Bob Dylan

Robert Allen Zimmerman was born in Duluth, Minnesota, on May 24, 1941. Grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota, listening to Little Richard, Hank Williams, and Woody Guthrie on the radio. Changed his name to Bob Dylan (after Dylan Thomas).

Dropped out of the University of Minnesota. Hitchhiked to New York in January 1961 to meet Woody Guthrie, who was dying of Huntington's disease at Greystone Park Hospital.

He played the Greenwich Village folk scene, signed to Columbia Records, and released Bob Dylan (1962). Nobody bought it. Then The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) arrived with Blowin' in the Wind and A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, and the folk movement had found its voice.

By 1965, he was bored with folk. He plugged in at Newport. The purists booed.

Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966) changed rock music forever.

He kept reinventing. Country albums (John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline). The divorce masterpiece (Blood on the Tracks, 1975).

The born-again Christian period (Slow Train Coming, 1979). A lost decade in the 80s. Then the resurrection: Oh Mercy (1989), Time Out of Mind (1997), Love and Theft (2001), Modern Times (2006) — all commercial and critical triumphs.

In 2016, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He didn't show up to accept it.

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (May 1963) is the album where it started. Blowin' in the Wind is the folk anthem. A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall is seven minutes of apocalyptic imagery written during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Masters of War is the anti-war song no other anti-war song has matched. Don't Think Twice, It's All Right is the breakup song every singer- songwriter has tried to write since. Girl from the North Country.

Corrina, Corrina. A twenty-one-year-old wrote this.

Highway 61 Revisited (August 1965) is the electric breakthrough. Like a Rolling Stone opens the album — six minutes and thirteen seconds of rage, humiliation, and freedom. "How does it feel to be on your own, with no direction home?

" Ballad of a Thin Man. Tombstone Blues. Desolation Row is the eleven-minute closer — a surrealist tour through American history, each verse featuring different archetypes and symbols.

Rolling Stone magazine put Like a Rolling Stone at number one on their 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list.

Blonde on Blonde (June 1966) was the first double album in rock history. Visions of Johanna. Just Like a Woman.

Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again. Rainy Day Women #12 & 35. Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands takes up one entire side of the second disc — eleven minutes of hushed devotion.

Then Dylan crashed his motorcycle and disappeared for eighteen months.

Blood on the Tracks (January 1975) is the divorce album. Nobody writes about emotional devastation like this anymore because nobody can. Tangled Up in Blue is a masterclass in nonlinear narrative — the tenses shift, the pronouns change, the relationship unfolds backward and forward simultaneously.

Idiot Wind. Simple Twist of Fate. If You See Her, Say Hello.

Shelter from the Storm. This is what heartbreak sounds like when a genius is going through it.

Time Out of Mind (September 1997) was the late-career resurrection. Dylan was 56, nearly died of a heart condition the year before, and recorded an album about mortality and love that won three Grammys including Album of the Year. Not Dark Yet.

Love Sick. Tryin' to Get to Heaven. Standing in the Doorway.

Every song sounds like it was recorded at the end of the world.

Bob Dylan made it possible for popular music to be literature. The Nobel Prize committee called him "a great poet in the English-speaking tradition" — equal to Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison. Every serious songwriter since 1965 — Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Patti Smith, Kurt Cobain, Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar — has cited Dylan as the reason they thought songs could be this.

The 1965 electric conversion changed rock music forever. When Dylan plugged in at Newport, he wasn't just betraying folk purists. He was proving that rock music could be poetry, that electric guitars didn't have to mean "baby baby baby.

" Without Dylan, there's no Sgt. Pepper's, no Velvet Underground, no Springsteen, no Radiohead. Every artist who tries to say something with a rock song is walking through the door Dylan kicked open on July 25, 1965.

His voice is famously imperfect. Critics have mocked it for sixty years. But it's the most instantly recognizable voice in popular music history.

When you hear Dylan, you know within one syllable that it's him. And that nasal, weathered, unapologetic voice is why the lyrics land. Because it sounds like a person, not a pop star.