These days, Bob Dylan enjoys the kind of stature that not very many musicians can lay claim
to but this icon has had plenty of ups and downs over the course of his long career.
From his beginnings on the New York folk scene in the '50s and '60s to his rise as a legendary
singer, songwriter, poet and actor, here's the untold truth of Bob Dylan.
Not only was the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in August 1969 the iconic cultural event of
the Baby Boomer Generation, but it also marked one of the most remarkable gatherings of musical
talent in human history.
Among the acts who played the farm that magical weekend were The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson
Airplane, Joe Cocker... and pretty much every other notable act from your dad's record collection
with the notable exception of Bob Dylan.
But that wasn't for lack of trying on the part of Woodstock's organizers.
They actually wanted Dylan, and got him to agree to perform.
They'd even started to draw up a contract and were finalizing the details when Dylan
backed out, just before Woodstock was scheduled to begin.
As it turned out, Dylan lived near the site where the concert was scheduled to go down,
saw the hordes of hippies amassing there, and promptly canceled.
At the time, he claimed his son was sick.
In the late 1980s, "it band" of the era Guns N' Roses brought Bob Dylan's music to a whole
new audience with their live cover of "Knockin' On Heaven's Door."
The song was a big hit and a big deal for Guns N' Roses, because the band didn't often
do covers, preferring to instead record their own songs.
It actually took the band some persuasion to record Dylan's song, and that push came
from Dylan himself.
At a 2009 concert, Axl Rose told the crowd:
"Bob asked me, 'When you gonna record 'Heaven's Door'?
And I said, 'I don't know, but we really love that song.'
And he said, 'I don't give a f---.
I just want the money.'"
After Guns N' Roses did record the song, Dylan told The Telegraph:
"Guns N' Roses is okay, Slash is okay, but there's something about their version of the
song that reminds me of the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers."
You just can't please some people.
In the weeks and months after the terrible events of 9/11, Americans were anxious about
the possibility of more attacks coming from out of nowhere.
To that end, airports and other places greatly enhanced their security measures, and in advance
of an October 2001 concert at the Jackson County Expo Center in Central Point, Oregon,
Bob Dylan's director of security gave strict rules to the guards hired for the event: Absolutely
nobody could go backstage if they didn't have their "credential," such as an ID badge on
a lanyard.
So when an older gentleman with wild hair tried to breeze through a security checkpoint,
some of the guards made a point of standing in his way.
The man then got very angry and demanded that the guards be fired.
Of course, he was in a very good position to demand that, because the disheveled man
who'd tried to wander backstage was, in fact, Bob Dylan.
Just a shame those guards didn't recognize him.
"There's a million, thousands vilianist and so many persons outside.”
“Oh I agree, absolutely.”
“You know you can't know 'em all, can you?"
In 1961, talent agency MCA aggressively courted Bob Dylan just before the release of his first
album.
But MCA wasn't much interested in touting Dylan's gritty authenticity; an executive
there had very different ideas for the singer.
He wanted two things from Dylan: for him to audition for The Ed Sullivan Show, and to
play Holden Caulfield in the agency's upcoming film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye.
In the end, no movie version of The Catcher in the Rye ever got made, with or without
Dylan.
And had he had the opportunity to star, he probably would've passed, judging by his reaction
to even the notion of appearing on Ed Sullivan.
According to Dylan biographer Anthony Scaduto:
"Dylan went up to the CBS TV studios, protesting all the way.
[...] He was shown to a studio, got up on a stage in a huge room and, while a half-dozen
men in dark Madison Avenue suits sat and listened, he went through several of the numbers on
his first album.
The executive types didn’t know what to make of him."
Dylan never did play The Ed Sullivan Show.
In 2009, New Jersey police officer Kristie Buble responded to a "suspicious person" report.
The occupants of a home that was up for sale saw an "eccentric-looking old man" hanging
around their yard before eventually wandering off down the street.
This was doubly weird since it was raining buckets at the time, and according to Buble
herself, the man was dressed in:
"...black sweatpants tucked into black rain boots, and two raincoats with the hood pulled
down over his head."
You've probably figured out who it was.
Buble asked Dylan just why he was walking around in the rain and creeping everybody
out.
His response was that he only wanted to see the house that was for sale.
Buble asked the man for his name, and, of course, didn't believe him when he told her
at least, not until she put him in the back of his squad car and drove him back to his
tour buses, where one of his entourage produced Dylan's passport.
Buble later said:
"It never crossed my mind that this could actually be him."
Bob Dylan is nothing if not prolific, releasing more than 35 studio albums over his career,
including unassailable classics like Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, and Time Out
of Mind.
Those and others frequently rank on "best albums of all time" lists.
His 1988 effort Down in the Groove, meanwhile, does not.
Now, Dylan has never been afraid to try something new he famously "plugged in" at the 1965 Newport
Folk Festival and brought electric guitar sounds to his acoustic songs, and even went
country for his album Nashville Skyline.
But for Down in the Groove, he might just have tried to do too much all at once.
David Fricke of Rolling Stone called the LP:
"...confusing, frustrating, and intermittently fab [...] it zigs and zags all over the place."
It took Dylan six different recording sessions spread over six years to get all the raw material
for the record, which saw its released delayed for a year and a half and its track listing
repeatedly revised.
Along with a number of covers, Down in the Groove also includes Dylan's decidedly not-punk
song "Sally Sue Brown," despite featuring Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols and Paul Simonon
of the Clash.
And then there's "Death Is Not the End," a collaboration with Brooklyn hip-hop collective
Full Force.
It's a weird album.
Bob Dylan's romantic life can probably best be described as rocky.
In 1961, Dylan met Suze Rotolo, and they broke up a few years later when Dylan's relationship
with singer Joan Baez evolved from professional to personal.
"And you performed a lot together?”
“Umm.”
“Would he be difficult to work with?"
Soon, Dylan left Baez for Playboy bunny Sara Lownds, marrying her in 1965 when she was
pregnant with their first child, Jesse.
The marriage ended in divorce in 1977 when Lownds caught Dylan at the kitchen table one
morning having breakfast with their kids... and a mystery woman.
Dylan remarried again in 1986, this time to backup singer Carolyn Dennis, with whom they
had a daughter together named Desiree.
The couple split up in 1990, but amazingly, the relationship remained a secret until a
biographer uncovered it in 2001.
But Dylan's secrets don't end there.
In 1991, a court ordered Dylan to pay alimony to a woman named Ruth Tyrangiel, who had proved
she'd been in a romantic relationship with the singer for more than 16 years.
Then in 1998, his on-and-off girlfriend Susan Ross revealed that Dylan had told her he'd
also once secretly married backup singer Clydie King and fathered two children with her.
Apparently, the guy's got a lot of love to give.
Joel and Ethan Coen's critically acclaimed 2013 film Inside Llewyn Davis starred Oscar
Isaac as a down-on-his-luck early-1960s New York City folk musician subjected to one personal
and professional indignity after another.
It's loosely based on the experiences of folk scenester Dave Von Ronk, who endured real-life
unpleasantness of his own at the hands of fellow folkie Bob Dylan, no less.
Like many folk musicians, Von Ronk's repertoire included the old standard "The House of the
Rising Sun."
According to the liner notes of the 2013 Von Ronk compilation Down in Washington Square,
he created an especially dynamic arrangement for himself, which Bob Dylan liked so much
that he asked Von Ronk if he could record it for his first album back in 1962.
Von Ronk politely asked him not to, since he was planning on recording the song himself.
The only problem here?
Dylan had already recorded the song.
Once Dylan's album came out, Von Ronk had no choice but to drop "The House of the Rising
Sun" from his act because, ironically, he was afraid people would think he was ripping
off Bob Dylan.
One thing to be said for Bob Dylan is that he's as authentic as they come; a straightforward
troubadour and poet who writes stark, simple, honest songs.
And for more than 50 years, he's done it all with a stage name.
"Here's what we know for sure: The singer-songwriter was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in 1941.
Here's what we don't know for sure: Everything else.... like exactly where Bob Dylan - the
pseudonym, came from.
Dylan first used the name by spelling Dylan with two l's, d-i-l-l-o-n.
That led many to believe that Gunsmoke's Matt Dillon was the main influence.
There's also another theory that Dillon plucked the name from a football player from the 1950s
named Bobby Dillon.
Or he took it from Dillon Road in his hometown of Hibbing, Minn.
And of course there's the most famous story that Dylan liberated the name of poet the
Dylan Thomas and made it his own.
But wait!
There’s more!
Zimmerman toyed around with other monikers: He used Elston Gunn, when he played piano
backing up pop idol Bobby Vee.
". Other Dylan pseudonyms used over the years included Tedham Porterhouse, Robert Milkwood
Thomas, Blind Boy Grunt, and Jack Frost.
By the time he joined the supergroup the Traveling Wilburys in the '80s where every member took
on stage names the practice was old hat to Dylan.
Or should that be Boo Wilbury?
During the 1970s, Bob Dylan became a "born-again" Christian, moving away from his traditionally
Jewish background.
According to a tale recounted in Ian Bell's book Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan,
the singer found himself in a Tucson, Arizona, hotel room in November 1978 and sensed a strange
presence in the room that Dylan decided must have been Jesus.
The presence placed a hand on Dylan, which caused his whole body to shake.
That supernatural experience led him to embrace Christianity not only in his heart but also
in his work.
Between 1979 and 1981, Dylan recorded three albums of explicitly Christian material: Slow
Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love.
The first performed the best, reaching number 3 on the U.S. album chart and spawning the
single "Gotta Serve Somebody," Dylan's first top 30 hit since 1973.
However, when he played only religious material to a classics-craving crowd in Arizona in
1980, he told fans:
"If you want rock 'n' roll, you can go see Kiss and rock 'n' roll all the way down to
the pit!"
Dylan is notoriously private, so we can’t say for certain if he is religious still - or
which religion he adheres to: we do know that he did study with Rabbis after his born-again
phase, but he rarely if ever mentions religion publicly.
Despite a slight misfire with The Catcher in the Rye, Bob Dylan has actually done a
little bit of acting throughout his career.
One such resume item was the 1978 curiosity Renaldo and Clara.
Dylan also directed and co-wrote the 1978 movie with actor and Pulitzer Prize-winning
playwright Sam Shepard... and boy, is it something.
"I saw a picture of a guy who had bangs: he said life if just a turkey or life is just
a cookie.
I was 17 I said that makes a lot of sense."
Dylan plays Renaldo, his then-wife Sara Dylan plays Clara, while a completely different
actor plays the role of "Bob Dylan."
Joan Baez shows up as the mysterious "Woman in White," and there's a character named "The
Masked Tortilla."
Interspersed between all the film's surrealism was footage from Dylan's "Rolling Thunder
Tour," a period in which he appeared on stage wearing masks and white face paint.
Oh, and the original cut of the thing ran for four hours.
Indie movie site Film Threat later said Renaldo and Clara was:
"...something that could charitably be described as the single biggest waste of celluloid in
the entire history of motion pictures."
"Life is just a cookie."
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