Bob Dylan is unquestionably one of  the most influential figures in the history of popular music. He is the writer of scores of classic songs and is
  generally regarded as the man who brought literacy to rock lyrics. The son of the middle-class proprietor of  an electrical and furniture store, as a teenager, living in Hibbing, Minnesota, he was always intrigued by the
  romanticism of the outsider. He loved James Dean movies, liked riding motorcycles and wearing biker gear,  and listened to R&B music on radio stations transmitting from the south. A keen fan of folk singer Odetta
  and country legend Hank Williams, he was also captivated by early rock 'n' roll.

       Dylan had learned about Guthrie in Minnesota and had quickly devoured and memorized as many Guthrie  songs as he could. In Denver, he assumed a new voice, began speaking with an Okie twang, and adopted  a new 'hard travellin'' appearance. Second, in Denver Dylan had met Jesse Fuller, a blues performer who  played guitar and harmonica simultaneously by using a harp rack. Dylan was intrigued and soon afterwards  began to teach himself to do the same. By the time he returned to Minneapolis, he had developed  remarkably as a performer. By now sure that he intended to make a living as a professional musician, he
  returned briefly to Hibbing, then set out, via Madison and Chicago, for New York, where he arrived on 24  January 1961.

    His first album, called simply Bob Dylan, was released in March 1961. It presented a collection of folk and  blues standards, often about death and sorrows and the trials of life, songs that had been included in  Dylan's repertoire over the past year or so, performed with gusto and an impressive degree of sensitivity for  a 20-year-old. But it was the inclusion of two of his own compositions, most notably the affectionate tribute,
  'Song To Woody', that pointed the way forward.  Dylan became interested in, and  was subsequently adopted by, the Civil Rights movement. His song 'Blowin' In The Wind', written in April  1962, was to be the most famous of his protest songs and was included on his second album, The
  Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, released in May 1963.

    In the meantime, Dylan had written and recorded several  other noteworthy early political songs. At the end of 1962, he recorded a single, a rock 'n' roll song called 'Mixed Up Confusion', with  backing musicians. The record was quickly deleted, apparently because Dylan's manager, Albert  Grossman, saw that the way forward for his charge was not as a rocker, but as an earnest acoustic folky.

    Similarly, tracks that had been recorded for Dylan's second album with backing musicians were scrapped,  although the liner notes which commented on them and identified the players remained carelessly
  unrevised. The Freewheelin' record was so long in coming that four original song choices were substituted  at the last moment by other, more newly composed songs. One of the tracks omitted was 'Talking John
  Birch Society Blues', which Dylan had been controversially banned from singing on the Ed Sullivan Show in  May 1963. The attendant publicity did no harm whatsoever to Dylan's stature as a radical new  'anti-  establishment' voice. At the same time, Grossman's shrewd decision to have a somewhat saccharine  version of 'Blowin' In The Wind' recorded by Peter, Paul And Mary also paid off, the record becoming a  huge hit in the USA, and bringing Dylan's name to national, and indeed international, attention for the first  time.

  At the end of 1962, Dylan flew to London to appear in the long-lost BBC Television play, The Madhouse On  Castle Street. The experience did little to further his career as an actor, but while he was in London, he
  learned many English folk songs, particularly from musician Martin Carthy, whose tunes he subsequently  'adapted'. Thus, 'Scarborough Fair' was reworked as 'Girl From The North Country', 'Lord Franklin' as 'Bob
  Dylan's 'Dream', and 'Nottamun Town' as 'Masters Of War'. The songs continued to pour out and singers  began to queue up to record them. It was at this time that Joan Baez first began to play a prominent part
  in Dylan's life. Already a successful folk-singer, Baez covered Dylan songs at a rapid rate, and proclaimed  his genius at every opportunity. Soon she was introducing him to her audience and the two became lovers,  the King and Queen of folk music. Dylan's songwriting became more astute and wordy as the months  passed. Biblical and other literary imagery began to be pressed into service in songs like 'When The Ship
  Comes In' and the anthemic 'Times They Are A-Changin'', this last written a day or two after Dylan had  sung 'Only A Pawn In Their Game' in front of 400,000 people at the March On Washington, 28 August  1963. Indeed, the very next day, Dylan read in the local newspaper of the murder of black waitress Hattie  Carroll, which inspired the best, and arguably the last, of his protest songs, 'The Lonesome Death Of Hattie  Carroll', included on his third album, The Times They Are A-Changin', released in January 1964.

  Dylan's songwriting perspectives underwent a huge change in 1964. Now finally separated from Suze  Rotolo, disenchanted with much of the petty politics of the Village, and becoming increasingly frustrated
  with the 'spokesman of a generation' tag that had been hung around his neck, the ever-restless Dylan  sloughed off the expectations of the old folky crowd, and, influenced by his reading the poetry of John  Keats and French symbolist Arthur Rimbaud, began to expand his own poetic consciousness. He then  wrote the songs that made up his fourth record, Another Side Of Bob Dylan - including the disavowal of  his past, 'My Back Pages', and the Illuminations-inspired 'Chimes Of Freedom' – while yet newer songs  such as 'Mr Tambourine Man' (which he recorded for but did not include on Another Side ), 'Gates Of Eden'  and 'It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding', which he began to include in concert performances over the next  few weeks, dazzled with their lyrical complexity and literary sophistication.

    Another Side Of Bob Dylan was to be Dylan's last solo acoustic album for almost 30 years. Intrigued by  what the Beatles were doing – he had visited London again to play one concert at the Royal Festival Hall in
  May 1964 – and particularly excited by the Animals' 'folk-rock' cover version of 'House Of The Rising Sun',  a track Dylan himself had included on his debut album, he and producer Tom Wilson fleshed out some of
  the Bringing It All Back Home songs with rock 'n' roll backings – the proto-rap 'Subterranean Homesick  Blues' and 'Maggie's Farm', for instance.

    However, the song that was perhaps Dylan's most important
  mid-60s composition, 'Like A Rolling Stone', was written immediately after the final series of acoustic  concerts played in the UK in April and May 1965, and commemorated in D.A. Pennebaker's famous  documentary film, Don't Look Back. Dylan said that he began to write 'Like A Rolling Stone' having  decided to 'quit' singing and playing.  At six minutes,  it destroyed the formula of the sub-three-minute single forever. 

    Dylan's discovery of the Hawks, a Canadian group who had been playing roadhouses and funky bars until  introductions were made via John Hammond Jnr. and Albert Grossman's secretary Mary Martin, was one
  of those pieces of alchemical magic that happen hermetically. The Hawks, later to become the Band,  comprised Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko and Levon Helm. Dylan's  songs and the Hawks' sound were made for each other. After a couple of stormy warm-up gigs, they took  to the road in the autumn of 1965 and travelled through the USA and finally to Britain, in May 1966. Dylan was  deranged and dynamic, the group wild and mercurial.  It was  certainly the loudest thing anyone had ever heard, and, almost inevitably, the electric set was greeted with  mayhem and dismay. Drummer Levon Helm was so disheartened by the ferocity of the booing that he quit  before the turn of the year – drummers Sandy Konikoff and Mickey Jones completed the tour.

    Offstage,  Dylan was spinning out of control, not sleeping, not eating, and apparently heading rapidly for rock 'n' roll  oblivion. Pennebaker again filmed the tour, this time in Dylan's employ. The 'official' record of the tour was  the rarely seen Eat The Document, a film originally commissioned by ABC TV. The unofficial version  compiled by Pennebaker himself was You Know Something Is Happening. 'What was happening,' says  Pennebaker, 'was drugs . . . '

  Dylan was physically exhausted when he returned to America in June 1966, but had to complete the film  and finish Tarantula, the book that was overdue for Macmillan. He owed Columbia two more albums before
  his contract expired, and was booked to play a series of concerts right up to the end of the year in  increasingly bigger venues, including Shea Stadium. Then, on 29 July 1966, Dylan was injured in a  motorcycle accident near his home in Bearsville, near Woodstock, upper New York State.

   More importantly, the accident allowed him to shrug off the responsibilities that had been lined up on his  behalf by manager Grossman. By now, the relationship between Dylan and Grossman was less than  cordial and litigation between the two of them was ongoing until Grossman's death almost 20 years later.  Dylan was nursed through his convalescence by his wife, Sara – they had been married privately in
  November 1965 – and was visited only rarely. Rumours spread that Dylan would never perform again.  Journalists began to prowl around the estate, looking for some answers but finding no-one to ask.

      Dylan chose to avoid the Woodstock Festival (though the Band – the newly rechristened Crackers, who by  now had two of their own albums, Music From Big Pink and The Band, to their credit – did play there),
  but he did play at the Isle Of Wight Festival on 31 August 1969. In a baggy Hank Williams-style white  suit, it was a completely different Bob Dylan from the fright-haired, rabbit-suited marionette who had howled
  and screamed in the face of audience hostility at the Albert Hall more than three years earlier. This newly  humble Dylan cooed and crooned an ever-so-polite, if ever-so-unexciting, set of songs and in doing so left
  the audience just as bewildered as those who had booed back in 1966. But that bewilderment was as  nothing compared with the puzzlement that greeted the release, in June 1970, of Self Portrait. This new  record most closely resembled the Dylan album that preceded it – the bootleg collection Great White  Wonder. Both were double albums; both offered mish-mash mix-ups of undistinguished live tracks,  alternate takes, odd cover versions, botched beginnings and endings. Some even heard Self Portrait 's  opening track, 'All The Tired Horses', as a caustic comment on the bootleggers' exploitation of ages-old  material – was Dylan complaining 'How'm I supposed to get any ridin' done?' or 'writin' done?' There was
  little new material on Self Portrait, but there was 'Blue Moon'. The critics howled. Old fans were dismayed. A Rolling Stone magazine review by Greil Marcus was vicious; the article began: 'What is this shit?'

  'We've Got Dylan Back Again', wrote Ralph Gleason in the same magazine just four months later, heralding  the hastily released New Morning as a 'return to form'. There was Al Kooper; there was the Dylan drawl;  there were some slightly surreal lyrics; there was a bunch of new songs; but these were restless times for  Dylan. He had left Woodstock and returned to New York, to the heart of Greenwich Village, having bought a  townhouse on MacDougal Street.

    A US tour followed. Tickets were sold by post and attracted six million applications. Everybody who went  to the shows agreed that Dylan and the Band were fantastic. The recorded evidence, Before The Flood,
  also released by Asylum, certainly oozes energy, but lacks subtlety: Dylan seems to be trying too hard,  pushing everything too fast. It is good, but not that good.

  What is that good, unarguably and incontestably, is Blood On The Tracks. Originally recorded (for CBS,  no hard feelings, etc.) in late 1974, Dylan substituted some of the songs with versions reworked in  Minnesota over the Christmas period. They were his finest compositions since the Blonde On Blonde  material. 'Tangled Up In Blue', 'Idiot Wind', 'If You See Her Say Hello', 'Shelter From The Storm',  one masterpiece followed another.  'Pain sure brings out the best in people, doesn't it?' Dylan sang in 1966's 'She's Your Lover  Now'; Blood On The Tracks gave the lie to all those who had argued that Dylan was a spent force.

      In 1979, Dylan  released an album of fervently evangelical songs, Slow
Train Coming, recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with Jerry Wexler and Barry Beckett, and featuring  Mark Knopfler and Pick Withers from Dire Straits. Dylan won a Grammy for best rock vocal performance on 'Gotta Serve Somebody'.   After three turbulent years,  Dylan dropped from sight for most of 1982, but the  following year he was back in the studio, again with Mark Knopfler, having written a prolific amount of new material.

     Dylan entered the video age by making promos for 'Sweetheart Like You' and  'Jokerman', but did not seem too excited about it.           Increasingly, it appeared that Dylan's best attentions were being devoted to his concerts. The shows with  Tom Petty had been triumphant. Dylan also shared the bill with the Grateful Dead at several stadium
  venues, and learned from the experience. He envied their ability to keep on playing shows year in, year out,  commanding a following wherever and whenever they played. He liked their two drummers and also admired
  the way they varied their set each night, playing different songs as and when they felt like it. These  peculiarly Deadian aspects of live performance were soon incorporated into Dylan's own concert
  philosophy.

      His appetite for work had never been greater, and this same year
 he found himself in the unlikely company of George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty and Roy Orbison  as one of the Traveling Wilburys, a jokey band assembled on a whim in the spring. Their album, Volume  One, on which Dylan's voice was as prominent as anyone's, was, unexpectedly, a huge commercial  success.

      In 1997 it was rumoured that Dylan was knocking on heaven's door. Although he had suffered a serious  inflammation of the heart muscles he was discharged from hospital after a short time, eliciting his priceless
  quote to the press: 'I really thought I'd be seeing Elvis soon'.  The Lanois-produced Time  Out Of Mind was a dark and sombre recording, with Dylan reflecting over lost love and hints of death.

    Dylan's first recording of the new millennium was 'Things Have Changed', which was featured as the main and end-title theme for Curtis Hanson's movie Wonder Boys.