When I began compiling my list of top 25 albums a year ago, I already knew who it would end with: Bob Dylan, the master, one of the 20th century’s leading songwriters, Nobel Prize-winning poet, still going strong after turning 80 this past Monday.
But what album would I choose? Something from his early acoustic folkie years? Well, no. I prefer Dylan the rocker. His middle period, just after he’d gone electric but before the motorcycle crash that would end the white-hot-genius phase of his career? His mid-’1970s comeback? What about his entirely unexpected return to relevance, when he released three albums from the late 1990s through the mid-2000s that were just a half-notch below his greatest work?
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Facts and Bob Dylan have always made for strange companions. Though he achieved worldwide fame as “The Voice of a Generation” a young man celebrated for his honesty as he sang of both the hard truths of social injustices as well as his own personal romantic anguish he did so as Bob Dylan, not as Robert Zimmerman, the name he was born with and went by growing up in Minnesota.
Even today, more than 50 years after he first began kicking around the Greenwich Village club scene, Dylan remains an elusive figure who has at times been accused of making career choices specifically to obfuscate and muddle his identity. But there’s plenty we do know about the Nobel Prize winner who wrote some of the most important songs in music history.
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Written by Andrew McCallum
Waiting for Bob Dylan’s Auckland show in 2018 to start, I had a chat with an older man in the seat two rows down from mine.
“Is this your first show?” I asked. “Yes” he said. “Dylan’s a legend. I gotta see him.” A moment later an announcement came over the PA: there are to be no cameras, no photos, no video recordings during the concert. Turn your phones OFF! The announcement is repeated several times.
Five-part web series Bob Dylan s New Zealand airing on Nine to Noon from 24th May and available on-demand here.