Bob Dylan
Robert Dylan, better known by his pseudonym Bob Dylan, was a highly influential singer/songwriter who enjoyed widespread fame and popularity from 1962 to 1966, producing songs ranging from simple musical parodies of respected American films to outspoken, riot-inducing protest songs. He gained his most success from 1965's "Like A Rolling Stone", which hinged on the bitter criticism of a young woman fallen on hard times. Dylan is also known for his unique singing style, which broke down the convention of needing a halfway decent beautiful voice to make it in the world of rock. However, his biggest accomplishment has always been his role in introducing the Beatles to marijuana, which would result in their creative awakening and subsequent years of innovative, classic rock music.
From music to activism[edit | edit source]
Born in 1941, and starting at an early age, Dylan was drop-dead serious about the artistry of guitar, piano and harmonica playing and writing lyrics. Dylan reportedly studied classical guitar from renowned flamenco guitar guru Stan Pickett. Dylan's serious devotion to mastering guitar technique was surpassed only by his devotion to lyrics. Dylan claimed that he memorized the complete works of William Shakespeare by the age of 15, including all the smarmy sonnets. "I especially like all the references to naughty things [tee hee] ..." By the way, to this day he refuses to sing lyrics that aren't written in iambic pentameter.
After hearing a jug band in Soho, Dylan decided to abandon his classical training for the higher art of folk music. "I wanted to engage in polemics," Dylan said of his unusual transition. "I wanted to revolutionize society. I was the oracle of the 60s." Dylan abandoned his crystal clear iambic pentameter for wheezed gibberish. "Oracles are hard to understand," Dylan said.
Sure enough, during the 60s Dylan became an extremely popular figure among the counterculture, earning the nicknames "the Metallica of folk" and "the Lisa Simpson of grumbling". "I thrived on the publicity," Dylan said. "I personally write thank you notes and send US$10 checks to each person who includes my name in a song." The Weathermen, a radical faction of the Students for a Democratic Society, took their name from a Dylan song. "I really supported the Weathermen in their efforts to overthrow the capitalist system. Music isn't about games, money, or fame to me."
At about this time, he decided he wanted to get drunk a lot, but he just didn't have time, so he invented a neat trick to save time, whereby instead of working on musical compositions, he just muttered whatever came into his head while bashing an out-of-tune guitar, like your annoying kid brother does (Conor Oberst was a master in this field, surpassing even Dylan himself). Unfortunately, these songs were rubbish, and nobody wanted to listen to them, but luckily Bob had a second good idea (this exhausted his stock of good ideas forever): "If I trick The Beatles into saying I influenced them, everyone will pretend my music's bearable." So he invited The Beatles back to his hotel room, planning to seduce them, then when he realised they were squares, he instead got them stoned and told them he was Dylan Thomas, but John Lennon thought he said he was The Walrus. Anyway, none of the Beatles had heard of Dylan Thomas, especially Paul Simon, who subsequently quit and moved to Africa. Boo hoo. Around this time, a flock of byrds flew in the window, needing help with their music. So Dylan and The Beatles agreed to be their sugar daddies for a few albums.
Bob Dylan's records at this time ceased to make any sense: "Maggie's here with no shoes, talkin' TV catfish blues, a man in a black coat's tryin' to fix my motorboat, woooaaahhh mama, look out Jesus, I'm eating your cheeses, God knows why but there's a bug in my eye". Luckily, nobody could tell that this made no sense and signified nothing, as they couldn't make out the words, thanks to his revolutionary singing technique: through his nose. Anyway, the bits at the end of each line seemed to rhyme, so everyone decided he must be a poet, even though he had stolen the idea of rhyming words from Greek poets such as Shakespeare, Jay-Z and Dr. Seuss. But it was the 60s and everyone was stoned, so his records seemed, in the words of one hippie, "Groovy, man." Bob made lots of money from the record sales, and used the time he saved not writing songs to write a novel, which was even worse. After the 60s ended, some of these hippies shaved, and got jobs and a sense of social responsibility.
After listening to Dylan's records again, they realised they were self-indulgent shit, but they were too embarrassed to admit it, so they decided it would be funny to pull the same prank on college students, who have ever since tried to appear cool by nodding appreciatively to "poetic" songs like "Like A Stoned Loser", "Underground Confused Blues ... What?" (which he turned out to have stolen from Radiohead), druggie favourite "It's All Right, Mama, Everybody's Gotta Serve Their Dealer By Getting Stoned ... I Mean, They're Not Drugs, It's Just The Smell Of My Burritos Cooking" and, of course, "Pissin' In The Wind", which he stole from a Kindergarten student. (John Lennon stole this idea but took it one step further, stealing "Alice in the Cellar with Indigo Diamonds", whose title coincidentally spelt out the name of a drug he had never taken, from his own son Julian Lennon. When the child complained John abandoned him forever. The son subsequently released his own songs on an album, but they were rubbish because they didn't spell out drug names.)
Bob Dylan vs. bears[edit | edit source]
“I can’t bare the sight of them.”
Sources tell us that Bob Dylan started hating bears around the late 50s. Through the many periods of Dylan's career, the only thing that seems to remain constant is his deep-seated hatred of all things that roar. When Dylan first emerged onto the folk scene in the early 60s, his message was obvious. "The bears, they are a-dyin', if I have anything to do with it!" His opposition stayed quiet until Dylan's electric performance of "Maggie's Gun" at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. When the bear-loving communist Pete Seeger heard Dylan say to the audience "This one's for the bears! I hate them bear-studs!" the banjo-strumming folkie picked up an axe to take out Dylan. No bears were injured in the incident. The next year, an enraged audience member at a show in England called Dylan "Judas". Dylan responded, "I don't believe you ... You're a bear." While many fans were outraged that Dylan had abandoned his folk roots, others embraced his new rock material. His new fans hated bears more anyway, and that made Bob happy. He later wrote of his old fans, "You got a lotta nerve/To say you're not a bear/When I was down,/You just stood there roaring." Another of Dylan's late '60s masterpieces, "It's Alright, Paw (I'm Only Bleeding)", was purported to be written from the perspective of a wounded bear. Not long after the release of the album Bear On Bear, Bob Dylan was injured in a near-fatal boat accident. "It was awful," his wife remembers tearfully. "He saw a bear in the distance, and tried to make a sharp turn so he could shoot it, and he just lost control." His wife was later found to be a bear, and they were divorced.
Another incident that was widely regarded as one of the most important in Bob Dylan's "war against bear-affectionism", was the one later named "Bear-icane". It is said that Bob Dylan stumbled in to a bar one late night in the 60s, and in his craze, he thought it filled with bears. He pulled out his silver bear-killing shotgun and saved the bar from the ferocious beasts. When he realized the bar was a hunting tavern and he had slain companions of his own bear-slaying tour, he called the police on the bear-loving middleweight boxer and founding member of the NAACP, Rubin "Honeycomb" Carter. This whole affair won Bob Dylan a few million dollars and the prestigious award of "Female Racist Of The Year". This award prompted Nelson Mandela to comment: "uBob Dylan uyathiya"!
Dylan apparently had a brief reconciliation with the species when a recent biography revealed that he had in fact been secretly married to a bear for a short time in the late 80s. The line, "My woman's got a face like a teddy bear/She's swingin' a baseball bat in the air" from a song on his critically reviled 2001 album Shovin' Heft, originally thought to be little more than a silly rhyme scheme not to be taken literally, now lends credence to the "forest bride" allegations while offering a harrowing glimpse into the couple's tumultuous relationship and Dylan's continued difficulties with all things ursine.
Half a century after his first album was released, Dylan remains one of the greatest, most influential artists of all time. But, above anything, it is his hatred of bears that sets him apart. "When The Bear Goes Down" is arguably the best song on his latest album. The closing lines of the album featured a tribute to all Bob Dylan's bear-hating fans, encouraging the extermination of the roaring, godless beasts: "Ain't talking/Just shootin'/My way through this/Weary world of bears".
Dylan's hatred of bears is further explored in the song "Shelter From the Bears": "I seen that a-bear in the forest, when I went for a walk, Couldn't help but notice that the trees were made of cork, Imagine a place where honey is available to share, Come on you gotta give me ... shelter from the bears".
Upon recent speculation that he no longer hates bears, Dylan stated, "Of course I still hate them! When I was a child, I could take a walk alone through the woods with my picnic basket full of honey. It's been years since I could do that without being mauled." Bob Dylan promised in 2008 that he will not die until every last bear has been tortured, killed, and put on display.
In 2011 the bears finally got their revenge (sort of) when Fred Shafer ran over Dylan with his Bearfoot™ monster truck. However, Dylan survived the incident. To this day, Dylan drinks tea mixed with honey.
Relationship with dinosaurs[edit | edit source]
Bob Dylan not only enjoys killing bears, he catches dinosaurs as stated in his second album "Free the Willy".
It is a well known fact that dinosaurs are closely related to chicken-like birds. Bob Dylan clearly says, "The son's not yellow, it's chicken" in his Jurassic Period hit "Tombstones Haven't Been Invented Yet Blues". With this line, Dylan is actually admitting to a scandalous relationship revealing the maternity of his son and the missing link in the evolutionary time line. By cheating on his yellow-scaled triceratops girlfriend (affectionately called "Doreen"), he redirected the evolutionary path of the dinosaurs by intermixing his eagle genes with that of the dinosaurs. This resulted in the chickens we know and love today.
Cryptic clues in Dylan's songs reveal much about them – dinos in general, their willies not so much. Some suspect that Dylan knows the reason why they became extinct. (Some suspect that Dylan is the reason they became extinct.) Whenever the subject predictably comes up in an interview, he consistently says "Mmm urogmmm mmgropmm" and breaks into a spirited version of "Death Is Not the End".
The boat wreck: Dylan and the 70s[edit | edit source]
Moonlighting as a fisherman to make ends meet due to the poor ticket sales of his directorial debut – the 1966 pornographic film Blonde On Blonde – Dylan was off the coast of Florida when he hooked a fifteen-foot swordfish. The great fish pulled his boat to Iceland, where he exchanged a meaningful glance with Bjork, and back to Florida. On the third day he fell asleep, and the fish pulled him overboard to an enchanted undersea world. He was nursed to health by generous mer-men and met a band called The Group.
The group, by the way, were later discovered to be a tape recorder, hidden in the chest of the phony guitarist, Little Joe Funglehurst.
Dylan and The Group recorded hundreds of songs in the undersea kingdom (before being banished after abusing several small off switches) most of which are difficult to find today, despite Google and the interweb.
In the late 60s and early 70s Dylan began the long project of alienating all his fans. Despite his best efforts, his live shows managed to attract thousands of Japanese businessmen. After rudeness and insulting his fans had failed to drive them away he ordered his most fanatical fans to attach bombs to themselves and blow up other fans at his concerts. He protected himself from splatter and debris by hiding behind abnormally fat men. When this failed to drive them away he played an electric guitar live. This surprisingly worked.
Fed up with fame, Dylan moved to Texas under an alias for a few years and was once photographed with famed cocaine cowboy Samuel Pahkinpeck. Not much is known about Dylan's life during this period – he himself has said only that he "ate a lotta beans" and returned to music because he "got bored with waiting for the daylight to catch up with the dawn".
His wife left him soon afterwards. Dylan cried, but the rest of the world laughed at his misfortune. The Yoko wannabe made off with half his cash, and to spite her he wrote the scathing ballad "Ho-ing in the Wind" which he later would describe as "Iz a herpidie jan oh purp".
A slow train wreck: Dylan and the 80s[edit | edit source]
Sometime in the late 70s, Bob Dylan and some of his buddies were smoking a bong when Tom Petty dared Dylan to inhale an entire canister of helium. This fucked up his voice for a long time. Nobody listened to the scores of records Dylan put out in the 80s more than a single time, because they couldn't understand a word he was saying. As best as Dylan scholars have been able to make out, most of them were a sort of country-soul-gospel and some even had a dance-beat with female background singers. All chicken-and-egg debates aside, let's just say he found Jesus and when that wasn't helping his record sales he started running with the Grateful Goddamned Dead.
He finally joined The Traveling Wilburys with his haggard friend and USSR head of state George Harrison, and also: Chuck Berry, Carlos Santana, Charles Darwin, and Frank Sinatra.
Around this time, it was reported that as a result of many years of tending to his flock of ducks, Bob Dylan suffered a fatal heart attack. "I'm lucky to be alive after that one man, I was nearly playing guitar with Elvis ya know," he informed The New York Times.
The 90s and beyond[edit | edit source]
In the last years of his life, Bob created conspiracy theories about the government and aliens, but as he was too afraid that he might be found out he recorded these conspiracies in a strange code language he called "poetry". To this day historians still have been unable to interpret this bizarre language. Bob Dylan is actually an eagle.
In 1991 the canister of helium that Dylan had inhaled a decade prior expanded further inside his stomach, causing the great man to experiment with new vocal styles in his live performance dances. The results of this can be heard on the live album Name That Animal Mating Call (Live in Stuttgart).
For five years whilst Bob Dylan was supposed to be making an album he was actually secretly a fat bus driver cunningly changing his name Dylan Truck. Not many people know this. In fact, even I don't, I just made it up.
One day in the late 90s, all the helium from years earlier suddenly left his lungs. Unfortunately for Bob, a frog filled with razor blades jumped down his throat at that exact moment, and permenently destroyed his vocal chords. It was at this point that Bob Dylan entered his so-called "old man phase". Although his music sounded largely the same, fans could tell it was his old man phase because he dressed like a dumb Texan, began to eat a lot of prunes, and attempted to seduce Alicia Keys (whom he had mistaken for Mama Cass]). Not to mention that he, in fact, began to sound like an old man. And he was old.
He wrote a book that told about the fluctuations of capital-bond values in northern Africa compared to regional levy differentials. He wrote a movie and cast himself as John Goodman and cast Penelope Cruz as the girl who is always sitting on John Goodman's lap. Promoting his movie, Dylan did a surrealist commercial for Victoria's Secret.
Dylan currently hosts The Well Adjusted Jew, a popular phone-in show on the Iowa-based radio station KQWE. Guests have included Adolf Hitler, Ted Kaczinski and United States president George W Bush, who are all Jewish-Americans.
One of the greatest tragedies of Dylan's recent career was the cancellation of a show he was scheduled to play in Phoenix, Arizona on August 11, 2009. The show was cancelled a couple days before the show because he thought it would be too hot for him to perform the show. It ended up being cloudy and 85 (American) degrees that day in Phoenix, causing the state of Arizona to start a state-wide boycott of Dylan's music. But nobody minded though.
In 2009 Dylan released his strangest album yet, a Christmas album named "Christmas in the wallet". When asked about the intentions of this album, Dylan shrugged saying "I wanted to show the world how much Gene Krupa meant to me. The single most important musician outside of Slut Bunwalla." He then went back to whacking a dead bear with his trusty crowbar.
Advertising[edit | edit source]
In the 2000s Dylan took the unusual step of making himself the "face" of a range of lady's underwear. This took the form of him appearing at the end of stylish, well-shot adverts for bras and panties – burying his face in drawerfuls of them and snuffling greedily, like a bear in a bee hive – and SALES ROCKETED.
Personal Life[edit | edit source]
- He famously fell asleep and swallowed his sunglasses, whilst riding a motorbike home from a party hosted by The Grateful Dead. Rumor has it that Jerry Garcia spiked his harmonica with NASA grade ketamine, although Garcia strongly denies the allegation. In a interview with LSD Magazine from 1978 he stated "I've never met Bob Dylan and I don't know what a harmonica is."
- Bob Dylan is not a vegetarian but loves vegetables.
- A lover of animals he recently paid for an elephant to go windsurfing.
- In 1990 he crashed Willie Nelson's tour bus into a California television studio, injuring weatherman AJ Weberman. Dylan and Nelson had been drunk and stoned out of their minds, and Dylan accidentially turned the wheel when he leaned over to snort some coke. When asked to comment, Nelson said "Well, I guess you don't need a weatherman to know which way my bus goes." Weberman sustained permenent injuries from the accident, both physical and mental. He has since written thousands of books on the evils of Bob Dylan and has been known to violently stalk Dylan in revenge, waiting for his time to strike like the hungry little bitch cat he is.
- In 1999 Bob first attempted kitten huffing; he has since become a "certified professional kitten huffer", the public Left being very vocal about their hate for his skill. Boo hoo.
- Bob Dylan went into a state of depression and refused to speak to the media after hearing Rebecca Black destroy his amazing song "Friday" and seeing all the comments criticizing it on YouTube. He then filed legal action and demanded the video be removed off of YouTube which it finally was but it was too late and the song had already been disgraced.
- The next entry in Dylan's Bootleg Series CD releases will be called The Bootleg Series Volume 10: Famous Songs That I Secretly Wrote At Big Pink But Were Stolen By Other Artists. It includes his original recordings of the following songs, remastered from the best surviving elements:
- "The Weight" – The Band (Levon wasn't the only one pissed at Robbie.)
- "American Pie" – Don McLean (Yes, Dylan's the jester.)
- "Sympathy for the Devil" – The Rolling Stones (Dylan actually thought about using this one for John Wesley Harding, but was never happy with how he recorded it in Nashville. Nevertheless, he's rolling in the Call of Duty royalties.)
- "Call Me Maybe" – Carly Rae Jepsen (Yes, Dylan's the Guy Washing the Car.)
- "Hotel California" – The Eagles (Dylan actually thought about bringing it back for Desire, but decided he'd get shit over it. Laugh all you want, Van Ronk.)
- "Who'll Stop the Rain?" – CCR (Another "Harding" outtake.)
- "Hallelujah" – Leonard Cohen (In return for Cohen's thievery, Dylan "borrowed" his voice for his last few records.)
- "Friday" – Rebecca Black (This will be a hidden track, because it's the worst song he's ever written. Yes, worse than even "Wiggle Wiggle".)
Discography[edit | edit source]
- Bob Dylan's Bob Dylan is Bob Dylan (1961)
- On the Wings of Joan Baez (1962)
- Groping Bob Dylan (1962)
- Coppin-A-Feelin With Bob Dylan (1962)
- Paintin-My-Ceilin With Bob Dylan (1962)
- The Left Side Of Bob Dylan (1964)
- The Underside of Bob Dylan (1964)
- The Dark Side of Bob Dylan (1965)
- The Side of Bob Dylan you don't want to see (1444)
- The Black Side of Bob Dylan (Rap Album)(1965)
- The Mangy Side of Bob Dylan (1965)
- Wearing My Shawl Back Home (1965)
- Brought It All Back Home, Upon Retrospection, It Wasn't That Great (1969)
- Songs For Hendrix To Steal (1967)
- So, What, I'm A Country Singer Now? (1969)
- Is He Purposely Trying To Be Weird Now Or Is This Some Sort Of Artistic Statement (1970)
- I'll Try Again, I Promise (1970)
- Look, Now I'm A Cowboy (1972)
- Planet Waves, Bob Dylan Waves Back (1974)
- Does Anybody Have A Tissue? (1975)
- A Desire for More Tissues (1976)
- On da Street and Legal (1978)
- I Love Jesus, Pt.1 (1979)
- I Love Jesus, Pt.2 (1980)
- I Love Jesus, Pt.3 ... Wait, Hold On A Minute – I Thought I Was Jewish! (1981)
- Bear on Bear – DISGUSTING! (The best of the bear-hating poet) (1982)
- Infertiles (1983)
(An assload more albums here)
- I Don't A-Give A-Shit – Wiggle Wiggle and other songs (1988)
- Intergalactic Supergroup Performs With the Lead Singer of ELO (1988)
- Oh Shit! Shits and Giggles for The Children of America (1989)
- An Assload Of Unreleased Songs That Wouldn't Fit On His First Eighty Albums (1991)
- You Mean People Actually Bought The Last Album? Wow ... Here's Some More Then. (1993)
- An Awkward MTV Hour With A Strange Old Man Named Bob Dylan (Trust Us, He Used To Be Like Really, Really Awesome And He Was Like Best Friends With Bob Marley) (1995)
- This Time I'm Really Out Of My Mind (1997)
- Hey Ma! Check out My Ass! (1998)
- Here to Remind You Bitches I Still Exist, Gargling Salt Water Over Some Old Classics! (1999)
- Hey Ma! Check out My Dick! (2012)
- Gloves and Methamphetamine (2001)
- Album Name Edited for Length (2002)
- Soundtrack To A Crappy Movie Nobody Liked Except For The Sycophants At Salon.com (2003)
- Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 – Official Soundtrack (2004)
- I Can See you Daft Bastards in Space! (2004)
- Leonard Part 7: Official Soundtrack (2005)
- Bootleg Series Volume XXX: Messages Dylan Left On Grossman's Answering Machine (2005)
- One More Cup of Money, Live at Starbucks (2005)
- Desolation Row, Live in Reno (2005)
- Songs I Stole And Hoped Nobody Would Notice (2006)
- Modem Chimes (2006)
- Bootleg Series Vol. XXXI, 31 Hours of the Theme Time Radio Hour (2007)
- Bootleg Series Vol. XXXII, 31 More Hours of the Theme Time Radio Hour (2007)
- Together Through Fife (2009)
- Christmas as a Jew (2009)
- Of Course I Love Jews! (2012)
- Damn Pests, Songs About Jewish People (2012)
- Let's See if I can Pronounce the Word "Licorice" (2013)
- Rough and Strange Ways, Squeaking in my Microphone for the Joy of America (2020)
- I'm Now A-Going To A-Wait Five Years 'Til My Next A-Real Album And Release Approximately, Absolutely 200 Compilation Albums (3007)
See also[edit | edit source]
- Protocols of the Elders of Zimmerman
- Friday, Dylan's freedom movement anthem (covered in 2011 by Rebecca Black)