His wonderfully laid-back country album Nashville Skyline saw him affecting a romantic croon, supposedly the result of the musician laying off cigarettes.
That era of domestic bliss with Sara — before the dissolution heard on Blood on the Tracks — saw his vocals grow more relaxed and mature. But even the great singers have to contend with age and the inevitable changes that occur to the larynx.
No longer straining, he found his comfort zone as a grizzled old pro spewing gloomy prophecy and even having a laugh or two. Dylan has never stopped recording, continuing to baffle fans with holiday albums Christmas in the Heart and a suite of Sinatra-era tunes three albums of covers now compiled on Triplicate.
He has so much more to say before his voice gives out completely. Over the decades, many musicians have covered Dylan, sometimes to brilliant effect. Often, these covers are more fetching, smoother, lit up with grace and beauty.
The Coen brothers masterpiece Inside Llewyn Davis concerns the title character Oscar Isaac , a struggling New York folk singer in the early s trying to make his name.
The film is a melancholy portrait of failures and never-beens — the artists who missed their moment in the sun.
But we and Llewyn know his fate is sealed when the young man with the wild hair and angular features goes to the mic. And despite all the people who have tried to imitate the Dylan Voice, no one has sounded like him since.
This article was featured in the InsideHook newsletter. Sign up now. Sign up for InsideHook to get our best content delivered to your inbox every weekday. And awesome. Popular at InsideHook. Chicago Los Angeles New York. The Goods Deals Subscribe Account. Music May 25, am. Sure, Bob Dylan's singing voice is unconventional, but is that actually what makes it great? By Tim Grierson TimGrierson. More Like This. Recommended Suggested for you. At the Newport Folk Festival, Dylan shocked fans and the music world by plugging in and rocking out, backed by a band that had been hastily-arranged the night before.
For the next year or so on tour around the world, Dylan and his band The Hawks were regularly booed when they went electric - including at London's Royal Albert Hall. The period that followed - with his trilogy of more abstract and surrealist bluesy folk rock albums, Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde - saw Dylan turn pop music into an art form, according to Sean Latham, director of the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies at the University of Tulsa.
Dylan married Sara Lownds, who had worked as a model, in secret in , and they had four children together. He also adopted her daughter from a prior marriage.
For a short while they lived at the famous Chelsea Hotel in New York. One of their sons, Jakob, became known as the frontman of the s band The Wallflowers. Dylan did a screen test at Andy Warhol's studio, aka The Factory, and walked away with a print of an Elvis portrait. He was injured in a mysterious motorbike accident in July The singer then stopped touring and became a bit of a recluse for most of the rest of the 60s, living in a remote artists' colony in Woodstock, upstate New York.
During this period he learned to paint, read the bible and would jam with his with touring bandmates - who would become affectionately known as The Band. The collection of historical ballads and traditional songs they recorded were released many years later under the name The Basement Tapes. The Band's star-studded final gig, which featured Dylan, was later the subject of a Martin Scorsese documentary entitled The Last Waltz.
Fans broke into Dylan's property and bed , and he eventually moved back to Greenwich Village, where he was similarly hounded by Dylanologists. The star rarely read the contracts he signed early on, and as a result he and his long-trusted manager Albert Grossman ended up suing each other in the s. Re-inventing himself again as a country singer, he wrote Wanted Man with Johnny Cash, who debuted the track live at San Quentin prison in Dylan made a rare TV appearance on his famous friend's new show.
His album Blood on the Tracks tackled the topic of his separation from Sara. Its opening track Tangled Up in Blue saw him experiment with timeless painting-style techniques in the muddled narrative of the song.
The singer said it took "ten years to live and two years to write". Dylan returned to the live circuit in , playing arenas with The Band - one of the first major tours of its kind. Dylan even drove a motor home for the circuit of small town venues, which was mythologised in a Scorsese Netflix film. At times during the unique tour, Dylan painted his face white and wore a mask, while former girlfriend Baez dressed up as him.
The finale of the first leg constituted a benefit concert for imprisoned boxer Ruben Carter - the subject of Dylan's recent song The Hurricane - and featured a cameo from fighting champion and activist Muhammad Ali. Baez has stated that the lyrics to her song Diamonds and Rust relate to her relationship with her fellow singer. He started to re-imagine his songs at this time, reworking the tempos and styles so they were almost unrecognisable.
A decade later, after sustaining a debilitating hand injury, Dylan said a jazz singer inspired him to play and sing his songs using a totally different technique. In , Dylan released a cubist-inspired film he had written and directed during The Rolling Thunder Revue tour, called Renaldo and Clara.
It was an expensive flop at the box office Film fan Dylan had previously enjoyed his first dramatic big screen role in the western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, for which he wrote Knockin' on Heaven's Door. Another song, Lay Lady Lay, was originally penned for the soundtrack of the movie Midnight Cowboy but was not submitted in time so it ended up on his album Nashville Skyline.
Dylan had a period of Christian revelation in the late s, following his divorce, after a fan threw a small silver cross on stage. He got baptised and released several albums containing contemporary gospel songs like Gotta Serve Somebody. Speaking about his faith in , however, the musician told Newsweek: "I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music, I don't find it anywhere else.
I don't adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists all of that, I've learned more from the songs than I have from any of this entity. His song Blind Willie McTell, a tribute to the late bluesman, was released in - oddly eight years after it was recorded.
Now regarded as part of the Dylan canon, it emerged belatedly via the official release of The Bootleg Series. Dylan married his backup singer Carolyn Dennis in and they had a daughter together, before divorcing in This second marriage remained a secret until Howard Sounes' book, Down the Highway, was first published in They each had band nicknames and Dylan was known as Lucky. Lucky Wilbury.
He had his own weekly one-hour satellite radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, from to Dylan's name appears on the wall of Blackpool's Opera House, alongside other acts to have performed there, such as comedians Little and Large and Roy Chubby Brown.
He's a hip-hop fan. Some consider his own track Subterranean Homesick Blues to be one of the first popular modern rap songs. He's also allegedly a master thief. Chronicles: Volume One to give it its full title was a New York times best-seller, however critics claimed its author, Dylan, had cribbed certain passages from Marcel Proust, Mark Twain, Time magazine and even a guide to New Orleans.
The Dylan-inspired film I'm Not There became Heath Ledger's last movie to be released during the actor's lifetime. A ft wide Dylan mural by Brazilian street artist Eduardo Kobra pictured below was unveiled in downtown Minneapolis in Dylan was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in , and the US Medal of Freedom in by then-President Barack Obama; before receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature four years later for having "created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition".
He became the first songwriter to win the prestigious award, but it was collected on his behalf by another - the priestess of punk Patti Smith , who nervously sang A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall. He eventually delivered a Nobel lecture in the form of a spoken word piece with added piano tinkling and references to the plays of William Shakespeare and Homer's hero, Odysseus.
He's played roughly gigs a year for the last 20 years. His first new song in eight years, Murder Most Foul , was released last year and it comprised of a minute rumination on the s and the assassination of JFK. It made Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, his 11 minute-plus epic from , seem pretty poppy by comparison. Dylan has been a keen painter and visual artist for decades and his work is currently on display and up for sale at the Halcyon Gallery in London and the Castle Fine Art gallery in Manchester.
Last week, it emerged Dylan had agreed to become an honorary patron of the The Bob Willis Fund - a new charity in memory of the late England cricketer. Willis once told the BBC's John Wilson that he had changed his middle name to Dylan as a young man, in honour of his favourite musician.
The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma - a museum dedicated to artefacts from his huge archive - will open to the public in May next year. So if you made it to the end of this list and are still craving more, now you know where to go for more Dylan facts. The 6 Music Artist Collection online also has programmes celebrating the singer.
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