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It is Sunday, July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode island, one of the most anticipated events on the American folk calendar. Darkness has fallen on a gently rolling field crammed with eager music fans. 46 year old Pete Seeger, an elder statesman of this music community and a member of the festival board, now emerges from backstage. Slim with a receding hairline, he crosses the empty stage and adjusts the microphone. It's almost time for the headline act. 24 year old Bob Dylan is a rising star, but the folk community still feels a sense of ownership over him. It was Newport, after all, that helped to make his name. Even so, Seger is a little nervous right now. He's heard rumors of the afternoon's sound check murmurs that not all the instruments in the set are acoustic. Now the performer himself appears at the edge of the stage and gives him a nod. Seeger introduces Dylan and steps aside, and the audience erupts. But when he steps out of the shadows onto the dark stage, he looks nothing like the young troubadour they know and love. Gone is the traditional folk uniform of jeans and work shirt. In their place is a black leather jacket that could have come straight from London's Carnaby Street. He still wears his harmonica holder around his neck, but in his hands is an electric guitar, something the folk purists see as a symbol of capitalism. With his band behind him, Dylan begins defiantly strumming his song Maggie's Farm. The noise of the electric instruments hits the audience like a shockwave. There's some scattered applause as the audience tries to work out what's going on. Some cover their ears while others lean forward, caught up in the raw, unfiltered energy, feeling something new crackle through the summer air. Seeger, though, is unimpressed. Folk music is about the lyrics, the message, and in this cacophony he can barely hear a word. From his spot near the edge of the stage, Seeger sees his response reflected in the crowd raised eyebrows, confusion, even anger. He marches over to the soundboard. In a backstage marquee, a couple of engineers, headphones on, are hunched over the deck, fine tuning the various knobs and sliders. Seger, though, demands that the sound is adjusted to at least attempt to make this unconventional set fit in at this celebration of traditional music. When he's refused by a couple of Dylan's supporters, including his manager, Seger threatens to find an axe to do the job himself. And he's not the only one who's furious. The majority of the crowd is now booing at some volume, their dissatisfaction audible even over the loud music, as Seger storms around backstage looking for something to make good on his threat. Dylan's set is over almost as soon as it began. The star leaves the stage after just three songs. Amid a smattering of applause punctuated with more booing. Peter Yarra, another festival organizer, makes his way on stage and begs Dylan to come back on eventually. Though he's visibly shaken, the singer relents, seeing that he's now holding an acoustic guitar. The crowd cheers, and when Dylan asks if anyone has a harmonica, a few clatter on stage. Thank you very much, he says, bringing a round of laughter. At least temporarily, Dylan is friends with his audience again. Fitting a harmonica into his rack, he begins to play Mr. Tambourine Man. Pete Seeger exhales. But what he and the rest of the audience don't know is that they have witnessed a key moment in musical history. Bob Dylan has gone electric. The American singer, songwriter and musician, Bob Dylan is one of the most important recording artists on the planet. A cultural icon, his work has had a profound influence on popular music since the 1960s, first gaining fame as a folk singer with songs that addressed the subjects of the Cold War and the Civil Rights movement. He later revolutionized rock music. Berdyllon is an artist of contradictions, a magnetic performer who remains fiercely private. One of the wealthiest musicians of his generation who dresses like a vagabond. A womanizer who has penned some of the world's most tender love songs. But how did a suburban boy from Minnesota become one of the world's most famous artists? Why does he inspire such fierce devotion and myth making? And after six decades of songwriting and performing, how can we begin to characterize his legacy? I'm John Hopkins from the Noiser Podcast Network. This is a short history of Bob Dylan. On May 24, 1941, the boy who will one day become Bob Dylan is born Robert Allen Zimmerman in the city of Duluth in northern Minnesota. His is a middle class Jewish family and he is close to his grandparents who fled pogroms in modern day Ukraine to settle here. He is nearly five when he is joined by a younger brother. But shortly afterwards, his father is struck by polio, leaving him bedridden and unemployed. Michael Gray is the pioneer of Dylan studies and the author of the first critical study of Bob Dylan's work, Song and Dance the Art of Bob Dylan.
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The family moved from Duluth to Hibbing, Minnesota, which is a mining town further north. It's not a large population sort of a place, but it sprawls over a huge acreage and Dylan was lucky because he went to an exceptional high school. He went to Hibbing High School, which had been built by the mining company. It has a sort of castellated frontage. It has solid marble steps and solid brass handles. And it has the most extraordinary concert hall. There's a Canadian critic who once said that after appearing on the school stage in Hipping, every auditorium Dylan has played ever since has been just a little bit of a letdown.
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Once his father is strong enough, he starts to run a hardware store while Bob begins to learn the piano and guitar on the family radio. He listens to the crooning of Bing Crosby and Hank Williams and at night, tunes into the raw blues of Howlin wolf. Through the 1950s, Bob becomes increasingly obsessed with music. He is born at exactly the right moment to absorb the explosive arrival of the of rock and roll. Hearing Elvis Presley, he later says, feels like busting out of jail. He begins playing in bands with the most successful of these, the golden chords. He gives a notorious performance at his high school in which he bounces so wildly at the piano that the pedal breaks. Less impressed than the students, the principal cuts his microphone and pulls the curtain. As a teenager, Bob's musical talent, charm and piercing blue eyes make him a favorite with the girls who, as he later puts it, bring out the poet in him. At school, he also earns a reputation for storytelling. Though not all of the legends he invents about himself stand up to fact checking in the school yearbook. He's still going by his real name, but soon he'll choose himself a new one.
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He renamed himself very early on in his career, and he did so. There's no set answer to that. There really isn't. I mean, it's absolutely typical of Dylan that he does not give straight answers. It may be that he just liked the sound of the name from the poet Dylan Thomas, who he was certainly aware of. But on the other hand, it might be that he just liked watching American television, cowboy films and cowboy TV in the 50s. And Matt Dillon felt differently was one of the characters that everyone knew about either way.
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By 1959, when he enrolls in a liberal arts program at the University of Minnesota, he settled on the stage name that will eventually accompany him to international fame. As a student, he discovers the records of folk artists, in particular Woody Guthrie, whose songs about the struggles of working people are so very different from what's often played on the radio.
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At the Beginning of the 1960s, American radio had squeezed rock and roll off and it had been replaced by very pretty harmless little pop songs by people who were all called Johnny and Bobby and so on. You know, really awful records like Johnny Tillotson had a big hit called Sent Me the Pillow you Dream on, and there started to be a lot of pisicato strings on the records and so on. And compared to all that, Woody Guthrie sounded so real.
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Dylan begins performing covers as a solo artist and soon becomes a fixture on the local folk circuit, emulating Guthrie in his preference for jeans, work shirts and newsboys caps. He even copies his hero in the way he holds his cigarettes. In January 1961, he drops out of his studies and leaves for New York City, determined to meet his hero and seek his own fortune. Dylan arrives in New York in January 1961, just as John F. Kennedy is sworn in. But the country the new president inherits is restless and divided. Racial violence grips the south as the civil rights movement gathers force and nuclear conflict feels closer as the Cold War intensifies. Against this backdrop, Greenwich Village hums with creative energy. The folk revival is in full swing, breathing new life into traditional music and using it to address the social issues of the day. Armed with his guitar and harmonica, it's here that Dylan hones a repertoire that largely consists of covers of Woody Guthrie and other folk and blues songs. In between gigs, he tracks his idol down, locating him at a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey. Though Guthrie has been diagnosed with Huntington's disease, a neurological condition, he still gathers weekly with family and friends for dinner. Deploying his gift of the gab, Dylan talks his way into one of these evenings, leaving with a small keepsake a card on which Guthrie has scrawled, I ain't dead yet. Back in the Village, Dylan's reputation grows fast. One of his first major compositions is Song to Woody, adapting the melody from Guthrie's ballad 1913 Massacre. Dylan's slurred delivery echoes his idle sound, though Guthrie's is accentuated by his illness. But in writing his own songs, Dylan sets himself apart in a musical environment in which most big stars rely on other people's material. However, it's not all work and no play. In the summer of 1961, Dylan meets a captivating 17 year old and falls
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in love, Suzie Rutolo, who came from a very left wing Italian American family. She introduced him to radical theater in New York as well as to radical politics, and so he encountered a whole other strand of theatrics as storytelling.
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In that way, too, these influences make their way into his performances and he adopts a slightly bumbling, scruffy stage Persona reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin. Leaning into his fondness for myth making. He also regales audiences with invented stories of his itinerant youth spent traveling with carnival folk. In September 1961, he plays a gig that changes his fortunes.
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He was the support act to a group that was being reviewed by a guy called Robert Shelton, folk music critic of the New York Times. And he was so taken with Bob Dylan as the support act that he gave him a big write up in the New York Times. And that helped to get Columbia Records to sign Dillon, which was quite a coup for Dillon.
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Six months after signing with Columbia, he releases his eponymous debut album. It draws primarily on traditional songs, but sales are disappointing. Within a month though, he's back in the studio, this time recording original material. One is a song entitled the Death of Emmett till, about the 1955 racist murder of a 14 year old African American boy. And a song titled Blowin in the Wind, deriving its melody from a 19th century Anti slavery song. It is built around a series of rhetorical questions and it will change Dylan's life.
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The most important thing about Blowing in the Wind, which white America did not necessarily register at the time, was the fact that it spoke to the civil rights movement, to black Americans who had been struggling. It resonated with everyone early on when it came out Blowing in the Wind because it was enigmatic, it wasn't too explicit, it had a poetic quality that carried you through. And it was totally unlike Send me the pillow you dream of. And so many people recorded it. I mean, it's just phenomenal how many cover versions there were even at that time.
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Immediately, the song appears on Dylan's second album, the Freewheeling Bob Dylan released in May 1963, an album which marks his breakthrough to mainstream success with an image of him and Rotolo strolling through Greenwich Village on the COVID The album includes personal ballads such as Don't Think Twice, it's all right as well as politically charged songs like Masters of War and A Hard Rains Are Gonna Fall, which critique the Cold War and Cuban Missile crisis. The resulting recognition leads to a slot at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode island and It's Here. But he is joined on stage by renowned singer and activist Joan Baez. With flowing dark hair and a voice Dylan describes as too pretty, Baez often performs barefoot, embodying the free spirited ethos of the movement. Though their initial connection was all about the music, by now they are romantically involved. Though Rotolo remains on the scene for A while longer. When he's in love, Dylan's girlfriends find him magnetic and attentive, but he guards his independence closely and is capable of being distant and cutting. This tension of wanting devotion without feeling that he's being owned runs through both his romances and his songs. Soon after they appear together at Newport, Baez invites him to join her on tour.
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In terms of Joan Byers, it was firstly and in the end, more importantly a public relationship, because it was a professional relationship. Joan Byers was first of all important to Dylan because she introduced him as a guest artist while she was touring, and that introduced him to a wider, bigger crowd of people, bigger audiences, than he had achieved by himself.
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The striking pair take to the stage to sing at a Washington protest in August 1963, where more than 200,000 people have gathered at the Lincoln Memorial demanding racial equality, economic justice and an end to segregation. Though they're certainly a big draw, the event is best known for Martin Luther King Jr's electrifying I have a Dream speech. Yet while the singer sympathizes with the causes of the moment, he rarely marches in the way Baez does. For Dylan, the music always comes first. That summer, his second album sells up to 10,000 copies a week. The man Baez affectionately calls her little vagabond is fast becoming a star in his own right. In October 1963, plans are afoot for a solo concert at New York's prestigious Carnegie Hall. The show sells out, but behind the scenes, trouble is brewing. Dylan has been weaving elaborate stories for a Newsweek profile, playing up the Persona of the traveling bard he's invented for himself and suggesting he is estranged from his family. The illusion collapses when his proud parents attend the concert and speak openly to a reporter. The resulting article exposes the gap between Dylan's constructed troubadour image and his conventional middle class roots. Seething and not a little humiliated, Dylan will be more careful with reporters in the future.
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He's certainly prettily and he doesn't want someone to come up to him and tell him how wonderful he is. You know, he doesn't do small talk. You can see this in a public forum as well in the way that he handles the press. Other people, even Elvis Presley, the great smoldering Teddy boy rebel of the 1950s, handling the press. It would be yes, sir and no mum, who was a polite Southern boy. And Dylan was the first one who just didn't answer questions properly in that way. He's been his own person since, certainly very much in every way.
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His resulting Suspicion of the press certainly doesn't make him better behaved, however. Weeks after Kennedy's assassination, he accepts the Tom Paine Award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, a prize given to a public figure for commitment to social justice. After drinking too much at the cocktail reception, Dylan gives a speech that questions the purpose of the committee, mocks its members, and even suggests a sense of fraternity with Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. This reaffirmation of his refusal to be anyone's spokesperson sees him booed off the stage. Yet his third album, released in 1964, contains some of his most enduring protest songs, including the title track, the Times They Are a Changin, a rallying cry for social transformation. From this point, Dylan has to contend with life in the limelight. Besieged in his dressing room after one packed LA concert, he considers escaping through a bathroom window. The frenzy continues outside the venue, where two young women are discovered hiding in his car.
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He was very young. The last time he was able to just mess around in America was 1964, 60 years ago. And since then he said things like, I can look through a window of a bar room somewhere and everything just looks how it is, and I know that if I walk in, the whole atmosphere will have changed.
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His international stature growing, he now plays gigs across Europe and despite the rumors of further affairs, his complicated relationship with Baez continues. Though Rotolo eventually decides she has had enough. Dylan's fourth studio album, Another side of Bob Dylan, is recorded in a single evening on June 9, 1964. Perhaps reflecting his growing rejection of the role of political spokesperson, the record is more introspective, with songs such as It Ain't Me Babe exploring the complexities of romantic relationships. This shift away from traditional folk themes comes with a change of wardrobe as he jettisons the jeans and work shirts of his early career in favor of sharp, tailored jackets and dark sunglasses. It's a time of change in Dylan's love life too. When he meets the model Sarah Lowndes in 1964, she is already married. Though the relationship is unraveling, and while Dylan himself is still involved with Joan Byers, her busy touring schedule means she remains oblivious to the new relationship. Even when Dylan starts living with Sarah and her three year old daughter at a New York hotel for his next album, he chooses to work for the first time with a full, electrically amplified band. There are no rehearsals, no detailed plans. He just starts strumming and the other musicians leap in. Titled Bringing It All Back Home, it aims to reclaim rock n roll for America since the genre's Shift to the UK with bands like the Beatles. Songs like Subterranean Homesick Blues bring a new electric energy, while side two offers acoustic numbers including Mr. Tambourine Man. But overall it's not an album for folk purists.
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Oh, the purity, the holiness of folk music. He was the person who emerged from the folk scene with these great protest songs, with these great critiques of American capitalism and America's war machine and all the rest of it. And for him to go electric, it was like him selling out to commerce. It was a sort of established received wisdom at the time, you know, that if he was picking up an electric guitar and singing stuff that sounded like rock and roll, he had sold out,
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reaching number six in the charts. The album is his most successful yet. In the spring of 1965, Dylan embarks on a triumphant UK solo tour. As well as Joan Baers, he's accompanied by a film crew who shoot a behind the scenes documentary called Don't Look Back. The footage shows Dylan running rings around British journalists and holding court with his entourage at the Savoy Hotel, while a forlorn looking Baez is increasingly ignored. Eventually she calls it a day and goes home. Flush with his new commercial success, Dylan buys a rambling house in the hills above Woodstock, New York, where he plans to live with Sarah and the child they're soon to welcome. Meanwhile, he works at crafting what will become one of his most famous songs. Like A Rolling Stone.
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Well, first of all, it's very long. American radio demanded that songs not be more than two and a half to three minutes. But the Like a Rolling Stone was six minutes and more. But also it was a very vituperative example of, of the dramatic monologue that is a song which is clearly addressed to one other person, but that other person is never allowed to get a word in anyways. But another thing about the song was that structurally and lyrically it was just very direct and biting. Plus it starts with an absolutely marvellous snare drum bang. It's really kicking off in every sense.
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Bruce Springsteen, a teenager in New Jersey, is bowled over by the song, later saying that the opening snare sounded like somebody had kicked open the door to your mind. Not long after the release of Like a rolling stone in July 1965, Dylan performs the song at the Newport Folk Festival backed by an electric band, sending shockwaves through the folk community. In November, he quietly marries Sarah and adopts her oldest daughter Maria, before the couple are joined by their baby, Jesse Dylan the following January. But even that's not enough to keep Dylan from the studio, or from heading out to perform in Europe and Australia just months later. Around this time, friends notice that he's looking strung out and thin. Though he always maintains he can take or leave drugs, when it comes to marijuana, there often seems to be more taking than leaving. This tour is perhaps most famous for a moment at the Manchester show in May, disgruntled by the electric nature of the set between songs, an audience member heckles Dylan by shouting, judas. Dylan fires back, I don't believe you. You're a liar. Before turning to the band and telling them to play loud, launching into a ferocious rendition of Like a Rolling Stone. Before long, Dylan is physically and emotionally exhausted. Burned out from releasing seven albums in four years and the associated relentless touring schedule, he retreats to his home in Woodstock, N.Y. one day in the middle of summer, he attempts to blow away the cobwebs on the open road. It is the morning of July 29, 1966. With the remote tree lined road unspooling in front of him like a dark ribbon, Bob Dylan rides low over the handlebars of his Triumph Tiger motorcycle. Sarah's car follows not far behind. But even so, this feels like a rare moment of solitude. There is no crowd, no flashing cameras, no one waiting to ambush him. Just the freedom of the road and the glimpses of sky breaking through the canopy. The only sounds are the steady thrum of the engine and the rush of wind tearing past his ears. Dylan's hair lifts and falls with the rush of the air flying by. When he glances into the mirror, his face is pale and pinched. There are shadows beneath his eyes, deepened by weeks of travel and too many sleepless nights. Gripping the handlebars, his long fingers are stained with nicotine. The engine's pitch shifts, working harder now as the road begins to climb. The asphalt is uneven here, cracked and littered with loose grit. Heat rises off the surface in faint ripples. Then, through a sudden break in the trees, the morning sun bursts through. For a split second, Dillon is blinded by the glare and he squeezes the brake in response, the rear wheel locks and the Triumph shudders violently, Handlebars twisting in his hands, the bike fishtails rubber screaming against asphalt. The ground rushes up to meet him as the motorcycle slides out from under his legs. In this single violent moment, the pace of his life finally catches up with him. Precisely what happens when Dylan falls off? His motorcycle remains shrouded in mystery. Some report he is rendered unconscious with a broken neck, others that he emerges relatively unscathed. Dylan himself claims he suffers several broken vertebrae Whatever the truth, after the accident he withdraws somewhat from public life, retreating to a more private existence with his wife and young family. During the late 60s, he and Sarah have three more children, Anna, Samuel and Jacob. For Dylan, it is a necessary period of rest and respite.
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Well, I think he'd have killed himself otherwise. He's obviously very stoned a good deal of the time. What's remarkable is that, you know, he can go on stage and do this recitation, if you like, of these very long, complex songs. On the one hand very stoned. On the other hand he is WordPress perfect without ever a falter of any kind in every single noise and pause that he creates in all that time on stage is exactly what he wants done. But you know, there's a limit to living that kind of self abusive life. And yeah, I think he needed to change.
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It's during this period that he turns to making relaxed, informal music at home, jamming with his bandmates, experimenting with melodies and improvising nonsensical lyrics to old favorites characterized by their intimate, earthy sound. The resulting recordings are collected together in a series called the Basement Tapes. Circulating initially in the burgeoning bootleg market, they become prized by collectors and are officially released as an album in 1975. Returning to the studio in 1967, Dylan now leans into a gentler, more country influenced sound to produce John Wesley Harding. The album includes all along the Watchtower, a song that gains wider fame after Jimi Hendrix covers it the next year. Yet even as he attempts to withdraw from public life, he is not left alone. Obsessive fans continue to pursue him, such as AJ Weberman, a self styled Dylanologist who is notorious for rifling through the stars garbage. A quiet life proves elusive and Dylan finds he can't step out of the limelight forever. For a long time. His output is uneven and he remains reclusive. 1974, though, sees him embark on his first major tour in more than seven years. But on the road he fails to remain faithful to his wife and a rift develops between the pair. It is the collapse of his marriage, many say, that inspires one of his greatest albums, Blood on the Tracks, a searingly personal collection of songs recorded and released when he is 33. It is seen as a return to form.
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He'd been influenced by Joni Mitchell's album Blue. Tangled Up In Blue is one of the songs on Blood on the Tracks, and that may be one of the playful interpretations of the title of that song. This person who had been so deeply and thoroughly associated with the 1960s, an era that was now over, Blood on the Tracks proved that he was an artist for the future and not just a hippie from the 60s. It offered the promise that you could go on having a substantial career, still breaking boundaries and so on right through. If you were Bob Dylan and you could do that in 1975, then everyone could have a longer career than they assumed was possible.
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Over the next year, he undertakes a carnival like touring project called the Rolling Thunder Revue with a rotating cast of collaborators, including the musicians Scarlett Rivera, Ramblin, Jack Elliott and Joni Mitchell, and the poet Allen Ginsberg. Joan Byers rejoins Dylan on stage around the same time that she releases her own take on her romance with him. Her song Diamonds and Rust evokes an enigmatic former lover with eyes bluer than Robin's eggs and becomes one of her greatest successes. Alongside Sarah Dillon, she also appears in his experimental film Ronaldo and Clara, which blends concert footage with surreal dramatizations of his life and relationships. But as well as mining his personal life for material, he also returns to political music. After reading the autobiography of Reuben Carter, an African American boxer who many believe to have been wrongly convicted of murder, Dylan visits him in prison in New Jersey. Moved by his story, Dylan not only co writes a song about him entitled Hurricane, but also drums up public support with benefit performances. In spite of his efforts, Carter remains in prison until 1985, when his convictions are finally set aside. The album that opens with Hurricane closes with a song called Sarah, a tribute to Dylan's wife that one critic calls a fevered cry of loss, posing a sincere devotion. But despite inspiring some of Dylan's most beautiful songs, Sarah is struggling. Being the wife of a mercurial, womanizing rock icon is not easy. In 1977, she files for divorce, taking primary custody of their children, though the kids spend holidays with their father, who remains a loving and affectionate parent. It is said that Sarah's ongoing silence about her time with Dylan is a condition of the settlement. Reeling from the split and further disappointment when Ronaldo and Clara is badly received, Dylan embarks on a long world tour. During one date in San Diego, a fan tosses a silver cross onto the stage and Dylan picks it up and begins to wear it. Shortly after, he experiences a moment of spiritual transformation and converts to Christianity. A pair of explicitly Christian albums follow. In the early 1980s, Dylan also stops playing some of his former hits.
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It was embarrassing to some of us because it seemed to suggest that he had done a complete volte face on Radicalism. The person who had sung Don't Follow Leaders, Watch the Parking Meters was now singing, there's only one authority, that's the authority on high. But having said all that, I have to say that he was deeply familiar with the Bible. Always, always had been. And, you know, it's perhaps not very noticeably, but it's there in early psalms. Times there are changing. I mean, it's full of biblical stuff about the last one now will later be first. First one now will later be last, all those phrases. And so when Dylan found Jesus, he said, you know, I'd always been interested in the Bible as literature. It never occurred to me to take it as belief. And so when he did, it gave him, you know, the scope to embellish and develop his own deep knowledge of biblical text into song. And so some of that work has remained well worth having.
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His 1983 album, Infidels, is seen as more successful. But overall, the 1980s is not a good period for him.
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It was a terrible decade. But for Dylan, I think, you know, he was older, he had the kind of weariness that descends on us in middle age, and I think that he probably used far too much alcohol as a personal habit in his life.
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Despite losing his way as an artist, Dylan is firmly established as a global megastar. Invited by Irish musician Bob Geldof, he contributes to the charity single We Are the World with artists including Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder. The record spends four weeks at number one, and in July 1985, Dylan appears at the Philadelphia edition of Live Aid, performing with Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. The following year, Carolyn Dennis, one of Dylan's backing singers, gives birth to his sixth child. In the summer of 1986, she and Dylan wed in Los Angeles, but the contract is filed with the LA county court registrar as a confidential marriage. Though Dylan is no more faithful to his new secret wife than he was to Sarah, he is a better father than husband and is as dedicated to his youngest daughter, Desiree, as he is to his other five children. Towards the end of the 80s, Dylan begins what fans call his Never Ending Tour. Though not its official title, it sees the restless star commit to a life on the road like the wandering folk singers of old. It casts Dylan in one of the few roles he is happy in, that of the modern troubadour. By 1992, after just six years, his second marriage is over. Dylan returns to his roots with a pair of stripped back albums consisting of folk covers. And although he performs at events marking the inauguration of the new president, Bill Clinton the following year, his public role feels more that of a heritage figure rather than a contemporary force. In the mid-1990s, Dylan gives up drinking and his creativity revives. The result is his first album of original material in seven years. Time out of Mind will contain some of the most powerful songs of his later career. Among them are the much covered make youe Feel My Love and Not Dark. Yet the latter, in its exploration of mortality, will come to be seen as strangely prophetic. Before the album is released in May 1997, Dylan Falls seriously ill with pericarditis, an inflammation of the sac around the heart. The news of the potentially fatal condition flies around the world. I really thought I'd be seeing Elvis soon, says Dylan. Once he's out of the woods, the release of Time out of Mind sees a full scale renaissance of a different sort. The album wins three Grammy Awards, including Album of the year, and Dylan's artistic revival gathers momentum. In 2001, he wins an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Things Have Changed, a song written for the film Wonder Boys. And even in his late 60s, Dylan remains on the road, a traveling musician in a changing world. But despite the accolades and the global fame, there are still just occasionally, moments of anonymity. It is July 23, 2009, a rainy afternoon in Long Branch, a quiet beach town in New Jersey. 24 year old police officer Christy Bubble is at her desk filing reports and sipping lukewarm coffee when the radio crackles with a message from Dispatch. A concerned resident has called to report a scruffy old man wandering along her street, peering into the windows of an empty house. Christy sighs, picks up her car keys and heads out into the rain. As she drives through the drizzle, she spots him, a slight, hunched figure with a hood pulled over his head. Getting closer, she sees the old man is wearing two raincoats layered over each other, as well as sweatpants and black boots that are sinking into the grass. She pulls up nearby and steps out of the car, approaching cautiously before introducing herself and asking his name. The man pauses, then lifts his gaze to her. His face is craggy, with blue eyes so piercing they are almost unnerving. In a voice that sounds roughened by years of hard living, he says he is Bob Dylan. Christie blinks, unconvinced. She's seen pictures of Bob Dylan, of course, but this scruffy, rain soaked man doesn't match any image she remembers. Perhaps noticing her uncertainty, he explains that he is in New Jersey to play a show in nearby Lakewood. For all the strangeness of the encounter. There seems to be nothing threatening about the man. If anything, he has a quiet, disarming charm. Christie stops a passerby and asks him for a second opinion. Does this gentleman look like Bob Dylan? The young man gives him the once over, then shakes his head and moves off as confused as the officer. Just to be absolutely certain, she asks the stranger to repeat his name one last time. He smiles as if privately amused by something. He says that he was actually born Robert Zimmerman. Christie sighs, then gestures to her patrol car and asks him to come with her. He lifts a hand in silent ascent and climbs into the backseat. When Christie asks where he's staying, he tells her he's at the hotel by the sea. She knows the one and pulls away from the curb, the passenger chatting amiably as they drive. Asked where he's from, he says he has houses all over the world, adding casually that he'd been thinking of buying the empty place he'd been peering into. Christy glances at him in the rearview mirror, wondering how much of this can be true, if any, considering that he looks for all the world like he's homeless. But as she slows to a stop outside the hotel, she sees the string of tour buses and doubt begins to creep in. The moment she pulls up, an officious looking man strides over and opens the car door. Her blue eyed passenger climbs out and thanks her before he's hustled away by the man who turns out to be his manager. Startled, Christy almost forgets herself before asking the manager for identification. After a few minutes, he returns holding a passport, which proves to her that despite her instincts and all evidence to the contrary, the man she just met was indeed not destitute, but a global megastar. As she returns to the car and starts to drive away, she realizes she's going to have a story to tell back at the station. Pepsi Prebiotic Cola in original and cherry vanilla that Pepsi taste you love with no artificial sweeteners and 3 grams of prebiotic fiber. Pepsi Prebiotic Cola Unbelievably Pepsi now at McDonald's. A McDouble is $2.50, so you can
- [46:57]
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Speculation about the New Jersey incident suggests Dylan was searching for Bruce Springsteen's former home, where Born to Run was written, as well as painting and drawing. Investigating the lives of rock musicians is one of the star's hobbies. Dylan's late career ascent continues unabated. In 2012, he received the highest civilian honor in the United States, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At a White House ceremony, he is awarded the medal by President Barack Obama, who says there is not a bigger giant in the history of American music. Then, in 2016, an announcement from Sweden surprises the world. Dylan has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for creating new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition. But even some of Dylan's fans have mixed feelings about the award.
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One of the great things about the Nobel Prize is that it's financially very, very big and therefore would be so life changing and so affirmative for someone who was just a freelance writer, effectively. And Bob Dylan, he's not just a writer, he's not just literature. He's music and he's theatre. And so it seems an uncomfortable fit to give him the Nobel Prize for Literature. I mean, you know, having thought that in theory he shouldn't get it, I was thrilled when he got it. But it's controversial because, you know, not everyone in literature departments of American or British universities thinks that he's all that good, let alone one of the greats.
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Yet for many, Dylan is indeed one of the greats. One of the first major artists to write his own material. He laid the foundations for the modern singer songwriter. Over the course of his career, he has created more than 600 songs and sold in excess of 125 million records worldwide. But more importantly, his lyrics brought poetic ambition, social commentary and literary depth to rock music.
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C
He's like no other singer in that he puts so much emphasis on variety of expression and so much emphasis on immediacy of communication. There's something about his voice that abolishes the gulf between the performer and the audience. You listen to one of his early solo recordings, it's just straight through from his mouth to your ear, as it were. And he has an extraordinary ability to vocalize in such a way that in a song where he's repeating a title line, for example, at the end of each verse, he never repeats it in exactly the same way. Most people have one voice, and Bob Dylan is more like a ventriloquist. He has any number of voices.
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Dylan has appeared or been represented on screen numerous times, from documentaries directed by Martin Scorsese to the recent biopic A Complete Unknown, which stars Timothee Chalamet as the young Dylan. In 2007's I'm Not There, the star was played by six actors, including Cate Blanchett, a cinematic nod to the many sides of his public Persona. Ever the shapeshifter, Dylan's constant reinvention from protest singer to electric rock pioneer and beyond has influenced generations of artists and permanently expanded the possibilities of popular song. To this day, well into his ninth decade, he continues to tour with the same restless momentum and commitment to his art that has defined his long career. Next time on Short History of We'll bring you a Short History of Sir Francis Drake.
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I think people are still so interested in Francis Drake today because of his complexity, I think is one of them because there are different aspects to his story that people can pull out depending on the point that they're trying to to make about England as a nation.
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That's Next time. You can listen to the next two episodes of Short History of Right now without waiting and without adverts by subscribing to Noiser Plus. Just hit the link in the episode description or head to www.noiser.comsubscriptions to unlock more episodes today.