Beginnings
Bob Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota and raised in Hibbing, Minnesota, northwest of Lake Superior. His grandparents were Jewish emigrants from Lithuania, Russia and Ukraine, and his parents, Abraham Zimmerman and Beatrice Stone (Beatty), were part of the area's small but close-knit Jewish community. He lived in Duluth until age seven, when his father was stricken with polio. The family returned to nearby Hibbing, Beatty's hometown, where Robert Zimmerman spent the rest of his childhood.
Zimmerman spent much of his youth listening to the radio, first to the powerful blues and country music stations broadcasting from New Orleans and, later, early rock and roll. He made his earliest known recordings on Christmas Eve 1956, with two friends in a department store booth, singing verses of songs by Carl Perkins, Little Richard, Lloyd Price, The Penguins and others. He formed several bands while in high school; the first, The Shadow Blasters, was short-lived, but the second, the Golden Chords, proved more durable. They played covers and the Zimmerman-penned tune "Little Richard" at their high-school talent show. In 1959 he toured briefly under the name of Elston Gunnn with Bobby Vee, playing piano and supplying handclaps.
An able but not outstanding student, Zimmerman enrolled at the University of Minnesota in 1959 and moved to Minneapolis. His musical focus on rock and roll gave way to an interest in subtler, Gaelic-inflected American folk music, typically performed with an acoustic guitar. He soon became actively involved in the local Dinkytown folk music circuit, fraternizing with local folk enthusiasts and occasionally "borrowing" many of their albums. During his Dinkytown days Zimmerman began introducing himself as "Bob Dylan" (or Dillon). In his autobiography "Chronicles" (2005) Dylan writes: "What I was going to do as soon as I left home was just call myself Robert Allen...It sounded like a Scottish king and I liked it." However he discovered by reading Downbeat magazine that there was already a saxophone player called David Allyn. Dylan explains that he liked the way Allyn has changed the spelling of his last name to appear more exotic. A little later he came across Dylan Thomas and then made a choice between Robert Allyn and Robert Dylan: "I couldn't decide - the letter D came on stronger" he explained. He decided on "Bob" as there were several Bobbys in popular music at the time (Bobby Vee, Bobby Vinton, Bobby Rydell).
Dylan quit college at the end of his freshman year but stayed in Minneapolis, working the folk circuit there with temporary sojourns in Denver, Colorado, and Chicago, Illinois. In January 1961, en route to Minneapolis from Chicago, he changed course and went to New York City to perform and to visit his ailing musical idol Woody Guthrie in a New Jersey hospital. Initially playing mostly in small "basket" clubs for little pay, he gained some public recognition after a review [1] in the New York Times by critic Robert Shelton, while John Hammond, a legendary music business figure, signed him to Columbia Records that September.
At the time his voice, musicianship and songwriting were still raw. His performances, like his first Columbia album (1962's Bob Dylan), consisted of familiar folk, blues and gospel material seasoned with a few of his own songs. As he continued to record for Columbia, he also recorded more than a dozen songs for Broadside Magazine (a folk music magazine and record label), under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt. In August 1962, Robert Allen Zimmerman went to the Supreme Court building in New York, and changed his name to Robert Dylan. By the time his next record, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, was released in 1963 he had begun to make his name as both a singer and songwriter, specializing in protest songs, inspired partly by Joe Hill and initially in the style of Guthrie but soon practically developing his own genre.
His most famous songs of the time are typified by "Blowin' In The Wind", its melody partially derived from the traditional slave song "No More Auction Block", coupled with Dylan's original lyrics challenging the social and political status quo. "Blowin' In The Wind" itself was widely recorded and was an international hit for Peter, Paul and Mary, setting an enduring precedent for other artists. While Dylan's topical songs solidified his early reputation, somewhat overlooked among them on Freewheelin' was a mixture of finely crafted bittersweet love songs ("Don't Think Twice, It's Alright", "Girl From the North Country") and jokey, frequently surreal talking blues ("Talking World War III Blues", "I Shall Be Free"). Humor was a large part of Bob Dylan's persona.
The Freewheelin' song "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall", built melodically from a loose adaptation of the stanza tune of the folk ballad Lord Randall, with its veiled references to nuclear apocalypse, gained even more resonance as the Cuban missile crisis developed only a few weeks after Dylan began performing it. Soon after the release of Freewheelin Dylan emerged as a dominant figure of the so-called "new folk movement" headquartered in Lower Manhattan's Greenwich Village. The Beatles, amongst others, listened to this album and 1964's The Times They Are A-Changin' repeatedly and realized that entire albums of boy-meets-girl songs were now, at one blow, outmoded.
With Joan Baez during the Civil Rights March on Washington D.C., 1963
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With Joan Baez during the Civil Rights March on Washington D.C., 1963
While undeniably a fine interpreter of traditional songs, Dylan's singing voice was unusual and untrained and his phrasing as a vocalist was eccentric. He sang his songs with an arrogance and aggression that was anathema to the music industry of the time. Many of his most famous early songs first reached the public through versions by other performing musicians who were more immediately palatable. Joan Baez, regarded at the time as the reigning queen of folk, became Dylan's advocate as well as his lover. In addition to jumpstarting Dylan's performance career by inviting him onstage during her concerts, she chose to record several of his early songs. Given her considerable fame at the time, her recordings of Dylan's songs were influential in bringing Dylan to national and international prominence.
Others who recorded and released his songs around this time included The Byrds, Sonny and Cher, The Hollies, Manfred Mann, The Brothers Four, Judy Collins and Herman's Hermits, most attempting to impart more of a pop feel and rhythm to the songs where Dylan and Baez performed them mostly as sparse folk pieces keying rhythmically off the vocals. So ubiquitous were these covers by the mid-1960s that CBS started to promote him with the tag: "Nobody Sings Dylan Like Dylan". Paradoxically, many new artists sprang up at this time with singing styles suspiciously similar to Dylan's, typically using his inflections and tone while dispensing with the "mumbly" and gruff qualities (see Donovan Leitch).
Post je objavljen 13.03.2006. u 21:00 sati.