May 24, 2011. Copyright 2011, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Singer-songwriter whose anthems defined a generation, Bob Dylan turns 70
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, May 24, Graphic News:  "May you stay forever young", sang Bob Dylan to the audience at the Chicago Stadium in January 1974. When he sang it again, at the Vector Arena in Auckland, New Zealand on April 30 this year, it was the anthem's 492nd performance. For five decades, this slightly-built troubadour -- the word literally means "a poet who writes verse to music" -- born Robert Zimmerman into a tight-knit Jewish community in Duluth, Minnesota, has provided the soundtrack to social change, from the flower power days of the 1960s well into the new millennium. And as he turns 70, having outlived so many of his contemporaries, not to mention Dylan Thomas, the bard whose name he borrowed when his career began to take off in the summer of 1962, his Never Ending Tour will play on through Germany, Sweden, Ireland, London and Israel in the next month alone.
 
A fixture now in the American folk firmament, Dylan was a college drop-out 50 years ago, heading to New York to take his chances as a musician. The city was home to his own musical hero, Woody Guthrie, whose songs had chronicled the struggles of dustbowl-era migrants, and to an ever-growing number of folk clubs in Greenwich Village. Rock 'n' roll was the new musical phenomenon, but, to Dylan, its early content seemed too lightweight: "...the songs weren't serious," he later recalled "or didn’t reflect life in a realistic way." With his pared down style of guitar and harmonica, harsh nasal voice and lyrical ballads, like his early signature, Blowin' in the Wind -- with its roots in an old slave song -- Dylan caught the spirit of the age, notably the Civil Rights movement and the growing opposition to American involvement in the war in Vietnam. Many of the tracks on his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), were seen in this light, such as A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall and I Shall Be Free, as well as his follow-up, The Times they are a-Changin. They made him, at just 22, a major artist and -- in a  term he came to loathe -- the voice of his generation. Among his girlfriends during this period was folk icon Joan Baez.
 
Dylan won new fans -- and upset others -- when he moved on from his early style and went "electric", broadening his range to include blues, pop and the rock 'n' roll he had first eschewed. He broke new ground with his 1965 hit, Like a Rolling Stone, from the album Highway 61 Revisited, the single running to over six minutes and being declared, in 2004, the greatest song of all time in Rolling Stone magazine's 500-strong list. A near-fatal motorbike accident in 1966 saw Dylan retreat from public life and give up touring for several years, later admitting in his Chronicle series of autobiography that the crash gave him the chance to "get out of the rat race". After a 19-month break he made his comeback with the quieter, more contemplative album, John Wesley Harding. He changed tack again in 1969 with Nashville Skyline, which featured a duet with Country giant Johnny Cash and one of Dylan’s best-selling singles, Lay Lady Lay.

Married twice, it was the break-up with his first wife, Sara Lownds, which is said to have provided the inspiration for his 1975 album, Blood on the Tracks, while conversion to Christianity in the late 70s lay behind the gospel-inspired Slow Train Coming (1979). Other critics have hailed later works such as Time Out of Mind (1997) and Modern Times (2006) as among his best. As well as publishing two volumes of his life story, the latest in January this year, Dylan is also the author of The Drawn Blank Series, an acclaimed collection of his own paintings and sketches.
/ENDS