The Nobel Committee for Literature prompted surprise on Oct. 13, 2016, when it awarded the prize in the category to Bob Dylan.
The singer-songwriter’s behavior following the announcement was equally baffling. He declined at first to answer calls from the Swedish Academy. Two weeks later, he finally accepted the Nobel Prize but declared later that he would not go to Sweden to accept the award due to “pre-existing commitments”.
Dylan is not however the only winner to refuse to travel to Stockholm to accept a Nobel Prize. The late English playwright Harold Pinter was gravely ill and in a wheelchair in 2005, when he won the prize; playwright and novelist Elfriede Jelinek was suffering from agoraphobia and said that she was “not suited as a person to be dragged into public” in 2004; the late Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1970 was terrified to leave his country for fear he would not be allowed back in.
Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
“He can be read and should be read as a great poet in the English tradition,” declared Professor Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the prizes.
Bob Dylan is considered one of the most influential songwriters of the 20th century, with works that chronicle social issues such as war and civil rights. President Obama presented Dylan with the Presidential Medal for Freedom in 2012. His unique talent has been recognized by the music industry and he has received several Grammy awards, including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement.
I have chosen two books to search for the truth about Bob Dylan: Andy Gill’s “Bob Dylan: Stories Behind the Songs 1962-1969”, and “Dylan on Dylan” by Jonathan Cott, which features 31 of the most significant and revealing interviews with the singer.
Andy Gill writes with gusto about Bob Dylan’s journey to stardom. It all started when the budding singer met John Hammond, who had launched the career of Billie Holiday and had been instrumental in the successes of Benny Goodman, Count Basie and Lionel Hampton.
Hammond was immediately intrigued by the young Dylan and organized a demo session on Sept. 29, 1961. That same day, the music critic Robert Shelton wrote a superb review of Dylan’s performance in The New York Times.
“Whether his verse is free or rhymed, whether the mood is somber, crusading, satiric, subject to the fanciful, Mr. Dylan’s words and melodies sparkle with the light of an inspired poet,” Shelton wrote.
Dylan’s debut album did not do well but Hammond was determined to let him record a second album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” which was the first of a string of Dylan masterpieces that “changed the face of first folk, then rock music.”
As his reputation grew, Dylan became more elusive and according to the folk singer Eric von Schmidt, he had “the most incredible way of changing shape, changing size, changing looks. The whole time... he wore the same thing, his blue jeans and cap. And sometimes he would look big and muscular, and the next day, he’d look like a little gnome, and one day he’d be kind of handsome and virile, and the following day he’d look like a 13-year-old child. It was really strange.”
“Blowin’ In The Wind” was included in “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” album and it remains the song, Andy Gill writes, with which Dylan’s name is most inextricably linked.
How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
How many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sands?
Yes how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they’re forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.
Dylan wrote this song in 10 minutes. The inspiration came to him one afternoon in April 1962 during a long political discussion with friends.
“The idea came to me that you were betrayed by your silence,” he told friends, “that all of us in America who didn’t speak out were betrayed by our silence, betrayed by the silence of the people in power. They refuse to look at what’s happening. And the others, they ride the subways, and read the Times, but they don’t understand. They don’t know. They don’t even care; that’s the worst of it.”
Dylan wrote songs so fast in the 1960s that he did not want to sleep at night, fearing a song would escape him. He subsequently recorded two extraordinary albums, “Bringing It All Back Home” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, which conveyed a new wit and literacy to rock’n’roll and an electric immediacy to poetry. Strangely enough, while his reputation as a poet grew, Dylan refused to see himself as such, and believes that telling people he is a poet would just be fooling them.
Half-way through “Dylan on Dylan,” it is obvious that Dylan is not an easy person to interview. He is rarely open and sincere, “and has long been notorious for questioning the questions rather than answering them, replying with put-ons and tall tales and surrounding his real feelings with mystery and circumlocution,” writer Ron Rosenbaum once observed.
Even when he is not playing the role of “Bob Dylan”, the artist does not seem to know who he really is: “I don’t think I’m tangible to myself. I mean, I think one thing today and I think another thing tomorrow. I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else. I don’t know who I am most of the time. It doesn’t even matter to me.”
Bob Dylan was the involuntary voice of the 1960s but after a decade of being the spokesman for a generation, he decided he would never again travel that way. He became an elusive, enigmatic figure, perennially out of step with changing musical fashions, a soul alone.
He dislikes interviews because he does not like to talk about his personal life or about the past. Maybe he is tired of always being measured against the standards he set in the 1960s.
“I’m always trying to stay right square in the moment,” he said in an interview with Robert Hilburn in April 2004 in The Los Angeles Times.
“I don’t want to get nostalgic or narcissistic as a writer or a person. I think successful people don’t dwell in the past. I think only losers do.”
Bob Dylan has brought music and literature together as no one else has and perhaps no living artist has shaped America’s soul so profoundly. The artist himself told American writer and music journalist Mikal Gilmore in a 2001 interview for Rolling Stone: “Every one of the records I’ve made has emanated from the entire panorama of what America is to me. America to me is a rising tide that lifts all ships, and I’ve never really sought inspiration from other types of music.”
An estimated 1,000 books have been devoted to the Minnesota-born singer-songwriter, and yet after all that has been written and said about Bob Dylan, there remains an enduring mystery and unpredictability about his persona, that very thing which nurtures his genius.
“Bob Dylan: The Stories Behind The Songs” and “Dylan on Dylan” complement each other. The first chronicles the history of Dylan’s musical background and the latter sheds light on his personal and professional life. Each of the 31 interviews in Jonathan Cott’s edited collection are outstanding and highlights a facet of Dylan’s complex nature. And for anyone looking for the truth about America’s most famous street poet, “Dylan on Dylan” helps you find the person behind the persona.
The singer-songwriter’s behavior following the announcement was equally baffling. He declined at first to answer calls from the Swedish Academy. Two weeks later, he finally accepted the Nobel Prize but declared later that he would not go to Sweden to accept the award due to “pre-existing commitments”.
Dylan is not however the only winner to refuse to travel to Stockholm to accept a Nobel Prize. The late English playwright Harold Pinter was gravely ill and in a wheelchair in 2005, when he won the prize; playwright and novelist Elfriede Jelinek was suffering from agoraphobia and said that she was “not suited as a person to be dragged into public” in 2004; the late Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1970 was terrified to leave his country for fear he would not be allowed back in.
Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
“He can be read and should be read as a great poet in the English tradition,” declared Professor Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the prizes.
Bob Dylan is considered one of the most influential songwriters of the 20th century, with works that chronicle social issues such as war and civil rights. President Obama presented Dylan with the Presidential Medal for Freedom in 2012. His unique talent has been recognized by the music industry and he has received several Grammy awards, including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement.
I have chosen two books to search for the truth about Bob Dylan: Andy Gill’s “Bob Dylan: Stories Behind the Songs 1962-1969”, and “Dylan on Dylan” by Jonathan Cott, which features 31 of the most significant and revealing interviews with the singer.
Andy Gill writes with gusto about Bob Dylan’s journey to stardom. It all started when the budding singer met John Hammond, who had launched the career of Billie Holiday and had been instrumental in the successes of Benny Goodman, Count Basie and Lionel Hampton.
Hammond was immediately intrigued by the young Dylan and organized a demo session on Sept. 29, 1961. That same day, the music critic Robert Shelton wrote a superb review of Dylan’s performance in The New York Times.
“Whether his verse is free or rhymed, whether the mood is somber, crusading, satiric, subject to the fanciful, Mr. Dylan’s words and melodies sparkle with the light of an inspired poet,” Shelton wrote.
Dylan’s debut album did not do well but Hammond was determined to let him record a second album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” which was the first of a string of Dylan masterpieces that “changed the face of first folk, then rock music.”
As his reputation grew, Dylan became more elusive and according to the folk singer Eric von Schmidt, he had “the most incredible way of changing shape, changing size, changing looks. The whole time... he wore the same thing, his blue jeans and cap. And sometimes he would look big and muscular, and the next day, he’d look like a little gnome, and one day he’d be kind of handsome and virile, and the following day he’d look like a 13-year-old child. It was really strange.”
“Blowin’ In The Wind” was included in “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” album and it remains the song, Andy Gill writes, with which Dylan’s name is most inextricably linked.
How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
How many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sands?
Yes how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they’re forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.
Dylan wrote this song in 10 minutes. The inspiration came to him one afternoon in April 1962 during a long political discussion with friends.
“The idea came to me that you were betrayed by your silence,” he told friends, “that all of us in America who didn’t speak out were betrayed by our silence, betrayed by the silence of the people in power. They refuse to look at what’s happening. And the others, they ride the subways, and read the Times, but they don’t understand. They don’t know. They don’t even care; that’s the worst of it.”
Dylan wrote songs so fast in the 1960s that he did not want to sleep at night, fearing a song would escape him. He subsequently recorded two extraordinary albums, “Bringing It All Back Home” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, which conveyed a new wit and literacy to rock’n’roll and an electric immediacy to poetry. Strangely enough, while his reputation as a poet grew, Dylan refused to see himself as such, and believes that telling people he is a poet would just be fooling them.
Half-way through “Dylan on Dylan,” it is obvious that Dylan is not an easy person to interview. He is rarely open and sincere, “and has long been notorious for questioning the questions rather than answering them, replying with put-ons and tall tales and surrounding his real feelings with mystery and circumlocution,” writer Ron Rosenbaum once observed.
Even when he is not playing the role of “Bob Dylan”, the artist does not seem to know who he really is: “I don’t think I’m tangible to myself. I mean, I think one thing today and I think another thing tomorrow. I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else. I don’t know who I am most of the time. It doesn’t even matter to me.”
Bob Dylan was the involuntary voice of the 1960s but after a decade of being the spokesman for a generation, he decided he would never again travel that way. He became an elusive, enigmatic figure, perennially out of step with changing musical fashions, a soul alone.
He dislikes interviews because he does not like to talk about his personal life or about the past. Maybe he is tired of always being measured against the standards he set in the 1960s.
“I’m always trying to stay right square in the moment,” he said in an interview with Robert Hilburn in April 2004 in The Los Angeles Times.
“I don’t want to get nostalgic or narcissistic as a writer or a person. I think successful people don’t dwell in the past. I think only losers do.”
Bob Dylan has brought music and literature together as no one else has and perhaps no living artist has shaped America’s soul so profoundly. The artist himself told American writer and music journalist Mikal Gilmore in a 2001 interview for Rolling Stone: “Every one of the records I’ve made has emanated from the entire panorama of what America is to me. America to me is a rising tide that lifts all ships, and I’ve never really sought inspiration from other types of music.”
An estimated 1,000 books have been devoted to the Minnesota-born singer-songwriter, and yet after all that has been written and said about Bob Dylan, there remains an enduring mystery and unpredictability about his persona, that very thing which nurtures his genius.
“Bob Dylan: The Stories Behind The Songs” and “Dylan on Dylan” complement each other. The first chronicles the history of Dylan’s musical background and the latter sheds light on his personal and professional life. Each of the 31 interviews in Jonathan Cott’s edited collection are outstanding and highlights a facet of Dylan’s complex nature. And for anyone looking for the truth about America’s most famous street poet, “Dylan on Dylan” helps you find the person behind the persona.
