Bob Dylan is the magician who sprinkled poetic fairy dust onto the popular music of the early sixties. His songwriting sparked a revolution and changed rock music forever.
The diminutive poet/singer claimed he was merely a 'song and dance man', but Dylan altered popular music from intellectually bereft teenage rebellion into a serious adult art form worthy of academic study.
Dylan headed for the sixties as a Little Richard rock 'n' roller but soon turned acoustic folkie. After absorbing the music and words of Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson and Brecht, he became a vagabond social troubadour. Basking in Rimbaud, he transformed into a poetic symbolist before later immersing himself in lysergic beat surrealism. The chameleon of Dylan in the sixties was bewildering to his followers. His first album was a raw debut folk/blues. He followed this with three acoustic poetic gems, three ground-breaking surreal, electric wonders and four that were more mundane and country tinged.
But by the mid-sixties, he was a strung-out polka-dotted rock star. He crashed (physically and mentally) before leaving the sixties as a clean-cut country crooner. Dylan had mutated more times than a trilobite. Dylan's ground-breaking music changed the world and his amazing story is revealed by exploring the eleven albums that he released between 1962 and 1970.
Opher Goodwin is the author of many books on rock music and science fiction and taught the first 'History of Rock Music' classes in the UK. He was fortunate to spend the sixties in London, the epicentre for the underground explosion of rock music and culture, where he was able to see everyone from Pink Floyd, Hendrix and Cream to The Doors, Captain Beefheart and Roy Harper. He now lives happily in East Yorkshire, UK.
