Bob Dylan at 80: From Elton John to Bono, stars reveal the man behind the ‘unknowable’ genius

Troubadour: Bob Dylan in 1963
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We live in the time of Bob Dylan. The great singer-songwriter turns 80 today, May 24. He released his first album in early 1962 when he was just 20 years old. From the surrealist rocker of the Sixties to the gypsy troubadour of the Seventies and reflective ancient bard of last year’s masterful Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan has been a singular giant of popular music for the whole of his adult life, almost 60 years in the spotlight, the greatest living figure of the most universally pervasive art form of the modern era.

The young Robert Zimmerman stumbled out of the Midwest with a guitar and harmonica, a precocious, firebrand folkie who changed his name and changed the world. In his visionary lyrical genius, Dylan instinctively grasped the immense potential of songcraft, reaching deep into the roots of folk tradition and blasting forward into the wild untamed country of rock’n’roll.

He opened up new vistas of poetry, philosophy and emotion, in the process unleashing the potential for something as simple as a song to become a complete vehicle for personal artistic expression.

His hallucinogenic brilliance put him so far ahead of the curve in the explosive decade of the 1960s that he gained a mystical, near mythical status amongst his peers as much as the public. And he has continued creating extraordinary work every decade since: 39 studio albums and many hundreds of songs, some of which have become folk songs of our age (Blowin’ In The Wind, I Shall Be Released, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door) and some that touch such mysterious depths you can’t imagine anyone but Dylan creating them (Visions of Johanna, Tangled Up In Blue, Jokerman).

What do we really know about Dylan?

But while we know the work, what do we really know of the man who makes it? For someone so famous, Dylan remains surprisingly elusive. There are over 1,000 critical books and biographies, but it is not known for sure how many times he has been married (at least twice), and how many children he has (five or more).

He has written his own acclaimed memoir, Chronicles, and given many long, absorbing interviews, but there is a mischievous aspect to his public utterances, seeded with deliberate mistruths (such as the fake footage interspersed throughout Martin Scorsese’s 2019 documentary Rolling Thunder including an imaginary encounter with a young Sharon Stone). I once asked his former lover, singing partner and early champion, Joan Baez, how well she felt she knew Dylan. Her answer was that “Bobby’s unknowable.”

Unknowable. It is a strange statement, but Dylan’s enigmatic personality seems to present challenges even to those who might call him a friend. ELO’s Jeff Lynne, who made two albums with Dylan as part of the Traveling Wilburys, described him to me as “a very mysterious guy who does the unexpected all the time.” He wrote a poem for Marianne Faithfull in 1965, then tore it up when she declined to sleep with him.

“That was a shame. Mad poet in terror!” noted Faithfull. “It’s very hard to say what Bob’s like, because he changes so much. He’s a very grand old man now, but in his youth, he was really a shapeshifter.” Elvis Costello, who has toured and sung with Dylan, said, “he’s very unpredictable, and that’s one of the things that makes him great. You really can’t pin him down.”

The Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart summed up this elusive quality when he told me about going for a stroll through Camden Market with Dylan in 1993. Passers-by reacted with slack-jawed shock, as if they could not believe what they were witnessing was real. “It was like walking with a ghost,” was Stewart’s memorable phrase.

I had my own encounter with the ghost in 1984. It was backstage at a massive open-air concert in Ireland, at a time when Dylan had emerged from his fierce Born Again Christian phase with the shiny and beguiling Infidels and was touring with a starry rock band featuring guitar supremos Mick Taylor and Carlos Santana with The Faces’ Ian Maclagan on keyboards. I had blagged my way backstage alongside my friend Bono.

The U2 star was escorted to a Winnebago, where Dylan was inside playing chess with Van Morrison, all of which completely boggled my young brain. It was Bono’s first meeting with the great man, and he later told me they had talked about Irish music, and Dylan recited Brendan Behan’s The Auld Triangle. Meanwhile, I had struck up a conversation with two American boys.

Eventually, I noticed this weird looking fellow sidle up alongside us, his jowly face caked in orange make-up and baggy eyes ringed with thick black liner. I gaped at this strange vision, who was making small talk with a buxom girl from MTV in a stoned drawl. “He looks so old!” I whispered to my new American friends, before babbling some nonsense about it being better not to meet your heroes. The boys turned out to be Dylan’s sons, Samuel and Jakob. Not my finest moment.

A generational appeal has led to his success

Dylan’s fans span the generations. I was a teenage punk in the late Seventies when I discovered Dylan for myself, an initial fascination with the Highway 61 hipster period of surrealist scorn expanding into a lifelong obsession as I embraced the phenomenal depth and range of his work. I’ve read many books, listened to everything he ever recorded and seen him perform live dozens of times, yet still there is a veil of beguiling mystery about the man himself.

Over the years, I have never passed up the opportunity to ask musicians about their personal encounters with Dylan. He shows a lot of generosity towards other artists, reaching out to tell Patti Smith, Nick Cave and Mike Scott of the Waterboys how much he admired their work.

Mythical: Bob Dylan performing in New York City, 1961 -  Sigmund Goode
Mythical: Bob Dylan performing in New York City, 1961 - Sigmund Goode

Irish singer-songwriter Glen Hansard was just 23 and rehearsing with his band The Frames in Dublin in 1993 when Dylan “stuck his head in and said ‘that’s good!’ I said, holy s___, that’s Bob Dylan! I didn’t even know he was in the country.” Dylan was in Ireland for a concert and subsequently took the Frames on tour in Australia as his support act.

When Hansard’s guitar developed problems, Dylan gave him one of his own. “I have it at home, but I’m actually kind of afraid to play it,” says Hansard. “How do you write a song on a guitar that belongs to the greatest songwriter in the world?”

There is a certain unquantifiable loneliness in being Bob Dylan. During an otherwise very stilted on-camera interview on the set of his film Hearts of Fire in 1987, Dylan spoke of a sense of exclusion. “Fame, it’s like when you look through a window. Say you pass a little pub, or an inn. You look through the window and you see people talking and carrying on. You can watch outside the window and see them all being very real with each other. But when you walk into the room, it's over.”

After a lifetime of being the object of other people’s fascination, he projects a powerful sense of privacy. He drives himself around in a big black people carrier, or rides a motorbike, and wears casual clothes, usually with a hat or hoodie. The unspoken rule is that if the hoodie is up, do not approach. If the hoodie is down, he may be open to conversation. “There is nothing about that man that will give you what you expect,” according to Hansard. “You learn in his company to ask for nothing, leave everything to him, and then he will surprise you. He’s definitely a man tuned to a different frequency.”

A different frequency: Bob Dylan - Elliott Landy
A different frequency: Bob Dylan - Elliott Landy

Marcus Mumford was intrigued by a quicksilver quality that others have noted. “He can be aloof, because he’s Bob Dylan, but it’s like a switch, and suddenly he's the most engaged, intelligent, articulate person in the world. And then the switch will go off, and he'll just grunt. It's so badass.”

His band Mumford & Sons were asked to back Dylan at the Grammy awards in 2011 performing a rowdy version of Sixties classic Maggie’s Farm. “We were in a rehearsal studio in LA and there was no sign of the great man, just two packets of cigarettes, an ashtray and a microphone, right in the middle of the room.

"So I went out to the toilet and there was this figure hunched over in a chair in a coat with the hood up, chain-smoking. I figured it was someone in the crew having a bad day and I just walked past. And as I was in the toilet, I thought, oh s___, that's Dylan! Then I came out and he was in full flow, giving instructions and we were all just playing along.”

Engineer Malcolm Burns worked with Dylan on the Oh Mercy album in 1989 and reports a similar experience. “We had the Neville Brothers rhythm section there, and the drummer, Willie Green, came up to me after the second night. Willie says, ‘Man, I’ve been here two or three days, when the f___'s Bob Dylan showing up?’ I said, ‘Willie, he’s sitting right next to you.’ And then the bass player, Tony Hall comes in, and he says, ‘Man, that Bob Dylan is some weird mother f____r!’ Bob just sort of looked up and raised his eyebrow. Then he went back to working on his lyrics.”

That strange cloak of invisibility turns up in other tales. Elvis Costello reports that he and Dylan accidentally locked themselves out of a venue where they were performing in 2007. “A couple of guys in washed-out, well-loved Dylan tour T-shirts squinted in our direction and just kept walking, assuming we must be a couple of jokers who had come to the show in drag. Not a single person spoke to us as we circled the building through the gathering crowd, looking for the stage door.”

In 2009, during a concert stopover in Long Branch, New Jersey, Dylan went for a stroll around the neighbourhood and was reported by a worried homeowner, then detained for loitering. The 24-year-old police officer refused to believe the shabby old man was Bob Dylan and feared he may have escaped from a local asylum. “I don’t think she was familiar with his entire body of work,” apologised a Long Branch civic spokesman. Earlier the same year, it was reported that Dylan had taken a minibus tour to John Lennon’s childhood home in Liverpool with 13 other tourists, none of whom recognised him. “He could have booked a private tour, but he was happy to go on the bus,” according to a National Trust spokeswoman.

Sharleen Spiteri of Texas had an odd encounter in 1992 at the Leysin festival in Switzerland, where Dylan was topping the bill. Spiteri was relaxing in her dressing room porta-cabin. “It had been raining, the air was really misty and muggy, and I was lying on a sofa looking out this window and suddenly this apparition appears, a man standing in the window.” The figure had a zip-up hoodie and appeared to be peering into her cabin.

“I went ‘who’s that pervert!?’’ says Spiteri, shouting “a few choice Scottish words” at the figure, who turned and fled. Later that night, Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders took Spiteri to meet Dylan. “He’s talking away, never mentioning anything.” But then he leaned over to whisper in her ear, quietly repeating her stream of invective word for word, before breaking into a chuckle. “I’ve never been so embarrassed in my whole life,” admits Spiteri. “He’s got a dirty sense of humour.”

Elton John: 'Come upstairs Dylan, I will fit you out with some of my clothes'

Elton John had an even more embarrassing encounter at a party in the Eighties, when he spotted a scruffy looking figure circulating amongst his guests. “I loudly demanded to know what the gardener was doing helping himself to a drink.” When it was pointed out that this was Bob Dylan, Elton rushed to make amends by grabbing Dylan’s arm and proclaiming “Bob! Bob! We can’t have you in those terrible clothes, darling. Come upstairs and I will fit you out with some of mine at once.” This, it should be noted, was during Elton’s less-than-sober years.

In 2016, Sir Elton told me about a recent visit to Dylan’s sprawling compound house in Malibu, where “he was there in his tracksuit and hoodie and roll up cigarettes, with his beautiful wife who was done up in a beautiful outfit, nails and jewellery and Louis Vuitton.” Who is this mysterious wife, who goes unmentioned elsewhere? All I can tell you is that she took Elton’s husband David Furnish on a tour of “all the art and the paintings” while Dylan played Elton a test pressing of an album of Frank Sinatra cover versions, Fallen Angels, reinterpreted in an Americana style.

“He’s always been very sweet to me,” according to Elton, who was inspired to return to a more rootsy writing and recording style by Dylan’s late period masterpiece Modern Times in 2006. “He just has an ability to do what he wants, to write what he wants, and not to worry about what anyone else thinks. He’s been a template for me. I think he’s a template for most artists.”

“He is definitely set apart, he is touched,” says songwriter and producer T Bone Burnett, who has worked with Dylan over the years. “He's the smartest person I know in music. And he understood the game better and faster and deeper than anyone.” He can be a pragmatic businessman, with record executive David Geffen (to whose Asylum label Dylan briefly signed in the mid-Seventies) saying “Bob Dylan is as interested in money as any person I’ve known in my life. That’s just the truth.”

Dylan held on to his publishing rights throughout his career, eventually selling his entire back catalogue last year in a deal worth over $300 million dollars, at a stroke putting Dylan’s personal wealth at over half a billion. Robbie Robertson of The Band, one of Dylan’s closest collaborators for many years, has noted this “hard-edged” streak. “Bob’s a good guy but he’s tough. He comes from the streets.”

'He had an amazing imagination, the greatest gift of all'

Robertson is refreshingly unawed by Dylan, perhaps because he worked so closely with him from the mid-Sixties to the mid-Seventies. “He has an amazing imagination, and that’s the greatest gift of all. His discoveries are really his own. He tore down some boundaries that needed tearing down, and he disrupted some tradition that it was really healthy to disrupt. But when I first was involved in that music, I thought there were too many words, too many verses, and I told him. And in the beginning there was too many guitar solos.

“He kept looking over and giving me the nod, and I had to play another one. I’d be like, ‘We got eight verses and six solos in this thing, I think we’re dragging it out too long.’ He was like, ‘Really? You think that?’ ‘Well, its something to look at!’”

Robertson felt some frustration at Dylan’s oft reported impatience in the studio, and his unwillingness to do more than a handful of takes. “His process is how do we get this down on tape with all the words in there, and then we’re done. That’s not record making, to me. That’s archival experiences.”

The speed and ease with which Dylan conjures up songs is mystifying, even to other songwriters. Leonard Cohen used to tell a tale of his encounter with Dylan in Paris in the Eighties. Dylan praised Cohen’s Hallelujah (which he had been performing in concert) and asked how long it took to write.

Cohen told him “Oh, the best part of two years.” Feeling he should repay the compliment, Cohen praised Dylan’s song I & I and asked how long that had taken to write. “Oh, about 15 minutes,” responded Dylan. Undoubtedly one of the greatest lyricists of all time himself, Cohen referred to Dylan as “the master.”

Comes from the streets: Bob Dylan in 2009
Comes from the streets: Bob Dylan in 2009

The late, great piano playing singer-songwriter Leon Russell helped produce a Bob Dylan session in 1971. “I’d heard a story that when he was writing his Nashville Skyline record, he’d write the next song while they were doing the playback of the previous song,” Russell told me in 2010. “So I told him I wanted him to show me how to do that.”

They set up a small band at Blue Rock Studio in New York. “I said, OK let me see you write the song. And he wrote Watching the River Flow, which starts out ‘What’s the matter with me / I ain’t got nothing to say.’” Then Dylan wrote When I Paint My Masterpiece during the same session.

“He said when he was on the road playing by himself, he’d write two or three songs before the show, do them on that show then throw them away and never do them again. It kinda makes you understand why that guy (self-styled Dylanologist A J Weberman) wanted to look in his trash.”

During one of Dylan’s prolific writing sessions in 1965, he knocked out Love Is A Four Letter Word. Joan Baez was in the room listening to him play it on the piano, and she took the scribbled sheet of paper without telling him. She eventually recorded it in 1968. When Dylan heard it on the radio, he told her how much he liked it, then asked who wrote it. “You did, you dope,” said Baez.

Joan Baez and Bob Dylan in Washington, 1963 - Alamy
Joan Baez and Bob Dylan in Washington, 1963 - Alamy

In 2014, T Bone Burnett put together a group with Elvis Costello and Marcus Mumford to record an entire album of discarded Dylan lyrics, Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes. Dylan’s manager supplied a suitcase of over 60 abandoned handwritten lyrics, all apparently composed whilst Dylan was recovering from his motorcycle crash in 1967. “Quite a lot of the sheets had little doodles,” according to Costello. “You see the rhythm, the choices being made on the fly because there are crossed out words. That’s a glimpse into the working method you don’t usually get.”

Costello recalls an encounter before a festival in Australia in 2011, when Dylan pulled out a narrow roll of paper from his jacket (“not unlike a London bus ticket”), unfurled it and proceeded to recite a new song scrawled upon it, Pay In Blood. Each time the chorus line came around (‘I pay in blood, but not my own’) “it was delivered with a different flourish: a swashbuckler’s panache, a black comical riposte, held with a steady gaze, tossed away with a wicked laugh or a ghost of a smile.”

The two wordy songwriters have occasionally spoken about their craft but Costello notes: “It's not like the oracle told me a secret, you know? All songwriters have all sorts of mechanisms, some of them conscious, many of them unconscious that they employ in songwriting. And obviously Bob Dylan's done it on a much larger scale just because he's written a lot more songs than most people. The range of his writing is disguised by the very distinctive nature of his voice. There’s qualities of great beauty in many of his songs, which isn’t the first thing you might associate with him.”

“I learnt so much from Bob Dylan,” the late Tom Petty once told me about his time in the Travelling Wilburys. “We’d sit down together and write lyrics. What a privilege. I remember he said to me, if you are stuck on a line, just say what it is you want to say, and don’t worry about the metre or the rhyme or anything. Just write down the sentence, and then find the key words and wallop you’ve got the line.

"He tended to write many more verses than we needed, and sometimes maybe in the seventh verse something would pop up that was better than anything in the first three. Bob is so far above the rest of us. He is the wandering minstrel, the travelling troubadour, and his gift is so great.”

Dylan himself seems uncertain of where it all comes from and is given to making pronouncements such as “the songs kind of write themselves and count on me to sing them.” Most great and potentially enduring contemporary song lyricists such as Costello, Cohen and Joni Mitchell have a formal, polished quality to their work. Dylan’s writing suggests something more untamed, as if he is in touch with a different reality.

Bono: 'He's the Picasso of pop music to me'

Bono has had many encounters with Dylan since his first meeting in 1984, and often remarks on his kindness and wisdom, or puzzles over his sometimes gnomic utterances. “He means more to me than anybody living in music or art. He was the lightning rod in my spiritual quest as a musician. He’s the Picasso of pop music to me. He’s Dickens, he’s Shakespeare, he’s Thackery … with a little bit of Charlie Chaplin thrown in.”

During the recording of U2’s Rattle & Hum in 1988, Bono had a dream about Dylan, and woke up with a song idea about a man treated as a saviour but who is searching for salvation himself. “I wrote a couple of verses, but I didn’t know what to do with it. Then I thought, ‘I’ve got Bob’s number, why don’t I give him a call?’” Bono was invited to Dylan’s house in Malibu, where they finished Love Rescue Me together in half an hour, with Dylan extemporising fully formed verses.

Bob Dylan performing in San Francisco, 1979 - Michael Ochs Archives
Bob Dylan performing in San Francisco, 1979 - Michael Ochs Archives

“He just sings fantastic stuff of the top of his head. He came up with the line ‘I’m hanging by my thumbs, I’m ready for whatever comes.’ Best line in the song.” A studio session was quickly arranged, with Dylan playing keyboards and singing backing vocals. The band were making good progress when Dylan suddenly announced that they would have to scrap one of his verses. “What’s the problem?” enquired Bono. “I used it before,” Dylan admitted.

I love that story. When you think of all the incredible songs swirling around Bob Dylan’s head, you can forgive him occasionally mixing them up.

Behind whatever wall of secrecy Dylan can muster, we know him to be a man driven by art and creativity. He is a voracious reader (he references sources from the Bible to the Roman poets and Shakespeare, and has spoken of his love for classic literature, particularly the great Russian writers, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekov), an obsessive music lover (as demonstrated on his occasional radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour), who, when not writing and performing, spends much of his spare time painting in oils and watercolours, and creating wrought iron art gates inspired by his childhood in the iron ore country of Duluth, Minnesota.

“Gates appeal to me because of the negative space they allow,” he commented on an exhibition brochure in 2013. “They can shut you out or shut you in. And in some ways there is no difference.” It’s a description that could almost apply to himself.

But there is, of course, yet another side to Bob Dylan, that precious few people ever get to witness. I have met Jakob Dylan in my travels, the boy whose father I was so foolishly rude about back in 1984. Jakob has grown up to be a fine singer and songwriter himself, with a great, tough rock band The Wallflowers. For him, the question of Bob Dylan’s character takes on a different light.

“When I was a kid, he was a god to me for all the right reasons. Other people have put that tag on him in some otherworldly sense. I say it as any kid who admired his dad and had a great relationship with him.” The phrase he used to describe his brilliant father had nothing to do with art or genius. “He was affectionate… he still is affectionate to me.”

Is Bob Dylan unknowable, as Joan Baez suggests, or merely inscrutable to the outside world, where his fame looms so large, and to which he presents so many different faces? “What’s important isn’t the legend, but the art, the work,” Dylan said in 1984. And as for the legend? “I don’t think I’m gonna be really understood until maybe 100 years from now.”

So there’s still time.

What are your favourite Bob Dylan memories? Tell us in the comments section below and join the conversation with Neil McCormick at 4pm.