Bob Dylan

Robert Allen Zimmerman was born on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, and grew up in Hibbing, where his father and uncles ran a furniture and appliance store. In high school his band, the Golden Chords, played Little Richard and Elvis covers, so loudly at a talent show that the principal cut the microphone. At the University of Minnesota he found folk music in the coffeehouses of Dinkytown, and began calling himself Bob Dylan.

In January 1961 he went to New York, partly to visit his idol Woody Guthrie in hospital. That September a rave review by Robert Shelton in the New York Times boosted his career, and playing harmonica on a Carolyn Hester album brought him to the producer John Hammond, who signed him to Columbia. His first album, Bob Dylan, came out on March 19, 1962, with just two songs of his own, and sold 5,000 copies in its first year; some at Columbia called him “Hammond’s Folly”.

His debut had two of his own songs; eleven of the thirteen on Freewheelin’ are his. It opens with “Blowin’ in the Wind”, which Peter, Paul and Mary made an international hit, and holds “Masters of War”, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”, written to the question-and-answer pattern of the old ballad “Lord Randall”.

The album made him famous, and got him called the spokesman of a generation, a label he refused. It reached No. 22 in the US and went to No. 1 in the UK in 1965. George Harrison said the Beatles “just wore it out”.

His first album of nothing but his own songs is stark and political: “Only a Pawn in Their Game” is about the murder of Medgar Evers, and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” the killing of a Black barmaid by a rich young white man. In August 1963 he and Joan Baez sang at the March on Washington.

He said he wanted “to write a big song, with short concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way”. By the end of 1963, though, he felt hemmed in by the folk and protest movements, and the next year’s Another Side of Bob Dylan already sounded lighter.

Dylan met the Beatles in their New York hotel in August 1964, and his next three albums turned to rock. On the first side of this one he is backed by an electric band, recorded with no rehearsal; the second side is mostly him alone with an acoustic guitar, on “Mr. Tambourine Man”, “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”.

It divided the folk scene. It was also his first album in the US top 10, at No. 6, and topped the UK chart that spring.

On July 25, 1965, headlining the Newport Folk Festival, Dylan played his first electric set since high school, with Mike Bloomfield on guitar and Al Kooper on organ, and left the stage after three songs to cheering and booing. Four days later he was back in the studio.

The album is named after the highway that runs from his birthplace, Duluth, down to St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans. Every song has a rock band but the last, the 11-minute “Desolation Row”. Michael Gray argued that in an important sense the ’60s “started” with it. It reached No. 3 in the US.

Months of sessions in New York with his touring band, the Hawks, gave Dylan one usable song. Bob Johnston took him to Nashville, with Al Kooper and Robbie Robertson, to work with the town’s best session players, and in February and March 1966 they recorded the rest of what Dylan called “that thin wild mercury sound”.

Kooper described it as “taking two cultures and smashing them together with a huge explosion”. It was one of the first double albums in rock, and went to No. 9 in the US.

On the 1966 world tour Dylan played the first half of each show alone and acoustic, and the second half loud, with the Hawks. In England the second halves were heckled and slow-clapped. In Manchester someone shouted “Judas!” Dylan said, “I don’t believe you … You’re a liar,” turned to the band and told them to play it loud, and they went into “Like a Rolling Stone”.

The electric set turned up on bootleg LPs in 1970 or 1971, credited to the Royal Albert Hall in London. In Creem, Dave Marsh called it “the most supremely elegant piece of rock ’n’ roll music I’ve ever heard.” The tape was only shown to be Manchester after a rejected Columbia mix leaked in 1995; Dylan approved a different one, released in 1998 under the famous wrong name, in quotation marks.

On July 29, 1966, Dylan crashed his motorcycle near his home in Woodstock. He said he broke vertebrae in his neck, and later that he “wanted to get out of the rat race”; he didn’t tour again for almost eight years. Four of the Hawks moved nearby, three of them into a pink-sided rental in West Saugerties, and from June to October 1967 they recorded in its basement with a borrowed tape machine and microphones lent by Peter, Paul and Mary.

They made more than 100 recordings of new songs, covers and old folk tunes, rootsy and funny and strange. Demos went out to other artists, and Manfred Mann and the Byrds had hits with them. Columbia put out 24 tracks in 1975 as The Basement Tapes, with overdubs and eight songs by the Band alone; this box, the “holy grail” for collectors, has 138 tracks, 117 of them never issued before.

Other artists were having hits with Dylan songs nobody could buy, and Los Angeles radio stations started playing the demos. Two men known as Ken and Dub got hold of a tape and paid a pressing plant in cash, with no real names, to press a double LP. It went into West Coast shops in July 1969 in a plain white sleeve, later rubber-stamped with its nickname: Great White Wonder. It is the first notable rock bootleg.

It mixed seven basement songs with the Minneapolis tape of December 1961, a 1962 radio session, studio outtakes and a track from The Johnny Cash Show. Dub remembered, “All of a sudden we just started having fistfuls of money.” A pirate copy of the bootleg came out within two months, and a minor industry followed, with Dylan one of its most popular subjects. Meanwhile he made John Wesley Harding and the country album Nashville Skyline, and topped the bill at the Isle of Wight in August 1969.

In 1974 Dylan toured again for the first time in seven years, with the Band. Afterwards he and his wife, Sara, became estranged, and he filled three small notebooks with songs about relationships and ruptures. He recorded them in New York that September and had a test pressing made, then let his brother, David, persuade him it was too stark, and re-recorded five songs in Minneapolis in December.

It got mixed reviews, and went to No. 1 in the US. Critics came to rank it among his masterpieces, and his son Jakob described the songs as “my parents talking”. Dylan denied they were about himself.

After the Rolling Thunder Revue of 1975 and 1976, Desire and a world tour, Dylan converted to evangelical Christianity, and made three albums of gospel music. On the first, Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits plays guitar. Wexler said Dylan tried to evangelize him during the sessions, and he replied, “Bob, you’re dealing with a 62-year-old Jewish atheist. Let’s just make an album.”

Many old fans were alienated, and many Christians drawn in. It went platinum and reached No. 3 in the US, and “Gotta Serve Somebody” was his first hit in three years.

Dylan’s 1980s records were uneven, and Michael Gray faulted him for leaving his best songs off them. The best known is “Blind Willie McTell”, recorded in 1983 with Mark Knopfler for Infidels and dropped. When bootleggers put out the Infidels outtakes, it was recognized as a match for “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Like a Rolling Stone”. Along the way he played Live Aid, toured with Tom Petty and with the Grateful Dead, formed the Traveling Wilburys with George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison and Petty, and ended the decade with Oh Mercy.

His 1985 box set Biograph had 18 unreleased tracks among its 53, an acknowledgement of the long appetite for pirated Dylan. In 1991 Columbia went further, with three CDs of outtakes, demos and live recordings that had circulated on bootlegs, under the name The Bootleg Series. It began the series that has run ever since.

After Under the Red Sky in 1990, Dylan released no new songs for seven years, only two albums of old folk and blues songs and MTV Unplugged. He wrote a fresh batch in the winter of 1996 on his farm in Minnesota and took them to Daniel Lanois in Miami. Before the album came out he was in hospital with pericarditis, and left saying, “I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon.”

Its bitter love songs and thoughts of death were hailed as a return to form. It won three Grammys, including his first Album of the Year, and began a renaissance.

The eighth volume gathers what Dylan left off his records from Oh Mercy to Modern Times, with soundtrack songs, live tracks and duets. One reviewer said it “feels like a new Bob Dylan record”. It entered the Billboard 200 at No. 6, and Rolling Stone named it the second-best album of 2008.

“Mississippi” was the first song left off Time Out of Mind. Dylan said Lanois thought it pedestrian and took it “down the Afro-polyrhythm route”, which “doesn’t work for knife-like lyrics trying to convey majesty and heroism”. He recut it for “Love and Theft” in 2001; this set has the earlier versions.

In 2001 “Things Have Changed” won Dylan an Academy Award, and “Love and Theft” came out on September 11. Chronicles: Volume One (2004) gave three chapters to his first year in New York and nearly skipped the mid-’60s. Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home followed in 2005, and in 2006 Dylan became a radio DJ on Theme Time Radio Hour. Modern Times was his first No. 1 album in the US since 1976, and Together Through Life (2009) made him, at 67, the oldest artist to debut there.

After Tempest (2012) he gave five albums’ worth of records to the Great American Songbook, beginning with ten songs Frank Sinatra had recorded, which Dylan said he was “uncovering”, not covering. On October 13, 2016, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”, the first musician to win it.

On March 26, 2020, early in the pandemic, Dylan released “Murder Most Foul”, a 17-minute song about the Kennedy assassination. It was the first song of his to top any Billboard chart. “I Contain Multitudes”, its title taken from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, followed three weeks later.

His first album of new songs since 2012 was made with his touring band, Blake Mills and Fiona Apple among the guests. It scored 95 on Metacritic, and its No. 1 in the UK made him the oldest artist to top the chart with new, original material.

In December 2020 Dylan sold his whole song catalogue to Universal Music Publishing, for more than $300 million by the New York Times’s estimate. His archive of about 6,000 notebooks, drafts, recordings and letters had already gone to Tulsa, and the Bob Dylan Center opened there on May 10, 2022. A biopic, A Complete Unknown (2024), was nominated for Oscars.

The Bootleg Series reached its 18th volume in October 2025 with Through the Open Window, eight CDs running from that Christmas Eve recording at 15 to his Carnegie Hall concert of October 1963. Dylan is still on the road: his European tour began in Oslo on October 17, 2026, and ends in London on December 8.