How Did Bob Dylan Reinvent His Music in His 80s?

Why Did Bob Dylan Step Away From the Spotlight in 1966?

Discover how a teenager from Hibbing, Minnesota, transformed into the iconic Bob Dylan. Explore his explosive creative streak in the 1960s, his legendary retreat from public life, and how an aging Nobel laureate continues to draw inspiration from the roots of the American songbook.

Want to learn more about the musical evolution of this legendary artist? Keep reading to explore David Remnick’s insights into Bob Dylan’s enduring career and his deep connection to American roots music.

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By the time Robert Zimmerman, a Jewish kid from small-town Minnesota, arrived in Greenwich Village in 1960, he was already Bob Dylan and already immersed in the folk and blues of the American songbook, especially the work of Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and the Stanley Brothers. Dylan released his first album in 1962, the precursor of a tremendous creative streak that included protest hymns such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and apocalyptic songs, including “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” both from 1963. Sometimes, he wrote multiple songs a day (as depicted in the 2024 film, A Complete Unknown, covering his career up to 1965). Dylan, born on May 24, 1941, may have slowed in his 80s, but, as David Remnick reports in the New Yorker, the Literature Nobelist isn’t done. He continues tapping American vernacular music in songs and books. Dylan – who sold his songwriting catalog for $400 million and his master recordings for $200 million – says he’s, “just extending the line.”

Take-Aways

• Robert Zimmerman felt he was born in the wrong place with the wrong name. He became Bob Dylan.
• Between 1962 and 1966, Dylan went on one of the greatest creative binges in American history, then he nearly died in a motorcycle accident.
• Suspicious of biographers, Dylan always made his story hard to understand.
• An aging Nobel Prize winner in literature, Dylan renewed himself by returning to his musical roots.

Summary

Robert Zimmerman felt he was born in the wrong place with the wrong name. He became Bob Dylan.

In the mid-1950s, Robert Zimmerman, a teenager in Hibbing, Minnesota, liked to stay up late and listen to radio broadcasts from the Midwest and Deep South. The DJs played gospel, jazz, blues, and early rock and roll. One hit single was “Tutti Frutti” (1955) by a guy from Macon, Georgia with the stage name Little Richard. Young Zimmerman started a band in which, like Little Richard, he screamed and pounded the piano.

“It was soon clear, as he put it later, that he’d been born in the wrong place. He was a middle-class Jewish kid far from everything he was tuned in to. He would need to leave town, change his name, and deepen his musical education to fulfill his outsized sense of destiny.”

Zimmerman first moved to a university neighborhood in Minneapolis and then to New York’s Greenwich Village, where he adopted the name Bob Dylan. He shifted away from rock music because he wanted something deeper and more resonant. He immersed himself in folk music and the blues. He apprenticed himself to coffee house legends such as Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. He listened to Alan Lomax’s recordings of the blues and Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music” (1952). He performed wherever he could. Before long, Dylan came to the attention of Columbia Records’ legendary talent scout and producer, John Hammond.

His first album, entitled “Bob Dylan,” came out in 1962.

Between 1962 and 1966, Dylan went on one of the greatest creative binges in American history, then he nearly died in a motorcycle accident.

Dylan’s first album was entirely made up of covers of traditional songs, except for a tribute he wrote, “Song to Woody” (1962), in honor of Woody Guthrie, who was then dying. It was also an anthem to the future of music and culture. Dylan wrote quickly and continuously, sometimes creating several songs a day.

During this time, he wrote multiple masterpieces, including: “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” (1963), “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “To Ramona” (all 1964), “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Desolation Row,” “Like a Rolling Stone” (all 1965), “Just Like a Woman,” and “Visions of Johanna” (both 1966).

“He seemed to be an antenna of the Zeitgeist. He was capable of writing three songs in one day. There was no accounting for the originality of the songs or the speed with which they kept coming.”

By 1966, Dylan was exhausted. He didn’t know that fans, writers, and commentators called him “the voice of his generation.” He had no interest in being a countercultural prophet. Wanting to be a songwriter like Guthrie, Dylan retreated to Woodstock, NY, with his wife and children. That same year, Dylan had a near-fatal motorcycle accident, broke several vertebrae, and withdrew from public view.

A major icon of the 1960s, he sat out the rest of the decade. Even if Bob Dylan had never recorded another song – including future classics like his post-accident “Blood on the Tracks” (1975) – he had already produced one of the greatest bodies of work of any American songwriter.

Suspicious of biographers, Dylan always made his story hard to understand.

By the 21st century, Dylan had become an industry that included the Bob Dylan Museum and Archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma and The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (2006). Christopher Ricks, a scholar of Victorian and modernist poetry, wrote that Dylan’s lyrics were the equal of great English literature. Multiple biographers attempted to capture Dylan’s life but struggled to be definitive.

“Early on, Dylan seemed to decide that, if he couldn’t make sense of his career, he would make sure that no one else could, either. He wasn’t about to be both artist and critic.”

From the first time that he came to public attention, Dylan enjoyed lying to journalists and mocking them to counter the myths people constructed about him. He’s always been uneasy about retelling memories of his life. Dylan’s first autobiographical book Chronicles: Volume One appeared in 2004, but even that was evasive. While Chronicles contains an account of Dylan’s early years in Greenwich Village, it skips the period during which he made some of the 20th century’s greatest albums, such as “Blonde on Blonde” (1966) or “Blood on the Tracks” (1975).

Instead, Dylan delves into the 1980s, when his creativity was at a low point, and he was ready to give up. Even so, he wrote great songs during that period, songs which suggested he was moving toward a timespan in which he explored – or re-explored – his musical past and heritage.

An aging Nobel Prize winner in literature, Dylan renewed himself by returning to his musical roots.

To beat back creative exhaustion and the simple fear of death, Dylan returned to the American song tradition that fed and inspired him. He recorded two albums covering folk and blues standards, “Good as I Been to You” (1992) and “World Gone Wrong” (1993). He put out albums of singular originals, such as “Time Out of Mind” (1997), “Modern Times” (2006), and “Together Through Life” (2009). He issued a holiday album, “Christmas in the Heart” (2009). He put out two albums that paid tribute to Frank Sinatra, “Shadows in the Night” (2015) and “Fallen Angels” (2016). From 2006 to 2009, Dylan hosted, “Theme Time Radio Hour,” a weekly satellite radio show, where he played the music that inspired him.

“What makes Dylan’s career all the more remarkable is the way it has evolved, with peaks, declivities, crags — all in service to the music he began to revere in Hibbing.”

In 2016, when the Nobel Prize committee awarded Dylan its highest honor, the Nobel Prize in Literature, some complained that he was a songwriter, not a literary writer. The late Canadian poet, novelist, and songwriter Leonard Cohen countered that giving Bob Dylan the literature Nobel “is like pinning a medal on Mt. Everest for being the highest mountain.”​​​​

About the Author

Author David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker magazine since 1998. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire.