From Minnesota to Greenwich Village
Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on 24 May 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota, and grew up in the nearby town of Hibbing. He took his new name as a young man and moved to New York in early 1961, where he played in the folk clubs of Greenwich Village and absorbed the repertoire of Woody Guthrie, whom he admired deeply. He signed to Columbia Records later that year.
His early albums, including The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) and The Times They Are a-Changin’ (1964), made him the best-known voice of the American folk revival. Songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” were taken up by civil rights marchers and by other singers, and he was widely cast as a spokesman for a generation, a role he did not appear to want.
Going electric
By 1965 he had moved on. Bringing It All Back Home put electric instruments on half the record, and “Like a Rolling Stone” became a major hit that summer. His electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965 drew a mixed reaction from the crowd, and the dispute over whether he had betrayed folk music has been argued about ever since. The albums Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and the double album Blonde on Blonde (1966) followed. They are often counted among the finest rock records, and their sound, dense with imagery, influenced almost everyone in the wave of rock that culminated in 1967.
A tour of Britain in 1966, much of it with the group that later became the Band, was marked by hostile audience reactions to the electric half of the show. Dylan was working at an exhausting pace.
The accident and the retreat
On 29 July 1966 Dylan was involved in a motorcycle accident near his home in Woodstock, New York. The exact details were never made public in full, and the severity of his injuries has been a matter of speculation. What is clear is that he cancelled a planned tour and largely disappeared from public view for many months. In later years he suggested that the pause was a welcome chance to step back from the pressure of fame, though accounts of the period differ.
During the rest of the decade he remained at Woodstock with his wife Sara and their young children. It was a conspicuous contrast to the loud public culture of 1967, when much of the American counterculture was built around celebrity and spectacle. He did not appear at the Monterey Pop Festival or take part in the Summer of Love.
The Basement Tapes
In 1967 Dylan began recording informally with the musicians who had backed him on tour, soon to be known as the Band: Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson and, later, Levon Helm. The sessions took place in and around Woodstock, in a house known as Big Pink and in Dylan’s own home. They were relaxed and wide-ranging, with old folk and country songs, jokes and new compositions.
Many of these recordings circulated for years as bootlegs, among the first well-known examples of the phenomenon, and a selection was released officially in 1975 as The Basement Tapes. Some of the songs, such as “I Shall Be Released” and “This Wheel’s on Fire”, were recorded by other artists, and the sessions are often viewed as an early influence on country-rock and what later became known as Americana. The Band’s own debut album, Music from Big Pink, followed in 1968.
John Wesley Harding
Dylan returned to a conventional studio in Nashville in the autumn and winter of 1967 and made John Wesley Harding, which was released at the end of December that year. It was strikingly different from the music around it. Where Sgt. Pepper and its imitators were layered and colourful, this record was spare, with a small group, acoustic guitar, harmonica and sparse drums and bass. Its songs were short and cryptic, drawing on biblical language and parables, outlaw ballads and moral puzzles. It included “All Along the Watchtower”, which Jimi Hendrix recorded in a famous version in 1968.
The album reached a large audience and was generally well received. Many critics have seen it as a deliberate answer to the excesses of psychedelia, and it is hard to overlook the contrast. Dylan did not say much about it at the time, which suited the mystique of a man who had stopped giving interviews.
What came after
John Wesley Harding pointed to a further change. Nashville Skyline (1969) was a country record in a gentle new vocal voice. He appeared at the Isle of Wight Festival in August 1969, but not at Woodstock, which was held a short distance from his own home. In the following decades he continued to change course repeatedly: Blood on the Tracks in 1975 is regarded as a high point, he made a series of gospel-oriented albums at the end of the 1970s, and he has toured regularly for many years. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016.
Why 1967 was a hinge
For the story of 1967, Dylan matters mostly through absence. He had helped to open the door that the Beatles, Hendrix and others went through, then chose not to follow the crowd. His silence and his low-key return remind us that the year’s music contained opposing impulses, towards exuberant experiment on one side and quiet, rooted songwriting on the other.