Bob Dylan arrived in New York in January 1961 after hitchhiking from Minnesota, a self-described folk singer carrying not much more than a guitar and a mouth organ. He was here to see his hero Woody Guthrie and maybe pick up a gig or two at one of the folk clubs in Greenwich Village he’d heard so much about. The next night, he played at Cafe Wha, and things, as they do, went from there.
By October 1963, he was headlining Carnegie Hall for the first time, his set full of era-defining songs – “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, “Blowin’ In The Wind”, “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall”, “Masters Of War”, “The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll” – all of them written in the two and a bit years he’d been in New York. He was being hailed as The Voice Of A Generation. Her was 22 years old. The ‘60s were his.
The folk community that had been his first New York audience was appalled when he remembered that before Woody Guthrie, he had wanted to sound like Little Richard, playing rock’n’roll, not singing dustbowl ballads. But he went electric, anyway. You may have seen the film. The old folkies cringed and wept. The world meanwhile thrilled to “Like A Rolling Stone”, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde.
His 1996 world tour nearly killed him. A conveniently timed motorcycle accident gave him an excuse to retreat from the madness and the American dates his manager Albert Grossman had already booked that would surely have done for him. He retreated to Woodstock with his family to put himself back together, He recorded over 100 songs with The Band that became the fabled Basement Tapes and writing 1967’s John Wesley Harding, a collection of stark parables that could be read as an epitaph to the fading ‘60s and a fearful anticipation of what was to come. Which from Dylan was a country and western album, Nashville Skyline, a winsome end to a fiery decade.
The run of albums Dylan made in those 10 years, from 1961’s Bob Dylan to Nashville Skyline in 1969, changed the world. Why be coy about it? So pity the fool charged with ranking them in order of merit or whatever; but someone had to do it.
10
Nashville Skyline
1969
Dylan had confounded his fans with John Wesley Harding and now seemed determined to put even more distance between who he had become, and the Dylan people still wanted him to be. And so, a country and western album. Nashville Skyline, complete with a duet with Johnny Cash, was utterly charming; the songs delivered in a handsome new croon over the gleaming picking of a Nashville crew familiar from the credits of Blonde On Blonde and John Wesley Harding. The creepy “Lay Lady Lay” was the album’s hit single, but its highlight was the heartbreaking “I Threw It All Away”.
9
Bob Dylan
1963
Dylan mostly sounded like an absolute tearaway on his debut album, attacking song after song with the raucous abandon of a delinquent punk rocker, the kind of noise that 13 years later you would have been more likely to hear coming from the stage of CBGBs than Gerdes Folk City. There were only two Dylan originals – the bitingly witty “Talkin’ New York” and the poignant “Song For Woody”, a tribute to his hero, Woody Guthrie, whose classic ‘40s recordings were the model for these sessions. Elsewhere Dylan covered Blind Lemon Jefferson, Bukka White and Blind Willie Johnson with swaggering confidence, Dylan honouring his stylistic roots before increasingly abandoning them on the extraordinary songs that would quickly follow.
8
The Times They Are A-Changin’
1964
Dylan on the cover of his third album looked like he’d been cropped out of a Dorothea Lange photograph of starving dustbowl Okies. The songs on the album were similarly gaunt and uncompromising. The title track welcomed a generational change; better, more enlightened times on the way. But the rest of the album seemed to go out of its way to remind the listener of the world’s general wretchedness. There were harsh songs about rural poverty, destitute mining communities, racism, murder, social injustice. For many, it was the album that confirmed Dylan as the reprimanding Voice Of A Generation; a label he would spend the rest of his career disputing, railing against and running from.
7
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
1963
The seismic impact of Dylan’s second album is genuinely hard to overestimate. There were 11 Dylan originals this time, compared to the two on his debut, including “Blowin’ In The Wind”, soon to be a civil rights anthem, a song sung at protest marches all over America. “Masters Of War” was a scathing condemnation, utterly merciless. The apocalyptic poetry of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” was a late addition, replacing “Let Me Die In My Footsteps”, a more explicit song about nuclear destruction. Elsewhere, there was room for absurdity and slapstick and also the tender nostalgia of “Bob Dylan’s Dream” and the luminous “Girl From The North Country”.
6
Another Side Of Bob Dylan
1964
After The Times They Are A-Changin’, the folk revivalist crowd expected a newly minted Dylan anthem for every new sit-in, demonstration and anti-war rally. On his fourth album, however, Dylan refused to pander to their needy expectations. There were no songs about murdered chambermaids, suicidal farmers, civil rights martyrs. Instead, there was the new poetry of “My Back Pages” and “Gates Of Eden”, the sly carnality of “All I Really Want To Do”, the manic absurdities of “I Shall Be Free No 10” and “Motorpsycho Nitemare”. Dylan was no longer finding inspiration in the day’s headlines. He was becoming his own world, so he felt a license to write about himself – his looming split with early Village sweetheart Suze Rotolo inspiring hurt and bitter recrimination on “I Don’t Believe You”, “Ballad In Plain D” and “It Ain’t Me Babe”.
5
Bringing It All Back Home
1965
There were many in the Greenwich Village folk fraternity that had originally nurtured him who came to Dylan’s fifth album somehow convinced they would find him returned to writing topical songs about significant events, preferably set to traditional melodies. Instead, they got “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, a song inspired not by an ancient Scottish ballad but Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business”. Otherwise, “She Belongs To Me” and “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” were exquisite love songs; “Outlaw Blues” and “Maggie’s Farm” had a bar band toughness; “Mr Tambourine Man” was trippily rhapsodic. “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” gave an unprecedented voice to torrid paranoia. His break with the folk movement was now complete, and he hadn’t gone fully electric yet.
4
Bob Dylan Live 1966: The “Royal Albert Hall Concert” – The Bootleg Series Vol 4
1998
Dylan’s 1966 world tour was attended nightly by fans made hostile by the plugged-in noise he was making with The Hawks, a far cry from the folk songs and harmonica solos they had so recently revered him for, these fans of another Dylan. You can hear all the 1966 concerts on the 36-CD The 1966 Live Recordings. This double CD was from a single fraught concert at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, thought for years to have been recorded at London’s Albert Hall, due to a bootlegger’s error, that catches vividly the high drama and fearless music of the entire tour. Dylan’s solo acoustic set was politely received, the audience breaking into boos and slow handclaps at the mere sight of The Hawks, then a notorious cry of “Judas!” A furious Dylan turned to the band with a simple instruction: “Play fucking loud.” They did, unforgettably.
3
Highway 61 Revisited
1965
Bob Dylan was in all ways transformed on Highway 61 Revisited. Gone was all vestige of the tousled-haired folky waif who’d blown into New York from Minneapolis in January 1961; no trace left of the scruffy kid obsessed with Woody Guthrie fumbling with his harmonica rack in Gerdes, the Gaslight or Cafe Wha? This was Bob recast as the ultimate 60s hipster, the music as sharp as the look, scything garage rock, electric blues. “Like A Rolling Stone” was a six-minute blast zone that changed everything. There was some semblance of an earlier Dylan on “Desolation Row”. At least it had an acoustic guitar. But over nearly 12 minutes the lyrics owed more to Ginsberg and The Beats than anything you would have found in The Child Ballads.
2
Blonde On Blonde
1966
The ecstatic pinnacle of Dylan’s electric rock’n’roll period, rock’s first double album was also the climax of an extraordinary three-album run that included Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, all recorded in 18 months. Few other albums hum with such excitement on so many levels, everything about it hot-wired, electrifying in its scope and thrilling in its execution. It was a kaleidoscope of blues, folk, country and rock’n’roll that barely contained the typhonic rush of “Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again”, the hushed majesty of “Visions Of Johanna”, the giddy epiphanies of “I Want You”, the absolute grandeur of “One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)”, the unfurling poetry of “Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands”. Sixty years from its release, its wild mercury sound blazes as brightly as ever.
1
John Wesley Harding
1967
It was 1967 and the Summer Of Love was upon America. A hippie utopia of peace and love was apparently at hand, a psychedelic paradise free of strife, conflict and other unpleasantness. Estranged by choice from the tie-dyed counterculture he had almost singlehandedly created, Dylan didn’t buy into the prevailing lysergic euphoria any more than The Velvet Underground. John Wesley Harding came out the same month as Their Satanic Majesties Request, the Stones’ excursion into fashionable psychedelia, but seemed to come from another time. The album presented America as a ghost world. The republic reduced to a bleached landscape populated by wandering prophets, saints, wicked messengers, homicidal angels, unhappy martyrs, a pilgrim drift of the dispossessed, helpless and lost. The music was as stark as Dylan’s visions, a simple guitar-bass-drums-harmonica set-up, plus a bit of piano. The songs were full of omen, prophesy and dire forecast, unadorned by anything as flippant as a chorus. It stands now as a somber monument to a ruined 60s dream and a grim anticipation of an America entering a season of riot, war and assassination. The wind was already howling.