With the current success of the BOB DYLAN biopic, A Complete Unknown, it seems an auspicious time to feature an excerpt from my Dylan profile taken from my book MUSIC TITANS – 250 GREATEST RECORDING ARTISTS OF THE PAST 100 YEARS-
In January 1961, a scruffy Minnesota college dropout made his way to the wintery streets of Greenwich Village, New York. Sleeping on borrowed couches and rifling through his hosts’ album and book collections, the 19-year-old Robert Zimmerman, who had begun calling himself Bob Dylan, began to hit the local coffee bars and clubs, Cafe Wha? and Gerde’s Folk City on Hootenanny and open-mic nights, singing mostly Woody Guthrie and traditional folk tunes. Joan Baez later put it into song, “You burst on the scene already a legend… ” Not quite, but, by year’s end, Dylan was headlining at Gerde’s, had received a glowing review in The New York Times, and was signed by legendary talent scout John Hammond to Columbia Records.
Dylan’s 1962 recording debut was inauspicious enough, a collection of mostly folk covers that failed to sell, but, by 1963, he was being hailed as the king of modern folk and a songwriting genius. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, with its iconic cover photo of Bob and girlfriend Suze arm in arm in the Village, features at least five genuine classics: “Blowin’ in the Wind,” perhaps Dylan’s most famous composition, covered hundreds of times, most famously by Peter, Paul, and Mary, who sang it at the 1963 March on Washington; “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” repeatedly linked to the Cuban Missile Crisis, though it was written before; “Masters of War,” with its timeless, no-holds-barred attack on the nameless politicians and industrialists who profit from war; “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” a bittersweet breakup lament; and the timeless love ballad, “Girl from the North Country.”
It was, however, in 1965-1966, in the space of 15 months, when Dylan recorded and released his unrivaled trio of classic rock and blues albums, with their surreal, poetic pyrotechnics, that he became a genuine recording superstar, the epitome of the hip New York artist and cultural/generational leader, admired and emulated even by the Beatles. “Like a Rolling Stone,” which “sounded like somebody’d kicked open the door to your mind,” said Bruce Springsteen; “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” in many ways a prototype rap; “Mister Tambourine Man,” with its poetic exploration of drug-induced or musically stimulated consciousness; “Desolation Row,” Dylan’s urban emulation of Eliot’s The Waste Land; the joyful longing of ” I Want You;” “Just Like a Woman,” with its painful sense of lost love—these, and so many other celebrated songs, come from this fertile period…
…It is probably safe to say that no other recording artist has been so honored this past century. In a few short decades, Dylan has gone from being hounded by Newsweek to being taught in universities from Stanford to Harvard and having his lyrics quoted by Supreme Court Justices. Dylan has had two Broadway plays utilizing his music; he has won Grammys, an Oscar, a Pulitzer, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, equivalent French and Spanish honors, even the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature. Academics now speak his name in the same breath with Shakespeare and Virgil, but Dylan himself would be the first to say not to take anybody else’s word for it—go and listen for yourself.
Suggested Songs:
Blowin’ in the Wind (1963)
Like a Rolling Stone (1965)
Desolation Row (1965)
Tangled Up in Blue (1975)
Mississippi (2001)
MUSIC TITANS continues to be available online (Amazon, BookBaby, B&N, Walmart, and more) in paperback and eBook formats at reduced prices.
Greatest Recording Artists 