The transformation of Bob Dylan from acoustic folk to rock music

¶ … Changing Musical Style of Bob Dylan

He not busy being born / is busy dying" is one of the immortal lines from an old Bob Dylan song. Dylan has lived this line all his life; constantly changing his musical style, hardly ever playing a song in the same way twice, always staying one step ahead of the expectations of his fans, refusing to be categorized or become stale. This rare ability to constantly re-invent himself is perhaps the reason why the singer-songwriter who became the "voice of a generation" in the early sixties is still in the news -- performing 'live' on a never-ending tour, releasing original albums, making enigmatic movies, and even finding time to do something he had always promised he would never do -- writing his autobiography. This paper focuses on the transformation in the musical style of Bob Dylan from an acoustic troubadour to a rock artist, and how the change has impacted contemporary popular music.

Early Career

Born in 1941 to Russian-Jewish parents in a small town in Minnesota, Dylan's real name was Robert Allen Zimmermann. Having become interested in music at an early age by listening to blues, country music, and the early rock and roll on radio, he formed his first band while in high school and started calling himself Bob Dylan, probably after the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in the late 1950s. He dropped out of college and moved to New York in 1961 primarily to meet his boyhood idol, Woody Guthrie, who was seriously ill and lay in a New Jersey hospital. Dylan started performing folk songs in small coffeehouses in Greenwich Village, accompanied by his acoustic guitar and his trademark harmonica attached to a neck-brace. He was "discovered" when the music critic, Robert Shelton, wrote a positive review about him in New York Times drawing attention to the young singer's talent and prompting Columbia Records into signing him.

The Folk and "Protest" Singer

Bob Dylan's voice, which has been compared to that of a "sheep in pain" among other not very flattering sounds, is almost certainly an acquired taste. What distinguished the singer from other folkies who aspired to 'make it' in the early sixties, was his astounding song-writing ability. At a time when lyrics of popular songs hardly merited a second thought, Dylan's topical poetry put into song made him stand out in New York's fledging folk movement.

Dylan's first ever album was released under the Columbia label in 1962; it was simply titled "Bob Dylan" and contained mostly traditional folk and blues songs. If Dylan did not feel confident enough to introduce his original songs in his first album, he soon overcame the tentativeness. His second album, "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," released in 1963, contained songs of such breathtaking range and variety that it astounded everyone. Even at that early stage of his career and at such a young age (Dylan was only 21 at the time) Dylan's talent was bursting at the seams and did not look like it could be confined in the folk music's straight jacket alone. The critics could not decide what to make of Dylan's music. The folk music journal Little Sandy Review while appreciating that."..right now, he is certainly our finest contemporary folk song writer. Nobody else really even comes close" (Quoted by Hentoff); was put off by the singer's unorthodox approach. Its review of Freewheelin' noted: "His melodies bear more relation now to popular music than folk music." The folk purists and the most 'promising folk singer to have emerged after Woody Guthrie,' therefore, were already having a falling-out, although Dylan's repertoire still contained enough "protest" material to keep the leftist folkies happy for a while. Finger pointing songs such as "Masters of War" existed alongside bittersweet love songs such as "Don't think twice" and "Girl from North Country" on the album, which also contained "Blowin' in the Wind" -- a song that became the anthem of the civil rights movement.

Dylan goes Electric

The year 1965 was the start of perhaps the most concentrated, magical, and impressive two-year period of creative musical innovation in the history of rock music. Dylan, of course, was at the center of this musical revolution. It all started in March 1965 when Dylan released his first half-electric album (Bring it All back Home) that featured him accompanied by a full-fledged back-up band on side 1 of the LP. There was immediate reaction from the folkies who dubbed their former hero as a political sell-out and warned him not to turn into "a different Bob Dylan than the one we knew," (quote from Sing Out! By Wilentz). Dylan's reaction was typically defiant. At the Newport Folk Festival in July, 1965 he decided to go electric before a live audience. It was sheer audacity on his part, considering the fact that the audience had come to hear pure folk music. That Sunday night of July 25, 1965 when Dylan walked onstage in an orange shirt and black leather, carrying an electric guitar accompanied by his hastily gathered band and swung into a rocking electric version of "Maggie's Farm" has entered into the folklore of rock music. The folk purist audience was stunned and then started to heckle and shouted: "Play folk music!... Sell out!... This is a folk festival!" (Shelton, 302); backstage, Pete Seeger was so incensed that he threatened to cut off the electric wires; some of the audience, however, was exhilarated by the high-voltage rock.

Dylan had now "crossed the rubric" and his confrontation with the folk purists continued over the next year. It reached a climax at a concert at Manchester in 1966 when a hostile audience confronted Dylan and his band with slow handclap and a hostile member of the audience shouted, "Judas!" To which Dylan responded with "I don't believe you" and proceeded to give a sneering, high powered rendition of "Like a Rolling Stone." The next one-year saw Dylan reach the pinnacle of his art with the release of "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Blonde on Blonde" -- two of the greatest rock albums ever recorded.

Conclusion

Bob Dylan's transformation from a folk singer known and worshipped for his finger-pointing protest songs into a rock artist who created his own genre of music has been an epochal event in contemporary music history. It is hard to think of any single event in the history of popular music that exceeds the importance of the event.