Extract from Bob Dylan 1962 to 1970 On Track

Posted on by Opher

Extract from Bob Dylan 1962 to 1970 On Track

Looking back to the early John Bucklen tapes, recorded in 1958 on a portable reel to reel tape recorder, of a young Robert Zimmerman, seventeen years old, still at school, pounding out his homage to his idol Little Richard, there was no inkling of the folk legend he was shortly to become. He wanted to become a rock star. That teenage Dylan was a rebel, assuming an image based on James Dean and Marlon Brando. He formed a number of loud rock ’n’ roll bands, the Golden Chords and Shadow Blasters being two, in which he pounded the piano oblivious to audience response. In the first of his chameleonic changes he assumed the name and wild persona of Elston Gunnn. Despite his naked enthusiasm the bands didn’t take off, indeed, had nowhere to go, but they did bring him some local notoriety and attract the girls. He was very into girls and rock music was both a magnet and aphrodisiac. A big motivator. This increasing rebelliousness led to fractious relationships with school, the tight-knit Jewish community and his father.

   By the age of eighteen, he’d wrung the little Minnesotan iron ore town of Hibbing dry. He’d learnt the rudiments of guitar and piano, formed a number of bands, and absorbed a huge range of musical styles and traditions from rock ‘n’ roll, r&b to country music and standards – the mainstay of the local radio station, all of which were going to contribute and inform his progressions over the course of the ensuing years. Groundwork was being laid. Bob’s tastes were eclectic – his first musical heroes being Hank Williams and Little Richard.

   Here we have to start to unravel the man from the myth. Robert Zimmerman was already outgrowing the little mining town of Hibbing in Minnesota. As soon as he was able, he looked for a way out of there. A fresh-faced boy, looking younger than his years, not yet needing to shave, set off on the start of his adventure.

Bob Dylan 1962 to 1970 On Track (Decades) : Opher Goodwin: Amazon.co.uk: Books

Bob Dylan Bringing It All Back Home: Rock Classics Paperback

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One of the most pivotal albums in the evolution of rock music, few other recordings have had more impact than the 1965 Bob Dylan classic, Bringing It All Back Home. In the mid-sixties, rock music was about to explode into psychedelia, prog and jazz fusion. Meanwhile, Bob Dylan had made an enormous impact on songwriting with his first four all-acoustic albums. He had created a different way of writing songs, by embracing themes such as civil rights, anti-war protests and social issues, which lifted the subject matter from teenage love songs to serious poetic works of art, rife with symbolism. But with Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan shot his lyrics through with surreal hard-edged beat poetry while the music contained both acoustic songs and blues-based loud electric rock. It alienated him from many of his peers in the folk community but nonetheless contains classic cuts like ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ ‘Maggie’s Farm’ and ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. Dylan had opened the door to experimentation. The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, The Doors, Hendrix, Pink Floyd and Cream all listened and responded. In its wake, Songwriting rose to new heights with few boundaries. After Bringing It All Back Home, music was forever changed.

Bob Dylan 1962 to 1970 On Track (Decades) Paperback

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Bob Dylan is the magician who sprinkled poetic fairy dust on to the popular music of the early sixties and his songwriting sparked a revolution and changed rock music forever. The diminutive poet/singer claimed he was merely a ‘song and dance man’ but Dylan altered popular music from intellectually bereft teenage rebellion into a serious adult art form worthy of academic study. Dylan headed for the sixties as a Little Richard rock ‘n’ roller but soon turned acoustic folkie and after absorbing the music and words of Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson and Brecht, he became a vagabond social troubadour. Basking in Rimbaud he transformed into a poetic symbolist before later immersing himself in lysergic beat surrealism. The chameleon of Dylan in the sixties was bewildering to his followers. His first album was a raw debut folk/blues. Then followed three acoustic poetic gems, three ground-breaking surreal ,electric wonders and four that were more mundane and country-tinged. But by the mid-sixties he was a strung-out polka-dotted rock star. He crashed (physically and mentally) before leaving the sixties as a clean-cut country crooner. Dylan had mutated more times than a trilobite. Dylan’s ground-breaking music changed the world and his amazing story is revealed by exploring the eleven albums that he released between 1962 and 1970.

Bob Dylan – On Track – 1962 to 1970 every album, every song

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This is the start of the introduction:

Introduction  

I was fortunate to be introduced to Bob Dylan’s music at the young age of thirteen, though I did not fully appreciate that at the time.

    A good friend of mine by the name of Charlie Mutton had purchased Bob’s debut album shortly after it was released and he was smitten. That was peculiar. Up to that time we had been listening to chart material and old rock ‘n’ roll.  Heaven knows where Mutt picked up on Dylan’s first album. I don’t remember it being either popular or available in my neck of the woods. We weren’t big on ‘folk’ music. However, my ears weren’t tuned in to the raw, nasally sound of Bob’s folk-blues and, although I listened all the way through and even appreciated a number of the tracks, I was not greatly impressed. Mutt was more clued up and assured me that Dylan was going to be huge and if he’d only release a single it would be a top ten hit. I remained quietly sceptical.

   Mutt was incredibly prophetic. Subsequent albums and the ‘Times They Are A Changin’’ single did just as he had predicted. Bob Dylan went on to become one of the most important figures in the history of rock music. Not only did he change the face of rock music but he also had a profound effect on the direction of youth culture. Once I’d ‘got it’, and my ears became more accustomed, I too was utterly smitten.

   As with Dylan I was caught up in the zeitgeist of the time. These were the days of great divisions in society, a rising rebellious youth, the threat of instant annihilation from nuclear war, great changes in attitudes. The traumas of the second world war were still fresh but the economy and world were opening up. Change was in the air. Our parents represented something we did not want to be. Bob was riding that wave of change.

   The 1950s Beats may have cracked the façade of the rigid conformity and strict hypocritical morality of the prevailing post-war 1950s culture. Rock ‘n’ roll and r&b may have liberated youth into a temporary hedonistic frenzy, but it was the 1960s generation who blew the whole structure to smithereens. Peculiarly, Robert Zimmerman found himself, sometimes unwillingly, right at the forefront of those shifts in the tectonic plates of society. Who could have predicted that?

   Who could have known that this young middle-class Jewish kid from a decaying nondescript town in the middle of nowhere would create a persona and develop the skills to take the whole world by storm?