For 40 years Bob Dylan has been cloaked in mystery, a messianic figure who constantly reinvented himself and infuriated his adherents by refusing to replicate his recorded songs on stage. This week the bardic hero will break his silence with the publication of his eagerly awaited autobiography.


Dylan let off a few tantalising firecrackers in a recent interview. He says he never wanted to be “the voice of a generation” and kept guns to protect his family from obsessed fans and crazed “creeps” who haunted his door. All he wanted was a “nine-to-five existence” and a house with a white picket fence and “pink roses in the back yard”.

Holy cow. What will the 63-year-old prince of folk, whose anthems were adopted by the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, tell us next? That he really wanted to be the crooner Perry Como? The intriguing question is how much further Dylan is prepared to go in deconstructing himself. For the edifice on which his fame rests was largely appropriated from others.

Robert Allen Zimmerman borrowed his name from the poet Dylan Thomas (or, as he initially claimed, from the Western hero Matt Dillon). He was also in the habit of borrowing tunes. The melody of Blowin’ in the Wind, his breakthrough hit, came from No More Auction Block, one of several old folk tunes he used in his songs. He borrowed his trademark wire harmonica brace from the bluesman Jesse Fuller and aped the cigarette-in-mouth stage posture of his friend and idol Woody Guthrie.

He also borrowed his own background from Guthrie’s prototype hobo minstrel. He told people he was an orphan and had ridden into New York City on a freight train. The truth, he admitted recently, was that he had driven in from his family’s Midwest home in a 1957 sedan.

To many British and even American ears, there was something suspiciously contrived about his distinctive singing style, part-Guthrie and part blues whine. It struck some as slightly comical. This tendency to mimic, allied to a fear of being marginalised by a’changing times, helps to explain his subsequent transformations.

But Dylan’s intelligence liberated pop from cars, blue suede shoes and bands of gold while giving a new dimension to folk music. According to Andy Gill, author of Classic Bob Dylan, 1962-69: My Back Pages: “From Hendrix to the Beatles, Clapton to Cohen . . . virtually all of rock music has been inspired or influenced in some way by Dylan’s creative ambition.”

Some couldn’t swallow the act. “What I can’t take is the vision of Dylan as seer, as teenage messiah, as everything else he’s been worshipped as,” Nik Cohn wrote in 1969. “The way I see him, he’s a minor talent with a major gift for self-hype.”

What Dylan had in spades was a poetic talent that allowed his early songs to pour out of him. A friend, Mikki Isaacson, recalled a car ride with him in 1962: “He had a small spiral notebook, and must have had four different songs going at once.”

Just what his lyrics meant is still a matter of some debate, even if they were delivered with riveting passion. Blowin’ in the Wind was so vague it could be applied to any freedom issue. Dylan once explained unhelpfully: “The idea came to me that you were betrayed by your silence.” A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, inspired by the Cuban missile crisis, was not about nuclear fallout, as many supposed, but referred to the “poison lies” showering down from the government.

These days it is hard to equate the epitome of 1960s cool, whose tousled hair, Cuban heels and skinny suits helped to capture the heart of the beautiful folk singer Joan Baez, with the rather raddled figure who reminded Paul McCartney, on their encounter at Heathrow in the early 1990s, of “a kind of bagman”.

A preoccupation with death, instilled by several car and motorcycle accidents in his youth, drove many of his early songs. “I don’t write when I’m feeling groovy,” he admitted once. “I write when I’m sick.”

Much has been made of a mysterious motorcycle crash in 1966 that signalled Dylan’s withdrawal into privacy. But the star had been brooding on his own mortality since the assassination of President John F Kennedy three years earlier.

“Being noticed can be a burden,” he said. “Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot.”

He was born on May 24, 1941, the son of a Jewish furniture store owner, in Duluth, Minnesota. When the family moved to nearby Hibbing, Dylan recalled: “Every once in a while a wagon would come through town with a gorilla in a cage or, I remember, a mummy under glass. It was a very itinerant place.” In school bands he thumped the piano like Little Richard.

At the University of Minnesota, he had a reputation for two-timing girlfriends. One recalled: “At first he seemed very shy, sort of scared, but it didn’t take long before you found out most of it was an act.”

When Dylan arrived in New York he took up with Suze Rotolo, a serious 17-year-old who drew him into the civil rights movement — to the disapproval of her mother, who doubted his truthfulness and personal hygiene. When Rotolo left him, a shattered Dylan wrote Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.

New York became his destination after rejecting the notion of enrolling in the army and going to West Point. As he began to build a reputation in Greenwich Village, rock music was being eclipsed by folk, boosted by the Kingston Trio’s 1958 hit Tom Dooley.

In 1963 Dylan performed alongside Baez, then at the height of her career, and the two became lovers. To the fans it seemed idyllic but they never talked much, he confessed, and after a few years they concluded they were too different to last.

“I never understood him at all — not a tweak,” Baez admitted three decades later.

His new love was Sara Lowndes, a former Playboy bunny girl whom he married in 1965, although his obsession with privacy prevented them being photographed together. In the same year he ditched folk for rock and was booed at the Newport folk festival for playing an electric guitar. In Glasgow, a knife-wielding hotel waiter called him a traitor.

Drugs and booze had kept him on the road — when he sang “Everybody must get stoned”, he meant it. In 1966 he retreated to Woodstock in upstate New York, finding contentment in family life (and five children), reflected in such songs as Lay, Lady, Lay.

When he hit the road (and the booze) again, his wife sued for divorce and secured $36m, plus a half-share of royalties. The split inspired his 1975 masterpiece Blood On the Tracks.

In 1978 he claimed to have seen Christ in an Arizona hotel room: “I felt my whole body tremble. The glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up.”

As a baptised born-again Christian, he delivered rambling lectures on the coming Armageddon to disgruntled fans.

In 1986 he secretly married Carol Dennis, one of his backing singers, when she declared herself pregnant with his child. The marriage came to an expensive end in 1992.

His creative powers appeared spent until 1997, when he produced the acclaimed Time Out Of Mind, and then won an Oscar for Things Have Changed, from the 2000 film Wonder Boys. Since the 1980s he has been on the Never-Ending Tour, sometimes playing hundreds of shows each year when illness did not intervene.

Retirement, he said recently, was never on the cards. “I feel I need to perform more than I need to write.” But writing still thrills him: “Every time I come up with a new song, it’s like the first rose of May.”

Some, including Dylan himself, wondered whether his former drug habit had rotted his memory banks. His autobiography, it seems, has retrieved some lost moments. “I was surprised myself with how much came back.”

He has promised to set the record straight in a way that “no one could misinterpret”. But who has written the book — Bob Dylan or Robert Zimmerman?