Chimes of freedom..

For over 40 years, Bob Dylan has remained the most influential American musician rock has ever produced and unquestionably the most important of the 1960s. Inscrutable and unpredictable, Bob Dylan has been both deified and denounced for every shift of interest, while whole schools of musicians took up his ideas. His lyrics - the first in rock to be seriously regarded as literature - became so well known that politicians from Jimmy Carter to Václav Havel have cited them as an influence. By personalizing folk songs, Dylan reinvented the singer/songwriter genre; by performing his allusive, poetic songs in his nasal, spontaneous vocal style with an electric band, he enlarged pop’s range and vocabulary while creating a widely imitated sound. By recording with Nashville veterans, he reconnected rock and country, hinting at the country rock of the ’70s. In the ’80s and ’90s, although he has at times seemed to flounder, he still has the ability to challenge, infuriate, and surprise listeners.I wont go on much about the man because his bio would not fit into this post.However, today i'll post some interesting trivia about some of his most famous songs, songs which have inspired countless millions across the globe; songs which certainly would figure amongst my favourites...

In April 1962, at Gerde's Folk City in New York's Greenwich Village, Bob Dylan gave a quick speech before playing one of his new songs: "This here ain't no protest song or anything like that, 'cause I don't write no protest songs," he said. He then sang the first and third verses of the still- unfinished "Blowin' in the Wind." Published in full a month later in the folk journal Broadside and recorded on July 9th, 1962, for his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, "Blowin' in the Wind" was Dylan's first important composition. It is also the most famous protest song ever written. As a songwriter, Dylan was still emerging from his Woody Guthrie fixation. But in a decisive break with the rhetorical, current-events conventions of topical folk, Dylan framed the crises around him in a series of fierce, poetic questions that addressed what Dylan believed was man's greatest inhumanity to man: indifference. "Some of the biggest criminals are those that turn their heads away when they see wrong and they know it's wrong," he declared in the Freewheelin' liner notes. Much later, Dylan revealed more about the mechanics of writing the song to the Los Angeles Times: "I wrote 'Blowin' in the Wind' in ten minutes, just put words to an old spiritual, probably something I learned from Carter Family records. That's the folk tradition. You use what's been handed down" -- and, of course, pass it on.

Knockin' on heaven's door :Three years had passed since his last studio album, and Dylan seemed at a loss. So he accepted an invitation to go to Mexico for Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, for which he shot a bit part and did the soundtrack. For a death scene, Dylan delivered this tale of a dying sheriff, who wants only to lay his "guns in the ground."This song is a personal favourite and has been covered by eric clapton, gun n roses and avril lavigne amongst others.

"I wrote it. I didn't fail. It was straight," Bob Dylan said of his greatest song shortly after he wrote and recorded it in June 1965. There is no better description of "Like a Rolling Stone" -- of its revolutionary design and execution -- or of the young man, just turned twenty-four, who created it.Al Kooper, who played organ on the session, remembers today, "There was no sheet music, it was totally by ear. And it was totally disorganized, totally punk. It just happened."
To this day, the most stunning thing about "Like a Rolling Stone" is the abundance of precedent: the impressionist voltage of Dylan's language, the intensely personal accusation in his voice ("Ho-o-o-ow does it fe-e-e-el?"), the apocalyptic charge of Kooper's garage-gospel organ and Mike Bloomfield's stiletto-sharp spirals of Telecaster guitar, the defiant six-minute length of the June 16th master take. No other pop song has so thoroughly challenged and transformed the commercial laws and artistic conventions of its time, for all time.During his British tour in May 1965, immortalized in D.A. Pennebaker's documentary Don't Look Back, Dylan began writing an extended piece of verse -- twenty pages long by one account, six in another -- that was, he said, "just a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred, directed at some point that was honest." Back home in Woodstock, New York, over three days in early June, Dylan sharpened the sprawl down to that confrontational chorus and four taut verses bursting with piercing metaphor and concise truth. "The first two lines, which rhymed 'kiddin' you' and 'didn't you,' just about knocked me out," he confessed to rolling stone magazine in 1988, "and later on, when I got to the jugglers and the chrome horse and the princess on the steeple, it all just about got to be too much."The beginnings of "Like a Rolling Stone" -- and its roots in Dylan's earliest musical loves -- can be seen in a pair of offstage moments in Don't Look Back. In the first, sidekick Bob Neuwirth gets Dylan to sing a verse of Hank Williams' "Lost Highway," which begins, "I'm a rolling stone, I'm alone and lost/For a life of sin I've paid the cost." Later, Dylan sits at a piano, playing a set of chords that would become the melodic basis for "Like a Rolling Stone," connecting it to the fundamental architecture of rock & roll. Dylan later identified that progression as a chip off of Ritchie Valens' "La Bamba."Yet Dylan obsessed over the forward march in "Like a Rolling Stone." Before going into Columbia Records' New York studios to cut it, he summoned Bloomfield, the guitarist in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, to Woodstock to learn the song. "He said, 'I don't want you to play any of that B.B. King shit, none of that fucking blues,' " recalled Bloomfield (who died in 1981). "I want you to play something else." Dylan later said much the same thing to the rest of the studio band, which included pianist Paul Griffin, bassist Russ Savakus and drummer Bobby Gregg: "I told them how to play on it, and if they didn't want to play it like that, well, they couldn't play with me."Just as Dylan bent folk music's roots and forms to his own will, he transformed popular song with the content and ambition of "Like a Rolling Stone." And in his electrifying vocal performance, his best on record, Dylan proved that everything he did was, first and always, rock & roll. " 'Rolling Stone' 's the best song I wrote," he said flatly at the end of 1965. It still is

Inspired by Bruce Langhorne -- a session guitarist who played on several Dylan records -- "Tambourine Man" is the tune that elevated Dylan from folk hero to bona fide star. "[Bruce] was one of those characters. . . . He had this gigantic tambourine as big as a wagon wheel," Dylan said. "The vision of him playing just stuck in my mind." Written partly during a drug-fueled cross-country trek in 1964, the song was recorded on January 15th, 1965; five days later, based on a demo they'd heard, the Byrds recorded their own version. "Wow, man," said Dylan, "you can even dance to that!"

The times..they are a changin':"I wanted to write a big song, some kind of theme song, with short, concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way," said Dylan. "This is definitely a song with a purpose." Inspired by Scottish and Irish folk ballads and released less than two months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the song became an immediate anthem and was covered by artists from the Byrds to Cher. Said Dylan, "I knew exactly what I wanted to say and who I wanted to say it to."