Positively 80th Birthday
Absolutely Bob Dylan🎸
Bob Dylan is still Forever Young as he turns 80 today! He has released 39 studio albums, 95 singles, 17 extended plays, 52 music videos, 15 volumes of The Bootleg Series, 12 live albums, 19 compilations, 20 box sets and in 2016 won the Nobel Prize in Literature. What follows are at least 80 reasons in no particular order to celebrate!
Robert Allen Zimmerman (Hebrew name Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham) was born in Duluth, Minnesota, at 9:05 p.m. on May 24, 1941, 8 lb 13 oz, 20.5”.
Dylan thought the Jimi Hendrix version of “All Along the Watchtower” to be the best Dylan cover.
The pump don’t work because the vandals took the handle at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
“You don’t necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they’re poets. I don’t call myself a poet because I don’t like the word. I’m a trapeze artist.”
Bob Dylan painted the cover for The Band’s first album Music from Big Pink (1968).
The Traveling Wilburys album “Volume 1” was released in 1988 with Dylan, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and George Harrison.
Dylan attended Buddy Holly’s penultimate performance at the National Guard Armory in Duluth on Jan 31, 1959, also seeing Ritche Valens, The Big Bopper, and Link Wray.
The cue cards used in the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” were Bob’s idea. He and Donovan, Bob Neuwirth, and Allen Ginsberg drew them. The segment was shot in an alley behind London’s Savoy Hotel.
One of the first celebrities Dylan met after coming to New York City was Jack Dempsey.
The Rolling Thunder Revue began Oct. 30, 1975 in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
The tour took on the appearance of a rural carnival and also served as a partial backdrop for the filming of Dylan’s art flick Renaldo and Clara. On hand at various times throughout: Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Joni Mitchell, Ronee Blakely and Ramblin' Jack Elliott. Musicians from the Desire LP completed the ensemble, including Scarlet Rivera, Rob Stoner, Howie Wyeth, and Mick Ronson.
His first school band was called Golden Chords.
The “no no no” in It Ain’t Me, Babe is believed by music enthusiasts to be an “answer” to the early Beatles and “yeah yeah yeah.” “Eight in the Top Ten,” Dylan quipped at the time. “It seemed to me like a definite line was being drawn.”
For the cover of Bringing It All Back Home, photographer Daniel Kramer posed Dylan at the estate of Albert Grossman. Dylan holds a cat as Sally Grossman reclines in the background. Kramer said it was the only one of ten shots “in which the cat was looking at the lens.”
His famous, mysterious motorcycle accident took place July 29, 1966, on a Triumph at Woodstock, New York. There is no official police report. Over the years, his injury has been reported as a concussion or a broken neck. A bizarre rumor circulated that author Richard Farina had been killed in the accident. Farina had died in a motorcycle accident in Carmel, California on Apr 30.
In 1980 Dylan won the Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for “Gotta Serve Somebody.”
Dylan has been sober since 1994.
Dylan returned from London in the summer of 1965 to find he had his second number one hit, “Mr. Tambourine Man” by The Byrds. His first was “Blowing in the Wind” recorded by Peter, Paul, and Mary.
The Swedish Academy awarded Dylan the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."
He declined the invitation to the Nobel Banquet and was given six months to deliver his laureate address, a requirement to receive the eight million kronor (837,000 euros, $891,000) that comes with the prize. "When I started writing my own songs, folk lingo was the only vocabulary that I knew, and I used it. But I had something else as well. I had principles and sensibilities and an informed view of the world, and I'd had that for a while. I learned it all in grammar school: Don Quixote, Ivanhoe, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, A Tale of Two Cities, all the rest."
—Bob Dylan, from his recorded message to the Swedish Academu
Dylan, 19, visited Woody Guthrie, 48, at the Greystone Park Hospital shortly after arriving by bus Jan 24, 1961. Guthrie was dying of Huntington’s disease.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers opened for Dylan on the 1986 True Confessions tour. The next year they opened for his Temple in Flames tour, the last tour before the never ending tour started.
His first Billboard #1 Single featuring him singing came in 2020; “Murder Most Foul,” a ballad about the assassination of JFK. “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35” both reached #2 in the 60s, but this was his first #1.
From a 1965 Musical Express questionnaire: Most thrilling experience: “Getting my birthday cake stomped on by Norman Mailer.”
Dylan has written over 500 songs recorded by over 2,000 artists.
During a 1970 event he would memorialize in “Day of the Locust,” Dylan was described as “the disturbed and concerned conscience of young America.” He was receiving an honorary doctorate during Princeton commencement ceremonies. In Chronicles: Volume One” (2004) he wrote “I couldn’t believe it! Tricked once more ... I was losing all kinds of credibility.”
Where you can get a legal Bob Dylan postage stamp: Gambia.
When The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) was released, John Lennon bought a copy for each of his fellow Beatles.
Dylan children: Maria Dylan 10/21/61, Jesse Byron Dylan 1/6/66, Anna Dylan 7/11/67, Sam Dylan 7/30/68, Jacob Luke Dylan 12/9/69, Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan 1/31/86.
One of the folk artists who performed on the National Mall before Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, Dylan sang “Only a Pawn in Their Game.” His set also included “When the Ship Comes In,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.”
Dylan has won 10 Grammy Awards out of 38 nominations as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Cameo appearances in “Desolation Row”: Albert Einstein (disguised as Robin Hood), Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Cinderella, Bette Davis, Romeo, Cain, Abel, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Casanova, the Phantom of the Opera.
Almost a year before the Beatles made history on the Ed Sullivan Show, Dylan walked away from his appearance scheduled for May 12, 1963. The producers wanted him to sing something less controversial, Dylan wanted to play “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” When he got the news he packed up his guitar and left.
The other three guys on the cover of John Wesley Harding (1967): Brother musicians Luxman and Purna Das of the Bengali Bauls, and Woodstock carpenter Charlie Joy.
After studying Christianity at the Vineyard Christian Fellowship school in California in 1979, Dylan’s next three albums were Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love.
Ian McLagen via Bill Lewis via Terry Buffalo Ware: In the 70s Ian found himself in a room with Dylan and Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant…Grant: “Hello, Bob. I’m Peter Grant, I manage Led Zeppelin.” Dylan: “I don’t come to you with my problems.”
On December 7, 2020, it was reported that Bob Dylan had sold the rights to his music catalog for $300 million. Now it is believed that amount was closer to $400 million to transfer all royalty and management rights covering more than 600 Dylan-penned songs to Universal Music Publishing Group.
Just before his 56th birthday in May 1997, Bob was hospitalized for histoplasmosis, a fungal infection.
Twice married: Sara Lowndes (1965-1977, divorced), and Carol Dennis (1986-1992, divorced). In song, he married Isis on the fifth day of May, but he could not hold on to her very long.
His first Album of the Year Grammy was for Time Out of Mind in 1997.
President Obama, noting “there is no bigger giant in the history of American music,” presented Dylan with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on May 29, 2012.
Andy Warhol Star Edie Sedgwick is said to be the inspiration behind the song “Just Like a Woman” as well as the album title for Blonde on Blonde (1966).
To remain anonymous, Dylan has been known to use the names “Elston Gunn” and “Robert Allyn.”
Bob was inducted by Bruce Springsteen into the Rock and Roll Hall of fame in 1988.
Dylan didn’t play Woodstock but he was near. The festival was on Max Yasgur's farm at Bethel. Dylan was at Woodstock, New York, about 50 miles from the gathering.
Of “Tangled Up in Blue” Dylan says it took him ten years to live and two years to write.
Dylan added his name to a whiskey brand in 2018 called Heaven’s Door, beginning with a seven-year-old bourbon, a “double-barreled” American whiskey and a rye finished in French Vosges oak barrels. The press releases stress that Mr. Dylan and his team don’t make the whiskey; they buy it from undisclosed producers and add their own twists (including a Dylan designed label) before bottling.
Dylan had worked on “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” in Denver and in the Chelsea Hotel (as he claimed in “Sara.”) On the studio clock in Nashville for Blonde on Blonde he wrote for 8 hours then took it to the waiting musicians at 4:00 in the morning. They recorded the 11- minute song in one take.
The never ending tour began June 7, 1988. Dylan turned 50, 60, and 70 on the road.
The 2,000th show took place in Dayton, Ohio on Oct 16, 2007.
The 3,000th show took place in Innsbruck, Austria on Apr 19, 2019.
In 2003 he wrote and starred in the film Masked and Anonymous.
The Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is a repository of approximately 100,000 items the George Kaiser Family Foundation purchased from Dylan for $20 million. Among the treasures, the leather jacket worn at Newport when he plugged in his guitar and gave the folk fans a jolt. Also, manuscripts, notebooks, master tapes, photographs, setlists, sticky notes and more.
Two classics in one day: Dylan recorded ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” on Jan 13, 1965, in Columbia Studios in New York City.
He shared a win in 1973 for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year for “The Concert For Bangladesh” with Billy Preston, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Klaus Voormann, Leon Russell, Ravi Shankar and Ringo Starr.
On Feb 9, 1963, drunken William Zantzinger, 24, attending the Spinsters’ Ball at Baltimore’s Emerson Hotel, assaulted three hotel workers with a toy cane. The barmaid, Hattie Carroll, 51, received the worst of it for not delivering his bourbon promptly. She died in a hospital eight hours later. Initially charged with murder, he was convicted of lesser manslaughter and assault chargers and given a six-month sentence and a $500 fine. The sentence was handed down Aug 28, the day of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Dylan wrote, then recorded the “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll on Oct 23, releasing it on record Jan 13, 1964.
“Forever Young” was written for his son Jesse.
On Sept 27, 1997, he did a command performance for Pope John Paul II, 77, and a crowd of 300,000 at the World Eucharist Congress in Bologna, Italy. Future Pope Benedict XVI was on hand, labeling Dylan’s music “anti-Christian” and Dylan himself as a false prophet.
One Oscar nomination, one win: “Things Have Changed” from Wonder Boys (2000).
Favorite food in his Hibbing high school cafeteria: cherry pie à la mode.
The first bootleg recording of note was called Great White Wonder and first appeared in the summer of 1969. A double LP in a plain white cover, it consisted of Dylan and the Band’s “Basement Tapes,” 1961 tapes of Dylan singing in a Minnesota hotel room, and outtakes from his appearance on The Johnny Cash Show.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 was awarded to Bob Dylan "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."
Suze Rotolo (1943-2011) was 19 when she appeared with Dylan on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963), and was the inspiration for “Don’t Think Twice,” “Boots of Spanish Leather,” and “Tomorrow is a Long Time.” Her autobiography, A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties was published in 2009.
Steve Jobs collected Dylan concert bootleg recordings from the early 60s.
“I was really nervous (about meeting Dylan) because he was one of my heroes, and I was also afraid that he wouldn’t be really smart any more, but I was delighted. He was everything I’d hoped…“He’s one of my all-time heroes. My love for him has grown over the years, it’s ripened. I can’t figure out how he did it when he was so young.”—Steve Jobs
“Lay, Lady, Lay” was originally commissioned for Midnight Cowboy (1968). At least that was the story until 2020 when a 1971 document was unearthed while preparing for an auction of original writings. In that note, Dylan says he wrote the song for Barbra Streisand.
On April 7, 2008, Dylan was awarded a Pulitzer Prize special citation for “his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.”
Cameo appearances in “Murder Most Foul”: The Beatles, Uncle Sam, Scarlett O’Hara, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, the Acid Queen, Patsy Cline, Anthony Zapruder, JFK, LBJ, Wolfman Jack, Tom Dooley, King James, Etta James, John Lee Hooker, Guitar Slim, Marilyn Monroe, Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Carl Wilson, Oscar Peterson, Stan Getz, Dickie Betts, Art Pepper, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, The Birdman of Alcatraz, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Bugsy Siegel, Pretty Boy Floyd, Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Nat King Cole, Terry Malloy, Lady Macbeth, Houdini, Jelly Roll Morton, Bud Powell.
Kris Kristofferson was working as a janitor in the Nashville Columbia studios when Dylan recorded Blonde on Blonde (1966).
In 1973 appeared with Kris Kristofferson in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. The Dylan soundtrack included “Knocking on Heavens Door.”
I was the only songwriter in Nashville allowed in at the time. There were police round the building. Bob was doing a great thing for Nashville, giving it credibility. I never said a word to him - I didn’t dare - but I spoke to his wife and son. In Nashville at the time, if you didn’t cut three songs in three hours, you were being extravagant and wasteful. He just went in there and sat down at the piano, all by himself, and wrote all night long. The band were playing ping pong and waiting for him. I’d never seen anything like it. I respected him. To me, he lifted songwriting up to an art form that was worth committing your life to, like poetry... To me, it was like watching Van Gogh go through different stages of his painting and his inspiration.”-Kris Kristofferson, The London Times, 2008
In 1971, Bob Dylan published his book Tarantula.
Dylan wrote “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding”) at Woodstock, NY, in 1964 while Mimi and Richard Farina were his houseguests.
Dyan received three Grammys the night of Feb 28, 1998: Best Contemporary Folk Album as well as Album of the Year for Time Out of Mind, Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for “Cold Irons Bound.”
Dylan painted the cover for his 1970 double album Self Portrait.
In 2011 Dylan, 70, performed for the first time in Vietnam and mainland China.
The management contract with Albert Grossman expired in 1970. Legal entanglements did not conclude until 1987, two years after Grossman’s death.
In the final settlement Dylan agreed to pay Grossman’s widow Sally, who appeared on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home, $2 million.
Dylan was in the midst of recording Empire Burlesque when he participated in the recording of “We Are the World” in Jan, 1985, at the A&M Studios in LA.
In Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home (2005) Dylan remembered finding his first guitar left behind by the residents of the Seventh Avenue home in Hibbing which his father had purchased.
Upon further exploration, the 10-year-old discovered an antique radio that had a 78 RPM turntable as part of the console. On it was a recording of “Drifting Too Far from the Shore” written by Charles E. Moody. He was unclear of the recording artist; it was either the Stanley Brothers or Bill Monroe. But according to Dylan, “the sound of the record made me feel like I was somebody else.”
“The past is a blast.”
