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Life
Bob Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota, on 24 May 1941. After living briefly in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Gallup, New Mexico, he graduated from high school in Hibbing, Minnesota "way up by the Canadian border".
For six troubled months, Bob attended the University of Minnesota on a scholarship. But like so many of the restless, questing students of his generation, the formal confines of college couldn't hold him.
"I didn't agree with school," he says. "I flunked out. I read a lot, but not the required readings."
He remembers staying up all night plowing through the philosophy of Kant instead of reading Living With the Birds for a science course.
"Mostly," he summarizes his college days, "I couldn't stay in one play long enough."
Bob Dylan first came East in February 1961. His destination: the Greystone Hospital in New Jersey. His purpose: to visit the long-ailing Woody Guthrie, singer, ballad-maker and poet. It was the beginning of a deep friendship between the two. Although they were separated by thirty years and two generations, they were united by a love of music, a kindred sense of humour and a common view towards the world.
The young man from the provinces began to make friends quickly in New York, all the while continuing, as he has since he was ten, to assimilate musical ideas from everyone he met, every record he heard. He fell in with Dave Van Ronk and Jack Elliot, two of the most dedicated musicians then playing in Greenwich Village, and swapped songs, ideas and stylistic conceptions with them. He played at the Gaslight Coffeehouse, and in April 1961 appeared opposite John Lee Hooker, the blues singer, at Gerde's Folk City. Word of Dylan's talent began to grow, but in the surcharged atmosphere of rivalry that has crept into the folk-music world, so did envy. His Talkin' New York is a musical comment on his reception in New York.
Recalling his first professinal music job, Bob says:
"I never thought I would shoot lightning through the sky in the entertainment world."
In 1959, in Central City, Colorado, he had that first job, in a rough and tumble striptease joint.
"I was onstage for just a few minutes with my folky songs. Then the strippers would come on. The crowd would yell for more stripping, but they went off, and I'd come bouncing back with my folky songs. As the night got longer, the air got heavier, the audience got drunker and nastier, and I got sicker and finally I got fired."
Bob Dylan started to sing and play guitar when he was ten. Five to six years later he wrote his first song, dedicated to Brigitte Bardot. All the time, he listened to everything with both ears -- Hank Williams, the late Jimmie Rodgers, Jelly Roll Morton, Woody Guthrie, Carl Perkins, early Elvis Presley. A meeting with Mance Lipscomb, Texas songster, left its mark on his work, as did the blues recordings of Rabbit Brown and Big Joe Williams. He speaks worshipfully of the sense of pace and timing the great blues men had, and it has become a trademark of his work already. His speed at assimiliating new styles and digesting them is not the least startling thing about Bob Dylan.
The future:
"I just want to keep on singing and writing songs like I am doing now. I just want to get along. I don't think about making a million dollars. If I had a lot of money what would I do?" he asked himself, closed his eyes, shifted the hat on his head and smiled:
"I would buy a couple of motorcycles, a few air-conditioners, and four or five couches."
from the liner notes from Bob Dylan.
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