After speaking with the Bob Dylan Center’s curator, Michael Chaiken, our own Vish Khanna learned that Center is more than just a tribute to the world’s most impactful, living songwriter.
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The Bob Dylan Archive was acquired by the George Kaiser Family Foundation in Tulsa and includes over 100,000 items including unreleased recordings, original manuscripts and never-before-seen film performances.
The archive will be on display at the Bob Dylan Center, which is located near the Woody Guthrie Center, an artist who was highly influential to Dylan.
Michael Chaiken, who curated the archive, said the center goes beyond examining Dylan’s career.
“The center is really built around this idea of restless creativity and using Dylan and his archive as a way to explore ideas about creativity and reinvention,” Chaiken said. “So we re also looking to pull in lots of other artists and ideas in other disciplines.”
For a few heady years in the Village, Shelton and Dylan were buddies; hanging out, often with their respective girlfriends Suze Rotolo and Baez in Dylan’s case. The friendship did not prevent Shelton from being critical, in person and in print, sometimes to Dylan’s annoyance. But he was fairminded and he understood from the moment he first heard him perform at a Gerde’s hootenanny in June 1961 that Dylan mattered, that his was a talent like no other. His review led to a contract with Columbia Records. The biography he proposed over dinner on New Year’s Eve 1965 was never intended as a potboiler but neither was it intended that it would take twenty years to write.
Winnipeg Free Press
Biographer dives deep into the archives for details of folk singer s early years
Joe Alper photo collection / The Associated Press files
In this 1962 photo, Bob Dylan (left), his girlfriend Suze Rotollo (centre) and Lena Spencer sit at Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
Bob Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin is considered the most thorough of Dylanologists.
Bob Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin is considered the most thorough of Dylanologists.
He is also the most punctual.
Heylin, right on time for Dylan’s 80th birthday on Monday, releases
The Double Life of Bob Dylan, which is a revamped version of his 1991 Bard of Hibbing bio