Tobias Zuberbühler

BAND – Bob Dylan

Album – The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan was born into a liberal Jewish family in rural Minnesota on 24 May 1941 (four weeks before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa). He studied arts in Minneapolis (where people are clashing again with the U.S. government these days) before moving to Greenwich Village in 1961 to perform folk songs of Woody Guthrie and others and mingle with the beatnik hipsters of New York. Dylan’s girlfriend Suze Rotolo (featured on the cover photo of the album), whose parents were members of the American Communist Party, nudged him towards left-wing politics.

Following an unsuccessful first album of folk cover versions, Dylan was signed by Columbia Records and started recordings for “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” in May 1962, at the age of 21. Combining the fury of beat poets with folk guitars, Bob Dylan became the first musician to write protest songs. “Blowin’ in the Wind” (an adaptation of the 1830s Negro spiritual “No More Auction Block” which became an anthem of the civil rights movement of the 1960s), “Masters of War” (an first attack against the U.S. military-industrial complex) and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” (one of Dylan’s most complex songs first performed live at Carnegie Hall on 22 September 1962, one month before the Cuban Missile Crisis) have set the tone as anti-war classics until today. My favorite is “Hard Rain”, which confronts gentle folk guitar strumming with incredible lyrics in which every single line sets off an explosion in your head. The album was finally issued in May 1963 and became a big success after Peter Paul and Mary’s rendition of “Blowin’ in the Wind” reached No. 2 of the Billboard Charts. 

With his mixture of moral authority and nonconfirmity, Bob Dylan has remained an enigmatic idol for generations, pushing away the many non-initiated who have bought tickets for his incredibly uncompromising concerts (where even music fans like me sometimes have not recognized a single song) only to walk out in anger. 

I like the fact that some artists still do not give a shit about audience expectation and just play what they feel like. Another example is the ex-Velvet John Cale who had a vicious performance some years ago in the Kaufleuten Zurich, during which 2/3rds of the audience walked out before he played one Velvet Underground song, only to return to pure noise and videos of Bosnian concentration camps thereafter. Uff. Of course, it helps to be old and world famous in these situations.

Unlike some well-known authors (who might have been hoping for the prize themselves), I think Bob Dylan deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 (even though my favorite writer, Haruki Murakami, was No. 1 for the bookies). It is a myth that he refused the prize. Dylan merely declined to appear for the official ceremony in December due to other (as yet undisclosed) commitments (and supposedly to avoid the spotlight he has always hated). His acceptance speech was held in May 2017, shortly before the deadline of six months elapsed to collect the prize money.