Bob Dylan, Britain and the making of a legend
THE HOUSE on Third Avenue, halfway up the steep hill out of Duluth, Minnesota, still looks much as it did on that spring day when Beatty and Abe Zimmerman came home from the city hospital, cradling their newborn son.
Perhaps in the future there will be a plaque by the front door. Some fitting commemoration, a reminder of how the extraordinary and gifted can emerge out of the most ordinary of backgrounds:
“Bob Dylan. Songwriter, poet, musician, Nobel Laureate. Born May 25 1941”.
The child who uttered his first words in the nursery there was to become a voice for his generation in the Sixties and perhaps the greatest single force in modern culture in every decade since.
Truly an all-American luminary you might think…but that would not be entirely correct.
Dylan, as he has evolved over the decades, is an artist for the whole world, precisely because he is the product of influences that are timeless and global – I Contain Multitudes he says in an unusually self-reflective opening song on his most recent collection, released last summer.
And of all the horizons that he has explored beyond the USA, the country that Dylan has drawn upon most is certainly Britain.
Its history, literature, style and design, and of course its music, past and contemporary – he absorbed all of this. It’s fair to say there is almost as much of Britain in the make-up of Bob Dylan as there is of America.
In the very first place, there was the transformation from Bobby Zimmerman to
