Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan (Duluth, Minnesota, May 24, 1941), registered at birth as Robert Allen Zimmerman, is an American musician, songwriter, singer, and poet., widely regarded as one of the most prolific and influential figures in popular music of the 20th century and turn of the XXI. In 2016 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s, when he rose to prominence as a folk singer-songwriter with compositions like "Blowin' in the Wind" and "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" with significant content of social protest. After leaving folk music behind, Dylan changed popular music in 1965 with the album Bringing It All Back Home and later Highway 61 Revisited, one of the most influential musical works of the XX century, in which he combined rock music with complex and literary compositions influenced by surreal imagery. His first single, "Like a Rolling Stone", was chosen as the best song of all time by magazine >Rolling Stone and reached number two on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart.

After Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan consolidated his interest in rock and blues with works like Blonde on Blonde and explored new musical registers such as country rock in Nashville Skyline and Self Portrait. Throughout the 1970s, after suffering a motorcycle accident in 1966 and not touring for eight years, he achieved further commercial success with records such as Planet Waves, Blood on the Tracks and Desire, number ones in his native country. At the end of the decade, he opened a new musical stage with the publication of Slow Train Coming, with a deep religious theme. Although the religious background and his interest in the Bible remained throughout the years, after Infidels he began to record albums with a greater weight of secular themes such as Knocked Out Loaded and Down in the Groove, which fared worse critically and commercially.

Dylan's musical career resurfaced in the late 1980s with the release of Oh Mercy, produced by Daniel Lanois described by the press as the "return to musical formality", and with the formation of The Traveling Wilburys with George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne. After a brief return to folk in the early 1990s, on works like Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, Dylan reteamed with Lanois on Time Out of Mind, an album with a "hazy, ominous sound" that won the Grammy for Album of the Year at the 40th Grammy Awards. From Time Out of Mind, released in 1997, their most recent albums —"Love and Theft", Modern Times and Together Through Life—have garnered endorsement from the music press and the public.

Dylan's lyrics incorporate a variety of social, political, philosophical, and literary themes that challenged existing mainstream pop music and generally appealed to the emerging counterculture of the time. Influenced by Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, and Hank Williams, Dylan expanded and personalized musical genres over a five-decade musical career, exploring the American musical tradition with folk, blues, country, gospel, rock and roll and rockabilly, as well as English, Scottish and Irish folk music, including >jazz and swing. Dylan plays guitar, harmonica and keyboards, and backed by a changing lineup of musicians, has toured annually since the late 1990s. 1980, in what is known as the Never Ending Tour —in Spanish: The interminable tour—.

Throughout his career, Dylan has been recognized and honored for his compositions, performances and recordings. His records have earned him several Grammys, Golden Globes, and Academy Awards, and his name is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the Nashville Hall of Fame. Composers' Fame. In January 1990, he was invested as a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by French Minister of Culture Jack Lang. In 1999, he was included in Time magazine's list of the hundred most influential people of the XX century. In 2000, he won the Royal Swedish Academy of Music's Polar Music Prize, and in 2004 he was ranked second on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 greatest artists of all time. i>, after The Beatles. On June 13, 2007, he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts, and a year later he received an honorary recognition from the Pulitzer Prize for his "profound impact on popular music and in North American culture, marked by his lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power». In this context, various authors and academics have nominated Dylan for the Nobel Prize in Literature since 1996. In May 2012, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.

On October 13, 2016, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature by the Swedish Academy for "creating a new poetic expression within the great American song tradition".

Biography

Early years and musical beginnings (1941-1959)

Hibbing Home (Minesota) where Dylan spent most of his childhood.

Robert Allen Zimmerman (Hebrew, רוברט אלן צימרמאן‎, Shabtai Zisl ben Avraham) was born in the hospital St. Mary of Duluth, Minnesota, on May 24, 1941 and was raised in the Mesabi Iron Hills in Hibbing, west of Lake Superior. Her paternal grandparents, Zigman and Anna Zimmerman, immigrated from Odessa—present-day Ukraine. — to the United States because of an anti-Semitic pogrom in 1905. On the other hand, his maternal grandparents, Benjamin and Lybba Edelstein, were Lithuanian Jews who came to America in 1902. In his autobiography Chronicles: Volume One , Dylan wrote that his maternal grandmother's surname was Kyrgyz and that his family hailed from Kağızman, in the Eastern Anatolia region of eastern Turkey.

His parents, Abram Zimmerman and Beatrice "Beatty" Stone, were part of a small Jewish community. Robert Zimmerman lived in Duluth until he was six years old, when his father contracted polio and his family returned to his mother's hometown of Hibbing, where he spent the rest of his childhood. Robert spent much of his youth listening to the radio, first with blues and country stations from Shreveport, Louisiana, and later with rock and roll stations. Hibbing's superior, he formed several bands such as The Shadow Blasters, of short duration, or The Golden Chords, where he performed covers of songs by Little Richard and Elvis Presley. With The Golden Chords, their interpretation of the Danny & The Juniors "Rock and Roll is Here to Stay" at the school talent show was so loud that the principal was forced to turn off his microphone. In 1959, Robert wrote as his top ambition in the school yearbook: " Join Little Richard". The same year, using the pseudonym Elston Gunn, he accompanied Bobby Vee playing piano and improvising handclaps for two concerts.

Dylan has evoked that time in these terms: “The town I grew up in was completely removed from the center of culture. It was outside the margins of the moment. You had the whole town to roam. There were simply forests, sky, rivers and streams, winter, summer, spring and fall. The culture was fundamentally based on circuses and carnivals, preachers and pilots, shows for lumberjacks and comedians, music bands and exceptional radio programs.

Zimmerman moved to Minneapolis in September 1959 to enroll at the University of Minnesota. During the time, his initial interest in rock and roll gave way to a closer approach to American folk. In 1985, Dylan explained his attraction to folk music: "The thing about rock and roll is that it wasn't enough for me anyway... There were really good catchphrases and a contagious rhythm, but the songs were not serious or did not reflect life in a realistic way. I knew when I got into folk music, it was a more serious thing. The songs were full of sadness, triumph, faith in the supernatural, and had deeper feelings." While in Minneapolis, he began playing at the Ten O'Clock Scholar, a coffee shop a few blocks from campus. college, and became active in the local Dinkytown folk music circuit.

During his Dinkytown days, Zimmerman began changing his name. According to biographer Robert Shelton, he entrusted his new name to his then-girlfriend, Echo Helstrom, whom he said he had found "a great name, Bob Dillon". Shelton surmised that Dillon's name came from two sources: from Matt Dillon, from the television series Gunsmoke, and from the Dillons, one of Hibbing's leading families. When Shelton began writing his biography in the mid-1960s, Dylan told him, "Say in your book that I didn't take my name from Dylan Thomas. Dylan Thomas' poetry is for people who aren't really satisfied in bed, for people who dig into masculine romance." Shelton added that it was only when he arrived in New York in 1961 that Zimmerman began to spell his last name as "Dylan," by which time he was already familiar with the work of poet Dylan Thomas.

However, Dylan himself acknowledged in Chronicles, Volume One that he had been influenced by Dylan Thomas when it came to changing his stage name: «I had seen some poems by Dylan Thomas. Dylan and Allyn's pronunciation was similar. Robert Dylan. Robert Allyn. The letter D was stronger. However, the name Robert Dylan was not as attractive as Robert Allyn. People had always called me Robert or Bobby, but Bobby Dylan seemed corny to me, and then there was Bobby Darin, Bobby Vee, Bobby Rydell, Bobby Neely and many other Bobbies. The first time I was asked my name in Saint Paul, I instinctively and automatically blurted out: Bob Dylan."

1960s

Move to New York and contract with Columbia (1960-1962)

Woody Guthrie, whom Dylan visited in January 1961 in New York.

Zimmerman dropped out of the University of Minnesota in May 1960, at the end of his freshman year. In January 1961, he traveled to New York in the hope of seeing Woody Guthrie, who was seriously ill with Huntington's disease at Greystone Park Mental Hospital. Guthrie had been a revelation to Dylan and was his greatest influence. in his first musical stage. Describing the impact Guthrie had on him, Dylan wrote: "The songs themselves had the endless sweep of humanity... [He] was the true voice of the American spirit. I told myself that he was going to be Guthrie's greatest disciple." In addition to visiting Guthrie in the hospital, Dylan struck up a friendship with his acolyte Ramblin & # 39; Jack Elliott, who had adapted much of Guthrie's repertoire and to whom Dylan paid tribute in the book Chronicles: Volume One.

From February 1961, Dylan began playing at various clubs in Greenwich Village, where he played material by artists from the folk scene such as Dave Van Ronk, Fred Neil, Odetta, the New Lost City Ramblers, and The Clancy Brothers. In September, began to gain some public recognition when Robert Shelton reviewed a concert at Gerde's Folk City in The New York Times. The same month, he played harmonica for Carolyn Hester during the recording of her third album, at which point he coincided with producer John H. Hammond.

A month later, Hammond signed Dylan to Columbia Records. In March 1962 he released Bob Dylan , his debut album with Columbia, made up of traditional folk, blues and gospel material with two of his own compositions, "Song to Woody" and «Talking & # 39; New York". The album met with little commercial success, with 5,000 copies sold in its first year. Within Columbia, Dylan began to be labeled "Hammond's nonsense" and suggested terminating his contract, but Hammond defended him and at the same time he found a good advocate in Johnny Cash, another musician on the label and a Dylan supporter. During his work with Columbia, Dylan also recorded several songs under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt for Broadside Magazine, a folk magazine and record label. He also used the pseudonyms Bob Landy to play piano on The Blues Project, an anthology released by Elektra Records in 1964, and Tedham Porterhouse to play the piano. harmonica on a Ramblin' Jack Elliott.

In August 1962, he took two important steps in his musical career. He changed his legal name to Bob Dylan and signed a management contract with Albert Grossman. Grossman was Dylan's manager until 1970 and was characterized by his sometimes confrontational personality and protective loyalty to his main client. Dylan he commented of Grossman: "He was sort of like a Colonel Tom Parker figure...you could smell him when he was coming." Tensions between Grossman and Hammond forced the latter to leave the recording of Dylan's second album, who was replaced by Tom Wilson.

Bob Dylan with Joan Baez on the Civil Rights march in Washington, D.C. in 1963.

In December 1962, Dylan traveled to the United Kingdom for the first time, where he was invited by director Philip Saville to appear in The Madhouse on Castle Street, a play directed for the BBC. the recordings were destroyed in 1968 and no copies of the work have survived, Dylan appeared at the end of the performance playing "Blowin'" in the Wind". During his stay in London, Dylan played at various folk venues such as The Troubadour, Les Cousins and Bunjies, and learned new folk songs from artists such as Martin Carthy.

With the release of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan in May 1963, Dylan grew significantly as a folk singer-songwriter. Much of the songs on The Freewheelin' were protest songs inspired by Guthrie and Pete Seeger. In this regard, "Oxford Town" ironically reflected James Meredith's experience of being the first black to enroll in the University of Mississippi.

The Freewheelin' also included "Blowin' in the Wind", one of their most famous songs, whose melody derives from the traditional song "No More Auction Block" and whose lyrics question the sociopolitical Statu quo at the time. The song was widely covered and became an international hit with Peter, Paul and Mary, setting a precedent for many other artists to hit Dylan compositions. On the other hand, "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" is musically based on the folk ballad "Lord Randall", and with its references to the nuclear apocalypse, the song gained resonance during the development of the crisis of the missiles in Cuba. Like "Blowin' in the Wind", "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" marked a new direction in modern songwriting, drawing on inner monologue and imaginative lyricism with traditional folk forms.

While Dylan's early compositions cemented his early reputation, The Freewheelin' also featured a mix of love songs and jocular blues. In this regard, humor was a part of Dylan's musical persona, and the range of material on the album impressed listeners such as George Harrison, guitarist for The Beatles. Harrison commented: "We had just heard it, he moved us. The lyrical content of the songs and just the attitude—it was incredibly original and wonderful." On the other hand, Dylan's gruff voice was a handicap for some listeners as well as an attraction for others. Of the impact Dylan had on her and her husband, writer Joyce Carol Oates wrote: "When I first heard this very young, gritty, seemingly inexperienced voice, frankly nasal, as if it could sing sandpaper, the effect it was dramatic and electrifying." Many of his early songs reached mainstream audiences through cover versions by other performers such as Joan Baez, who became Dylan's early patron as well as his lover. Baez was instrumental in the time to elevate Dylan to national and international popularity with numerous versions of his compositions and by frequently inviting him to play at his own concerts.

From The Times They Are a-Changin' Another Side of Bob Dylan (1963-1964)

Bob Dylan at a concert at St. Lawrence, New York (1963).

In May 1963, Dylan's political profile rose when he left The Ed Sullivan Show. During rehearsals, CBS executives informed the musician that the song he intended to play, "Talkin & # 39; John Birch Paranoid Blues", was potentially libelous to the John Birch Society. Rather than indulge the censors, Dylan refused to appear on the show.

During the time, Dylan and Baez were prominent figures in the civil rights movement, and sang together at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. Their political views were reflected in The Times They Are a-Changin', their third studio album, featuring songs that often included contemporary real-life stories, such as "Only a Pawn in Their Game," which deals with the murder of Medgar Evers, and "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll", about the death of a black hotel maid at the hands of William Zantzinger, a white socialite. On a more generic level, "Ballad of Hollis Brown" and "North Country Blues" they epitomized the despair engendered by the breakdown of the farming and mining communities. This political material was accompanied by two love songs, "Boots of Spanish Leather" and "One Too Many Mornings".

By late 1963, Dylan felt manipulated and constrained by folk and the protest movement. These tensions became apparent when, accepting the Tom Paine Award from the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee shortly after the Assassination of John F. Kennedy and while intoxicated, Dylan questioned the role of the commission, characterized the members as old and bald, and claimed to see something of himself and all men in Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy's material assassin..

Another Side of Bob Dylan, his next studio album, was recorded in a single day in June 1964 and featured lighter humor than its predecessor. Dylan's surreal humor re-emerged with "I Shall Be Free No. 10" and "Motorpsycho Nitemare." "Spanish Harlem Incident" and "To Ramona" are passionate, romantic love songs, while "Black Crow Blues" and "I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)" suggest a future dominating factor. of rock and roll in his music. "It Ain't Me, Babe", a priori a song about rejected love, was described as a refusal of the role her fame had pushed her into. Her new compositional direction was signaled on two songs: "Chimes of Freedom", which intersperses social commentary and a dense metaphorical landscape in a style described by poet Allen Ginsberg as "chains of flashing images", and "My Back Pages", which attacks simplistic gravity and the seriousness of his early songs and seems to predict the reaction he would meet with from his former bandmates as he took a new musical direction.

Between late 1964 and early 1965, Dylan's image and musical style changed rapidly, as he rose from a folk singer-songwriter to a pop and folk rock star. His jeans and plaid shirts were replaced with Carnaby Street gear, sunglasses and Beatles-esque boots. Of his makeover, an English reporter wrote: “Hair that could make a comb stand on end. A loud shirt that turns off the neon lights in Leicester Square. He looks like a malnourished cockatoo." Dylan also began dealing in increasingly surreal ways with the music press. On the Les Crane show, when asked about a movie he intended to shoot, the musician replied that it would be one of cowboys and horror. And when asked if he was going to play the part of the cowboy, Dylan replied to Crane: "No, I play my mother."

Electrical Controversy (1965)

Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan's fifth album, marked another stylistic leap in Dylan's musical career, due to the introduction of recordings with electric instruments. The first single, "Subterranean Homesick Blues", included a free association of verses that were described as a return to the energy of beat poetry and as a precursor to rap and hip-hop. The song was accompanied by a music video that preceded Don't Look Back, a documentary by D. A. Pennebaker about the 1965 tour of Great Britain. Instead of mimicking During the recording, Dylan illustrated the lyrics with cards containing keywords that he tossed to the ground as the song progressed. Pennebaker acknowledged that the sequence was Dylan's idea, and it has since been imitated in numerous music videos and commercials.

In addition to introducing a stylistic change with rock songs, the second side of Bringing It All Back Home included four long folk compositions with acoustic guitar and harmonica as the only instrumentation, in the line of previous works. Of them, "Mr. Tambourine Man" soon became one of the musician's most recognizable compositions when The Byrds recorded an electric version that reached number one in both the United States and the United Kingdom. On the other hand, "It's All Over Now Baby Blue" and "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" were hailed as two other important compositions by the musician.

Despite generally receiving good reviews from the music press, the stylistic change of Bringing It All Back Home and the progressive incorporation of rock and rock elements i>blues to the detriment of folk were criticized by conservative sectors and folk purists. In 1965, as a headliner at the Newport Folk Festival, Dylan played his first electric set since his high school days with a backing group consisting of Mike Bloomfield, Sam Lay, Jerome Arnold, Al Kooper, and Barry Goldberg. Dylan had appeared in Newport the previous two editions, but his 1965 performance drew a mix of boos and cheers, leading him to leave the stage after playing three songs. Different interpretations of the events suggest that the boos came from the purist section of folk, which did not welcome Dylan's electric performance, although others cite poor sound quality as the reason for the booing. Murray Lerner, who filmed the performance, commented, "I absolutely think they were booing Dylan going electric." The second version is backed by Kooper and one of the festival directors, who commented that the only booing at the concert came afterward. before the master of ceremonies announced that there was only enough time for a short concert.

In any case, Dylan's appearance in Newport drew a hostile response from the folk music establishment. In the September issue of Sing Out!, singer Ewan MacColl wrote: "Our songs and ballads are the creations of extraordinarily talented artists working in disciplines formulated over time... "But what about Bobby Dylan?", shout outraged teenagers. Only a completely uncritical audience, nurtured on the watery mush of pop music, could have fallen for such tenth-rate nonsense." On July 29, four days after the Newport concert, Dylan returned to the recording studio to record. "Positively 4th Street".

Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde (1965-1966)

Dylan embarked on his first world tour with The Hawks — later known as The Band— as an accompaniment band.

Despite beginning his career in the context of the revival of American folk music and suffering criticism from certain sectors of the establishment when he began to play rock music, Dylan consolidated his new musical style in later years. In July 1965, Dylan released the single "Like a Rolling Stone", which reached number two on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart and number four on the UK singles chart. Voted the greatest song of all time by Rolling Stone magazine, the song has been credited with changing previous attitudes about what pop music is capable of conveying. In this regard, Bruce Springsteen commented that the first time he heard the song, "that drumbeat sounded like someone kicked open the door of your mind." The song also opened his next album, Highway 61 Revisited. , titled as a tribute to the Route 61 that moved Dylan from his home in Duluth to the musical hotbed of New Orleans, and whose songs followed the style of "Like a Rolling Stone", driven by the background blues by Mike Bloomfield on guitar and by organ riffs by Al Kooper. "Desolation Row," backed by acoustic guitar and bass, offers the only exception to the dominant sound of Highway 61, and includes surreal allusions to a variety of Western cultural figures that were described by Andy Gill as "an eleven-minute epic of entropy, taking the form of a Fellinian parody with grotesque figures and oddities featuring a huge cast of celebrated characters, some historical—Einstein, Nero—some biblical—Noah, Cain, and Abel—, some fictional—Ophelia, Romeo, Cinderella—some literary—T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound—and some who don't fit into any of the above categories, like Dr. Filth and his dubious nurse."

In support of the album, Dylan was booked for two concerts in the United States and set about putting together a band. Bloomfield was not willing to leave the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, so he brought together Kooper and Harvey Brooks, present at the recording of Highway 61, with Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm, better known at the time as part of the of The Hawks, Ronnie Hawkins' backing band. On August 28, an audience still upset with Dylan's electric sound booed the group at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium. However, the reception for the September 3 concert at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles was more favourable.

Although Dylan and The Hawks found increasingly receptive audiences on the subsequent tour, several attempts to record a new single in the recording studio failed. Producer Bob Johnston persuaded Dylan to record in Nashville, backed by various session musicians. At Dylan's insistence, Robertson and Kooper also traveled to Nashville to join the sessions. The Nashville sessions produced the double album Blonde on Blonde, which included what Dylan himself defined as "that wild thin mercurial sound". Kooper described the album as "taking two cultures and slamming them together with one huge bang: the musical world of Nashville and the maverick Dylan world of New York".

In the midst of his growing popularity, Dylan secretly married former model Sara Lownds on November 22, 1965. In early 1966, Dylan undertook his first world tour, dubbed the Bob Dylan World Tour 1966 , with several stages in Australia and Europe. Each concert was divided into two parts: a first part where Dylan performed acoustic songs, accompanied only by acoustic guitar and harmonica, and a second set backed by The Hawks, with electric music. This contrast caused sectors of the public to boo the group and give slow, irregular applause in anger. The tour culminated in a well-known confrontation between Dylan and the public at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester on May 17, 1966, recorded in the compilation The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert. At the end of the concert, an audience member, angered by Dylan's electric sound, yelled: "Judas!", to which the musician replied: "I don't believe you... you're a liar!", before turning to the band and ordering off the microphone: "Play it fucking loud", to play the last song at night, "Like a Rolling Stone".

During his 1966 tour, Dylan was often described as exhausted and acting "as if on a death trip". D. A. Pennebaker, director who accompanied Dylan on Eat the Document, described Dylan "taking a lot of amphetamines and who knows what else". In an interview with Jann Wenner, Dylan commented: "I was on the road for almost five years. He took me down. I was into drugs, a lot of things... just to keep going, you know?"

In 2011, an interview recorded by Robert Shelton in 1966 was discovered, where he declared that he had been addicted to heroin and that he spent up to $25 a day to buy it, confessing that he could no longer continue with that rhythm of life. Some journalists, however, have questioned the veracity of this confession, pointing out that Dylan "had been telling real lies about his past since the early days of his career." Dylan said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 1984 that he was "never hooked on any kind of drug".

Motorcycle accident and imprisonment in Woodstock (1967-1969)

After the European leg of his world tour, Dylan returned to New York, though the pressures on him continued to mount. The ABC television network paid an advance to broadcast a television documentary, and the Macmillan publishing house demanded a finished manuscript of the novel Tarantula. In addition, Albert Grossman, his agent, had programmed a new and extensive tour with concerts between July and November 1966.

On July 29, 1966, Dylan was involved in an accident involving a Triumph Tiger 100 motorcycle on a highway near his home in Woodstock. Although the severity of his injuries was never fully disclosed, Dylan said he suffered fractures of several cervical vertebrae. Mystery still surrounds the circumstances of the accident, as Dylan was not hospitalized for his injuries and there are no medical reports. Several biographers have noted that the accident offered Dylan an opportunity to escape the pressures that had built up around him. Dylan himself confirmed this interpretation of the accident in Chronicles: Volume One writing: «I was in a motorcycle accident and I was injured, but I recovered. The truth was, I wanted to get off that rat road.” Following his accident, Dylan withdrew from public view, and with the exception of a few select appearances, he did not tour again for eight years.

Following his convalescence, Dylan was sufficiently recovered to resume creative work and began editing material filmed by D. A. Pennebaker during the 1966 tour. A first cut was shown to ABC executives and was promptly rejected as incomprehensible for a general audience. The film, titled Eat the Document, soon began circulating on bootlegs and screened at various film festivals before its official release four years later. In addition, the same year he began recording music with The Hawks in his own home and in the basement of a nearby chalet, called "Big Pink" and located in West Saugerties. The songs, initially collected as demos to availability of other artists for recording, they provided hits for Julie Driscoll and The Brian Auger Trinity —"This Wheel's on Fire"—, The Byrds —“You Ain't Goin' Nowhere”, “Nothing Was Delivered”— and Manfred Mann —“Quinn the Eskimo”—, among others. The "Big Pink" recordings were selected by Columbia Records in 1975 and collected on The Basement Tapes, though over the years, more home recordings from the era have appeared on bootlegs. A fuller version of the period, The Genuine Basement Tapes, included 107 songs and alternate takes recorded with The Hawks. In the months that followed, The Hawks launched their own career with Capitol Records under the new name of The Band and with the release of Music from Big Pink, an album that also included songs they rehearsed with Dylan in the Woodstock basement. The album cover art was also his own.

Following the success of Blonde on Blonde, Dylan returned to Nashville in October 1967 after nineteen months without entering a recording studio. Accompanied only by Charlie McCoy, Kenneth Buttrey and Peter Drake, Dylan recorded John Wesley Harding, an album of short, quiet, contemplative songs set in landscapes evoking the American West and the Bible. The structure and sparse instrumentation, along with lyrics that took the Judeo-Christian tradition to heart, marked a new turning point not only in Dylan's work, but in the growing psychedelic fervor in the musical culture of the mid-1960s. i>John Wesley Harding included "All Along the Watchtower", with lyrics derived from the Book of Isaiah and popularized by Jimi Hendrix in a version that Dylan himself recognized as "definitive".

Dylan's first public appearance took place twenty months after his last concert following the death of Woody Guthrie, his youthful idol, on October 3, 1967. Dylan participated in the memorial organized at Carnegie Hall in New York on January 20, 1968 with the backing of The Band. His appearance at the Guthrie concert was one of Dylan's few public appearances in several years, as he began to lead a home life with a view to caring for his growing family - between July 1967 and September 1969, the couple had three children: Anna Lea, Jesse and Jakob - and devoting time to new hobbies such as painting, without detriment to music.

Her next effort, Nashville Skyline, was a country record backed by Nashville session musicians and introduced a different vocal range from his early work, using a softer crooner voice. The album, which featured a duet with Johnny Cash on "Girl from the North Country", marked Dylan's fourth consecutive number one hit on the United Kingdom. Variety magazine commented on the album: "Dylan is definitely doing something that can be called singing. Somehow he's managed to add an octave to his range." In May 1969, Dylan appeared on the first episode of television's The Johnny Cash Show, in which he sang a duet with Cash on the songs "Girl from the North Country", "I Threw It All Away" and "Living the Blues". The publication of Nashville Skyline was followed by his second public appearance in as many years, performing with The Band as a headliner at the Isle of Wight Festival on August 31 and after turning down several proposals. to perform at a Woodstock Festival much closer to home.

1970s

Self Portrait, New Morning and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1970-1973)

Dylan kicked off the 1970s by issuing Self Portrait, a double album featuring covers of other artists' songs, instrumentals and four songs performed with The Band at the Isle of Wight Festival in August. of 1969. Immersed in a home life in Woodstock with his family and away from the stage, Dylan assured that Self Portrait was intended to publish mediocre work in response to those who continued to consider him "the spokesperson for a generation". » and those who expected him to retake his status in the counterculture movement of the decade that Dylan deliberately distanced himself from with the release of John Wesley Harding. Although it reached number one in the UK, Self Portrait garnered less endorsement from the music press, to the point that Greil Marcus headlined a review in Rolling Stone magazine. with the title «What is this shit?» -in Spanish: «¿Qué es esta mierda?» -

The same year he released New Morning, an album that included new compositions recorded in New York, some of them like "New Morning", "Father of Night" and "Three Angels" written on request by playwright Archibald MacLeish for inclusion in a play that never materialized. After the rejection of Self Portrait, New Morning gained greater recognition from the music press than its predecessor: Ralph Gleason wrote about it in Rolling Stone: "We've got Dylan back," just a few months after Greil Marcus's critique of Self Portrait.

New Morning was also Dylan's last studio album for three years, a period with few public appearances and few musical recordings. In August 1971 he participated in The Concert for Bangladesh, a benefit concert organized by George Harrison in which he performed six songs: "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall", "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry», «Blowin' in the Wind", "Just Like a Woman", "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Love Minus Zero/No Limit." The musical bond between Dylan and Harrison had grown years before and materialized when they co-wrote "I'd Have You Anytime", a track included on the triple album All Things Must Pass along with a cover of "If Not for You".

Between March 16 and 19, 1971, Dylan booked three days at Greenwich Village's Blue Rock Studios to record a single, "Watching the River Flow," and a re-recording of "When I Paint My Masterpiece." On November 4, he recorded "George Jackson", a return to the protest song as a tribute to George Jackson, a leader of the Black Panther Party killed shortly before by guards at San Quentin State Prison. The song was released in double version.: acoustic and with big band, In addition, Dylan contributed piano playing on Steve Goodman's album Somebody Else's Troubles under the pseudonym Robert Milkwood Thomas. A further public appearance took place on New Year's Day 1972 during a concert by The Band published in Rock of Ages.

In 1972, Dylan starred in Sam Peckinpah's feature film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid recording the eponymous soundtrack and playing the role of "Alias", a member of Billy the Kid's gang with some historical basis. Despite the film's failure at the box office, the song "Knockin'; on Heaven's Door" has proven its durability as one of the musician's most covered songs.

Return to the stage (1974-1978)

Dylan and The Band—from left to right, Rick Danko, Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm—in Chicago, during the musician's first tour in eight years.

Dylan began 1973 by signing a new record deal with Asylum Records, a company founded by David Geffen, when his contract with Columbia ended. His arrival at Asylum began with the recording of Planet Waves, an album recorded with The Band that included two versions of "Forever Young", one of their most popular songs. Biographer Clinton Heylin described that the song "projects something hymnic and sincere that speaks of the father in Dylan", something that the musician himself acknowledged: "I wrote it with one of my children in mind and without wanting to be too sentimental". Another biographer, Howard Sounes, noted that Jakob Dylan believed the song was about him. Planet Waves became the first album to reach number one on the US Billboard 200 chart.

Despite his departure, Columbia simultaneously released Dylan, a collection of studio outtakes, mostly covers by other artists, that was widely regarded as a rude response to Dylan's signing with a company. rival record label. In 1973, Dylan also published Writings and drawings, in which he collected lyrics and writings from the period between 1961 and 1971. The lyrics included more than 60 songs not included on any of his albums..

In January 1974, Dylan returned to the stage with his first tour in eight years. Backed by The Band, the tour included forty concerts from coast to coast across the United States and was documented on Before the Flood, Dylan's first live album. Dylan's success with Asylum led Columbia to state that "they weren't going to spare a thing to bring Dylan back into the fold". By the 1974 tour, Geffen had only managed to sell 700,000 copies of Planet Waves. Dylan eventually returned to Columbia Records, which subsequently added his two albums with Asylum to its own catalogue.

After the tour, Dylan and Sara, whose marriage had deteriorated, publicly distanced themselves. The musician filled a small red notebook with songs about relationships and breakups, and quickly recorded a new album titled Blood on the Tracks. Once recorded, Dylan delayed its release and re-recorded part of the album in Sound 80 Studios in Minneapolis using various local musicians hired by his brother, David Zimmerman.

Blood on the Tracks, which marked the musician's second number one in the United States, was chosen as the 16th best album of all time by Rolling Stone magazine. , its third best position on the list after Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. In addition, and despite getting mixed reviews at the time of its release, the music press hailed Blood on the Tracks as one of Dylan's greatest achievements. In this regard, Bill Wyman wrote: «Blood on the Tracks is his only flawless and best produced album. The songs, each one of them, are built in a disciplined way. It's the kindest, most dismayed album of his, and it seems, in retrospect, that he's struck a sublime balance between the verbiage-laden excesses of the mid-1960s and the self-consciously simple compositions of his post-accident years."

Dylan with Allen Ginsberg during the Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1975.

During the summer of the same year, Dylan composed a lengthy ballad championing the cause of boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, incarcerated for a triple murder committed in Paterson, New Jersey in 1966. After visiting Carter in prison, Dylan wrote "Hurricane", in which he defended Carter's innocence. Despite exceeding eight minutes in length, the song was released as a single, peaked at number 33 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and was performed at every concert on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour. tour included several parts of entertainment with nearly a hundred performers and fans hailing from Greenwich Village's renaissance folk scene, including T-Bone Burnett, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Joni Mitchell, David Mansfield, Roger McGuinn, Mick Ronson, Joan Baez, and violinist Scarlet Rivera, whom Dylan discovered while walking down the street with her violin case slung across her back. Poet Allen Ginsberg also accompanied. the group and created scenes for the film that Dylan was shooting simultaneously. On the other hand, Sam Shepard was initially hired to write the script for the film, but ended up accompanying the group as an informal chronicler.

Desire, her next studio album, was released between legs of the Rolling Thunder Revue tour and included a narrative style close to the travelogues influenced by her new collaborator, the playwright Jacques Levy. The second half of the tour was documented in Hard Rain, a television special and album that received less critical reception. No concert from the better-received first half of the tour was published until the appearance of The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue in 2002. The 1975 tour also provided the backdrop for Renaldo and Clara, a nearly four-hour-long film with a lengthy, improvised narrative blending concert footage and reminiscences. Released in 1978, Renaldo and Clara generally garnered poor and sometimes scathing reviews, and had short theatrical releases. At the end of the same year, Dylan allowed the film to be edited down to a two-hour mastered feature film. for concerts on the tour that garnered better reviews.

Dylan at the last concert of The Band in November 1976, filmed by Martin Scorsese and published in The Last Waltz.

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. The concert, staged at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, was filmed by Martin Scorsese and published as a music documentary in The Last Waltz, which featured half of the songs Dylan played. The same year, Dylan wrote and sang the song "Sign Language" on Eric Clapton's album No Reason to Cry.

In 1978, he again embarked on a new world tour with 114 concerts between Japan, Europe and the United States, with an audience of over two million people. For the tour, Dylan assembled a band of eight musicians and three backing vocalists. His concerts in Tokyo in February and March were recorded and released on the album Bob Dylan at Budokan, to mixed reviews: Robert Christgau gave it a laughable review, while Janet Maslin defended it in Rolling Stone writing, "These latest live versions of his old songs have the effect of freeing Dylan from the originals." When Dylan took the tour to the United States in September 1978, he was dismayed. because the press described the look and sound of the concerts as the "Las Vegas Tour", mimicking the later years of Elvis Presley. The tour grossed over $20 million and Dylan recognized the Los Angeles Times that he had several debts to pay because “I had a couple of bad years. I put a lot of money into the movie [Renaldo and Clara], built a big house...and it's hard to get a divorce in California."

In April and May 1978, Dylan brought the same group and backing vocalists to Rundown Studios, a rehearsal room he had rented in Santa Monica to record Street Legal, described by the biographer Michael Gray as "after Blood on the Tracks, Dylan's arguably best record of the 1970s: a seminal album documenting a pivotal period in Dylan's own life"., suffered poor sound recording and mixing, attributed to Dylan's studio practices, which clouded instrumental details and was the focus of criticism from several journalists. The sound of Street Legal was improved for its SACD release in 1999.

Conversion to Christianity: Slow Train Coming and Saved (1979-1980)

Dylan at a concert in Toronto, Canada in 1978.

In the late 1970s, Dylan became a born-again Christian and released two albums of gospel music with significant religious undertones. The first, Slow Train Coming, included the accompaniment of guitarist Mark Knopfler, leader of the group Dire Straits, and was produced by Jerry Wexler. Wexler himself commented that Dylan tried to evangelize him during the recording of the album, to which he replied: "Bob, you're dealing with a sixty-two-year-old atheist Jew. Let's do the album." The album peaked at number three on the Billboard 200 chart and won the Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance at the 22nd Grammy Awards for the single. "Gotta Serve Somebody".

During the tours between the fall of 1979 and the spring of 1980, Dylan stopped performing his best-known, secular songs, and began making onstage statements about his faith, such as the following: "Years ago I was told that he was a prophet. I used to say, 'No, I'm not a prophet.' They said, "Yes you are, you are a prophet." I was like, 'No, it's not me.' They used to say, "Surely you are a prophet." They used to convince me that he was a prophet. Now I come out and say that Jesus Christ is the answer. They say: "Bob Dylan is not a prophet." They just can't handle it."

Dylan's conversion to Christianity was directly rejected by a section of his public and fellow professionals. Shortly before his assassination, John Lennon recorded a demo of "Serve Yourself" in response to Dylan's song " Gotta Serve Somebody." In 1981, Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times that "neither age—he is now forty years old—nor his much-publicized conversion as a born-again Christian have altered his essentially iconoclastic temperament.".

1980s

Secular return and commercial decline (1981-1986)

In the early 1980s, Dylan briefly went on tour again for a series of concerts labeled "A Musical Retrospective," where he reintroduced popular 1960s songs into the repertoire. In addition, Shot of Love, recorded between March and May 1981, included Dylan's first secular compositions in more than two years, mixed with other songs of a Christian nature. Among them, the song "Every Grain of Sand" reminded some critics of verses by William Blake.

During the decade, critical reception of Dylan's work ranged from the well-received Infidels in 1983 to the critically criticized Down in the Groove in 1988. Journalists such as Michael Gray criticized his works of the decade for showing a lack of care in the studio and for not knowing how to choose the best songs to publish. In this regard, the recording sessions for Infidels, which included the participation and production by Mark Knopfler, led to several notable songs that Dylan left off the album. Examples of such outtakes were "Blind Willie McTell", a tribute to blues musician Blind Willie McTell and an evocation of African-American history, "Foot of Pride" and "Lord Protect My Child", later compiled in The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991. In any case, and despite publishing works with good critical reception, Dylan's musical career progressively declined commercial due to the rise of new musical genres and the growing lack of interest in the musicians of his generation.

Bob Dylan in Barcelona on June 28, 1984.

Between July 1984 and March 1985, Dylan recorded Empire Burlesque with the help of sound engineer Arthur Baker, who had previously worked with Bruce Springsteen and Cyndi Lauper. Baker commented that he felt that he had been hired to make Dylan's sound "a little more contemporary". Dylan also provided vocals on "We Are the World", a USA for Africa charity single. In addition, on July 13, 1985, he appeared at the Live Aid concert organized at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. Backed by Keith Richards and Ron Wood, Dylan performed a version of "Ballad of Hollis Brown," a ballad about rural poverty, and then turned to the audience to say, "I hope some of the money...maybe I can just take a little bit of it, maybe... a million or two, maybe... and use it to pay off the mortgages on some of the farms and, from the farmers here, that they owe to the banks." His comments were criticized as inappropriate., but they also inspired Willie Nelson to found Farm Aid, a non-profit organization that raises funds for American farmers through annual concerts.

In commemoration of his twenty-five years of musical activity, Columbia released Biograph, a triple album featuring outtakes and alternate takes of previously unreleased songs interspersed with the musician's greatest hits. In April 1986, he made a brief foray into the world of rap music when he added vocals to the first verse of "Street Rock", a song included on Kurtis Blow's album Kingdom Blow. His next studio effort, Knocked Out Loaded, was released in July of the same year and included three covers by other artists—by Junior Parker, Kris Kristofferson, and the traditional gospel anthem "Precious Memories"—as well as three collaborations with other songwriters—Tom Petty, Sam Shepard, and Carole Bayer Sager—and two unique Dylan compositions. The first album since Freewheelin' not to enter the top 50 in its native country, the album garnered poor reviews from the music press: Rolling Stone called it a depressing adventure", while Stephen Thomas Erlewine commented that "the record follows too many detours to be consistently convincing, and some of these detours goes down paths that are inarguably dead. In 1986, so many irregular records weren't entirely unexpected by Dylan, but that didn't make them any less frustrating."

Back on the road and Traveling Wilburys (1986-1988)

Between 1986 and 1987, Dylan toured with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and shared vocals with Petty on several songs each night. He also shared the stage in 1987 with The Grateful Dead during concerts recorded and compiled on the album Dylan & amp; The Dead. The album garnered some of the worst reviews of Dylan's career: Allmusic openly called it "possibly the worst album, Dylan, is the Grateful Dead".

In 1987, he was cast in Richard Marquand's feature Hearts of Fire, in which he plays Billy Parker, a rock star turned farmer whose mistress teenager Fiona dumps him for an outdated English synth-pop sensation played by Rupert Everett. Dylan also contributed to the film's soundtrack with "Night After Night", "I Had a Dream About You, Baby" and a cover of John Hiatt's "The Usual." However, Hearts of Fire was a critical and commercial failure.

Dylan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in January 1988, with an introductory speech by Bruce Springsteen in which he declared, "Bob freed your mind the way Elvis freed your body. It taught us that just because music was naturally physical didn't mean it was anti-intellectual." lower than their previous studio albums. In this regard, Michael Gray wrote: "The very title undermines any idea that inspirational work may be within. Here is a further devaluation of the notion of a new Dylan album as something significant."

However, criticism of Down in the Groove was quickly followed by the success of Traveling Wilburys, a project started by chance when Harrison was recording a B-side in Bob's studio. Dylan founded the group along with George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty, and their first album, Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1, released later in the year, peaked at number three on the Billboard 200 chart. . Despite Orbison's death in December 1988, the four remaining Wilburys released a second album in May 1990 under the title Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3.

The beginning of the Never Ending Tour and Oh, Mercy (1988-1990)

After sharing the stage with various groups, Dylan began a new tour in June 1988 with a backing band led by guitarist G.E. Smith. For the next twenty-five years, Dylan continued to tour with the backing of an ever-evolving small band on what became known as the Never Ending Tour.

Dylan ended the decade with a career upswing and critical acclaim thanks to Oh Mercy, produced by Daniel Lanois and described by Michael Gray as "intentiously written, verbally distinctive, musically hot and professional." With no compromises, this cohesive set is as close as you can get to a great Dylan album from the '80s." The song "Most of the Time", a composition about a love lost, was featured in the film High Fidelity, while "What Was It You Wanted?" it was interpreted as an ironic comment on the expectations of critics and fans before a work by the musician.On the other hand, the religious imagery of "Ring Them Bells" struck some critics as a reaffirmation of his faith.

1990s

From The Bootleg Series to MTV Unplugged (1991-1996)

Dylan began the 1990s by recording Under the Red Sky, a radical departure from its predecessor, Oh Mercy. The album featured rock songs with seemingly simple lyrics such as "Under the Red Sky" and "Wiggle Wiggle" which drew criticism from the music press. Featuring the collaboration of friends such as George Harrison, David Crosby, Bruce Hornsby, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Elton John, Under the Red Sky was dedicated to "Gaby Goo Goo", nickname of Desiree, daughter Dylan had with his second wife, Carolyn Dennis, and whose relationship was kept secret until the publication of Howard Sounes' biography Down the Highway. Under the Red Sky it was also Dylan's last album with new compositions in seven years.

Dylan in concert at the Lida Festival of Stockholm, Sweden in 1996.

In 1991 he was awarded a Grammy for artistic career by the music industry at the hands of actor Jack Nicholson. The event coincided with the beginning of the Gulf War and Dylan performed the song "Masters of War". The musician also made a short speech in which he stated: "My father once said to me, he said to me: 'Son, it is possible that you will become so dishonored in this world that your own mother and your own father will abandon you.. If that happens, God believes in your ability to mend your own ways." This sentiment was derived from a quote by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. The same year, Columbia and Legacy Recordings released The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991, a triple album of outtakes, rarities and alternate takes recorded by Dylan between 1961 and 1989. The compilation was the first in a series of albums released in successive years under the The Bootleg Series with unpublished material in order to give a commercial outlet to Dylan's huge music archives.

Over the next couple of years, Dylan returned to his musical roots with two albums of covers of folk and blues songs: Good as I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993), which featured material recorded exclusively on acoustic guitar and harmonica.

Late 1992 marked the 30th anniversary of Dylan's musical career beginning in 1962, commemorated with a tribute concert held on October 16, 1992 at Madison Square Garden in New York. The event was recorded live and was later released as a live album by Columbia Records in August 1993 under the title The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration. the most memorable performances by celebrities on the music scene (with the presence of John Mellencamp, Stevie Wonder, Lou Reed, Johnny Cash, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, George Harrison and Chrissie Hynde among others), with covers of classic Dylan songs, as well as some songs performed by Dylan himself at the end of the event. The concert's support band consisted of the surviving members of the group Booker T. & the M.G.'s: Booker T. Jones on organ, Donald "Duck" Dunn on bass and Steve Cropper on guitar, as well as drummer Anton Fig replacing Al Jackson. Also on drums is Jim Keltner.

After World Gone Wrong, the musician renewed his contract with Columbia and gave several concerts at Manhattan's Supper Club "investing power and passion in "Jack-A-Roe&# 34;, "Delia" and "Weeping Willow" lost to an entire year of mediocre concerts," according to biographer Clinton Heylin. With avenues for release as a record, the Supper Club recordings were shelved and instead released MTV Unplugged, an album in acoustic format that included "John Brown," a previously unreleased song from 1963 detailing the ravages of of war and chauvinism. Although the musician stated his desire to perform traditional songs in the vein of his two previous albums, Sony executives insisted that he play his biggest hits.

Illness and creative return: Time Out of Mind (1997-1999)

With a collection of songs written during a snowfall on his Minnesota ranch, Dylan booked Miami's Criteria Studios with Daniel Lanois producing. Shortly after completing the recording, Dylan fell ill with histoplasmosis, a fungal infection or systemic mycosis caused by the yeast Histoplasma capsulatum , for which he was forced to cancel his tour and remain in bed during June. in 1997. The musician soon recovered and left the hospital commenting: "I really thought I would see Elvis very soon." In mid-1997 he returned to the stage and played at the XIII International Eucharistic Congress held in Bologna, Italy, before Pope John Paul II. Later, the pope read a sermon before an audience of more than 200,000 people based on the lyrics of the song Blowin'; in the Wind.

In September 1997 he released Time Out of Mind, produced by Lanois and his first release of new material in seven years. With a bitter assessment of love on tracks like "Love Sick" and musings on death on "Not Dark Yet," "Tryin' to Get to Heaven" and "Standing on the Doorway", Time Out of Mind was acclaimed by music critics: in this regard, Stephen Thomas Erlewine, who highlighted the "hazy and ominous sound" of the album, wrote that "the songs themselves are uniformly potent and add up to Dylan's best overall collection in years." Time Out of Mind won two Grammys at the 40th Grammy Awards at the Album of the Year and Best Contemporary Folk Album categories, while the song "Cold Irons Bound" won the Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance.

In December of the same year, United States President Bill Clinton presented Dylan with the Kennedy Center Honor at the White House, commenting, "He has probably had more impact on people of my generation than any other creative artist. His voice and his lyrics have never been easy on the ear, but throughout his career Bob Dylan was never meant to please. It has disturbed the peace and inconvenienced the powerful". which included the last concert of the 1966 tour in Manchester and at which an audience member called Dylan "Judas", apparently for abandoning folk and taking up electric music.

2000s

From the Oscar to "Love and Theft" (2000-2001)

Concert in Bologna in November 2005, in the framework of his tour Never Ending Tour, with Dylan's logo as a backdrop.

Dylan began the new century by averaging 100 concerts a year on his Never Ending Tour and winning his first Oscar for Best Song and a Golden Globe for "Things Have Changed," composed for the film Wonder Boys. The Oscar, or a facsimile of it according to some media, usually presides over the stage located on an amplifier. A year later he published "Love and Theft", a new album recorded with his Dylan self-produced touring band under the pseudonym Jack Frost. swing, jazz and ballads, and won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album at the 44th Grammy Awards. However, & #34;Love and Theft" sparked controversy when The Wall Street Journal pointed out similarities between some of the song lyrics and Junichi Saga's book Confessions of a Yakuza.

Dylan playing the keyboard at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in April 2006.

During the decade, Dylan combined his tours with new extra-musical activities. In this regard, he co-wrote the feature film Anonymous with director Larry Charles under the alias Sergei Petrov and played the film's lead, Jack Fate, alongside actors such as Jeff Bridges, Penélope Cruz and John Goodman. The film divided film critics between those who called it an "incoherent mess" and those who treated it as a serious work. In addition, in October 2004 he published the first part of his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, in which he devoted three chapters to his early years in New York in 1961 and 1962, as well as another two to the recordings of New Morning and Oh . The book reached second place on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list and was nominated for a National Book Award.

No Direction Home and new Bootleg Series (2002-2005)

Between 2002 and 2006, Columbia and Legacy Recordings released three new volumes of The Bootleg Series: Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue, featuring concert excerpts from the first leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue tour, Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall, featuring a concert at New York's Philharmonic Hall dominated by protest songs, and No Direction Home: The Soundtrack, soundtrack to the documentary No Direction Home, directed by Martin Scorsese. The documentary, released in September 2006, focuses on the period from Dylan's arrival in New York in 1961 to his motorcycle accident in 1966, and included interviews with Suze Rotolo, Liam Clancy, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Pete Seeger, Mavis Staples and Dylan himself.

Radio host and Modern Times (2006)

In May 2006, Dylan made his debut as a radio host on the Theme Time Radio Hour show, with a weekly selection of songs around a theme song. On the show, Dylan curated little-known and classic songs from the 1930s to the present, including contemporary artists from diverse genres such as Blur, Prince, L.L. Cool J or The Streets, among others. The show was praised by critics and fans as a "great radio show" for including a regular dynamic with stories told by Dylan himself and references to his sardonic humor and musical knowledge. The last show, titled "Goodbye", It was broadcast in April 2009 and closed with the Woody Guthrie song "So Long, It's been Good To Know Yuh".

The same year he published Modern Times, described by the music press as the last installment in a successful trilogy and preceded by Time Out of Mind and &# 34;Love and Theft". Modern Times, Dylan's first album to debut at number one on the Billboard 200 since Desire, was chosen by Rolling Stone as the best album of 2006 and received two awards at the 49th Grammy Awards: one for best contemporary folk album and another for Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance for the song "Someday Baby".

From Together Through Life to Christmas in the Heart (2007-2009)

Dylan at the Azkena Rock Festival of Vitoria in June 2010.

I'm Not There, a new biopic about the life of Dylan, was released in August 2007. Written and directed by Todd Haynes, the The film makes use of six different characters, played by Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw, to represent different aspects of his life. A previously unreleased 1967 recording from which the film takes the name was first included on the film's soundtrack, while the rest of the songs were covers by other artists such as Eddie Vedder, Stephen Malkmus, Jeff Tweedy, Willie Nelson, Cat Power, Richie Havens and Tom Verlaine. In October of the same year, he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in Oviedo, without the presence of the musician, coinciding with a concert in Omaha, Nebraska.

In October 2008, Columbia and Legacy published Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006, the eighth volume in The Bootleg Series, which included live performances. and outtakes from studio albums between Oh Mercy and Modern Times, as well as contributions to various soundtracks and collaborations with David Bromberg and Ralph Stanley. The release was well received by the music press: In this regard, Thom Jurek wrote that the abundance of alternate takes and previously unreleased material "feels like a new Dylan record, not only because of the astonishing freshness of the material, but also because of the incredible sound quality and organic feel." of everything".

A year later he released Together Through Life, a new album that had its origins in "Life Is Hard", a song he composed for Olivier Dahan's feature film My Own Love Song. As he declared to the journalist Bill Flanagan: "The record took its own direction." The album, whose songs were mostly co-written between Dylan and Robert Hunter, combined genres such as rock , folk rock and blues, with a sound "close to records on Sun Records and Chess Records", according to Flanagan. Together Through Life again garnered positive reviews from the music press and reached number one on both the US and UK best-seller charts.

The same year he released Christmas in the Heart, an album of Christmas music intended to raise funds for humanitarian organizations such as Feeding America and for the UN World Food Program. of Christmas carols such as "Little Drummer Boy", "The Christmas Song", and "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" and garnered mixed reviews from the press: Edna Gundersen of USA Today noted that Dylan "was reviewing styles popularized by Nat King Cole, Mel Tormé and Ray Conniff Singers" and concluded that it "couldn't sound more sentimental or sincere".

2010s

New compilations and tributes (2010-2011)

Dylan salutes the President of the United States Barack Obama after a White House performance to celebrate the music of the civil rights movement, on February 9, 2010.

Despite releasing studio albums at long intervals of time, Columbia maintains Dylan's recording activity with the release of compilations, new volumes of The Bootleg Series or live albums on an almost annual basis. In this regard, in October 2010 he published The Witmark Demos (1962–1964), the ninth volume of The Bootleg Series with 47 demos recorded with acoustic guitar and harmonica for publishers. Leeds Music and M. Witmark & Sons between 1962 and 1964, and The Original Mono Recordings, a box set featuring Dylan's first seven albums in monaural sound accompanied by a 56-page booklet and an essay by critic Greil Marcus. A year later, Columbia published In Concert – Brandeis University 1963, a previously unreleased concert recorded at the Brandeis Folk Festival in Waltham, Massachusetts on May 10, 1963, two weeks before the publication of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.

In October 2011, Dylan released The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams, a project of previously unreleased songs by Hank Williams under his own record company, Egyptian Records. Dylan helped complete the project with songs that Williams left unfinished after his death in 1953, and which were recorded by musicians including Levon Helm, Norah Jones, Jack White, Dylan himself, and his son Jakob. The same year, Amnesty International released Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International, a compilation with 76 covers of Dylan's songs performed by a long list of musicians such as Pete Townshend, Kronos Quartet, Sinead O'Connor and Pete Seeger, among others.

Tempest (2012-2013)

In May 2012, United States President Barack Obama awarded Dylan the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House. Obama praised Dylan for the "unique and serious power of his that redefined not only what music sounded like, but also the message he delivered and how he made people feel." In September of the same year he released Tempest, a new studio album with a marked turn towards dark and violent lyrics that includes references to the sinking of the RMS Titanic in "Tempest" and a tribute to John Lennon in " Roll On John". The album again garnered good reviews from the music press: The Daily Telegraph commented that "popular music's greatest troubadour is still as brilliant and mystifying as ever", while McCormick said "I was blown away by the crazy energy of the album. At 71, Dylan still draws attention to strange new places rather than re-examine his past."

In August 2013, Columbia published Another Self Portrait (1969-1971), the tenth volume of The Bootleg Series featuring 35 previously unreleased tracks, including alternate takes and demos, from sessions between 1969 and 1971 during the recording of Self Portrait and New Morning. The deluxe edition also included a third disc featuring Dylan's concert with The Band at the Isle of Wight Festival on August 31, 1969. In November, he released The Complete Album Collection: Vol. One, a box set containing Dylan's complete music catalog and a collection titled Side Tracks of songs not included on any album. To publicize the box set, Columbia released a interactive video clip for "Like a Rolling Stone" that allows the listener to switch between sixteen simulated television channels, with all the characters lip-syncing the lyrics of the song. Time magazine chose the video clip for "Like a Rolling Stone" as the best music video of 2013.

Shadows in the Night and Fallen Angels (2014-2016)

In May 2014, Dylan posted a cover of "Full Moon and Empty Arms", a song made popular by Frank Sinatra in 1945, on his website. The song served as a preview for the album Shadows in the Night, which contains versions of 10 songs written between 1923 and 1963 recorded by Sinatra. The album was finally released in February 2015. Additionally, in November of the same year, Columbia released The Basement Tapes Complete, a six-disc box set of 138 tracks recorded with The Band at their home in Woodstock. in 1967. To date, only a selection of songs had been released on The Basement Tapes in 1975 and a hundred alternate takes on bootleg records.

In September 2015, Sony Music announced the release of The Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965-1966, featuring previously unreleased material from the recording sessions for the three albums Dylan released. recorded between January 1965 and March 1966: Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde.

In early 2016, Dylan sold more than 6,000 pieces from his personal archive, including manuscripts, notebooks, recordings and letters, to the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa, with an estimated value of "between fifteen and twenty millions of dollars". The collection also included thirty hours of footage from the documentary Don't Look Back, as well as film footage from the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour. The archive will be on display at the Helmerich Center for American Research. On March 7, he announced the release of Fallen Angels, an album of covers of classic songs in the vein of Shadows in the Night, accompanied by a tour through Japan and the United States with Mavis Staples.

In September 2016, Legacy Recordings announced the November release of Bob Dylan: The 1966 Live Recordings, a 36-CD box set containing all known recordings made during Dylan's tour in 1966 by the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and Australia, in which he was supported by the group The Band. Legacy Recordings President Adam Block commented: "While we were compiling the material for The Cutting Edge 1965-1966, we realized how really good the live recordings from the tour were. of 1966." The recordings began in Sydney (Australia), on April 13, 1966, and ended with the concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London, on May 27. Except for the concert published in The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: Live 1966. The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert and several songs included in the Biograph compilation, most of the concerts included in The 1966 Live Recordings, coming from soundboard, from CBS Records portable studios and public tapes, are previously unreleased. Dylan's Big Boo, a study of the 1966 tour.

Dylan also participated in the mega-festival called Desert Trip, held in California on October 7, 2016, which included the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Paul McCartney, The Who and Roger Waters

Triplicate and new Bootleg Series (2017-2018)

In early 2017, Columbia announced the release of a triple album, Triplicate, on March 31. The album features 30 new recordings of classic American songs, including "As Time Goes By" by Herman Hupfeld and "Stormy Weather" by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler. The album was recorded at Hollywood's Capitol Studios with Dylan's regular band. Triplicate is the thirty-eighth studio album by Dylan.

On September 20, 2017, Dylan's official YouTube channel posted a cover of the song "When You Gonna Wake Up" recorded in Oslo, Norway, on July 9, 1981, as the lead single from a new compilation album, The Bootleg Series Vol. 13: Trouble No More 1979–1981, which covers the called "Christian stage" by Dylan, and whose publication took place on November 3, 2017. In parallel, in September 2017, the New York Film Festival celebrated the premiere of the film Trouble No More, which is about about Bob Dylan's tour in 1979 and 1980.

In September 2018, Sony Legacy announced the release of the album The Bootleg Series Vol. 14: More Blood, More Tracks on November 2nd. The compilation album includes all recordings made for his 1975 album Blood on the Tracks. It will be released in two versions, a single CD and a complete 6 CD deluxe edition.

Never Ending Tour

Bob Dylan in concert, at the Finsbury Park London, 18 June 2011.

The Never Ending Tour —in Spanish: "The endless tour"— is the popular name by which Dylan's musical tour has been known since June 7, 1988, since which he has maintained a similar format of his concerts and an average of one hundred annual dates for three consecutive decades. The tour, which as of May 2014 totals more than 2,500 concerts, includes a changing backing band with a core consisting of bassist Tony Garnier, multi-instrumentalist Donnie Herron and guitarist Charlie Sexton. The concerts are characterized by a revision of Dylan's catalog with new musical arrangements of his old compositions and changes in vocal approach from year to year and even between concerts.

Critical opinion on the tour is mixed: critics such as Richard Williams and Andy Gill consider Dylan to have found a successful formula for presenting his vast musical legacy, though others have criticized his live performances for giving and spitting "the best lyrics ever written in a way that makes them effectively unrecognizable" and for giving so little to the audience that "it's hard to understand what he's doing on stage".

Her China tour stop in April 2011 sparked controversy by failing to make any explicit comment on the country's political situation and by agreeing to censor her own set list according to Chinese authorities. On the contrary, others defended Dylan's presence in the country and argued that there was no evidence that the musician submitted to the country's censorship. In response to these allegations, the musician issued a statement on his website: "Regarding censorship, the Chinese government had asked for the names of the songs he was going to play. There's no logical answer to that, so we send you the list for the last three months. If there was any censored song or verse or line, no one told me about it and we played the songs we intended to play."

Influence, importance and international recognition

Bob Dylan has been described as one of the most influential figures of the 20th century musically and cultural. He was included in the special Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century, where he was defined as a "master poet, caustic social critic and intrepid guiding spirit of the countercultural generation". In 2004, he was elevated to the second position on the list of the greatest artists of all time in Rolling Stone magazine. President Barack Obama stated of Dylan in 2012: "There is no greater giant in American music history." For 20 years, various academics campaigned for the Swedish Academy to award Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was finally awarded in 2016, making Dylan a the first musician to receive it. Horace Engdahl, a member of the Swedish committee, described Dylan's place in literary history in the following words:

...a singer who deserves a place next to the Greek bards, next to Ovid, together with the romantic visionaries, together with the kings and queens of the blues, together with the forgotten masters of brilliant musical standards.

In a style initially modeled on the songs of Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson, Dylan brought increasingly sophisticated lyrical techniques to the folk music of the early 1960s, infusing it with "the intellectualism of classic literature and poetry'. Paul Simon suggests that with his early compositions, Dylan virtually took over the folk genre: 'The early songs were very rich, with strong melodies. "Blowin' in the Wind" it has a real strong melody. He aggrandized himself through the folk background that he incorporated for a while. For a time, he defined the genre & # 34;.

When Dylan transitioned from acoustic music to folk rock, the mix was even more complex. For many critics, Dylan's greatest achievement was the cultural synthesis exemplified by his trilogy of mid-'60s albums: Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. According to Mike Marqusee:

"Between the end of 1964 and the summer of 1966, Dylan created a work that remains unique. On the basis of the folk, the blues, the country, the R strangerB, the rock'n'roll, the gospel, the British beat, the symbolist, modernist and beat poetry, the surrealism and the Dadaism, and recommending the jargon and the social commentary, Fellini and the Mad Magazine, forged a coherent and original voice and artistic vision. The beauty of these albums preserves the power of impact and comfort."

A legacy of Dylan's verbal sophistication was the increasing attention he garnered from literary critics. Dylan's lyrics began to be studied in more detail by academics and poets beginning in 1998, when Stanford University organized the first international academic conference on Bob Dylan in the United States. In 2004, Richard F. Thomas, a professor at Harvard University, created a seminar titled "Dylan", to "put the artist in the context of not only the popular culture of the last half century, but in the tradition of classic poets such as Virgil and Homer.' William Arctander O'Brien, literary scholar and professor of German and comparative literature at the University of California, San Diego, memorialized the importance of Dylan's contribution to literature with the creation in 2009 of an entire academic course dedicated to Dylan, which analyzed and celebrated the "historical, political, economic, aesthetic and cultural significance of Dylan's work."

Literary critic Christopher Ricks published a 500-page analysis of Dylan's work, Dylan's Visions of Sin, placing it in the context of authors such as Eliot, Keats and Alfred Tennyson. For his part, Britain's Poet Laureate Andrew Motion also suggested that Bob Dylan's lyrics should be studied in school. The consensus that Dylan's lyrics and songs constitute his greatest creative achievement was reflected in the Encyclopædia Britannica, where its entry stated: "Hailed as the Shakespeare of his generation, Dylan set the standard for songwriting."

The extent to which his work is studied academically was demonstrated on his seventieth birthday, May 24, 2011, when three universities organized symposiums on his work. The University of Mainz, the University of Vienna and the University of Bristol invited literary critics and cultural historians to give presentations on various aspects of Dylan's work. Other events, including tribute bands and discussions, took place simultaneously throughout the world. As The Guardian commented: “From Moscow to Madrid, from Norway to Northampton and from Malaysia to their home in Minnesota, self-confessed "Bobcats" will come together today to celebrate the 70th anniversary of a giant of popular music."

If Dylan's work in the 1960s is seen as an attempt to bring intellectual ambition to popular music, critics today portray him as a figure who greatly expanded the folk culture from which he initially emerged. Following the publication of Todd Haynes' Dylan biopic I'm Not There, J. Hoberman wrote in his review of the Village Voice in 2007:

Elvis may never have been born, but surely someone would have lighted the rock 'n' roll. That logic doesn't explain to Bob Dylan. No general law of history asked that a candidate for Elvis de Hibbing, Minesota, would deviate from the folk revival of the Greenwich Village to become the first and greatest beatnik bardo of rock 'n' roll, and then — having achieved fame and unmeasured worship — would fade into a folk tradition of his own.

When Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, The New York Times commented: "In choosing a popular musician for the literary worlds highest honor, the Academy Sweden, which awards the prize, has redefined the border of literature, sparking a debate about whether song lyrics have the same artistic value as poetry or novels." Reactions ranged from sarcasm to Irvine Welsh, who described it as a "hippie nostalgia act", to the enthusiasm of Salman Rushdie who wrote: "From Orpheus to Faiz, song and poetry have been inextricably linked. Dylan is the brilliant heir to the bardic tradition. Great choice."

Within the musical field, Lou Reed, Jimi Hendrix, Bono, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, The Beatles, Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, U2, The Go-Betweens, David Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Mike Watt, Roger Waters, Ian Hunter, Paul Simon, David Gilmour, Nick Cave, Keith Richards, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Jack White, Ronnie Wood, Billy Joel, Glen Hansard, Robyn Hitchcock, Joe Strummer and Tom Waits, among others, have recognized Dylan's importance in contemporary music. Also the Spanish singer-songwriters Joaquín Sabina, Enrique Bunbury and Nacho Vegas, as well as the Argentine Andrés Calamaro, who participated in a tour of Spain with him in 1999, feel influenced by his music and legacy. The Asturian Toli Morilla released in June 2009 an album with ten versions in Asturian authorized by Dylan. Charly García and León Gieco have recognized the influence of Bob Dylan, and they were even the musicians with whom Dylan gave the recital at the stadium of Club Atlético Vélez Sarsfield (Buenos Aires) during their 2008 tour of the American continent.

Paintings and drawings

Dylan was fond of drawing and painting from his youth. The cover of the Sing Out! magazine in October 1968 is by him. It is a seated man with a hat and a guitar, probably a self-portrait. The cover of the album Self Portrait (1970) reproduces one of his paintings. Another of his drawings was also reproduced on the cover of the 1974 album Planet Waves.

More than a decade after Random House published Drawn Blank (1994), a book of Dylan's drawings, the exhibition The Drawn Blank Series opened in October 2007. i> at the Kunstsammlungen in Chemnitz, Germany. The first public exhibition of Dylan's paintings featured more than two hundred watercolors and gouaches of his original drawings. The exhibition coincided with the publication of the book Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series, which included 170 reproductions of the series. Between September 2010 and April 2011, the National Gallery of Denmark exhibited forty acrylic paintings by Dylan, under the title The Brazil Series.

In July 2011, the Gagosian Gallery, specializing in contemporary art, announced the representation of paintings by the musician. An exhibition of Dylan, titled The Asia Series, opened at the Gagosian Madison Avenue Gallery on September 20, featuring paintings of scenes set in China and the Far East. The New York Times noted that "some fans and dilanologists have raised questions about whether some of these paintings are based on experiences and observations of the singer, or in photographs that are widely available and were not taken by Dylan", while The Times noted similarities between Dylan's paintings and photographs taken by Dmitri Kessel and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The Magnum agency confirmed that Dylan had licensed the reproduction rights to the imitated photographs.

Dylan's second exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery, Revisionist Art, opened in November 2012. The show consisted of thirty paintings that transformed and satirized popular magazines such as Playboy and Babytalk. In February 2013, Dylan exhibited the paintings from The New Orleans Series at the Royal Palace in Milan. In August of the same year, the National Portrait Gallery London hosted Dylan's first major UK exhibition, Face Value, featuring twelve pastel paintings.

In November 2013, London's Halcyon Gallery hosted Mood Swings, an exhibition of seven iron gates created by Dylan. In a statement released by the gallery, Dylan said: "I have lived with iron all my life since I was a child. I was born and raised in an iron ore country, where you could smell and breathe it every day. Doors appeal to me because of the negative space they allow. They can be enclosed, but at the same time they allow the seasons of the year and the breezes to enter and flow. They can lock you out or in. And in a way there is no difference."

Personal life

Suze Rotolo, the young woman immortalized on the cover of the album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan —of which he said: «It was the most erotic thing he had ever seen... The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We started talking and my head started spinning »—, she was her partner from 1961 to 1964. Suze Rotolo was very politically active and introduced Dylan into social protest circles, turning his career around. She also passed on her passion for Rimbaud's poetry and was the muse of such important songs as "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright", "Tomorrow Is a Long Time", "One Too Many Mornings" and «Boots of Spanish Leather».

By the time Joan Báez met Dylan, in April 1961, she had already released her first album and was hailed as the "queen of folk". In July 1963, Baez invited Dylan to play with her at the Newport Folk Festival. From that moment on, the press began to circulate rumors of a relationship beyond the professional, rumors that would return at the end of each of Dylan's official relationships.

Dylan was married twice. On November 22, 1965, he married former model Sara Lownds, with whom he had four children: Jesse Byron Dylan, who was born on January 6, 1966; Anna Lea, on July 11, 1967; Samuel Isaac Abraham, on July 30, 1968; and Jakob Luke, on December 9, 1969. Dylan also adopted Maria Lownds, a daughter Lownds had from her previous marriage. Dylan and Lownds divorced on June 29, 1977. In "Sara", the song that Dylan dedicated to her on the album Desire (1976), the singer evokes another song that she inspired him at the beginning of their relationship, "spending days at the Chelsea Hotel / writing 'Sad Eyes Lady of The Lowlands' for you".

In June 1986, Dylan married showgirl Carolyn Dennis. Their daughter, Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan, was born on January 31, 1986. The couple divorced in October 1992, and their marriage remained secret. to public opinion until the publication of Howard Sounes's biography Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan in 2001.

When he's not on tour, Dylan currently resides in Malibu, California.

Discography

List of awards

United States President Barack Obama granted Dylan the Presidential Medal of Freedom in May 2012.

Dylan has received numerous awards throughout his career, including the Nobel Prize in Literature, twelve Grammys, a Film Academy Award, and a Golden Globe. Rock and Roll, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In May 2000, he won the Royal Swedish Academy of Music's Polar Music Prize, awarded by King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden.

In June 2007, the musician was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts, and a year later he received an honorary recognition from the Pulitzer Prize for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked for his lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power. In May 2012, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.

In November 2013, Dylan was awarded the Legion of Honor by French Minister of Education Aurélie Filippetti. In February 2015, Dylan accepted the MusiCares Person of the Year award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, in recognition of his artistic and philanthropic contributions to society.

Nobel Prize in Literature

On October 13, 2016, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature for "creating a new poetic expression within the great tradition of American song." The newspaper The New York Times reported that "Dylan, at 75, is the first musician to win the award, and his choice on Thursday is probably the most sweeping in the awards' history since 1901." Because of the awarding of this prize, many comments arose, both negative and positive, about whether a singer should deserve a prize for writers or not. It was the first time since 1993 that the Nobel committee awarded the prize for Literature to an American.

On October 21, a member of the Swedish Academy, writer Per Wästberg, accused Dylan of being "rude and arrogant" for ignoring the Nobel Committee's attempts to contact him. The Academy's permanent secretary, Sara Danius, retorted: "The Swedish Academy has never held any position on a prize winner's decision in this regard.", and he won't now either." Dylan subsequently contacted the Academy, speaking to Danius on the phone: "The news about the Nobel prize left me speechless. I appreciate the honor very much."

Following two weeks of speculation about Dylan's silence on the award, an interview was published in The Daily Telegraph newspaper with Edna Gundersen in which she stated that: "[receiving the prize] has been great, incredible. Who dreams of something like that?' Despite this, on November 17 the Swedish Academy announced that Dylan would not travel to Stockholm to attend the Nobel ceremony due to "pre-existing commitments& #34;.

However, at the Nobel banquet in Stockholm on December 10, 2016, a speech by Dylan was delivered, read by the US ambassador to Sweden, Azita Raji. In it he stated: «From an early age, I have become familiar with and have read and absorbed the work of those who were marked with such distinction: Kipling, Shaw, Thomas Mann, Pearl Buck, Albert Camus, Hemingway. These literary giants and their works, taught in classrooms, stored in libraries around the world, and reverently spoken of, have always made a deep impression on me. That I now join the names of such a list is truly beyond words." The speech ended: “Like Shakespeare, I too am often busy pursuing my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life's mundane affairs. "Who are the best musicians for these songs?" "Am I recording in the right studio?" "Is this song in the right key?" Some things never change, even in 400 years. Not once have I had time to ask myself: "Are my songs literature?". Therefore, I thank the Swedish Academy for taking the time to consider that very question and, ultimately, providing such a wonderful answer." Singer Patti Smith attended the award ceremony to perform live a rendition of the song "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" along with an orchestral accompaniment.

On April 2, 2017, Swedish Academy secretary Sara Danius announced that the Academy had met Bob Dylan in a private ceremony (with no media presence) in Stockholm, taking advantage of the singer's presence to give two concerts in the city, during which the Academy congratulated him on the award, and Dylan received his medal and diploma: "Twelve members of the Academy were present. The atmosphere was lively. Champagne was drunk. We spent some time looking closely at the gold medal, particularly the beautifully carved reverse, an image of a young man seated under a laurel tree listening to the Muse. The inscription, taken from Virgil's Aeneid, reads: Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes, which can be roughly translated as “And they who improved life on Earth by their newfound mastery.”

Finally, on June 5, 2017, the Swedish Academy published Dylan's lecture on their website. Secretary Danius commented: "The speech is extraordinary and, as one would expect, eloquent. Now that the speech has been delivered, Dylan's adventure nears its end." In his essay, Dylan writes in detail about the impact three influential books had on him: Moby Dick by Herman Melville, The Odyssey by Homer and All Quiet on the Front by Erich Maria Remarque. He concludes: "Our songs are alive in the land of the living." But songs are not like literature. They are meant to be sung, not read. The words of Shakespeare's plays were meant to be performed on stage. As song lyrics are meant to be sung, not read on paper. And I hope some of you get a chance to hear these lyrics the way they were meant to be heard: in concert or on recording, or the way people hear the songs now. I return back to Homer, who says, 'Sing in me, O Muse, and through me tell the story.'

Predecessor: Svetlana Aleksiévich

Nobel Prize in Literature 2016

Successor: Kazuo Ishiguro