Bob Dylan net worth is $180 Million. Also know about Bob Dylan bio, salary, height, age weight, relationship and more …

Bob Dylan Wiki Biography

Robert Allen Zimmerman was born on 24 May 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota USA, of Russian- and Lithuanian-Jewish ancestry. As Bob Dylan – a name adopted in tribute to Welsh poet Dylan Thomas – he is a singer and songwriter, artist and writer, an iconic and highly influential figure in the music industry over the past 50 years.

So just how rich is Bob Dylan? Sources have estimated that Dylan’s current net worth is over $180 million, accumulated from his album sales, concert performances and song-writing over the last five decades.

During his  years in high school, Bob Dylan was a member of several bands, such as ‘The Shadow Blasters’ and ‘The Golden Chords’. In 1959, Dylan moved to study at the University of Minnesota, during which period his initial interest in rock’n’roll gave way to American folk music. At that time he began to use his adopted name, but also other pseudonyms such as Elston Gunn, Blind Boy Grunt, Bob Landy, Robert Milkwood Thomas, Tedham Porterhouse, Lucky/Boo Wilbury, Jack Frost and Sergei Petrov, and collaborated with several bands. In 1962, Bob Dylan released his first self-titled album, which featured folk standards and two original compositions,  ‘Talkin’ New York’ and ‘Song to Woody’. The album was not very popular and only 5,000 were sold. However, by the time his second album ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’ was released, Bob had begun to make his name and net worth accumulation as both a singer and a songwriter. A lot of songs on the second album were labeled as protest songs. In 1964, his third album, ‘The Times They are a-Changin’’, was released, consisting mostly of blunt, scarcely arranged songs, discussing the problems of racism, poverty and social change. Continuing at this pace of song-writing and album releases, Bob Dylan accumulated his net worth at a steady rate.

During his career Bob Dylan has released 64 albums, of which ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ and ‘Nashville Skyline’ are probably the most iconic; 200 singles and EPs, many having been covered by a multitude of artists and including ‘The Times They Are A’Changin”, ‘Blowin; in the Wind’, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ as the most iconic; and 99 compilations.

During his long lasting career Bob has won many awards including 11 Grammy Awards, one Academy Award and one Golden Globe Award. Dylan’s net worth increased after every single award. Bob Dylan has been enrolled into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2000, Dylan was awarded the Polar Music Prize and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. Most recently, in 2015 Dylan accepted the MusiCares Person of the Year Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, in recognition of his philanthropic and artistic contributions to society.

All these awards and demonstrable means of recognition have increased Dylan’s net worth significantly. Overall, Bob Dylan has been characterized as one of the most influential personalities of the 20th century, musically and culturally. He appeared in the ‘Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century’, in which he was described as ‘master poet, caustic social critic and intrepid, guiding spirit of the counterculture generation’.

In his personal life, Bob Dylan has had two marriages. Firstly, Dylan married Sara Lownds in 1965, and they had four children, but divorced in 1977. Then Dylan married Carolyn Dennis in 1986. Prior to this, their daughter Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan was born. The couple divorced in 1992.

IMDB Wikipedia $180 Million 1941 5 ft 7 in (1.71 m) Actor Anna Dylan Anna Lea Artist Arts Ashkenazi Jews Author Blind Boy Grunt Bob Bob Allen Zimmerman Bob Dylan Bob Dylan Net Worth Bobby Zimmerman Boy Dylan Carolyn Dennis Carolyn Dennis (m. 1986–1992) Converts to Christianity Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan Duluth Electric Dylan controversy Guitarist Jack Frost Jakob Dylan Jakob Luke Jesse Byron Dylan Jesse Dylan Like a Rolling Stone Lucky Wilbury Lyricist Maria Dylan May 24 Minnesota Music Musician Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame Peace activist Poet Record producer Robert Allen Zimmerman Robert Zimmerman Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Rock Stars Sam Dylan Samuel Isaac Abraham Sara Dylan Sara Dylan (m. 1965–1977) Sara Lownds Sergei Petrov Singer-songwriter Song to Woody The Times They Are a-Changin’ The Voice of Protest United States United States of America University of Minnesota

Bob Dylan Quick Info

Bob Dylan Trademarks

1. Low rasping voice
2. His seemingly personal but often mysterious and nebulous lyrics
3. Thin Moustache
4. Often wears a stetson hat
5. Often dresses entirely in Black
6. Messy Black Hair
7. Lyrics inspired by real life events
8. Curly hair
9. Harmonica
10. Lyrics about important social issues
11. Depressing yet witty lyrics
12. Distinctive voice

Bob Dylan Quotes

• [on Gordon Lightfoot] Every time I hear a song of his, it’s like I wish it would last forever.
• [on Bing Crosby] A lot of people would like to sing like Bing Crosby, but very few could match his phrasing or depth of tone. He’s influenced every real singer whether they know it or not. I used to hear Bing Crosby as a kid and not really pay attention to him. But he got inside me nevertheless.
• The Fifties were a simpler time, at least for me and the situation I was in. I didn’t really experience what a lot of other people my age experienced, from the more mainstream towns and cities. Where I grew up was about as far from the cultural center as you could get. It was way out of the beaten path. You had the whole town to roam around in, though, and there didn’t seem to be any sadness or fear or insecurity. It was just woods and sky and rivers and streams, winter and summer, spring, autumn. The changing of the seasons. The cultural was mainly circuses and carnivals, preachers and barnstorming pilots, hillbilly shows and comedians, big bands and whatnot. Powerful radio shows and powerful radio music. This was before supermarkets and malls and multiplexes and Home Depots and all the rest.
• Folk musicians, blues musicians did write a lot of songs about the “Titanic”. That’s what I feel I’m best at, being a folk musician or a blue musician, so in my mind it’s there to be done. If you’re a folk singer, blues singer, rock & roll singer, whatever, in that realm, you oughta write a song about the “Titanic”, because that’s the bar you have to pass.
• If you’re not fulfilled in other ways, performing can never make you happy. Performing is something you have to learn how to do. You do it, you get better at it and you keep going. And if you don’t get better at it, you have to give it up…Whatever you do, you have to be the best at it-Highly skilled. It’s about confidence- not arrogance. You have to know you’re the best whether someone tells you that or not. And that you’ll be around, in one way or another, longer than anybody else.
• I don’t care what people expect of me. Doesn’t concern me. I’m doing God’s work. That’s all I know.
• [on the recordings that become known as ‘The Basement Tapes’] I didn’t know how to record the way other people were recording, and I didn’t want to. The Beatles had just released Sgt. Pepper which I didn’t like at all. I thought that was a very indulgent album, though the songs on it were real good. I didn’t think all that production was necessary.
• [on folk rock] It’s all music. No more, no less. I know in my own mind what I’m doing. If anyone has imagination, he’ll know what I’m doing. If they can’t understand my songs they’re missing something. If they can’t understand green clocks, wet chairs, purple lamps or hostile statues, they’re missing something too.
• You can be a priest and be in rock ‘n’ roll. Being a rock-‘n’-roll singer is no different from being a house painter. You climb up as high as you want to.
• Politics was always one because there were people who were trying to change things. They were involved in the political game because that is how they had to change things. But I have always considered politics just part of the illusion. I don’t get involved much in politics. I don’t know what the system runs on. For instance, there are people who have definite ideas or who studied all the systems of government. A lot of those people with college-educational backgrounds tended to come in and use up everybody for whatever purposes they had in mind. And, of course, they used music, because music was accessible and we would have done that stuff and written those songs and sung them whether there was any politics or not. I never did renounce a role in politics, because I never played one in politics. It would be comical for me to think that I played a role. Gurdjieff thinks it’s best to work out your mobility daily.
• A saint is a person who gives of himself totally and freely, without strings. He is neither deaf nor blind. And yet he’s both. He’s the master of his own reality, the voice of simplicity. The trick is to stay away from mirror images. The only true mirrors are puddles of water.
• The myth of the starving artist is a myth. The big bankers and prominent young ladies who buy art started it. They just want to keep the artist under their thumb. Who says an artist can’t have any money? Look at Picasso. The starving artist is usually starving for those around him to starve. You don’t have to starve to be a good artist. You just have to have love, insight and a strong point of view. And you have to fight off depravity. Uncompromising, that’s what makes a good artist. It doesn’t matter if he has money or not. Look at Matisse; he was a banker. Anyway, there are other things that constitute wealth and poverty besides money.
• Sometimes I might shift paradigms within the same song, but then that structure also has its own rules. And I combine them both, see what works and what doesn’t. My range is limited. Some formulas are too complex and I don’t want anything to do with them.
• [on artist from the 1960s who still play songs in the same way they always have] Those guys all had conspicuous hits. They started out anti-establishment and now they are in charge of the world. Celebratory songs. Music for the grand dinner party. Mainstream stuff that played into the culture on a pervasive level. My stuff is different from those guys. It’s more desperate. [Roger Daltrey], [Pete Townshend], [Paul McCartney], the Beach Boys, [Elton John], Billy Joel. They made perfect records, so they have to play them perfectly…exactly the way people remember them. My records were never perfect. So there is no point in trying to duplicate them. Anyway, I’m no mainstream artist.
• [on what kind of artist he is] Byronesque maybe. Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was [Frank Sinatra], Perry Como, Andy Williams, The Sound of Music (1965). There was no fitting into it then and of course, there’s no fitting into it now. Some of my songs have crossed over but they were all done by other singers.
• I’m coming out of the folk music tradition and that’s the vernacular and archetypal aesthetic that I’ve experienced. Those are the dynamics of it. I couldn’t have written songs for the Brill Building if I tried. Whatever passes for pop music, I couldn’t do it then and I can’t do it now.
• People have different emotional levels. Especially when you’re young. Back then I guess most of my influences could be thought of as eccentric. Mass media had no overwhelming reach so I was drawn to the traveling performers passing through. The side show performers – bluegrass singers, the black cowboy with chaps and a lariat doing rope tricks. Miss Europe, Quasimodo, the Bearded Lady, the half-man half-woman, the deformed and the bent, Atlas the Dwarf, the fire-eaters, the teachers and preachers, the blues singers. I remember it like it was yesterday. I got close to some of these people. I learned about dignity from them. Freedom too. Civil rights, human rights. How to stay within yourself. Most others were into the rides like the tilt-a-whirl and the roller-coaster. To me that was the nightmare. All the giddiness. The artificiality of it. The sledge hammer of life. It didn’t make sense or seem real. The stuff off the main road was where force of reality was. At least it struck me that way. When I left home those feelings didn’t change.
• [on the question of “what made you decide to go the rock-‘n’-roll route?”] Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I’m in a card game. Then I’m in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a “before” in a Charles Atlas “before and after” ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy – he ain’t so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I’m in Omaha. It’s so cold there, by this time I’m robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain’t much to look at, but who’s built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything’s going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?
• [on the question of “message” songs] Well, first of all, anybody that’s got a message is going to learn from experience that they can’t put it into a song. I mean it’s just not going to come out the same message. After one or two of these unsuccessful attempts, one realizes that his resultant message, which is not even the same message he thought up and began with, he’s now got to stick by it; because, after all, a song leaves your mouth just as soon as it leaves your hands. Are you following me? Well, anyway, second of all, you’ve got to respect other people’s right to also have a message themselves. Myself, what I’m going to do is rent Town Hall and put about 30 Western Union boys on the bill. I mean, then there’ll really be some messages. People will be able to come and hear more messages than they’ve ever heard before in their life.
• What’s so bad about being misunderstood?
• I don’t need to be happy. Happiness is kind of a cheap word. Let’s face it, I’m not the kind of cat that’s going to cut off an ear if I can’t do something.
• [on Paul McCartney] I’m in awe of McCartney. He’s about the only one that I am in awe of. He can do it all. And he’s never let up…he’s just so damn effortless.
• Art, if there is such a thing, is in the bathrooms; everybody knows that.
• I would really like to think of myself as a poet, but I just can’t because of all the slobs who are called poets.
• Genius? There’s a real fine line between genius and insanity. Anybody will tell you that.
• I don’t break the rules, because I don’t see any rules to break. As far as I’m concerned, there aren’t any rules.
• [on his songs today] I just come down the line too far to make any superfluous song. I mean, I’m sure I’ve made enough of them, or that I’ve got enough superfluous lines in a lot of songs. But I’ve kind of passed that point. I have to impress myself first, and unless I’m speaking in a certain language to my own self, I don’t feel anything less than that will do for the public, really.
• [following the death of Charlton Heston] Charlton gets a bad rap for his strong conservative beliefs and involvement with the NRA, but truth to tell, he was a strong advocate for civil rights, many years before it became fashionable … Never mind the fact that he’s in a couple of our favorite movies, including Touch of Evil (1958), The Big Country (1958), Planet of the Apes (1968) and of course, Soylent Green (1973).
• [on Barack Obama] Right now, America is in a state of upheaval. Poverty is demoralizing. You can’t expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor. But we’ve got this guy there now who is redefining what a politician is, so we’ll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I’m hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to.
• [on Mark Knopfler] He does me better than anybody.
• I don’t consider myself an educator or an explainer. You see what it is that I do, and that I’ve always done. But it is time now for great men to come forward. With small men, no great things can be accomplished at the moment.
• Things will have to change. And one of these things that will have to change: People will have to change their internal world.
• [on Johnny Cash, in 2005] Johnny Cash was more like a religious figure to me. Just the fact that he’d sing one of my songs was unthinkable.
• [on Joni Mitchell] Joni and I go back a long ways. Not all the way back, but pretty far. I’ve been in a car with Joni. Joni was driving a Lincoln. Excellent driver. I felt safe.
• A giraffe can go a long time without water. But he wants to see the menu right away.
• Not all songs about crying are necessarily sad.
• Lipstick traces on cigarettes can get you in trouble or remind you of the wonders of the night before.
• I’m not ashamed to say that I lived my life to that code. Quite a man, that Gene Autry.
• The harmonica is the world’s best-selling musical instrument. You’re welcome.
• I always liked songs with parentheses in the title.
• I always thought I might want to be a doctor. Where else could you ask a woman to take off her clothes and send a bill to her husband?
• [on Bob Seger] Some people think Bob is a poor man’s Bruce Springsteen, but personally I always thought Bruce was the rich man’s Bob Seger. Love ’em both, though.
• My friend’s wife is a really bad cook. I broke a tooth on her coffee.
• The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the “Blonde on Blonde” album. It’s that thin, that wild mercury sound. It’s metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up. That’s my particular sound. I haven’t been able to succeed in getting it all the time. Mostly I’ve been driving at a combination of guitar, harmonica and organ.
• When I first heard [Elvis Presley’s] voice I just knew that I wasn’t going to work for anybody; and nobody was going to be my boss. Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail.
• [on his hometown of Hibbing, MN] The town didn’t have a rabbi, and it was time for me to be bar mitzvahed. Suddenly a rabbi showed up under strange circumstances for only a year. He and his wife got off the bus in the middle of winter. He showed up just in time for me to learn this stuff. He was an old man from Brooklyn who had a white beard and wore a black hat and black clothes. They put him upstairs above the café, which was the local hangout. It was a rock and roll café where I used to hang out, too. I use to go up there every day to learn the stuff, either after school or after dinner. After studying with him an hour or so, I’d come down and boogie.
• People can learn everything about me through my songs, if they know where to look.
• My childhood is so far away . . . it’s like I don’t even remember being a child. I think it was someone else who was a child.
• Art is the perpetual motion of illusion. The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for anyone but to inspire them?
• What the songwriter does is just connect the dots. The ends he sees and the ones given to him and he connects them.
• I think of myself as a song-and-dance man.
• [1966] It’s the thing to do, to tell all the teeny-boppers, “I dig The Beatles” and you sing a song like “Yesterday” or “Michelle”. Hey, God knows, it’s such a cop-out, man, both of those songs. If you go into the Library of Congress, you’ll find stuff a lot better than that. There are millions of songs like “Michelle” or “Yesterday” written in Tin Pan Alley.
• [about Woody Guthrie] His influence on me was never in inflection or in voice. What drew me to was that hearing his voice, I could tell he was very lonesome, very alone and very lost in his time. That’s why I dug him.
• You don’t necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they’re poets. I don’t call myself a poet because I don’t like the word. I’m a trapeze artist.
• The bootleg records, those are outrageous. I mean, they have stuff you do in a phone booth. Like, nobody’s around. If you’re just sitting and strumming in a motel, you don’t think anybody’s there, you know . . . it’s like the phone is tapped and then it appears on a bootleg record. With a cover that’s got a picture of you taken from underneath your bed and it’s got a striptease-type title and it costs $30. Amazing. Then you wonder why most artists feel so paranoid.
• Those are songs from the Tree of Life. There’s no love on the Tree of Life. Love is on the Tree of Knowledge, the Tree of Good and Evil. So we have a lot of songs in popular music about love. Who needs them? Not you, not me. You can use love in a lot of ways in which it will come back to hurt you. Love is a democratic principle. It’s a Greek thing.
• [on a visit to Israel in the early 1970s] There was no great significance to that visit, but I’m interested in the fact that Jews are Semites, like Babylonians, Hittites, Arabs, Syrians, Ethiopians. But a Jew is different because a lot of people hate Jews. There’s something going on here that’s hard to explain.
• [on the legendary Woodstock Festival] I didn’t want to be part of that thing. I liked the town. I felt they exploited the shit out of that, going up there and getting 15 million people all in the same spot. That don’t excite me. The flower generation – is that what it was? I wasn’t into that at all. I just thought it was a lot of kids out and around wearing flowers in their hair taking a lot of acid.
• I can move, and fake. I know some of the tricks and it all applies artistically, not politically or philosophically.
• You can’t be wise and in love at the same time.
• They’d like to use my tunes for different beer companies and perfumes and automobiles. I get approached on all that stuff. But, shit, I didn’t write them for that reason. That’s never been my scene.
• I know there are groups at the top of the charts that are hailed as the saviors of rock ‘n’ roll and all that, but they are amateurs. They don’t know where the music comes from . . . I wouldn’t even think about playing music if I was born in these times . . . I’d probably turn to something like mathematics. That would interest me. Architecture would interest me. Something like that.
• [from his acceptance speech for a lifetime achievement award at the Grammys in 1991] Well, my daddy, he didn’t leave me much, you know he was a very simple man, but what he did tell me was this, he did say, “Son,” he said, “you know it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own father and mother will abandon you, and if that happens, God will always believe in your ability to mend your ways.
• [when asked what his songs are “about”] Oh, some are about four minutes; some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about 11 or 12.
• [on his song “Everything Is Broken”] Critics usually don’t like a song like this coming out of me because it didn’t seem to be autobiographical. Maybe not, but the stuff I write does come from an autobiographical place.
• I wasn’t a good husband . . . I don’t even know what a good husband is.
• I’ve only written four songs in my whole life, but I’ve written those four songs a million times.
• At times in my life the only place I have been happy is when I am on stage.
• Basically you have to suppress your own ambitions in order to be who you need to be.
• Being noticed can be a burden. Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot.
• A mistake is to commit a misunderstanding.
• A lot of people can’t stand touring, but to me it’s like breathing. I do it because I’m driven to do it.
• Being on tour is like being in limbo. It’s like going from nowhere to nowhere.
• Chaos is a friend of mine.
• I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.
• All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.
• All I can do is be me, whoever that is.
• A poem is a naked person . . . Some people say that I am a poet.
• I accept chaos, I’m not sure whether it accepts me.
• Democracy don’t rule the world, You’d better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that’s better left unsaid.
• I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking there’s some kind of change.
• I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.
• I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.
• I say there’re no depressed words, just depressed minds.
• I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.
• I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.
• I’m speaking for all of us. I’m the spokesman for a generation.
• It rubs me the wrong way, a camera . . . It’s a frightening thing . . . Cameras make ghosts out of people.
• If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.
• Maybe in the ’90s or possibly in the next century people will look upon the ’80s as the age of masturbation, when it was taken to the limit; that might be all that’s going on right now in a big way.
• Just because you like my stuff doesn’t mean I owe you anything.
• Money doesn’t talk, it swears.
• People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.
• People today are still living off the table scraps of the ’60s. They are still being passed around – the music and the ideas.
• Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them.
• What good are fans? You can’t eat applause for breakfast. You can’t sleep with it.
• The radio makes hideous sounds.
• When you feel in your gut what you are and then dynamically pursue it don’t back down and don’t give up – then you’re going to mystify a lot of folks.
• What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.
• I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.

Bob Dylan Important Facts

• First man to win the Nobel prize in literature despite not having written a single book.
• Lifelong friend of Van Morrison.
• Is lampooned in Seth MacFarlane’s Comedy Cavalcade.
• He is widely known to be a very private person. He often wears a hoodie and/or a blonde wig when out in public, reportedly because he is very shy and likes to avoid being recognized.
• Winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
• He is one of the eight surviving people mentioned by name in the 1989 Billy Joel song “We Didn’t Start the Fire”. The other seven are Doris Day, Queen Elizabeth II, Brigitte Bardot, Fidel Castro, Chubby Checker, John Glenn and Bernard Goetz.
• His songwriting is both narrative and metaphorical.
• In 1963 he canceled a booking on The Ed Sullivan Show (1948) because the show’s producers told him that he couldn’t sing “Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues”.
• In 2012 Dylan claimed to Rolling Stone magazine that he was a philosophical believer in transfiguration. He says he came to believe in it after reading “Hell’s Angel” by Sonny Barger, former president of the notorious Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, which included a passage about Bobby Zimmerman, a Hell’s Angel “president” who is erroneously reported to have died in a biking accident in 1965, coincidentally the same year Dylan was at the zenith of his fame (actually it was 1961 that the biker Zimmerman died, around the time that Dylan started getting noticed in Greenwich Village). Coincidentally, Dylan’s birth name was also Robert Zimmerman, a last name also shared by the book’s co-authors, Kent Zimmerman and Keith Zimmerman.
• He has developed the habit in recent years of making impromptu visits to the childhood homes of musical colleagues he admires. He told Rolling Stone magazine that he has visited the childhood homes of Neil Young, John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen. In Springsteen’s case, some neighbors called police when they allegedly saw Dylan peering into the window of Springsteen’s childhood home in Long Branch, New Jersey, He was questioned by a pair of police officers who didn’t recognize him. He was not arrested.
• Awarded the Presidendial Medal of Freedom (the highest civilian award in the United States) by President Barack Obama on 29 May 2012.
• Parodied by ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic in the song “Bob”, consisting of palindromes sung in a Dylan-like voice.
• He no longer plays the guitar when performing live, instead either playing on the keyboards or only on his harmonica. Although this has erroneously claimed to be due to back problems, it is apparently due to his opinion of the band’s sound. He has accumulated several talented guitarist in his long-time touring band who fill the void.
• Although celebrated as one of the most original songwriters of all time, he has borrowed heavily at some points in his songwriting. In his early acoustic days (before 1964), he often put his own original lyrics to melodies and chords cribbed from traditional folk songs, which is a fairly common tradition in blues and folk music. He returned to regularly “borrowing” tunes and lyrics more recently since the late 1990s.
• He refused the use of his recording of the song “Moonshiner” in the soundtrack for the film An American Werewolf in London (1981) due to his objections to the moral content of the script since he was at the height of his Christian born-again phase at that point. Ironically, several Dylan songs were used nearly 30 years later in the TV show True Blood (2008), which has similar content.
• Although it has been reported that Dylan renounced his faith in Christianity, he in fact has never publically renounced it and he only seemed to drift away gradually from being outspoken in regards to his religious beliefs. Despite remaining more subtle in their Christian elements, the songs recorded for the album “Infidels” (often described as the first secular album after the born-again albums) almost all contained some Bible-based material. Dylan was also observed to discuss his preoccupation with Jesus and Armageddon and engage in Christian prayers at least through the mid-1980s and still occasionally sings songs from his “born again” phase today. He also recorded a full-length album of Christmas standards, “Christmas in the Heart”, including fairly religious songs, in 2009.
• According to Dylan writer Clinton Heylin, Dylan’s “true story” songs were usually riddled with inaccuracies, with Dylan indifferently taking poetic license with the truth. In “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”, he wrote of William Zantzinger beating Hattie Carroll to death with a cane, when in fact she died of heart failure some time after she had been verbally abused and tapped on the rear end with a toy cane by an inebriated Zantzinger. In “Hurricane” (arguably his most famous “true story” song), Dylan and Jacques Levy got several facts about the case against former boxer Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter wrong, including false accusations of police corruption in the case, claiming without evidence that the witnesses to the crime were lying and claiming that Carter was an almost saint-like figure that “coulda been the champion of the world”, when in fact Carter was long past his prime as a boxer and had been known throughout the area as a bully with a brutal, hair-trigger temper. In “Joey” (about murderous mob boss Joe Gallo) and “John Wesley Harding” (about famous western gunfighter John Wesley Hardin), Dylan spins the title characters into Robin Hood-like do-gooders, when in fact both men were known to be sadistic killers–Hardin once emptied his pistol through a hotel-room wall because the man on the other side was snoring and keeping Hardin awake. The man died instantly–and unrepentant thieves.
• He has sometimes erroneously been parodied as having lyrics that are hard to understand due to his singing voice.
• He is a big fan of the films of John Ford.
• Between the ages of 10 and 18, Dylan ran away from home seven times.
• Historically, he rarely fraternized or even spoke extensively with the studio band members he recorded with. The musicians would usually await instruction only from the producer at the time and were frequently rankled by Dylan’s chilly behavior and lack of credit they received after recording. Recently, when Dylan has begun producing his own albums and recording with the touring band he assembled in the ’80s and ’90s, this has been said to have changed somewhat.
• He was awarded the American National Medal of the Arts on February 25, 2010, in Washington D.C. for his services and contributions to the arts.
• His Album “Love and Theft” (2001) was voted the 11th Best Album of the Decade by Rolling Stone Magazine.
• His Album “Modern Times” (2006) was voted the 8th Best Album of the Decade by Rolling Stone Magazine.
• Although he had previously disparaged the use of his likeness and music for advertisements, he has appeared in commercials for Victoria’s Secret, Cadillac, Apple and Pepsi within the last 10 years (2009).
• Recorded “Empire Burlesque” as well as several tracks from his platinum selling “Bootleg Series” at the well-known Cherokee Studios in Hollywood.
• Voted the seventh greatest singer of the rock era in a Rolling Stone magazine poll in 2008.
• Resides in Malibu, California.
• Supported Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election.
• Awarded a 2008 Pulitzer Prize (Special Citation “for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power”). He is the first rock or folk musical artist to win this prestigious honor.
• (April 7, 2008) Awarded a special Pulitzer Prize.
• In 1999, British progressive rock guitarist Steve Howe released “Portraits of Bob Dylan”, an album consisting entirely of 12 of Dylan’s songs. In 2007, British singer Bryan Ferry released “Dylanesque”, an album consisting entirely of 11 of Dylan’s songs.
• “All Along the Watchtower” is the song he’s performed the most, with nearly 2,000 known performances. It is also, including Jimi Hendrix’s performance of the song, the song that’s been most frequently featured on film and TV soundtracks.
• Fan of Elvis Presley.
• Portrayed by Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Ben Whishaw, Marcus Carl Franklin and Richard Gere in I’m Not There. (2007).
• 1982: Inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
• Has a brother named David Zimmerman.
• Son of Abraham Zimmerman and Beatrice Stone (Beatty Zimmerman).
• 11/16/05: Inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame for his outstanding contribution to British music and integral part of British music culture.
• A father of six children. His children are: Maria Lowndes Dylan (born 21 October 1961; married to Peter Himmelman and a mother of four), Jesse Byron Dylan (born 6 January 1966; married to Susan Traylor and father of William), Anna Leigh Dylan (born 11 July 1967; she is married, but has no children), Samuel Abraham Dylan (born 30 July 1968; married to Stacy Hochheiser and father of Jonah), Jakob Luke Dylan (born 9 December 1969; married to Paige and a father of three), Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan (born 31 January 1985). His eldest child, Maria, became his step-daughter when he married Sara Lowndes, and he later adopted her as his own. His youngest daughter, Desiree, was born to his second wife, Carolyn Dennis. His other four children were all with his first wife, Sara.
• He has nine grandchildren – four from his step-daughter, Maria, one each from Jesse and Samuel, and three from Jakob Dylan. He also has a “World’s Greatest Grandpa” bumper sticker that he proudly displays on his car.
• 1959: Played piano for Bobby Vee in a make-up band booked for show left vacant by the airplane-crash death of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper (aka J.P. Richardson).
• Rode a 500cc T100S/R Triumph Tiger motorcycle upon which he famously crashed
• Some notable covers of his songs: “Quinn the Eskimo” – Manfred Mann; “Mr. Tambourine Man” – The Byrds; “All Along the Watchtower” – Jimi Hendrix; “It Ain’t Me, Babe” – Johnny Cash, The Turtles; “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” – Eric Clapton; as well as Guns N’ Roses, “Maggie’s Farm” – Rage Against the Machine, “Desolation Row” – My Chemical Romance, and there are over 100 covers of “Blowin’ in the Wind”.
• Despite rumors that he hates rap music, Dylan cites several rappers as having “brilliant minds” and, in his “Chronicles” states that he is a big fan of several Old School rappers, particularly Public Enemy, who were one of his favorite artists of that era. Many see an early connection to rap in Dylan’s music, particularly the song “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. However, Dylan apparently dislikes the commercialism of much modern hip-hop and warned popular rappers that “sometimes less is more”. When he hosted “Bob Dylan’s Radio Theme Time Hour”, during his “Mother’s Day” hour in 2008, Dylan played “Momma Said Knock You Out” by LL Cool J and was heard to rap along with the first verse. LL Cool J himself was thrilled when he heard this.
• His song “Like a Rolling Stone” was named # 1 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time (2004). Other songs listed include: “Blowin’ in the Wind” (# 14), “The Times Are A-Changin'” (# 59), “Tangled Up In Blue” (# 68), “Mr. Tambourine Man” (# 106), “Desolation Row” (# 185), “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” (# 190), “Positively 4th Street” (# 203), “Just Like a Woman” # (230), “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (# 332), “Highway 61 Revisited” (# 364), and “Visions of Johanna” (# 403).
• Widely regarded as one of the greatest songwriters in the history of popular music, he holds the impressive distinction of having had his songs covered by nearly 3,000 artists. Some notable covers of his songs: “Quinn the Eskimo” – Manfred Mann; “Mr. Tambourine Man” – The Byrds; “All Along the Watchtower” – Jimi Hendrix; “It Ain’t Me, Babe” – Johnny Cash, The Turtles; “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” – Eric Clapton; as well as Guns N’ Roses, “Maggie’s Farm” – Rage Against the Machine, “Desolation Row” – My Chemical Romance, and there are over 100 covers of “Blowin’ in the Wind”. Other well known artists to cover Dylan songs include U2, Dave Matthews Band, Sheryl Crow, Stevie Wonder, Joe Cocker, Diana Ross, Rod Stewart, Elvis Costello, Phil Collins, Bryan Ferry, Steve Hackett, Steve Howe, Emerson Lake and Palmer, The Beach Boys and Adele.
• May 1997: He was diagnosed with pericarditis, which can be lethal if it’s not discovered in time.
• At the The 40th Annual Grammy Awards (1998) he won a Grammy for best male rock singer (on “Cold Irons Bound”), best contemporary folk singer and album of the year (“Time Out of Mind”).
• Other bands Dylan preformed in are The Satin Stones, Elston Gunn and the Rock Boppers, and The Rockets.
• His favorite movie is Shoot the Piano Player (1960) by François Truffaut.
• For the recording of the famous, rambling song “Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35” (with its chorus of “everybody must get stoned!”), Dylan took the group of mostly straight-laced, professional session musicians he was recording with, got them very drunk and had them smoke pot. When they returned, he had each man play a different instrument to what they usually played. After this went on, somebody asked Dylan when they were actually going to record the song, Dylan countered, “That was it.”
• Despite his reputation as a “protest singer”, he was never very active politically and very rarely rallied for causes. Although he did some work in support of the civil right movements and often fought individual injustices (most famously, that of Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter), many of his peers in the folk community found his apparent indifference to politics frustrating.
• Although he had several stalkers over the years, perhaps the most dogged was the self-titled Dylanologist, A.J. Weberman. This obsessed fan started the “Dylan Liberation Front,” protesting that Dylan had sold out and has abandoned his political causes (in reality, Dylan was never very political). Weberman staged several “protests” in front of Dylan’s home, rooted through Dylan’s garbage repeatedly, and accused Dylan of heroin use. After Weberman pushed aside Dylan’s wife, Sara, and broke into Dylan’s home, Dylan lost his patience and defeated his considerably beefier stalker in a fight.
• Won an Academy Award for the song “Things Have Changed” from the Wonder Boys (2000) soundtrack. He performed the song and accepted the Oscar via satellite due to the fact that he was on tour through Germany at the time.
• There is much myth surrounding his changing his last name. In his “Chronicles” he said that he didn’t think Zimmerman would be catchy enough as a stage name and that he first considered making his last name to his middle name, Allen. He then noted that a “D” would be stronger than an “A”. But rather than spell it Dillion and in tribute to one of his favorite poets, Dylan Thomas, he choose to spell it Dylan. By late in college as many people called him “Dylan” as they did “Zimmerman” or “Zimmy” and, by the time he made it to New York City, everybody called him “Dylan.”.
• In his book, “Chronicles,” Dylan indicates that the reason he began starting writing songs were the works of folk-legend Woody Guthrie (he was obsessed with Guthrie’s “hopped-up union meeting sermons”), mysterious blues great Robert Johnson (saying he evoked the “dark night of the soul”) and certain songs by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (due to their “tough language” and their “resilience and outrageous power”).
• By the time he was ten, Bob began to get piano lessons and he was beginning to listen to the country, blues, and (a little later) the rock ‘n’ roll played on radio late at night in Hibbing. In his teens, Bob’s father bought him an electric guitar and he started a series of rock ‘n’ roll cover bands with friends from school and summer camp called The Jokers, The Shadow Blasters, and, lastly, The Golden Chords. Once in college, he became so excited by the folk music of Woody Guthrie that he traded his electric guitar for an acoustic one.
• Always something of a Casanova, he had his first steady girlfriend at 14 and was seeing as many as five girls at once by the time he was in college.
• Early 1980s: He studied with Lubavitch Hasidim.
• Was a member of The Traveling Wilburys with Beatle George Harrison, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, and Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra.
• He was voted the second Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Artist of all time by Rolling Stone.
• Although he continues to influence musicians today, perhaps his most significant influence was on other musicians of his own generation in the 1960s. Among the musicians he influenced to start writing deeper, more introspective material were The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Beach Boys, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding and Paul Simon, among many, many others. Ironically, when those he influenced were at their creative peaks in the late 1960s, Dylan himself was in seclusion (after a motorcycle accident) and he really had nothing to do with the “hippie counterculture.”.
• He turned down an offer to headline the legendary Woodstock Festival in 1969 (Jimi Hendrix ultimately headlined), even though he had been living on a farm in Woodstock for many years at that point.
• Although he is often thought of as just playing guitar, harmonica, and singing, Dylan is equally skilled on the piano, and he has played most instruments at one point or another in his 40+ years in music. On the album “John Wesley Harding,” for example, he played all the instruments but drums and bass on most of the tracks.
• Almost all of his studio recordings has been original songs. One exception was his self-titled debut which was comprised mainly of standards. The others were from two periods when he allegedly suffered from a case of “writer’s block”, the early 1970s (“Self Portrait” and “Dylan”) and two from the the early 1990s (“Good As I’ve Been to You” and “World Gone Wrong”, respectively).
• Although he avoids discussing religion now, Dylan said in a 1997 interview with Rolling Stone that he’s no longer a follower of any organized religion.
• Although raised Jewish (being of fully Jewish heritage), he converted to a born-again version of Christianity in the late 1970s. He drifted away from Christianity later, though, returning to Judaism in the 1990s and 2000s by studying and attending services with an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect, the Chabad Lubavitcher Chassids.
• Said that when he performs “All Along the Watchtower,” he thinks of it as a tribute to Jimi Hendrix. Although Dylan was the song’s original writer, Hendrix’s cover is the best known version of the song.
• Early 1980s: Visited Israel on what was supposed to be a private trip; this was spoiled when he was photographed at Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, and the picture made headlines around the world.
• Dylan once visited artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol when he came to pick up actress/model Edie Sedgwick, whom he was dating at the time, and found himself the subject of Warhol’s movie camera. Dylan responded by picking up an original Warhol painting and taking it with him “for payment” for being filmed, which he used first as a dartboard, then traded for a sofa (he apologized to Warhol in a press interview years later for his attitude).
• Some of his biggest influences are Hank Williams, Muddy Waters, Ferdinand ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton, Leadbelly, Mance Lipscomb, Big Joe Williams and Woody Guthrie.
• June 2004: Awarded an honorary degree at the University of St. Andrews (Scotland).
• The town of Hibbing, Minnesota where he went to high school still acknowledges him. On Howard Street, there is a restaurant called Zimmy’s taken after his real last name (Zimmerman).
• 1959: Graduated from Hibbing High School.
• According to the stage manager at Hibbing High School, and a local documentary, the piano that he played on stage is currently the same one that the school uses during their drama performances.
• Dylan’s father owned a furniture store when young “Bobby” was in high school, and sent him once on rounds, to collect from installment-plan customers late on their bills. When Dylan returned and told his father “Dad, those people don’t have any money,” his father replied “Some of those people make as much money as I do; they just don’t know how to manage it.” The lesson stuck with Dylan.
• 1964: Introduced The Beatles to pot-smoking, during their first meeting in New York; each told the press later, “We just laughed all night.”.
• Hitchhiked from Minnesota to New York after leaving college, paying his way by doing odd jobs and sleeping wherever he could find space. Stopped at a courthouse along the way and legally changed his name from Zimmerman to Dylan (when asked later if his name was spelled like Dylan Thomas, he answered “No, like Bob Dylan”).
• Attended the University of Minnesota briefly after graduating high school; flunked out by non-participation (“refusin’ to see a rabbit die” in a science class, and reading Kant instead of a required textbook), and cutting classes to frequent the local Dinkytown coffeehouses.
• Borrowed lines from a Japanese book “Confessions of a Yakuza” for lyrics in the songs of his album “Love and Theft” – the author was apparently flattered by this.
• Appears on sleeve of The Beatles’ “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”.
• His albums “Time Out of Mind” (1997), “Love and Theft” (2001) and “Modern Times” (2006) were voted Album of the Year in the Village Voice’s annual critics’ poll.
• Early in his career used the stage name Elston Gunn.
• Son Jesse Dylan is a director.
• At the famous “Johnny Cash at San Quentin” concert, Johnny Cash introduced a song co-written by Dylan, describing him as “…the greatest writer of our time”.
• 1985: Daughter Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan born. Mother is gospel-rock vocalist Carol Dennis, a backup singer who formerly worked with him and who he secretly married.
• 1/18/88: Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Bruce Springsteen at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, New York City.
• 6/9/70: Awarded honorary doctorate by Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.
• 1/30/90: Received France’s highest cultural award, the Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
• 2000: Awarded the Polar Music Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Music Award.
• February 1964: Dylan and three friends drove south from New York to see some of the US heartland. He insisted they stop unannounced to see poet Carl Sandburg in North Carolina. To his lasting disappointment, Dylan left after some ten minutes when he sadly realized he couldn’t get the venerable man of letters to take him seriously as a fellow poet.
• Father of the singer/songwriter Jakob Dylan of The Wallflowers.
• 5/27/97: Admitted to hospital for treatment of a “potentially life-threatening infection”.
• 1991: Awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys.
• July 1966: He was in a serious motorcycle accident, and in seclusion until late 1969.

Bob Dylan Filmography

Bob Dylan Awards