Eighteen years after he was born this day (May 24, 1941), he hitchhiked from his home up in the frozen Iron Belt and wound up in Greenwich Village, USA. ...

... As soon as he could he headed over to hang out with his hero, a dying Woody Guthrie. He picked and sang Woody's songs for him. He hit the open mic's in the Village. A New York Times columnist caught his act and wrote a good piece about him. Famed Columbia Records A&R man, John Hammond, dropped by one evening and wound up signing him. He went on to write over 1,000 songs, get the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prizes for literature. And he's still touring - "The Never-ending Tour" Go, Bob! Happy Birthday!

Click Dylan with The Band at Carnegie Hall where they played at a Woody Guthrie tribute concert in 1971. The Woody song is "I Ain't Got No Home." Bob has made a career of playing with top musicians, and it doesn't get much better than Richard Manuel's haunting vocal harmonies and honky tonk piano, Robbie Robertson's blues-drenched lead guitar, Levon Helm's right-on drums and Arkansas vocals, Rick Danko's lonesome-sounding vocals and pulsating bass, and Garth Hudson on electric keys - the wizard presiding over it all!

At 22 he was a celebrity on account of "Blowing in the Wind." He was seen as a protest singer who voiced the spirit of his generation, an image that made him wince or at least shrug. Appearances at the Newport Folk Festival confirmed the image. Dylan cemented that impression when he and Pete Seeger performed at a SNCC-sponsored voter-registration rally in Greenwood, Mississippi. Click Bob and Pete playing one of my favorite songs from that time.

Click harp-blowin' Bob to hear the first Dylan song to mean anything really personal to me. This goes way back. It'd been made clear to me that I could show myself out. She went to the back of her apartment. Up front there was a record player with The Freewheelin' album on it. Side two. I lifted the needle arm and gently placed it down in the groove and heard this song as I headed for the door.

Click Bob with mutual hero, Johnny Cash, to hear them perform "One Too Many Mornings." They recorded it while Bob was in Nashville cutting the Nashville Skyline album, 1969.

It was a big deal when our folk poet laureate went electric! He speed-jumped into a world tour with The Band (sans Levon Helm who sat it out working on an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana). They got booed everywhere! (Except in Austin, Texas!). This vid is from the Newcastle date. In Manchester, England, he gets cat-called, "Judas!" for "betraying" the pure folkies and selling out. His response is to tell The Band to play "Fucking loud," as he launches into rock and roll's number one anthem, "Like a Rolling Stone!" Click it! "How does it feel!"

Click the gypsy Dylan to hear a song off of one of my favorite albums, Blood on the Tracks. This was recorded during his Rolling Thunder Revue concert tour. It included a traveling caravan of musicians, such as Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Ramblin Jack Elliott, and perennial side-kick, the late Bob Neuwirth. And Bob plays some bottleneck slide on this one.

Bob was on hand when The Band called it quits, Thanksgiving 1976, with one of the best concert movies ever, The Last Waltz. He leads them in two numbers, "Forever Young" and one stemming from their early days on the road, "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down."

Click to hear "Thunder on the Mountain" from one of Dylan's later albums, Modern Times. The vid shows a good montage of him performing over the years.