Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan

American, b. 1941

Although internationally known as a singer-songwriter, Bob Dylan is also an author, film director, actor, disc jockey and visual artist. One of the most influential and, at times, controversial figures in the music of the past five decades, he has sold over 110 million records around the world and since 1988 has played around 100 live shows a year in the ‘Never Ending Tour’.

Born into a close-knit Jewish community in Duluth, Minnesota, on 24 May 1941, Dylan was originally named Robert Allen Zimmerman. The family relocated to Hibbing when his father contracted polio, and he spent the remainder of his childhood there. Dylan taught himself piano and guitar and played in several bands; by the time he went to the University of Minnesota in 1959 he was hoping ‘to join Little Richard’. Dropping out of college after a year, he moved to New York in 1961, began to play at various clubs and signed up with Columbia Records. The following year he produced his first album and officially changed his name to Bob Dylan. After his initial interest in rock ‘n’ roll, his focus fell onto folk and protest music; he was heavily influenced by Woody Guthrie.

Many of Dylan’s early songs were made famous by other artists, such as Joan Baez, who promoted him and was his lover in the early sixties. In 1965 Dylan married Sarah Lowndes, with whom he would have four children; he also adopted her daughter from her first marriage. Divorced in 1977, he was married to Carolyn Dennis from 1986 to 1992 and had a daughter with her. He has had a number of other intimate relationships. In the late 1970s Dylan converted to evangelical Christianity, returning to Judaism in the 1980s and subsequently distancing himself from organised religion.

From his performances in Greenwich Village coffee houses, festivals and rallies in the early 1960s to his stadium rock concerts of the 1970s and subsequent worldwide tours, Dylan has built his musical reputation on the strength of live appearances. He has appeared alongside such major artists as George Harrison, the Grateful Dead, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen. Over five decades he has released more than 50 albums and written in excess of 500 songs, some of the most famous being ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’ and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. His songs have been covered more than 3,000 times by artists as diverse as Sonny and Cher, Duke Ellington, Jimi Hendrix, Keith Jarrett, Guns N’ Roses, Stevie Wonder, Rod Stewart, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bob Marley, Pearl Jam and Neil Young.

Dylan’s music has been recognised and honoured with many awards. He received an honorary doctorate of music from Princeton University, New Jersey, in 1970 and another from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, in 2004. In addition to winning 11 Grammy Awards in rock, folk and general categories, he has achieved six entries in the Grammy Hall of Fame, which honours recordings of ‘qualitative or historical significance’ at least 25 years old. His song ‘Things Have Changed’ from the film Wonder Boys (2000) won him an Academy Award in 2001 and his album Together Through Life (2009) entered the charts at number one in America and Britain, reaching the top position in a total of 15 countries.

The publication of Dylan’s experimental novel, Tarantula, written in stream-of-consciousness style in the mid 1960s, was planned for 1966 but delayed by a serious motorcycle accident until 1971. His autobiographical Chronicles: Volume One (2004) became an international bestseller. Dylan has both directed and acted in a number of films, making his first appearance in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) and more recently co-writing and starring in Masked and Anonymous (2003).

Dylan dates the origins of his work as a visual artist to the early 1960s. In Chronicles he writes:

‘What would I draw? Well, I guess I would start with whatever was at hand. I sat at the table, took out a pencil and paper and drew the typewriter, a crucifix, a rose, pencils, knives and pins, empty cigarette boxes. I'd lose track of time completely.... Not that I thought I was any great drawer, but I did feel like I was putting an orderliness to the chaos around.’

A few drawings reached the public gaze on such album covers as Music from Big Pink (1968). Then in 1974 Dylan spent two seminal months studying art with Norman Raeben, son of Sholem Aleichem.[1] He was attracted to the teacher’s philosophy and his ability to describe truth, love and beauty. Later, Dylan ascribed responsibility to Raeben for changing both his outlook and his technique: ‘He put my mind and my hand and my eye together, in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt.’[2] A book of 92 drawings titled Drawn Blank followed in 1994, and exhibitions of reworked versions of these images were mounted in Germany in 2007 and the following year at the Halcyon Gallery in London.

The original Drawn Blank sketches date from 1989 to 1992. Dylan explains that he drew them as a way of relaxing and refocusing his mind while touring America, Europe and Asia. When approached by a gallery wanting to exhibit the works, he returned to the images and reworked them. Digitally enlarging the drawings, he transferred scans onto deckle-edged paper and in eight months during 2007 created 320 paintings in watercolour and gouache. A single picture would emerge as a set, coloured sometimes delicately, sometimes brilliantly, with different elements emphasised. ‘He riffs with color across the same simple black-and-white sketches the way he plays songs in concert, sometimes making subtle changes, other times brutally overhauling them’, comments Marisha Pessl.[3] ‘His brush strokes are like his voice: straightforward, rough, occasionally fragile, but always intent on illustrating the treads of human experience.’

In 2008, Dylan received a Special Citation Pulitzer Prize ‘for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power’. A major exhibition of his visual art, including the première of his ‘Brazil Series’, is being presented by the National Gallery of Art, Copenhagen, in 2010.