The folk rock singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, turns 75 today.
-
Bob Dylan
The folk rock singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, turns 75 today.
The legend became a regular in clubs and coffeehouses in New York City's Greenwich Village in the early 60s, after dropping out of college. He soon signed his first recording contract and officially became Bob Dylan.
Bob Dylan, 22, performed on Nov. 8, 1963. In early 1962, Dylan had released his first album "Bob Dylan" followed by "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" in 1963.
Credit: AP
According to Rolling Stone magazine, the Bible of rock music, Bob Dylan wrote and recorded the greatest song of all time.
1
Bob Dylan, 'Like a Rolling Stone'
Writer: Dylan
Producer: Tom Wilson
Released: July '65, Columbia
"I wrote it. I didn't fail. It was straight," Bob Dylan said of his greatest song shortly after he recorded it in June 1965. There is no better description of "Like a Rolling Stone" — of its revolutionary design and execution — or of the young man, just turned 24, who created it.
Al Kooper, who played organ on the session, remembers today, "There was no sheet music, it was totally by ear. And it was totally disorganized, totally punk. It just happened."
The most stunning thing about "Like a Rolling Stone" is how unprecedented it was: the impressionist voltage of Dylan's language, the intensely personal accusation in his voice ( "Ho-o-o-ow does it fe-e-e-el?" ), the apocalyptic charge of Kooper's garage-gospel organ and Mike Bloomfield 's stiletto-sharp spirals of Telecaster guitar, the defiant six-minute length of the June 16th master take. No other pop song has so thoroughly challenged and transformed the commercial laws and artistic conventions of its time, for all time.
Just a few weeks earlier, as he was finishing up the British tour immortalized in D.A. Pennebaker's documentary Don't Look Back , Dylan began writing an extended piece of verse — 20 pages long by one account, six in another — that was, he said, "just a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred, directed at some point that was honest." Back home in Woodstock, New York, over three days in early June, Dylan sharpened the sprawl down to that confrontational chorus and four taut verses bursting with piercing metaphor and concise truth. "The first two lines, which rhymed 'kiddin' you' and 'didn't you,' just about knocked me out," he confessed to Rolling Stone in 1988, "and when I got to the jugglers and the chrome horse and the princess on the steeple, it all just about got to be too much."
The beginnings of "Like a Rolling Stone" can be seen in a pair of offstage moments in Don't Look Back . In the first, sidekick Bob Neuwirth gets Dylan to sing a verse of Hank Williams' "Lost Highway," which begins, "I'm a rolling stone, I'm alone and lost/For a life of sin I've paid the cost." Later, Dylan sits at a piano, playing a set of chords that would become the melodic basis for "Like a Rolling Stone," connecting it to the fundamental architecture of rock & roll. Dylan later identified that progression as a chip off of Ritchie Valens' "La Bamba."
Yet Dylan obsessed over the forward march in "Like a Rolling Stone." Before going into Columbia Records' New York studios to cut it, he summoned Bloomfield, the guitarist in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, to Woodstock to learn the song. "He said, 'I don't want you to play any of that B.B. King shit, none of that fucking blues,' " recalled Bloomfield (who died in 1981). " 'I want you to play something else.' " Dylan later said much the same thing to the rest of the studio band, which included pianist Paul Griffin, bassist Russ Savakus and drummer Bobby Gregg: "I told them how to play on it, and if they didn't want to play it like that, well, they couldn't play with me."
Just as Dylan bent folk music's roots and forms to his own will, he transformed popular song with the content and ambition of "Like a Rolling Stone." And in his electrifying vocal performance, his best on record, Dylan proved that everything he did was, first and always, rock & roll. " 'Rolling Stone' 's the best song I wrote," he said flatly at the end of 1965. It still is.
I believe that this was the first song of Dylan's to crack the top 40.
He's one of a kind, for sure! I always liked this song! Here is one of my very favorites:
Happy birthday Bob!
Bob Dylan is one person I surely would like to meet.
I did get to meet him. I was the President of the Mariposa Folk Festival in 1971, held on Toronto's Olympic Island. Our festival was going well, and besides the many top folk music artists performing both Joni Mitchell and Neil Young showed up gratis and performed a set. We had six stages going all day with a varied program. While I was in our management trailer someone came in and announced that Bob Dylan was on his way to our festival. Believe it or not there was some panic mixed with elation at that news. Some pressured me to ask him to play a set, while others, including many of our regular annual performers demanded that we not let him play on the basis that it would cause a desertion of their performances, or if we did they would never play for us again at our annual festival. When he arrived with his wife and young son what we found out was that he had heard about our festival being the best of its kind and wanted to see it. Many of his friends, like Joan Baez had performed there previously. We gave them the necessary badges to have full access and I put one of my closest friends on the job of shadowing him to make sure he would not have any problems. He wandered around the stages and for a long time was not recognized until one guy went up to him and said (as related to me by my friend) "Hey, man, you look just like Bob Dylan. What's your name." Bob ignored him but the guy persisted and asked again, and Dylan responded "My name's Jerome Avenue." (I think Jerome Avenue is a street in Greenwich Village). By this time a few people started to gather so we got him and his family back in the closed off performers' area. I went over to see him and introduced myself, and he shook my hand and said "I really dig your festival, man." Because a crowd was gathering all the way round the performer's area we had to get him off the island for his safety, and he and his wife and kid were taken by a Toronto Harbour police boat back to the mainland.
To this day I've questioned whether I should have let him play a set, because I was the person who made that final decision to not let him perform at the festival. Afterwards, John Brower, a rock and roll festival impresario I knew told me that there wasn't an impresario who wouldn't have given his eye teeth to have been in my shoes.
I don't know how I missed this article when it was originally posted. I guess it was because it was posted while I was sleeping and then pushed quickly off the Home Page. I was a dedicated fan of his. I watched what was probably his first TV appearance when he performed sitting next to an old man. When he first came to perform in Toronto at the Massey Hall Auditorium I went to see him, and also was given tickets by Neil Young's brother (who was my client) to see the Rolling Thunder Review. I had all his albums, considered him America's poet laureate, and bought a fantastic painting done by another client of mine of children holding weapons, representing the line "I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children" from the song "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall". My son really wanted that painting so I gave it to him before I moved here.
I think I'll repost this on the Music group since it's of little interest to those who are drowning in politics and religion. I have other personal stories to tell, about Joni Mitchell, Arlo Guthrie and Ramblin' Jack Elliott.
A escort/body guard for Bob Dylan, good show Buzz.