Bob Dylan sang those wise words at the tender age of 23, on his track My Back Pages.
As he reaches his 80th birthday on Monday, we’ve decided to ignore the advice of the famous Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back and celebrate the life and career of the US singer-songwriter.
1. Bob Dylan is not his given birth name. But you already knew that, right? So here are 79 more facts about the artist formerly known as Robert Allen Zimmerman.
2. He has sold more than 125 million albums around the world.
3. Despite his success and cultural impact, Dylan has never had a number one single in the UK or US. For context, Mr Blobby, Crazy Frog and Las Ketchup have all topped the charts.
4. A poll of musicians, writers and academics, conducted on Dylan’s 70th birthday, found his best song to be 1965’s Like a Rolling Stone, which the singer once said was his most honest and direct work. “After that I wasn’t interested in writing a novel or a play,” he said. “I knew I wanted to write songs because it was just a whole new category.”
5. Bruce Springsteen said the track, with its opening snare kick, sounded like “somebody kicked open the door to your mind”. While another high-profile fan, U2’s Bono, called it “a black eye of a pop song”.
6. When asked what his songs were about, in a 1966 interview with Playboy magazine, Dylan quipped: “Some are about four minutes, some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve.”
7. Surprisingly to many, the counterculture icon did not play at the 1969 Woodstock festival. Dylan was a Woodstock resident at the time (the festival was actually about 40 miles away) but he got a better offer – £35,000 to headline the Isle of Wight festival instead, with The Beatles watching on.
8. Speaking of The Fab Four… Dylan was the first man to introduce the band to marijuana, Sir Paul McCartney recently revealed to Uncut. ‘We all ran into the backroom going, ‘Give us a bit!'” said Sir Macca. “So that was the very first evening we ever got stoned!”
9. Many of his songs are more familiar to mainstream audiences as cover versions. For example Adele’s version of Make You Feel My Love, The Byrds’ Mr Tambourine Man and All Along The Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix. “He played [my songs] the way I would have done them if I was him,” he said of the late guitarist. Dylan himself has recorded covers of Frank Sinatra and Paul Simon tunes.
10. Malibu resident Dylan has 17 houses around the world according to biographer Howard Sounes. One of them is reportedly in the Scottish Highlands.
11. The troubadour has won 10 Grammy awards, including three for his 1997 album Time Out of Mind, which many critics considered to be a return to form after a long artistic slump.
12. He was born into a Jewish family in Duluth, Minnesota, before moving upstate to Hibbing.
13. Country singer Hank Williams, and bluesmen Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker were among his musical heroes growing up, along with the king of rock ‘n’ roll Elvis Presley. The Rebel Without a Cause James Dean was his celluloid hero.
14. Dylan saw Buddy Holly play live locally just a few days before he died in a plane crash.
15. As a youngster he played piano and guitar in several summer camp/high school bands. Their names included The Jokers, The Shadow Blasters, The Golden Chords and (our personal favourite) The Rock Boppers.
16. He wrote in his high school year book that it was his ambition “to join Little Richard”.
17. Working as busboy in a Fargo restaurant, after finishing high school, remains the only normal job Dylan has ever done. But in another life he’d like to have been a soldier. In his 2004 memoir Chronicles he wrote he’d always pictured himself “dying in some heroic battle rather than a bed”.
18. After moving to Minneapolis to study he turned his attention to folk music, swapping his electric guitar for an acoustic, which he played in cafes around the city’s bohemian Dinkytown area.
19. He became totally enchanted by US folk singers like Odetta and Woody Guthrie, who he would later visit in a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey and play his own songs to him.
20. His first original composition of any note was called Song for Woody, and he even began to sing and talk like the Oklahoma singer.
Source: bbc.com
