, The Golden Chords, lasted longer and played covers including "Rock
and Roll Is Here to Stay" at their high school talent show. In his 1959 school year book,
Robert Zimmerman listed his ambition as "To join Little Richard.The same year, he
performed two dates under the name of Elston Gunn with Bobby Vee, playing piano and
providing handclaps.

Robert Zimmerman enrolled at the University of Minnesota in September 1959 and

moved to Minneapolis. His musical focus on rock and roll gave way to an interest in
subtler, Gael-inflected American folk music, typically performed with an acoustic guitar.
He soon became actively involved in the local Dinkytown folk music circuit, fraternizing
with local folk enthusiasts and occasionally "borrowing" many of their albums.During his
Dinkytown days, Zimmerman began introducing himself as "Bob Dylan". In his
autobiography, Chronicles (2004), Dylan wrote: "What I was going to do as soon as I left
home was just call myself Robert Allen.... It sounded like a Scottish king and I liked it."
However, by reading Downbeat magazine, he discovered that there was already a
saxophonist called David Allyn. A little later he became acquainted with the work of
writer Dylan Thomas and made a choice between Robert Allyn and Robert Dylan: "I
couldn't decide—the letter D came on stronger" he explained. He decided on "Bob"
because there were several Bobbies in popular music at the time.

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, he headed for New York City to perform and to visit his ailing musical
idol Woody Guthrie in a New Jersey hospital. Guthrie had been a huge revelation to
Dylan and was a major influence. In the hospital room, Dylan also met Woody's old road-
buddy Ramblin' Jack Elliott visiting Guthrie the day after returning from his trip to
Europe. Bob and Jack became friends and much of Guthrie's repertoire was actually
channelled through Elliott. Dylan paid a fulsome tribute to Elliott in Chronicles (2005).

After initially playing mostly in small "basket" clubs for little pay, he gained some public
recognition after a positive review in The New York Times by critic Robert Shelton.
Shelton's review and word-of-mouth around Greenwich Village led to legendary music
business figure John Hammond's signing Dylan to Columbia Records that October. His
performances, like his first Columbia album Bob Dylan (1962), consisted of familiar folk,
blues and gospel material combined with some of his own songs. As he continued to
record for Columbia, he recorded more than a dozen songs for Broadside Magazine a folk
music magazine and record label, under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt. In August
1962, Robert Allen Zimmerman went to the Supreme Court building in New York and
changed his name to Robert Dylan.

By the time his next record, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, was released in 1963, he had
begun to make his name as both singer and songwriter. Many of the songs on this album
were labelled protest songs, inspired partly by Woody Guthrie and influenced by Pete
Seeger's passion for topical songs.[15] "Oxford Town" was a sardonic account of James
Meredith's ordeal as the first black student to risk enrollment at the University of
Mississippi.

His most famous song of the time, "Blowin' in the Wind", partially derived its melody
from the traditional slave song "No More Auction Block", and coupled this to Dylan's
lyrics questioning the social and political status quo. The song was widely recorded and
became an international hit for Peter, Paul and Mary, setting a precedent for other artists.
While Dylan's topical songs solidified his early reputation, Freewheelin' also included a
mixture of love songs and jokey, frequently surreal talking blues. Humor was a large part
of Dylan's persona,[17] and the range of material on the album impressed many listeners
including the Beatles. George Harrison said, "We just played it, just wore it out. The
content of the song lyrics and just the attitude - it was incredibly original and wonderful."

The Freewheelin' song "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall", built melodically from a loose
adaptation of the stanza tune of the folk ballad Lord Randall, with its veiled references to
nuclear apocalypse, gained even more resonance as the Cuban missile crisis developed
only a few weeks after Dylan began performing it.[19] Like "Blowin' in the Wind", "A
Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" marked an important new direction in modern songwriting,
blending a stream-of-consciousness, imagist lyrical attack with traditional folk
progressions to create a sound and sense that struck listeners as somehow new and
ancient simultaneously.[20] Soon after the release of Freewheelin, Dylan emerged as a
dominant figure of the so-called "new folk movement" headquartered in Lower
Manhattan's Greenwich Village.

While an interpreter of traditional songs, Dylan's singing voice was unusual and
untrained and his phrasing as a vocalist was eccentric. He sang his songs in a style that
hearkened back to the folk-singers of the 1920s and 30s, which was almost unheard-of in
the music industry of the time. Many of his most famous early songs first reached the
public through versions by other performing musicians who were more immediately
palatable. Joan Baez, celebrated as the queen of the folk movement, became Dylan's
advocate as well as his lover. In addition to jumpstarting Dylan's performance career by
inviting him onstage during her concerts, she recorded several of his early songs and was
influential in bringing Dylan to national and international prominence.

Others who recorded and released his songs around this time included The Byrds, Sonny
and Cher, The Hollies, Peter, Paul and Mary, Manfred Mann, The Brothers Four, Judy
Collins and Herman's Hermits, most attempting to impart more of a pop feel and rhythm
to the songs where Dylan and Baez performed them mostly as sparse folk pieces keying
rhythmically off the vocals. These covers were so ubiquitous by the mid-1960s that CBS
started to promote him with the tag "Nobody Sings Dylan Like Dylan".

Protest and another side

By 1963, Dylan and Baez were becoming increasingly prominent in the civil rights
movement, singing together at rallies including the March on Washington where Martin
Luther King, Jr. gave his "I have a dream" speech.[22] In January, he appeared on British
television in the BBC play Madhouse on Castle Street, playing the part of a "hobo guitar-
player".[23] 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 accompanied by two love songs, "Boots of Spanish Leather" and
"One Too Many Mornings", and the renunciation of "Restless Farewell". The Brechtian-
influenced "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" describes a young socialite's killing
of a hotel maid. The song never explicitly mentions race, but many sources wrote it
leaves no doubt that the killer is white, the victim black.

By the end of 1963, 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.

His next album, 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", accompanied by a sense of humor that has often
reappeared over the years. "Spanish Harlem Incident" and "To Ramona" were love songs,
"I Don't Believe You" a rock and roll song played on acoustic guitar, and "It Ain't Me
Babe" a rejection of the role his reputation thrust at him. His newest direction was
signaled by three lengthy songs: the impressionistic "Chimes of Freedom" 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" attacks
the simplistic and arch seriousness of his own earlier topical songs; and "Mr. Tambourine
Man", written before many songs included on Another Side but held back for Dylan's
next release.

In 1964-65 Dylan’s appearance changed rapidly as he made his move from leading
contemporary song-writer of the folk scene to rock’n’roll star. His scruffy jeans and work
shirts were replaced by a Carnaby Street wardrobe. A London reporter wrote: “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.” Dylan also began to play
with interviewers in increasingly cruel and surreal ways. Appearing on the Les Crane TV
show and asked about a movie he was planning to make, he told Crane it would be a
cowboy horror movie. Asked if he played the cowboy, Dylan replied. “No, I play my
mother.”

His March 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home was a huge stylistic leap.[29] Influenced
by The Animals (whose recording of "House of the Rising Sun" was racing up the US
charts),[30] and the rock and roll of his youth, the album featured his first significant up-
tempo rock songs. The 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 cinéma vérité presentation of Dylan's 1965 tour,
Dont Look Back.[31] Its free association lyrics both harked back to the manic energy of
Beat poetry and were a forerunner of rap and hip-hop. In 1969, the militant Weatherman
group took their name from a line in "Subterranean Homesick Blues" ("You don't need a
weatherman to know which way the wind blows").

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

That summer Bob Dylan made history by performing his first electric set (since his high
school days) with a pickup group drawn mostly from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, i.e.
Mike Bloomfield, guitar, Sam Lay, drums, Jerome Arnold, bass, plus Al Kooper, organ
and Barry Goldberg, piano, at the Newport Folk Festival.[33] Dylan had appeared at
Newport twice before in 1963 and 1964, and two wildly divergent accounts of the
crowd's response in 1965 emerged. 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 by 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, "It's All over Now, Baby Blue" and
"Mr. Tambourine Man".

The significance of Dylan's 1965 Newport performance was that he outraged the folk
music establishment.[34] Ewan MacColl wrote in Sing Out!: "Our traditional songs and
ballads are the creations of extraordinarily talented artists working inside traditions
formulated over time... But what of Bobby Dylan?... Only a non-critical audience,
nourished on the watery pap of pop music could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel."

Many in the folk revival had embraced the idea that life equalled art, that a certain kind of
life defined by suffering and social exclusion in fact replaced art.[35] Folksong collectors
and singers often presented folk music as an innocent characteristic of lives lived without
reflection or the false consciousness of capitalism. [36] This philosophy, both genteel and
paternalistic, was ultimately what Dylan had run afoul of by 1965. At an Austin press
conference in September of that year, on the day of his first performance with Levon and
the Hawks, he described his music not as a pop charts-bound break with the past, but as
“historical-traditional music.” [37] Dylan later told interviewer Nat Hentoff: “What folk
music is... is based on myths and the Bible and plague and famine and all kinds of things
like that which are nothing but mystery and you can see it in all the songs….All these
songs about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and
swans that turn into angels…and seven years of this and eight years of that and it’s all
really something that nobody can touch....(the songs) are not going to die.”[38] It was this
mystical, living tradition of songs that served as the palette for Bringing It All Back
Home and subsequent collections, which would seem to confer their status as 'historical-
traditional'. As Dylan wrote in the sleeve notes for Bringing It All Back Home, "i accept
chaos. i am not sure whether it accepts me."

Creative height, motorcycle crash

The single "Like a Rolling Stone" was a U.S. and UK hit; at over six minutes and devoid
of a bridge, it helped to expand the limits of songs played on hit radio. In 2004, Rolling
Stone listed it at number one on its list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. [39] Its
signature sound — with a full, jangling band and an organ riff — characterized his next
album, Highway 61 Revisited. Titled after the road that led from Dylan's native
Minnesota to the musical hotbed of New Orleans, the songs passed stylistically through
the birthplace of blues, the Mississippi Delta, and referenced any number of blues songs.
For example, 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 rhythm section and Dylan's obvious enjoyment of the sessions. The closing
song, "Desolation Row", is an apocalyptic vision with references to many figures of
Western culture.

A mix of folk music, rock and roll and Dylan's own brand of surrealism, Blonde on
Blonde (1966)[40] is often considered one of the finest recordings of American popular
music.

In support of the record, Dylan was booked for two U.S. concerts and set about
assembling a band. Mike 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 Tennis Stadium, the group was heckled by an audience who,
Newport notwithstanding, still demanded the acoustic troubadour of previous years. The
band's reception on September 3 at the Hollywood Bowl was more uniformly
favorable.[41]

Neither Kooper nor Brooks wanted to tour 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.

Dylan secretly married Sara Lownds on November 22, 1965; their first child, Jesse Byron
Dylan, was born on January 6, 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 October 21, 1961) from a prior marriage. In the 1990s
the youngest of the pair's children, Jakob Dylan, became well known as the lead singer of
the band The Wallflowers. Jesse Dylan is a film director and a successful businessman.

While Dylan and the Hawks met increasingly receptive audiences on tour, their studio
efforts floundered. Producer Bob Johnston had been trying to persuade Dylan to record in
Nashville for some time. In February 1966 Dylan agreed and Johnston surrounded him
with a cadre of top-notch session men. At Dylan's insistence, Robertson and Kooper came
down from New York City to play on the sessions. The Nashville sessions created what
Dylan later called "that thin wild mercury sound" - Blonde on Blonde (1966). Al Kooper
said the record was a masterpiece because it was "taking two cultures and smashing them
together with a huge explosion": the musical world of Nashville, and the world of the
"quintessential New York hipster" Bob Dylan.

For many critics, Dylan's mid-'60s trilogy of albums – Bringing It All Back Home,
Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde – represents one of the great cultural
achievements of the 20th century. In Mike Marqusee's words: "Between late 1964 and the
summer of 1966, Dylan created a body of work that remains unique. Drawing on folk,
blues, country, R&B, rock’n’roll, gospel, British beat, symbolist, modernist and Beat
poetry, surrealism and Dada, advertising jargon and social commentary, Fellini and Mad
magazine, he forged a coherent and original artistic voice and vision. The beauty of these
albums retains the power to shock and console.

Dylan undertook a "world tour" of Australia and Europe in the spring of 1966. Each show
was split into two part. Dylan performed solo during the first half, accompanying himself
on acoustic guitar and harmonica. In the second half, backed by the Hawks, he played
high voltage electric music. This contrast provoked many fans, who jeered and slowly
handclapped.

The tour culminated in a famously raucous confrontation between Dylan and his audience
at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in England (officially released on CD in 1998 as The
Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert). At the
climax of the concert, one fan, angry with Dylan's electric sound, shouted: "Judas!" and
Dylan responded, "I don't believe you. You're a liar!" He turned to the band and, just
within earshot of the microphone, articulated with almost mathematical precision: "Play
... fuckin' ... loud!" They then launched into the last song of the night — "Like a Rolling
Stone" — with an apocalyptic intensity.[45]

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. Manager Albert Grossman had already scheduled an extensive summer/fall
concert tour. On July 29, 1966, while Dylan rode his Triumph 500 motorcycle in
Woodstock, New York, its brakes locked, throwing him to the ground. Though the extent
of his injuries were never fully disclosed, it was confirmed that he indeed broke his neck.
Dylan used an extended convalescence to escape the pressures of stardom: "When I had
that motorcycle accident ... I woke up and caught my senses, I realized that I was just
workin' for all these leeches. And I really didn't want to do that."

Once Dylan was well enough to resume creative work, he began editing footage of his
1966 tour 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 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 songs, initially
compiled as demos for other artists to record, provided hit singles for Julie Driscoll, The
Byrds, and Manfred Mann. 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.

In December 1967 Dylan released John Wesley Harding, his first album since the
motorcycle crash. It was a quiet, contemplative record of shorter songs, set in a landscape
which drew on both the American West and the Bible. 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. It included "All Along the Watchtower", with lyrics
derived from the Book of Isaiah (21:5–9). The song was later recorded by Jimi Hendrix,
whose celebrated version Dylan himself acknowledged as definitive in the liner notes to
Biograph. Dylan live has performed Hendrix's arrangement since 1974.

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

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". In 1969 Dylan
appeared on the first episode of 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 Festival far closer to his home).

1970s

In the early 1970s critics charged Dylan's output was of varied and unpredictable quality.
"What is this shit?" Rolling Stone magazine writer and Dylan loyalist Greil Marcus
notoriously asked, upon first listening to 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, which some considered 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.

In 1972 Dylan signed onto Sam Peckinpah's film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, providing
the songs (see Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (album)) and taking a role as "Alias", a minor
member of Billy's gang. The most memorable song, "Knockin' on Heaven's Door", has
proved its durability, having been covered by over 150 recording artists.[51]

Dylan signed with David Geffen's new Asylum label when his contract with Columbia
Records expired in 1973, and he recorded Planet Waves with The Band while rehearsing
for a major tour. The album included two versions of "Forever Young". The phrase may
have been lifted from John Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn ("For ever panting, and for ever
young") but Dylan turned it into an emotional work which has become one of his most
popular concert songs.[52][53] Columbia Records simultaneously released Dylan, a
haphazard collection of studio outtakes (almost exclusively cover songs), which was
widely interpreted as a churlish response to Dylan's signing with a rival record label.[54] In
January 1974 Dylan and The Band embarked on their high-profile, coast-to-coast Bob
Dylan and The Band 1974 Tour of North America; promoter Bill Graham claimed he
received more ticket purchase requests than for any prior tour by any artist. A live double
album of the tour, Before the Flood, was released on Asylum Records.

After the tour, Dylan and his wife became publicly estranged. He filled a small red
notebook with songs about his marital problems, and quickly recorded a new album
entitled Blood on the Tracks in September 1974.[55] Word of Dylan's efforts soon leaked
out, and expectations were high. But Dylan delayed the album's release, and then re-
recorded half of the songs in Minneapolis by year's end.

Released in early 1975, Blood on the Tracks received mixed reviews. In the NME, Nick
Kent described "the accompaniments [as] often so trashy they sound like mere practise
takes." In Rolling Stone, reviewer Jon Landau wrote that "the record has been made with
typical shoddiness". Over the years critics have come to see it as one of Dylan's greatest
achievements, perhaps the only serious rival to his great mid 60s trilogy of albums. In
Salon.com, Bill Wyman wrote: "Blood on the Tracks is his only flawless album and his
best produced; the songs, each of them, are constructed in disciplined fashion. It is his
kindest album and most dismayed, and seems in hindsight to have achieved a sublime
balance between the logorrhea-plagued excesses of his mid-'60s output and the self-
consciously simple compositions of his post-accident years."[56] The songs have been
described as Dylan's most intimate and direct.[57][58]

That summer Dylan wrote his first successful "protest" song in twelve 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). After visiting Carter in jail, Dylan wrote "Hurricane", presenting the case for
Carter's innocence. Despite its 8½ minute length, the song was released as a single,
peaking within the top forty on the U.S. Billboard Chart, and performed at every 1975
date of Dylan's next tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue.[59] The tour was a varied evening of
entertainment featuring many performers drawn mostly from the resurgent Greenwich
Village folk scene, including T-Bone Burnett; Allen Ginsberg; Ramblin' Jack Elliott;
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;[60] and a reunion with Joan Baez (the tour marked
Baez and Dylan's first joint performance in more than a decade). 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. Sam Shepard was
initially hired as the writer for this film, but ended up accompanying the tour as informal
chronicler.[61]

Running through late 1975 and again through early 1976, the tour 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.[62][63] The spring 1976 half of the tour was documented by a TV concert
special, Hard Rain, and the LP Hard Rain; no concert album from the better-received and
better-known opening half of the tour was released until 2002, when Live 1975 appeared
as the fifth volume in Dylan's official Bootleg Series.

The fall 1975 tour with the Revue also provided the backdrop to Dylan's nearly four-hour
film Renaldo and Clara, a sprawling and improvised narrative mixed with concert
footage and reminiscences. Released in 1978, the movie received generally poor,
sometimes scathing, reviews[64][65] 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.

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 acclaimed[66] cinematic chronicle of this show, The Last Waltz, was released in
1978 and included about half of Dylan's set.
Dylan and Lownds were divorced on June 29, 1977,[67] though they reportedly remained
in regular contact for many years and, by some accounts, even to the present day.

Dylan's 1978 album Street Legal was lyrically one of his more complex and cohesive;[68]
it suffered, however, from a poor sound mix (attributed to his studio recording
practices),[69] submerging much of its instrumentation in the sonic equivalent of cotton
wadding until its remastered CD release nearly a quarter century later.

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 more accomplished, winning him a Grammy Award for "Best Male
Vocalist". The second album, Saved (1980), was not so well-received. When touring from
the fall of 1979 through the spring of 1980 Dylan refused to play secular music and
delivered sermonettes on stage, such as:

Years ago they used ..., 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.[70]

Dylan's religious conversion was met with distrust by some fans and fellow artists. [71]
Shortly before his December 1980 shooting, John Lennon, for example, recorded "Serve
Yourself", in negative response to Dylan's "Gotta Serve Somebody". But for Rolling
Stone editor Jann Wenner, writing in his review for Slow Train Coming, Dylan had not
"sold out" totally to born-again Christianity so much as he had simply shifted focus.
According to him, Dylan was still Dylan, and the same intensity and passion had been
present in Dylan's protest songs of the 1960s. Wenner commented:

Slow Train Coming is pure, true Dylan, probably the purest and truest Dylan ever.
The religious symbolism is a logical progression of Dylan's Manichaean vision of
life and his pain-filled struggle with good and evil.
"I don't go to church or to a synagogue. I don't kneel beside my bed at night. I
don't think I will. I have yet to face the terror I read about in all the great
literature. But, since politics, economics and war have failed to make us feel any
better—as individuals or as a nation—and we look back at long years of disrepair,
then maybe the time for religion has come again, and rather too suddenly—'like a
thief in the night.
Later career

1980s

In the fall of 1980 Dylan briefly resumed touring, restoring several of his most popular
1960s songs 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. The haunting "Every Grain
of Sand" reminded some critics of William Blake’s verses.[73]

In the 1980s the quality of Dylan's recorded work varied, from the well-regarded Infidels
in 1983 to the panned Down in the Groove in 1988. Critics such as Michael Gray
condemned Dylan's 1980s albums both for showing an extraordinary carelessness in the
studio and for failing to release his best songs.[74]

The Infidels recording sessions produced several notable outtakes, and many have
questioned Dylan's judgment in leaving them off the album. Most well-regarded of these
were "Blind Willie McTell" (which was both a tribute to the dead blues singer and an
extraordinary evocation of African American history reaching back to "the ghosts of
slavery ships"[75]), "Foot of Pride" and "Lord Protect My Child";[76] these songs were later
released on the boxed set The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-
1991. An earlier version of Infidels, prepared by producer/guitarist Mark Knopfler,
contained different arrangements and song selections than what appeared on the final
product.

Dylan contributed vocals to USA for Africa's famine relief fundraising single "We Are the
World". On 13 July 1985, he appeared at the climax of the Live Aid concert at JFK
Stadium, Philadelphia. Backed by Keith Richards and Ron Wood, Dylan performed a
ragged version of "Hollis Brown", his ballad of rural poverty, and then said to a
worldwide audience exceeding one billion people: "I hope that some of the money ...
maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe ... one or two million, maybe ... and use it
to pay the mortgages on some of the farms and, the farmers here, owe to the banks." His
remarks were widely criticised as inappropriate, but they did inspire Willie Nelson to
organise a series of events, Farm Aid, to benefit debt-ridden American farmers.[77]

In June 1986 Dylan married his longtime backup singer Carolyn Dennis (often
professionally known as Carol Dennis).[78] Their daughter, Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-
Dylan, was born on January 31, 1986. The couple divorced in October 1992.[79]

In 1987 Dylan starred in Richard Marquand's movie Hearts of Fire, in which he played a
washed-up-rock-star-turned-chicken farmer called "Billy Parker", whose teenage lover
(Fiona) leaves him for a jaded English synth-pop sensation (Rupert Everett). The film
was a critical and commercial flop.[80] 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,
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.

Dylan finished the decade on a critical high note with the Daniel Lanois-produced Oh
Mercy (1989).[81] Lanois's influence is audible throughout Oh Mercy.[82][83] "Ring Them
Bells" seems to call for Christians to maintain a visible presence in the world. The track
"Most of the Time", a lost love composition, was later prominently featured in the film
High Fidelity, while "What Was It You Wanted?" has been interpreted both as a catechism
and a wry comment on the expectations of critics and fans.[84] Dylan made a number of
music videos during this period, but only "Political World" found any regular airtime on
MTV.

Dylan's 1990s began with Under the Red Sky (1990), an about-face from the serious Oh
Mercy. The album was dedicated to "Gabby Goo Goo", and contained several apparently
simple songs, including "Under the Red Sky" and "Wiggle Wiggle". The "Gabby Goo
Goo" dedication was later explained as a nickname for Dylan's four-year-old daughter. [85]
Sidemen on the album included George Harrison, Slash from Guns N' Roses, David
Crosby, Bruce Hornsby, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Elton John. Despite the stellar line-up,
the record received bad reviews and sold poorly. Dylan would not make another studio
album of new songs for seven years.[86]

The next few years saw Dylan returning to his roots with two albums covering old folk
and blues numbers: Good as I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993),
featuring interpretations and acoustic guitar work. Many critics and fans commented on
the quiet beauty of the song "Lone Pilgrim",[87] penned by a 19th century teacher and sung
by Dylan with a haunting reverence. An exception to this rootsy mood came in Dylan's
1991 songwriting collaboration with Michael Bolton; the resulting song "Steel Bars", was
released on Bolton's album Time, Love & Tenderness. In 1995 Dylan recorded a live
show for MTV Unplugged. He claimed his wish to perform a set of traditional songs for
the show was overruled by Sony executives who insisted on a greatest hits package.[88]
The album produced from it (see MTV Unplugged (Bob Dylan album)) included "John
Brown", an unreleased 1963 song detailing the ravages of both war and jingoism.

With a collection of songs reportedly written while snowed-in on his Minnesota

ranch,Dylan returned to the recording studio with Lanois in January 1997. Late that
spring, before the album's release, he 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."[90] He was back on the road by midsummer, and in early
fall performed before Pope John Paul II at the World Eucharistic Conference in Bologna,
Italy. The Pope treated the audience of 200,000 people to a sermon based on Dylan's lyric
"Blowin' in the Wind".[91]

September saw the release of the new Lanois-produced album, Time Out of Mind. With
its bitter assessment of love and morbid ruminations, Dylan's first collection of original
songs in seven years became highly acclaimed. It also achieved an unforeseen popularity
among young listeners, particularly the opening song, "Love Sick". 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 love
song "To Make You Feel My Love" was covered by both Garth Brooks and Billy Joel.

In December 1997 President Clinton presented Dylan with a Kennedy Center Honor in
the East Room of the White House, paying this tribute: "He probably had more impact on
people of my generation than any other creative artist. His voice and lyrics haven't always
been easy on the ear, but throughout his career Bob Dylan has never aimed to please. He's
disturbed the peace and discomforted the powerful."

2000 and beyond

In 2000 his song "Things Have Changed", penned for the film Wonder Boys, won a
Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song and 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.[citation needed]

"Love and Theft" was released on September 11, 2001. Dylan produced the album
himself under the pseudonym Jack Frost,[94] and its distinctive sound owes much to the
accompanists. Tony Garnier, bassist and bandleader, had played with Dylan for 12 years,
longer than any other musician. Larry Campbell, 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. The album was critically well-received and
nominated for several Grammy awards. Critics noted that at this late stage in his career,
Dylan was deliberately widening his musical palette. The styles referenced in this album
included rockabilly, Western swing, jazz, and even lounge ballads.

"Love and Theft" was controversial due to some similarities between the lyrics of the
song "Floater" to Japanese writer Junichi Saga's book Confessions of a Yakuza. It is
unclear if Dylan intentionally lifted any material. Dylan's publicist had no comment.

In February of 2003, an 8-minute long epic ballad called "Cross The Green Mountain",
written and recorded by Dylan, was released as the closing song on the soundtrack to the
Civil War movie "Gods and Generals", and later appeared as one of the 42 rare tracks on
the iTunes Music Store release of "Bob Dylan: The Collection". A music video for the
song was also produced in promotion of the motion picture.

2003 also saw the release of the film Masked & Anonymous, a creative collaboration with
television producer Larry Charles, featured many well-known actors. Dylan and Charles
cowrote the film under the pseudonyms Rene Fontaine and Sergei Petrov. [99] As difficult
to decipher as some of his songs, Masked & Anonymous was panned by most major
critics[100] and had a limited run in theaters.
In 2005 preproduction began on a film entitled I'm Not There: Suppositions on a Film
Concerning Dylan. 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, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale and Richard Gere.

Martin Scorsese's film biography No Direction Home was shown on September 26 and
September 27, 2005 on BBC Two in the United Kingdom and PBS in the United
States.[101] An accompanying soundtrack was released in August 2005, which contained
much previously unavailable early Dylan material. The documentary received a Peabody
Award in April 2006.

Dylan himself returned to recording studio at some point in 2005. He recorded at least
one song, "Tell Ol' Bill", for the motion picture North Country. The song is an original
composition, not the similarly titled traditional folk song.

In February 2006, Dylan recorded tracks for a new album in New York City that resulted
in the album Modern Times, released on August 29, 2006. This date also included the
iTunes Music Store release of Bob Dylan: The Collection, a digital box set containing all
of his studio and live albums (773 tracks in total), along with 42 rare & unreleased tracks
and a 100 page booklet. To promote the digital box set and the new album (on iTunes),
Apple released a 30 second TV spot featuring Dylan, in full country & western regalia,
lip-synching to "Someday Baby" against a striking white background. In a well-
publicized interview to promote the album, Dylan criticised the quality of modern sound
recordings and claimed that his new songs "probably sounded ten times better in the
studio when we recorded 'em".[102]

Despite some coarsening of Dylan’s voice (The Guardian critic characterised his singing
on the album as “a catarrhal death rattle”[103]) most reviewers gave the album high marks
and many described it as the final instalment of a successful trilogy, embracing Time Out
of Mind and Love and Theft.[104] The track most frequently singled out for praise was the
final song “Ain’t Talkin’”, a nine minute talking blues in which Dylan appeared to be
walking “through all-enveloping darkness, before finally disappearing into the murk”.[105]
Modern Times made news by entering the US charts at #1, making it Dylan's first album
to reach that position since 1976's Desire. At 65, Dylan became the oldest, still-living
musician to top the Billboard albums chart. The record also shot to number one in
Australia, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway and Switzerland.

In September 2006 Scott Warmuth, an Albuquerque, N.M.-based disc jockey, noted

similarities between Dylan's lyrics in the album, Modern Times and the poetry of Henry
Timrod, the 'Poet Laureate of the Confederacy'. A wider debate developed in The New
York Times and other journals about the nature of "borrowing" within the folk process and
in literature.[106][107][108][109]

May 3, 2006, was the premiere of Dylan's DJ career, hosting a weekly radio program,
Theme Time Radio Hour, for XM Satellite Radio.[110] Amongst the classic and obscure
records played on his show from the 30s, 40s and 50s, Dylan has also played tracks by
Blur, Prince, Billy Bragg & Wilco, Mary Gauthier and even L.L. Cool J and The Streets.
In the fall, 2006, Dylan announced the next installment of his "Never Ending Tour",
commencing in Vancouver and ending in Philadelphia.

Recent live performances and the Never Ending Tour

Dylan has played roughly 100 dates a year for the entirety of the 1990s and the 2000s, a
heavier schedule than most performers who started out in the 1960s.[111][112] 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,[113] Dylan refuses to be a nostalgia act; his reworked arrangements, evolving
bands and experimental vocal approaches keep the music unpredictable night after night.

Dylan, once known 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
increasingly frequent harmonica solos. Various rumors have circulated as to why Dylan
gave up his guitar, none terribly reliable. According to David Gates, a Newsweek reporter
who interviewed Dylan in 2004, "...it has to do with his guitar not giving him quite the
fullness of sound he was wanting at the bottom... He's thought of hiring a keyboard
player so he doesn't have to do it himself, but hasn't been able to figure out who."

Dylan chooses songs from throughout his 40-year career, seldom playing the same set
twice.Around 2000, and especially in 2001, Dylan began employing a vocal mechanism,
which his fan base has dubbed 'upsinging', during sizable portions of his live show. While
'upsinging', Dylan ends a vocal phrase or phrases with a "high" note, which tends to be
the root of whatever chord the progression resolves to at the end of any given measure.
This unusual mannerism is unprecedented in the world of popular music. 'Upsinging'
remains a part of Dylan's live show to this day. Dylanologist Doug Evans coined the term
'upsinging' after Dylan's 2002 concert at Newport, RI, which was laden with