What do we really know about Bob Dylan...he's left the answer blowing in the wind

Dylan: forever young... The world’s favourite troubadour turned 80 this week. Paul Hopkins ponders how much we really know about the enigma that was born Robert Allen Zimmerman

To me, Woody Guthrie was the be-all and end-all. So has said Bob Dylan, the song-and-dance man and legendary troubadour who turned 80 this week. “Woody’s songs were about everything at the same time.

They were about rich and poor and black and white, the highs and lows of life, the contradictions between what they were teaching in school and what was really happening.’’

In talking about the man who was his first inspiration – and there have been others from Blind Willie McTell to TS Eliot to Dylan Thomas to Johnny Cash (think Nashville Skyline) – Dylan could just as easily have been talking about himself. When he first went down to Greenwich Village in the early '60s, to an audience content to listen to Guthrie and Tom Paxton and Liam Clancy, it was to play before an audience that could just as much have despised Dylan’s eventual 'rockisation' of American folk music as embrace it. Here was an audience who thought that films could be works of art but rock music? Surely not.

Yet, in the end, or more correctly from the beginning, that audience was to embrace the art of the man born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota to Jewish immigrants from what is now Ukraine. Asked once in an interview with Playboy magazine did he know what his songs were about – ‘cos no-one else darn did –he said: “I know what my songs are about.’’ Playboy: “And what’s that?” Dylan: “Oh, some are about four minutes, some are about five minutes and some, believe it or not, are about 11 or 12 minutes.’’

There has always been that elusive, somewhat self-effacing side to Dylan. The Joker so often written off in his work. Despite that, this painter of images has been a major figure in music for six decades. His early lyrics incorporated a variety of political, social and philosophical, as well as literary influences. But more than anything, there is a sense in which, more fully than, say, F Scott Fitzgerald or Jack Kerouac did, Dylan created a generation.

For us the answers were indeed blowing in the the wind, the times were indeed a-changing and then we grew up and fell in love and asked honey for just one more chance to get along with her and when friends turned out to be not so, we said they had a lot of nerve to say they were our friends (Positively 4th Street). Then the maturity of love and passion for tonight we were staying here with her (Lay, Lady, Lay and Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You and I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight), and then we lost her as in I Threw It All Away and so on and so forth.

Themes, he says, have never been a problem. When he started out the Korean war was just ending and Vietnam beginning, and then came Masters Of War. He has found much subject matter in newspapers such as The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, the story of a wealthy Baltimore man who was given only a six- month sentence for killing a maid with a cane.

Dylan has, in more than one interview, scoffed at the idea of daily writing, or even that waiting for the Muse. “I’m not that serious a songwriter,’’ he once quipped, a smile on his face. “I’ll take a concept, a line I want to get into a song and if I can’t figure how to simplify it, I’ll take it all, lock, stock and barrel, and figure how how to get it to fit the rhyming scheme.’’

This, and probably this alone, we do know: He went to the University of Minnesota in 1959 where he was first attracted to American folk music. He dropped out in 1961 and in August ’62 he legally changed his name to Bob Dylan, and signed to Colombia Records. In April 1965 he went all-electric with Bring It All Back Home which met with a lot of booing when he performed the album at the Newport festival. In July that year he finally arrived when Like A Rolling Stone, that confused and exultant anthem, reached No. 2 in the US and No. 4 in the UK charts. It is still to this day No.1 in Rolling Stone Magazine’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. On November 22, 1965, Dylan secretly married 25- year-old former model Sara Lownds – that’s her on the cover of Freewheelin.

Their first child, Jesse Byron Dylan was born in January 1966, and they had three more children: Anna Lea, Samuel Isaac Abraham, and Jakob Luke who as a professional performer has long lived in his father's shadow. Dylan also adopted Sara's daughter from a prior marriage, Maria Lownds. Dylan and Sara divorced in 1977, and she died in 2011. In June 1986, Dylan married his longtime back-up singer Carolyn Dennis.

They had one child, a daughter, Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan, and the couple divorced in October 1992. Their marriage and child remained a closely guarded secret until the publication of Howard Sounes' Dylan biography, Down the Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan, in 2001.

Dylan now lives in Malibu, California when not on the road. On July 29, 1966, Dylan crashed his 500cc motorbike on a road near his then home in Woodstock, New York. Though the extent of his injuries were never fully disclosed, Dylan said that he broke several vertebrae in his neck.

In the wake of his accident, he withdrew from the public and did not tour again for eight years. But in what is known as his ‘post- bike crash period’, he produced, in this writer’s opinion, his greatest work, eclipsing the seminal works of Highway 61 Revisited (with its riveting and desperate Desolation Row) and Blonde On Blonde (the greatest love song of all in Just Like A Woman or the troubling, cartoon-like but uplifting I Want You), with Blood On The Tracks, with its painfully direct and inscrutably mystifying Idiot Wind and the equally painful but honest Simple Twist Of Fate.

As he turns 80, what of the legacy of the Zimm? Time magazine has him as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century, calling him “master poet, caustic social critic and intrepid, guiding spirit of the counterculture generation”.

Biographer Howard Sounes places him among the most exalted company when he says: “There are giant figures in art who are sublimely good — Mozart, Picasso, Shakespeare, Dickens ... Dylan ranks alongside these.” For this writer, and the many who grew up on Dylan, he, like us, seemed so much older then. He’s younger than that now.