Married secretly, twice: Dylan married Sara Lownds in 1965 without the press or even close friends knowing. Biographer Howard Sounes says the ceremony took place under an oak tree on Long Island with only two others present. The news became public only the following year, when Nora Ephron (then a journalist, later a screenwriter and filmmaker) published a story in the New York Post headlined: Hush! Bob Dylan is Wed. The marriage ended in 1977. Dylan later married backup singer Carolyn Dennis. This time, the public didn’t know about it until 2001, nine years after their separation.
Appeared in a Victoria’s Secret ad: If you were following pop culture in 2004, you’d have seen Dylan amble though a Victoria’s Secret ad interspersed with cuts of lingerie-clad models. The commercial also played his 1997 song, Love Sick.
Rapped with Kurtis Blow: In 1986, a decade that saw Dylan experiment with Christian themes and struggle to produce hits, he also put rap on his resume. Collaborating with Blow, often seen as one of the founding fathers of rap, he appeared on the Kingdom Blow album, on the song Street Rock. It sounds more legit than you’d expect.
Published poetry: The experimental prose / poetry book Tarantula came out in 1971 and seems much like it was written by one of the Beat poets.
Been mistaken for a homeless man: Dylan was strolling in a New Jersey town in 2009, scheduled to play a gig there, when two police officers responded to complaints about a scruffy old man acting suspiciously. They picked Dylan up. He wasn’t carrying identification. They only found out when he was escorted back to his much-less-shabby hotel.
Hated on Led Zeppelin: Sometime in the 1970s, Dylan ran into rock band Led Zeppelin’s manager Peter Grant. “Hello, Bob. I’m Peter Grant. I manage Led Zeppelin,” the manager said. After a short silence, Dylan replied, “I don’t come to you with my problems.” Burn! The exchange was witnessed by keyboardist Ian McLagan, who shared the anecdote in his memoir, All the Rage.
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SKIPPING REELS OF RHYME...
Milestones marking the public and very private life of a musician. Bob Dylan’s works span genres, generations and geographies.
1941: Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Minnesota. His mother declared him so beautiful, he should have been a girl. He experimented with several stage names in his youth, including Elston Gunn, Robert Allyn and Bob Dillon, before settling on Dylan.
1962: He released a self-titled debut album. Selling 5,000 copies it was not a stellar debut.
1963: The stirrings of genius. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan became one of the defining albums of the decade. He captured the mood of the moment with Blowin’ in the Wind and Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright, songs that would prove to be timeless.
1965: A mixed year. Dylan was labelled a Judas and booed offstage by folk music fans for playing the electric guitar. He managed to bounce back into favour. The fully electric album, Highway 61 Revisited, with songs such as Like a Rolling Stone and Tombstone Blues, put the lyrics in focus. Bringing It All Back Home, out the same year, was half acoustic and half electric and had Subterranean Homesick Blues and It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.
1966: Dylan, 25, crashed his beloved Triumph on the backroads of Woodstock. He also secretly married model Sara Lownds. What seemed like a retreat to recuperate became a decade of lying low and evolving from celebrity to artist. His next album, Blonde on Blonde, blended folk, pop, rock and soul to divide and unite fans.
1967: Already there was enough for a documentary. DA Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back took an intimate look at Dylan’s 1965 tour of England. It showed a young, confident artist navigating fame, truth, craft and career. The film influenced music documentaries for decades.
1969: From folk to country-rock. Dylan’s pivot with the album Nashville Skyline set a new tone and spoke to a new audience with songs like Lay Lady Lay and Girl from the North Country.
1975: Dylan showed he enjoyed not just concerts and studio albums but sessions too. The Basement Tapes (with his band that would eventually be called The Band) turned his post-accident sessions recordings from 1967 into a separate album. It’s one of the finest tapings of its kind. The iconic Blood on the Tracks came out the same year, with Tangled Up in Blue and Shelter from the Storm. It’s anti-establishment, anti-music-establishment and a portrait of a crumbling marriage (that would end in divorce in 1977).
1988: The ’80s weren’t Dylan’s creative best. He’d given up Judaism for Evangelical Christianity. The new messaging led to some underwhelming (and rambling) musical projects. He kicked off a concert series, a never-ending tour that has had more than 3,000 performances to date.
1997: 35 years into his career, finally an Album of the Year Grammy. Dylan picked it up for Time Out of Mind, his 30th.
2001: An even more secret marriage. A biographer broke the news that Dylan had married singer and actress Carolyn Dennis in 1986. By this time, they’d been separated for nearly a decade.
2005: Another stellar documentary. Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home, tracked Dylan’s early years, a sort of rediscovery for a new generation and simmering post 9/11 mood. Modern Times, out the following year, went back to his folk roots, but adding blues, country and rock to define American nostalgia.
2016: Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”. He skipped the banquet, but later delivered a lecture in order to receive his prize.
2020: Sold. Dylan’s catalogue was bought by Universal Music for an undisclosed sum. It gives the company the right to use his music in perpetuity. At 79, a new album. The acclaimed Rough and Rowdy Ways included the 17-minute spoken-word ballad Murder Most Foul.
2021: In November, Retrospectrum, featuring 120 paintings by Dylan over six decades, goes on display in November in Miami.
2022: The Bob Dylan Center, a sort of museum and archive, is scheduled to open in Okhlahoma.
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