Why I admire Bob Dylan

Why I admire Folk-rock singer-songwriter Bob Dylan ?

Legendary folk and Rock singer Bob turned eighty last week. He is one of the singer who has influenced my generation all over the globe. Many music personalities came took Centre-stage for few years than gone into obliteration. Bob is still very active in this age. His 1997 album Time Out of Mind marked the beginning of a renaissance for his career. Bob has continued to tour and release new studio albums even in the age of sevent plus that includes Together Through Life (2009), Tempest (2012), Shadows in the Night (2015) and Fallen Angels (2016). He has released five critically acclaimed albums of original material since then, the most recent being Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020).

He is first performer and lyrics writer awarded Nobel Prize for his contribution in literature. This had created controversy in the literary world. 

Why I loved Bob at the first place, it is little bit difficult to answer. When I was in my teens his kind of music and songs used to give a feeling of liberation and simply mesmerized by the flow of love in his simple lyrics. 

If my memory cells are strong enough than I heard his song "I Want You" (from album Blonde on Blonde) on Breakfast Show at Voice of America in 1967 and became his fan. In fact Bob emerged as one of the most original and influential voices in American popular music. 

The legendary singer-songwriter has received Grammy, Academy and Golden Globe awards, as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, to parents Abram and Beatrice Zimmerman. He and his younger brother David were raised in the community of Hibbing, where he graduated from Hibbing High School in 1959.  Driven by the influences of early rock stars like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard (whom he used to imitate on the piano at high school dances), the young Bob formed his own bands, including the Golden Chords, as well as a group he fronted under the pseudonym Elston Gunn. While attending the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, he began performing folk and country songs at local cafés, taking the name "Bob Dillon." (Despite a popular myth to the contrary, the pseudonym was not inspired by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas — who he later professed to dislike — but by the main character from the popular Western television series Gunsmoke.)

In 1960, Dylan dropped out of college and moved to New York, where his idol, the legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie, was hospitalized with a rare hereditary disease of the nervous system. He visited with Guthrie regularly in his hospital room; became a regular in the folk clubs and coffeehouses of Greenwich Village; met a host of other musicians; and began writing songs at an astonishing pace, including "Song to Woody," a tribute to his ailing hero. 

In the fall of 1961, after one of his performances received a rave review in The New York Times, he signed a recording contract with Columbia Records, at which point he legally changed his surname to Dylan. Released early in 1962, Bob Dylan contained only two original songs, but showcased Dylan's gravel-voiced singing style in a number of traditional folk songs and covers of blues songs.

The 1963 release of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan marked Dylan's emergence as one of the most original and poetic voices in the history of American popular music. The album included two of the most memorable 1960s folk songs, "Blowin' in the Wind" (which later became a huge hit for the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary) and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." His next album, The Times They Are A-Changin', firmly established Dylan as the definitive songwriter of the '60s protest movement, a reputation that only increased after he became involved with one of the movement's established icons, Joan Baez, in 1963. 

While his romantic relationship with Baez lasted only two years, it benefited both performers immensely in terms of their music careers—Dylan wrote some of Baez's best-known material, and Baez introduced him to thousands of fans through her concerts. By 1964 Dylan was playing 200 concerts annually, but had become tired of his role as "the" folk singer-songwriter of the protest movement. Another Side of Bob Dylan, recorded in 1964, was a much more personal, introspective collection of songs, far less politically charged than Dylan's previous efforts.

In 1965, Dylan scandalized many of his folkie fans by recording the half-acoustic, half-electric album Bringing It All Back Home, backed by a nine-piece band. On July 25, 1965, he was famously booed at the Newport Folk Festival when he performed electrically for the first time. The albums that followed, Highway 61 Revisited (1965) — which included the seminal rock song "Like a Rolling Stone" — and the two-record set Blonde on Blonde (1966) represented Dylan at his most innovative. With his unmistakable voice and unforgettable lyrics, Dylan brought the worlds of music and literature together as no one else had.

The best thing I can say about Bob that he continued to reinvent himself. Following a near-fatal motorcycle accident in July 1966, Dylan spent almost a year recovering in seclusion. His next two albums, John Wesley Harding (1967)—including "All Along the Watchtower," later recorded by guitar great Jimi Hendrix—and the unabashedly country-ish Nashville Skyline (1969) were far more mellow than his earlier works. Critics blasted the two-record set Self-Portrait (1970) and Tarantula, a long-awaited collection of writings Dylan published in 1971. In 1973, Dylan appeared in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, a feature film directed by Sam Peckinpah. He also wrote the film's soundtrack, which became a hit and included the now-classic song, "Knockin' on Heaven's Door."

It is very difficult to shortlist the best of Bob, but I tried :

1. Like a Rolling stone from his Highway 61 Revisited, 1965

2. A hard rain’s a gonna fall from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1963

3. Tangled up in blues from Blood On the Tracks, 1975

4. Just like a woman from Blonde On Blonde, 1966

5. All along the watch tower from  John Wesley Harding, 1967

And also Every grain of sand from his Shot of Love, 1981

Enjoy his songs

A hard rain’s a gonna fall

https://youtu.be/T5al0HmR4to

And a very romantic son ‘ To fall in love with you’

https://youtu.be/tcD4iX3dhF4