Robert Allen Zimmerman was born on the 24th of May, 1941 in Minnesota, US. In 1959 he started performing folk music in the coffee houses of Minneapolis, and began introducing himself as Bob Dylan. The rest, they say, is history.
Five decades on, there’s still never been another artist that so many have written and speculated about to no avail whatsoever. Bob Dylan is still an enigma in an age where artifice and construct pretty much exists to be torn down and exposed. This is still the case even after he began publishing his own memoirs, and that’s saying something.
All we know for sure about one of the most influential and respected recording artists is that he earned that title with each and every one of his 35 studio albums, from 1962’s self-titled debut, to his most recent effort 2012’s “Tempest”.
It’s pretty much pointless to try and sum up Dylan’s career unless you’ve been given a books amount of space to do so. His countless amounts of reinventions and the sheer musical diversity on display give even the chameleonic likes of Bowie and Madonna a run for their money.
Every single incarnation has given the world something entirely unique, from the serious troubadour of 1964’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’!” through the rock and roll Judas of “Highway 61 Revisited”, all the way up to his Gospel period heralded by 1979’s “Slow Train Coming”, or more recently, the thunderous urban Blues of 2009’s “Together Through Life”.
This is a man whose influence on music and pop culture in general is up there with his old buddies The Beatles (who, legend has it, Dylan introduced to weed on the set of the film “Help!”). So the truth of the matter is that even if you aren’t a fan of his songs, Bob Dylan is still more deserving of your respect than practically any other solo artists in music history.
Neal Francis
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