Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Minnesota in 1941, and he hit New York City in 1961 with a guitar, a harmonica and a head full of old folk and blues. His first album, in 1962, was mostly traditional material. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, a year later, was the breakthrough, and suddenly the kid was writing songs that sounded older than he was: "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'" were being sung by the civil rights and antiwar movements almost before the ink was dry.

Then he plugged in, and the uproar hasn't died down yet. Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, both in 1965, set his cascading, surreal verses against electric rock bands, and "Like a Rolling Stone" ran six minutes long, a sneering kiss-off that blew the doors off what a single was supposed to be. Blonde on Blonde followed in 1966. The words dragged literature, politics and philosophy into the pop charts, and the counterculture took them as scripture.

A motorcycle crash in 1966 took him off the road for seven years. He spent part of that time recording a mountain of songs with members of the Band, eventually issued as The Basement Tapes, and he came back to records with the quiet, rural John Wesley Harding in 1967 and the country croon of Nashville Skyline in 1969. Blood on the Tracks in 1975 was a return to the knife's edge, and Time Out of Mind, much later, took Album of the Year at the Grammys.

He's been on the road more or less continuously since the late '80s, on what everyone calls the Never Ending Tour, with a detour into the Traveling Wilburys along the way. The honors piled up: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1997, an Academy Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. And in 2016 the Nobel committee gave him the Prize in Literature, which is the kind of ending even he couldn't have scripted.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.