Forty years ago, Joan Baez dragged him on to the stage at the Newport Folk Festival. They didn't like it one bit and jeered the scruffy waif whose voice sounded like a tortured cat. Joan Baez pleaded with them. Just listen to him.
Now dig out the bell-bottomed jeans, the beads and that old tambourine for Bob Dylan is about to turn 60. Next Thursday. Yo, man, dig that. And get ready for an outpouring of nostalgia.
Robert Allen Zimmerman, the grandson of Jewish-Russian immigrants, the poet and father of folk rock, may never have had a Number 1 single in 453 recorded songs on 42 albums, but has left a mark like no other on the 1960s generation. From Blowing in the Wind through The Times They Are A Changing, he told them "I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours."
And he's still at it, though in a different gear and tone from those days of revolution - only last month he won an Oscar for Things Have Changed from the film Wonder Boys and this month his cover version of Dean Martin's Return to Me has been released on The Sopranos soundtrack.
Today, after multiple comebacks and self-reinventions, he is a lonely, still enigmatic figure who obsesses about his privacy, sings about death and seems to have alienated many old friends. He will celebrate the birthday alone. "He has absolutely no public plans," says spokesman Elliot Mintz. His next concert is scheduled for next month in Norway.
But others will remember and celebrate. "Everyone owes a debt to Dylan," says Bruce Springsteen, whose Ghost of Tom Joad has the clearest of lineages through Dylan to Dylan's great inspiration Woody Guthrie.
The sentiments were echoed by Bono who recalls learning guitar to his music and how Dylan, when they first met, steered him firmly back to the richness of the Irish folk tradition, reciting Brendan Behan's Banks of the Royal Canal. "Bob scolded me," he told USA Today, " `You're sitting on all this stuff. You should check it out'."
Like a rolling stone . . .
