Happy Birthday, Bob

Birthday boy: Bob Dylan performs during the 2006 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. (AP Photo/Jeff Christensen)

My attachment to Bob Dylan began on Day 1. We share a birthday: he’s 65 today, May 24; I’m 39. When my parents played his music at parties in my youth, the carpets got rolled up. As I listened and watched from the stairs, these then-young lawyers and their spouses spun, whooped, clapped their hands and generally went for broke on the dance floor. When I got my first Walkman for my 14th birthday, it came with a cassette of Dylan’s greatest hits; my malicious brother once let me walk an entire block with my headphones blaring before informing me that I had been screaming the lyrics to I Want You. In university, I audited a course on Dylan taught by an aging hippie prof who was convinced the songwriter combined the best qualities of Christ, Mozart and Dylan Thomas, the poet who inspired Robert Zimmerman to adopt the last name Dylan.

Of course, he’s famous for not being able to sing, and his melodies only got their due — and their highest ranking on the Billboard song charts — when others sang them. But, in the end, the hippie prof was right: words are what distinguish Dylan. Without Dylan, it’s fair to assume we would have been deprived of bardish singer-songwriters like Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell and Ron Sexsmith.

In recognition of Dylan’s myriad accomplishments, including the opening of a major retrospective at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland today, here are 65 quotes by and about the man as he officially reaches retirement age.

1941-1959
Bob was born in Duluth, Minn., the eldest son of Abe and Beatty Zimmerman, a Jewish appliance salesman and a homemaker. As a teen, Bob admired James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, dated bad girls and played in bad rock bands.

1. “I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be so, really, I’m on my way home.” —Dylan, 2005

2. “If it’s quiet, I will sing.” —Dylan, age four, responding to a request that he perform Accentuate the Positive at an aunt’s wedding reception, 1945

3. “Bob fell off his motorcycle at a railroad junction because he didn’t like to wait for anything or anybody, and when one train passed, he took off into the junction, barely missing another hidden train.” —High-school friend LeRoy Hoikalla, 2001

4. “The music that was popular when I was growing up was How Much Is That Doggie in the Window? and that wasn’t our reality. We were expecting an atomic explosion, and everything to disappear in a black cloud.” —Dylan, 2004

5. “He was a very naughty boy, but he was so sweet.” —Echo Star Helstrom, Dylan’s first girlfriend, 2001

6. “Robert Zimmerman: Ambition in life: to join Little Richard." —Hibbing High School yearbook, 1959

Bob Dylan, pictured on a program for his first New York City concert, presented by the Folklore Center at Carnegie Chapter Hall in 1961. (Photo Getty Images/Blank Archives)

1959-1960
While enrolled at the University of Minnesota, Bob discovered the folk music scene in Minneapolis-St. Paul’s bohemian coffee houses. He also became obsessed with the foremost folkie of the previous generation, Woody Guthrie.

7. “When I left home, I was like Columbus going off into the desolate Atlantic.” —Dylan, 2004

8. “Tutti Frutti and Blue Suede Shoes were great catch phrases and driving pulse rhythms and you could get high on the energy, but they weren’t serious or didn’t reflect life in a realistic way.” —Dylan, 2004

9. “He wasn’t entirely comfortable in my company because I was too Jewish for him.” —Flamboyant beatnik Tova Hammerman, a fixture on the Twin Cities folk scene, 2001

10. “‘Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’” [from Outlaw Blues] and [the song] You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere are typical later examples of Bob’s deliberately atrocious grammar.” —Biographer Howard Sounes, 2001

11. “Tell Woody I’m coming out to see him.” —Dylan talking by phone in 1960 to a nurse at the New York-area hospital where Woody Guthrie was slowly dying of Huntington’s Chorea

12. “When I arrived in Minneapolis, it had seemed like a big city or a big town. When I left it was like some rural outpost you see once from a passing train.” —Dylan, 2004

13. “With only a few tattered rags in a suitcase and a guitar and harmonica rack, I stood on the edge of town and hitchhiked east to find Woody Guthrie.” —Dylan, 2004

Dylan performing on stage with Joan Baez in 1963. (Photo Getty Images/Columbia Records)

1960-1965
Dylan learned his craft in the so-called basket-houses in New York’s Greenwich Village. Dylan’s first song was a tribute to his idol: “Song to Woody” appeared on Dylan’s eponymous debut album in 1962. That song and those that followed — most notably Blowin’ in the Wind, A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall and The Times They Are A-Changin’ — separated Dylan from other folk singers, who sang either traditional melodies or ones written by Tin Pan Alley songsmiths.

14. "When I arrived in New York it was winter. Outside the wind was blowing, straggling cloud wisps, snow whirling in the red lanterned streets, city types scuffling around, bundled up — salesmen in rabbit-fur earmuffs hawking gimmicks, chestnut vendors, steam rising out of manholes.” —Dylan, 2004

15. “You’d never know who you were liable to run into at [the pub] The Kettle of Fish. Everyone seemed like somebody and nobody at the same time.” —Dylan, 2004
 
16. “Well you burst on the scene / Already a legend / The unwashed phenomenon / The original vagabond.” —From Joan Baez’s song Diamonds and Rust (1975), a tribute to Dylan

17. “I began cramming my brain with all kinds of deep poems. It seemed like I’d been pulling an empty wagon for a long time and now I was beginning to fill it up and would have to pull harder. —Dylan, 1960

18. “Mr. Dylan’s voice is anything but pretty. He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his back porch.” —Robert Shelton, New York Times, Sept. 29, 1961

19. “I did everything fast. Thought fast, ate fast, talked fast and walked fast. I even sang my songs fast. I needed to slow my mind down if I was going to be a composer with anything to say.” —Dylan, 2004

20. “There were maybe a thousand kings of the world, and he was one of them.” —Dylan, in 2004, on meeting record producer John Hammond, who signed him to Columbia

21. “Hey, hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song / ’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along. / Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn, / It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born.” —Song to Woody (1962)

22. “When I heard the first album, I thought, ‘Wow, this is terrible.’ Nobody sang like that. After a while, I loved it, but it took a little time.” —Woody Guthrie’s son, Arlo, 2001

23. “I needed to get my own place, one with my own bed, stove and tables. I guess it could have happened earlier, but I liked staying with others.” —Dylan, 2004

24. “I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it / I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it, / I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’, / I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’” — A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall (1963)

25. “Every line [of A Hard Rain] was the start of a song I do not think I’ll have the time to write.” —Dylan, 1964

26. Reporter: “Does it take a lot of trouble to get your hair like that?”
Dylan: “No, you just have to sleep on it for about 20 years." —Sydney Morning Herald, 1963

27. “How many times can a man turn his head, / Pretending he just doesn’t see?” —Blowin’ in the Wind (1963)

28. “I am not a protest singer. I sing ordinary mathematical songs.” —Dylan, 1965

29. “Come mothers and fathers / Throughout the land / And don’t criticize / What you can’t understand.” —The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964)

30. “Bob Dylan is a no account son of a bitch.” —William Devereux Zantzinger, portrayed in Dylan’s 1964 song The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll as a privileged Southerner who callously murders a black maid

31. “There are seven levels to the meaning of life.” —Paul McCartney, after getting stoned on marijuana with Dylan during the Beatles’ 1964 U.S. tour

Dylan singing at an open-air festival near Ryde, Isle of Wight, England in September of 1969. (Photo CP)

1965-1969
By the mid-’60s, Bob Dylan had become “Dylan,” the “spokesman for a generation,” a label he loathed. After a series of controversial concerts, where he was booed by folk purists for switching from the acoustic to an electric guitar, Dylan retreated to a rural getaway in Woodstock, N.Y., the town that would become famous for a 1969 concert he refused to participate in. Fans and journalists tormented him during this time, not allowing him or his new wife, former model Sara Lownds, any privacy. Dylan had a motorcycle accident in 1966, which may or may not have prompted him to cease touring and spend more time in the studio.

32. “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose / You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.” —Like a Rolling Stone (1965)

33. “The events of the day, all the cultural mumbo jumbo were imprisoning my soul — nauseating me, civil rights and political leaders being gunned down, the mounting of the barricades, the government crackdowns, the student radicals and demonstrators versus the cops and the unions, the streets exploding, fire of anger boiling, the lying, noisy voices, the free love, the anti-money system movement, the whole shebang. I was determined to put myself beyond the reach of it all. I was a family man now, didn’t want to be in that group portrait.” —Dylan, 2004

34. “One of Bob’s most important things is refusing to smile for cameramen.” —folk singer Pete Seeger, 2005

35. “Esquire magazine put a four-faced monster on their cover, my face along with Malcolm X’s, Kennedy’s and Castro’s. What the hell was that supposed to mean?” —Dylan, 1967

36. “Play f---in’ loud!” — Dylan responding to a heckler who called him “Judas” after Dylan shifted from an acoustic to an electric guitar during a 1966 concert in Manchester, England

37. “If I had an axe on the evening at Newport when [Dylan] broke out the electric guitar, I’d have cut his cable.” — Pete Seeger, 1972

38. “My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet, / I have no one to meet / And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming.” —Mr. Tambourine Man (1965)

39. “Drugs never played a part in [Mr. Tambourine Man]. I could take ’em or leave ’em. They never hung me up.” —Dylan, 2005

40. “Bobby was not really a political person.” —Pete Yarrow (of Peter, Paul and Mary), 2004

41. “The spokesman of a generation, the conscience of this or that, I couldn’t relate to that.” —Dylan, 1968

42. “She takes just like a woman, yes, she does / She makes love just like a woman, yes, she does / And she aches just like a woman / But she breaks just like a little girl.” —Just Like a Woman (1966)

43. “I would like to thank Dylan for putting names [of back-up musicians] on albums. That didn’t happen before he got here.” —Session man Wayne Moss, who played guitar and sang on the album Blonde on Blonde, 1966

44. “He’s only a pawn in the game.” —Dylan on one of the men who shot the black civil-rights activist Medgar Evers, 1968

45. “I got so crazy I thought he was the new Messiah.” —Allen Ginsberg, 1968

46. “I stole Love Is a Four-Letter Word. I was there when he heard me singing it on the radio, and he said that’s a good song. He’d forgotten that he’d written it.” —Joan Baez, 2004

47. “I don’t try to endear myself to the crowd.” —Dylan, 2001

48. “He would always say what do you think [of a lyric]. I wouldn’t understand the thing at all, but I loved it so I tried to figure it out. I gave him my interpretation of what I thought it was about. He said, “Oh, that’s pretty f---ing good. Twenty years from now all these assholes are going to be writing about the s--- I wrote. I don’t know where the f--- it comes from and what the f--- it’s about.’” —Joan Baez, 2004

49. “That Woodstock Festival was the sum total of all this bullshit.” —Dylan, 2004

Dylan with Van Morrison (left) and The Band's Robbie Robertson (right) in the finale of director Martin Scorsese's 1978 concert film The Last Waltz. (Photo Getty Images/United Artists)

1969-1979
Splitting his time between homes in New York and Los Angeles, in 1974, Dylan embarked on the first of many “comeback tours.” He also converted from Judaism to Christianity, to the dismay of much of his fan base. Mid-way through the 1970s, his marriage to Lownds began to unravel. Their eventual split was documented on Blood on the Tracks (1975), an album many fans believe to be his finest.

50. “Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed / Stay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhile / Until the break of day, let me see you make him smile / His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean / And you’re the best thing that he’s ever seen”
—Lay, Lady, Lay (1969)

51. “In the white heat of the Watergate scandal, the crowd [during the 1974 concerts] roared when Bob sang that even the president had to stand naked. Thousands held aloft matches and cigarette lighters in a spontaneous gesture of solidarity – the first time this had ever happened at a concert.” —Biographer Howard Sounes, 2001

52. “May you grow up to be righteous, / May you grow up to be
true, / May you always know the truth / And see the lights surrounding you.” —Forever Young (1974)

53. “He lost his mind. It was beautiful. There were tears in his eyes.” —A second-hand account of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter’s reaction to hearing Dylan’s 1976 song Hurricane, which argued the former professional boxer was wrongfully convicted of murder, 1976

54. “Marriage was a failure. Husband and wife was a failure, but father and mother wasn’t a failure.” —Dylan, commenting on his split with Lownds, with whom he had four children, 1976

55. “Leonard [Cohen] used to wander around the house, wringing his hands saying, ‘I don’t get it. Why would [Dylan] go for Jesus at a late time like this?’” —singer-songwriter Jennifer Warnes, talking about Dylan’s conversion to Christianity in 1979

56. “I believe in you even through the tears and the laughter; / I believe in you, even though we be apart; / I believe in you, even on the morning after.” —I Believe in You (1979)

Dylan performs at the 2002 Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. (Photo Getty Images/AFP/Hector Mata)

1980-the present
Dylan relentlessly keeps on producing albums. In the late '80s, he began what he terms his never-ending tour; even now, he still averages 100 gigs a year. The biggest commercial success of the late ’80s was The Traveling Wilburys, a whimsical collaboration with Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and George Harrison. A brief marriage to Carolyn Dennis, a back-up singer, in the late 1980s, produced another child. Against his father’s advice, Dylan’s son Jakob entered the music industry in the 1990s with his band The Wallflowers.

57. “I know [music videos] are thought of as an art form, but I don’t think they are.” —Dylan, 1983

58. “Tin Pan Alley is gone. I put an end to it. People can record their own songs now.” —Dylan, 1986

59. “I hate to see female artists perform because they whore themselves. Especially the ones that don’t wear anything.” —Dylan, 1988

60. “He had about 150 yes-men in his room [backstage]. If he had reached for a cigarette, so many lighters would have come out that it would have turned the sprinkler system on.” —singer Ronnie Hawkins, in reference to visiting Dylan after a 1990 concert in Toronto

61. “The kids were ready for him. What he didn’t know was that they loved him and they wanted him there.” —Patrick Stansfield, stage manager at Woodstock 1994, commenting on Dylan’s reception at the 25th anniversary concert

62. “You say the answer is blowing in the wind, my friend. So it is: but it is not the wind that blows things away. It is the wind that is the breath and life of the Holy Spirit, the voice that calls and says, ‘Come!’” —Pope John Paul II on sharing the stage with Dylan at the World Eucharistic Congress in Bologna, Italy, in 1997

63. “My initial thought was that I just didn’t want to see [Jakob] get roughed up.” —Dylan on his son Jakob’s foray into pop with the band The Wallflowers, 1998

64. “I’m just glad I’m feeling better. I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon.” —Dylan after recovering from a “potentially fatal infection” in 1997

65. “A lot of my own songs have been played on the radio, but this is the first time I’ve ever been on the other side of the mic.” —Dylan on his weekly radio show on the XM Satellite Radio Network, 2006

Alec Scott writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites - links will open in new window.