Age, Biography, and Wiki
- Birth Date: May 24, 1941
- Birth Place: Duluth, Minnesota, USA
- Birth Name: Robert Allen Zimmerman
- Bob Dylan is known for his iconic contributions to music, poetry, and literature. He rose to fame in the 1960s with songs like "The Times They Are a-Changin'" and "Blowin' in the Wind," which became anthems for the Civil Rights and anti-war movements.
| Occupation | Autobiographer |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | 24 May 1941 |
| Age | 84 Years |
| Birth Place | Duluth, Minnesota, U.S. |
| Horoscope | Gemini |
| Country | U.S |
Height, Weight & Measurements
- Height: 5 feet 9 inches (175 cm)
- Weight: 154 lbs (70 kg)
- Dylan's slender build and distinctive voice have been part of his enduring image.
Dylan's late March 1965 album, Bringing It All Back Home, was another leap, featuring his first recordings with electric instruments, under producer Tom Wilson's guidance. The first single, "Subterranean Homesick Blues", owed much to Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business", its free-association lyrics described as harking back to the energy of beat poetry and as a forerunner of rap and hip-hop. The song was provided with an early music video, which opened D. A. Pennebaker's cinéma vérité presentation of Dylan's 1965 British tour, Dont Look Back. Instead of miming, Dylan illustrated the lyrics by throwing cue cards containing key words on the ground. Pennebaker said the sequence was Dylan's idea, and it has been imitated in music videos and advertisements.
| Height | 5 feet 9 inches |
| Weight | 154 lbs |
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Dating & Relationship Status
- Bob Dylan has been married twice: first to Sara Lownds from 1965 to 1977, and then to Carolyn Dennis from 1986 to 1992. He has six children from these marriages.
Dylan's father Abram Zimmerman and his mother Beatrice "Beatty" Stone were part of a small, close-knit Jewish community. They lived in Duluth until Dylan was six, when his father contracted polio and the family returned to his mother's hometown of Hibbing, where they lived for the rest of Dylan's childhood, and his father and paternal uncles ran a furniture and appliance store.
During this period, he began to introduce himself as "Bob Dylan". In his memoir, he wrote that he considered adopting the surname Dillon before unexpectedly seeing poems by Dylan Thomas, and deciding upon the given name spelling. In a 2004 interview, he said, "You're born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free."
On August 9, 1962, Dylan legally changed his name to Robert Dylan in the St. Louis County Court, Hibbing. His father, Abraham Zimmerman, was the witness. The same month, Dylan signed a management contract with Albert Grossman. Grossman remained Dylan's manager until 1970, and was known for his sometimes confrontational personality and protective loyalty. Dylan said, "He was kind of like a Colonel Tom Parker figure ... you could smell him coming." Tension between Grossman and John Hammond led to the latter suggesting Dylan work with the jazz producer Tom Wilson, who produced several tracks for the second album without formal credit. Wilson produced the next three albums Dylan recorded.
The final track on the album expressed Dylan's angry response to a hostile profile published in Newsweek. As biographer Clinton Heylin puts it, the profile wrote about "the way the Bar Mitzvah boy from Hibbing, Minnesota, had reinvented himself as the prince of protest", emphasising his birth name, his attendance at the University of Minnesota, and his close relationship with his parents from whom he claimed to be estranged. The day after the article appeared, Dylan returned to the studio to record "Restless Farewell" which ends with his vow to "make my stand/ And remain as I am/ And bid farewell and not give a damn".
In late 1964 and early 1965, Dylan moved from folk songwriter to folk-rock pop-music star. His jeans and work shirts were replaced by a Carnaby Street wardrobe, sunglasses day and night, and pointed "Beatle boots". A London reporter noted "Hair that would set the teeth of a comb on edge. A loud shirt that would dim the neon lights of Leicester Square. He looks like an undernourished cockatoo." Dylan began to spar with interviewers. While on Les Crane's television show, asked about a movie he planned, he told Crane it would be a "cowboy horror movie". Asked if he played the cowboy, Dylan replied, "No, I play my mother."
| Parents | |
| Husband | Sara Lownds (m. November 22, 1965-June 29, 1977) Carolyn Dennis (m. June 4, 1986-October 1992) |
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Net Worth and Salary
- Net Worth: Approximately $500 million
- Annual Income: Before selling his song catalog, Dylan earned about $15 million annually from royalties. After significant deals with Universal Music Publishing Group and Sony, his income structure has changed, but his legacy continues to generate substantial revenue.
Career, Business, and Investments
- Music Career: Dylan's music spans over five decades, with consistent touring since the late 1980s as part of his "Never-Ending Tour."
- Songwriting Legacy: Over 6,000 artists have covered his songs, which have been featured in films, TV shows, and commercials, ensuring continuous royalty income.
- Business Ventures:
- In 2020, Dylan sold his entire song catalog to Universal Music Publishing Group for approximately $400 million.
- In 2021, he sold his master recordings to Sony for $200 million.
- Literary and Artistic Ventures: Dylan has published several books and has been involved in visual art projects.
Bob Dylan (legally Robert Dylan; born Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter. Considered one of the greatest songwriters of all time, Dylan has been a major figure in popular culture over his nearly 70-year career. With an estimated more than 125 million records sold worldwide, he is one of the best-selling musicians of all time. Dylan added increasingly sophisticated lyrical techniques to the folk music of the early 1960s, infusing it "with the intellectualism of classic literature and poetry". His lyrics incorporated political, social, and philosophical influences, defying pop music conventions and appealing to the burgeoning counterculture.
From February 1961, Dylan played at clubs around Greenwich Village, befriending and picking up material from folk singers, including Dave Van Ronk, Fred Neil, Odetta, the New Lost City Ramblers and Irish musicians the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. In September, The New York Times critic Robert Shelton boosted Dylan's career with a very enthusiastic review of his performance at Gerde's Folk City: "Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Folk-Song Stylist". That month, Dylan played harmonica on folk singer Carolyn Hester's third album, bringing him to the attention of the album's producer John Hammond, who signed Dylan to Columbia Records. Dylan's debut album, Bob Dylan, released March 19, 1962, consisted of traditional folk, blues and gospel material with just two original compositions, "Talkin' New York" and "Song to Woody". The album sold 5,000 copies in its first year, just breaking even.
Social Network
- Despite his influential status, Dylan is not active on social media platforms, maintaining a private life away from digital platforms.
Louis County, Minnesota. He moved to New York City in 1961 to pursue a career in music. Following his 1962 debut album, Bob Dylan, featuring traditional folk and blues material, he released his breakthrough album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), which included "Girl from the North Country" and "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall", adapting older folk songs. His songs "Blowin' in the Wind" (1963) and "The Times They Are a-Changin' (1964) became anthems for the civil rights and antiwar movements. In 1965 and 1966, Dylan created controversy among folk purists when he used electrically amplified rock instrumentation for his albums Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited (both 1965), and Blonde on Blonde (1966). His six-minute single "Like a Rolling Stone" (1965) expanded commercial and creative boundaries in popular music.
In the early 1950s, Dylan listened to the Grand Ole Opry radio show and heard the songs of Hank Williams. He later wrote: "The sound of his voice went through me like an electric rod." Dylan was also impressed by the delivery of Johnnie Ray: "He was the first singer whose voice and style, I guess, I totally fell in love with.... I loved his style, wanted to dress like him too." As a teenager, Dylan heard rock and roll on radio stations broadcasting from Shreveport and Little Rock.
In May 1963, Dylan's political profile rose when he walked out of The Ed Sullivan Show. During rehearsals, Dylan had been told by CBS television's head of program practices that "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" was potentially libelous to the John Birch Society. Rather than comply with censorship, Dylan refused to appear.
Another Side of Bob Dylan, recorded in a single evening on June 9, 1964, had a lighter mood. The humorous Dylan reemerged on "I Shall Be Free No. 10" and "Motorpsycho Nightmare". "Spanish Harlem Incident" and "To Ramona" are passionate love songs, while "Black Crow Blues" and "I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)" suggest the rock and roll soon to dominate Dylan's music. "It Ain't Me Babe", on the surface a song about spurned love, has been described as a rejection of the role of political spokesman thrust upon him. His new direction was signaled by two lengthy songs: the impressionistic "Chimes of Freedom", which sets social commentary against a metaphorical landscape in a style characterized by Allen Ginsberg as "chains of flashing images," and "My Back Pages", which attacks the simplistic seriousness of his own earlier topical songs and seems to predict the backlash he was about to encounter from his former champions.
In July 1965, Dylan's six-minute single "Like a Rolling Stone" peaked at number two in the US chart. In 2004 and in 2011, Rolling Stone listed it as number one on "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". Bruce Springsteen recalled first hearing the song: "that snare shot sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind." The song opened Dylan's next album, Highway 61 Revisited, named after the road that led from Dylan's Minnesota to the musical hotbed of New Orleans. The songs were in the same vein as the hit single, flavored by Mike Bloomfield's blues guitar and Al Kooper's organ riffs. "Desolation Row", backed by acoustic guitar and understated bass, offers the sole exception, with Dylan alluding to figures in Western culture in a song described by Andy Gill as "an 11-minute epic of entropy, which takes the form of a Fellini-esque parade o
Education
- Dylan attended Hibbing High School in Minnesota and later enrolled at the University of Minnesota, though he did not graduate. His education was largely self-directed through reading and music exposure.
Throughout his career, Bob Dylan has been recognized for his profound impact on music and literature, earning a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. His legacy continues to inspire new generations of artists and fans alike.
Dylan formed several bands while attending Hibbing High School. In the Golden Chords, he performed covers of songs by Little Richard and Elvis Presley. Their performance of Danny & the Juniors' "Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay" at their high school talent show was so loud that the principal cut the microphone. On January 31, 1959, 17-year-old Dylan saw Buddy Holly perform at the Duluth Armory, four days before Holly's fatal plane crash. Dylan was electrified and in his Nobel Prize lecture he explained: "Buddy wrote songs – songs that had beautiful melodies and imaginative verses. And he sang great – sang in more than a few voices. He was the archetype. Everything I wasn't and wanted to be."
In 1959, Dylan's high school yearbook carried the caption "Robert Zimmerman: to join 'Little Richard. That year, as Elston Gunnn, he performed twice with Bobby Vee, playing piano and clapping. In September 1959, Dylan enrolled at the University of Minnesota. Living at the Jewish-centric fraternity Sigma Alpha Mu house, Dylan began to perform at the Ten O'Clock Scholar, a coffeehouse near campus, and became involved in the Dinkytown folk music circuit. His focus on rock and roll gave way to American folk music, as he explained in a 1985 interview:
Dylan dropped out of college in May 1960 at the end of his first year. In January 1961, he traveled to New York City to perform and visit his musical idol Woody Guthrie at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey. Guthrie had been a revelation to Dylan and influenced his early performances. He wrote of Guthrie's impact: "The songs themselves had the infinite sweep of humanity in them... [He] was the true voice of the American spirit. I said to myself I was going to be Guthrie's greatest disciple". In addition to Guthrie, Dylan wrote in Chronicles that major influences on his early song writing included Robert Johnson's blues and what he called the "architectural forms" of Hank Williams's country songs.
With the release of Dylan's second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, in May 1963, he began to make his name as a singer-songwriter. Many songs on the album were labeled protest songs, inspired partly by Guthrie and influenced by Pete Seeger's passion for topical songs. "Oxford Town" was an account of James Meredith's ordeal as the first Black student at the University of Mississippi. The first song on the album, "Blowin' in the Wind", partly derived its melody from the traditional slave song "No More Auction Block", while its lyrics questioned the status quo. The song was widely recorded by other artists and became a hit for Peter, Paul, and Mary. "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" was based on the folk ballad "Lord Randall". With its apocalyptic premonitions, the song gained resonance when the Cuban Missile Crisis developed a few weeks after Dylan began performing it. Both songs marked a new direction in songwriting, blending a stream-of-consciousness, imagist lyrical attack with traditional folk form.
In 1965, headlining the Newport Folk Festival, Dylan performed his first electric set since high school with a pickup group featuring Mike Bloomfield on guitar and Al Kooper on organ. Dylan had appeared at Newport in 1963 and 1964, but in 1965 he was met with cheering and booing and left the stage after three songs. One version has it that the boos were from folk fans whom Dylan had alienated by appearing, unexpectedly, with an electric guitar. Murray Lerner, who filmed the performance, said: "I absolutely think that they were booing Dylan going electric." An alternative account claims audience members were upset by poor sound and a short set.
