million miles - bob dylan










                           

                   
                                                     May  24 : )

It's the birthday of the singer and songwriter Bob Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota (1941). He grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota, a mining town on the decline. Dylan later said, "It was a very itinerant place  no interstate highways yet, just country roads everywhere. There was an innocence about it all, and I don't recall anything bad ever happening." At school, his classmates said he was a quiet kid who didn't call much attention to himself. But then, in 1955, the movie Rebel Without a Cause came out, and Dylan went to see it at least four times. After that, he began wearing a red leather jacket to school, and he put grease in his hair. He set about forming the first rock and roll band in the history of Hibbing, Minnesota, and he called his band The Golden Chords.

It was onl　　　　　y after he enrolled in the University of Minnesota that Dylan became interested in folk music. He heard a record by the folk singer Odetta in 1958 and immediately went out and traded his electric guitar for an acoustic. He soon dropped out of college to focus on learning as many folk songs as he could. At some point, he stumbled upon the work of Woody Guthrie and became a kind of Guthrie disciple. He bought a harmonica and a metal neck brace so that he could sing, play guitar, and play the harmonica at the same time, just like Woody, and he began performing at local coffeehouses. It was at one　　　　　 of these coffeehouses that he first called himself Bob Dylan. He took the name Dylan from the poet Dylan Thomas.

After a few years in Minneapolis, Dylan decided to take off for New York City in January of 1961. He arrived in the middle of a snowstorm. It was one　　　　　 of the worst winters in decades, and he had no place to stay. He spent several days just riding the subways, because it was the onl　　　　　y place he could keep warm. He found a place to stay by the end of the week, and then he took a trip down to Greystone Hospital in New Jersey, where he'd heard that Woody Guthrie was slowly dying of Huntington's disease.

Guthrie was staying in the psychiatric part of the hospital, and he was already suffering spasms and having difficulty talking. But Dylan brought along his guitar and he sang songs to Guthrie, which Guthrie loved. Dylan went back to visit Guthrie many times, and the first song he wrote after his arrival in New York was called "Song to Woody." It included the lines, "Here's to the hearts and the hands of the men / That come with the dust and are gone with the wind."

Within a year, Dylan had his first record contract, and he recorded his first album when he was just 19. He went on to become one　　　　　 of the most prolific songwriters in American history, writing and recording songs such as "Blowin' in the Wind," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," "Mr. Tambourine Man," "Subterranean Homesick Blues," and "Like a Rolling Stone." Dylan also published his first memoir a few years ago, Chronicles, Volume One　　　　　 (2004), which got great reviews and was even nominated for a National Book Award.

Bob Dylan was onc　　　　　e asked if he thought of himself more as a singer or a poet. He said, "I think of myself more as a song-and-dance man."