Dylan: changin' with the times

Bob Dylan delights in confounding expectations. He did so as a folkie who "went electric" at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965; the Jewish singer famously converted to Christianity in 1978; two years ago he left millions of TV viewers gaping in astonishment when he appeared in, of all things, a Victoria's Secret ad.

The enigmatic songwriter's career has taken another unexpected turn of late. Coinciding with this week's release of "Modern Times," an album that many critics are scoring as a perfect "10", the often reclusive Dylan is enjoying more public visibility than at anytime since he became a generation's icon in the 1960s.

In addition to an interview on CBS's "60 Minutes" and cover stories in Newsweek and Rolling Stone, Dylan's recent activities include becoming a DJ on XM Satellite Radio, starrring in a TV commercial for iTunes, and collaborating with director Martin Scorsese on a Dylan documentary. In December, Twyla Tharp gives Dylan the Billy Joel treatment, setting his songs to dance for a Broadway show.

It all points to a career renaissance for the artist long revered as our greatest living folk-rock poet.

"He's always looking ahead,'' says Dylan scholar Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, who is a Dylan scholar. "He's addressing universal themes. A 22-year-old could listen to this record as a 55-year-old like me could.''

The songwriter, born Robert Zimmerman, has undergone periods of extreme popularity and visibility, as well as periods of notoriety and obscurity over the course of his storied career. Joan Baez once mused in the song "Time Rag" how Time magazine once profiled her only to, in her opinion, get close to the mystery man called "Bobby."

But he no longer parcels himself out as a rare commodity. For the past 18 years, he's played more than 100 concerts a year, many in college gyms, and others in minor-league baseball stadiums. He's long been known to reinvent or reconfigure his songs in concert – sometimes to the point of nonrecognition – so that they sometimes turn into tepid blues-rock shuffles.

Dylan's real comeback, however, has been in his studio work. The Minnesotan has been thought to have burned out many times, after the fabled 1966 motorcycle accident, when he wrote and directed the 1978 movie "Renaldo and Clara" movie, and during a long stretch in the 1980s. It was 1998's "Time Out of Mind" that made Dylan seem relevant again, ushering in his new halcyon era.

In addition to releasing an acclaimed followup, 2001's "Love and Theft," the troubadour has authorized the ongoing "bootleg'' series (No. 8 is supposed to come next year), and released "Chronicles," the first volume of his autobiography. He also wrote and starred in the 2003 movie "Masked and Anonymous." Dylan himself will be the subject of a biographical film that might strike some as unusual. Titled "I'm Not There" and starring Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger, the movie will reportedly employ seven characters, male and female, to portray the bard.

Is Dylan making a bid to secure or cement his legacy?

"I don't think he's trying to control his legacy as much as this is a convergence of a couple of projects that have been in the works for a long time,'' suggests Bill Flanagan, executive vice president at MTV Networks.

He observes that Dylan had been working on the first installment of his autobiography for a long time, and publication was delayed. Moreover, he notes that Martin Scorsese's documentary, "No Direction Home," had been in the works for 10 years.

Page: 1 | 2