For over 40 years, Bob Dylan has remained the most influential American musician rock has ever produced and unquestionably the most important of the 1960s. Inscrutable and unpredictable, Bob Dylan has been both deified and denounced for every shift of interest, while whole schools of musicians took up his ideas. His lyrics - the first in rock to be seriously regarded as literature - became so well known that politicians from Jimmy Carter to V�clav Havel have cited them as an influence. By personalizing folk songs, Dylan reinvented the singer/songwriter genre; by performing his allusive, poetic songs in his nasal, spontaneous vocal style with an electric band, he enlarged pop’s range and vocabulary while creating a widely imitated sound. By recording with Nashville veterans, he reconnected rock and country, hinting at the country rock of the ’70s. In the ’80s and ’90s, although he has at times seemed to flounder, he still has the ability to challenge, infuriate, and surprise listeners.
Born Robert Zimmerman his family moved to Hibbing, Minnesota, from Duluth when he was six. After taking up guitar and harmonica, he formed the Golden Chords while he was a freshman in high school. He enrolled at the arts college of the University of Minnesota in 1959; during his three semesters there, he began to perform solo at coffeehouses as Bob Dylan (after Dylan Thomas; he legally changed his name in August 1962).
Dylan moved to New York City in January 1961, saying he wanted to meet Woody Guthrie, who was by then hospitalized with Huntington’s chorea. Dylan visited his idol frequently. That April he played New York’s Gerdes’ Folk City as the opener for bluesman John Lee Hooker, with a set of Guthrie-style ballads and his own lyrics set to traditional tunes. A
New York Times review by Robert Shelton alerted A&R man John Hammond, who signed Dylan to Columbia and produced his first album.
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from The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock And Roll (Simon and Schuster, 2001)
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