How Bob Dylan Studied His Way to Greatness

Key Takeaway

Build your own apprenticeship today: choose one creator whose work represents the level you want to reach, study a specific piece closely, then practice publicly before you feel ready. Dylan spent hours absorbing records, books, and live performances, copied techniques precisely, and played anywhere he could. Don’t wait for ideal conditions or an audience—use repetition, close observation, and small public reps to turn borrowed lessons into your distinct voice.

Episode Overview

This episode examines Bob Dylan’s self-education and relentless early apprenticeship through Dylan’s memoir, Chronicles: Volume One. The host highlights how Dylan studied folk music, history, biographies, language, and other performers; practiced constantly in public; and repeatedly reinvented himself when he felt creatively stuck. It also connects Dylan’s originality and evolution to Steve Jobs’s admiration for him.

Full Transcript

Transcript of How Bob Dylan Studied His Way to Greatness from Founders. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

I've just signed a contract with Leeds Music, giving them the rights to publish my songs. Although there wasn't much to discuss. I haven't written much yet. Lou paid me $100 in advance towards future signing fees, and I was happy with that. John took me to Lou's. John had only heard two of my original compositions, but he had a feeling there would be more. John was John Hammond, the great talent scout and discoverer of monumental artists, significant figures in the history of recording. Artists who created music that resonated in American life .

He was a legend. He followed the call of his heart, and it was music that he supported and defended with his entire life. No one could block his path, and he had no time to waste. This is one of my favorite sentences in the book. No one could block his path, and he had no time to waste. I could hardly believe it was actually happening as I sat in his office and he signed me to a contract with Columbia Records. It was so incredible. It sounded like fiction.

Folk music was considered junk, second-rate, and was only released on small labels. But John was an extraordinary man . He had vision and foresight, he saw and heard me, felt my thoughts, and believed in what awaited us. It was an excerpt from the book I will talk about today, “Chronicles. Volume 1", written by Bob Dylan. In fact, he wrote it without any help. He wrote every word himself. He didn't even have an editor. So I want to go back to the very beginning of the book.

The first few pages are just rave reviews of the book. This is just a lot of praise for the book . I think this is probably the best autobiography I have ever read in my life. In fact, Rolling Stone magazine ranked her number one. It is number one on their list of the 50 best biographies and autobiographies of musicians. But I want to read one of the reviews that I think really explains why this book is so important. It says: "Bob Dylan did not actually write the story of his life in this captivating, engaging, intimate, accessible, and widely acclaimed memoir." " Instead, he wrote mostly the story of his birth, as he transformed from Bobby Zimmerman into Bob Dylan." I heard Bob Dylan say something when he was older that I think relates to what this book is about and what that review is pointing to.

Bob said, "Life is not about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself." So, before I get back to the book, I want to talk about one of the most interesting things: Steve Jobs, from his young age, when he was in his 20s, until his death, constantly talked about the influence of Bob Dylan on his work. And I think there are a lot of useful ideas for entrepreneurs there. Steve mentions Bob Dylan probably 15 times in the biography he worked on with Walter Isaacson before his death, or rather, as he was dying.

I went back to my notes and picked out everything Steve said about Bob Dylan and just went through them. In fact, Steve Jobs was obsessed with Dylan even before he founded Apple. One of the first things Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak did together was search for underground recordings of Bob Dylan records. Steve also collected printed lyrics of Bob Dylan songs and spent hours interpreting them. In this biography, Steve says that he managed to collect hundreds of hours of Dylan's concert recordings, and he lay in bed listening to them on headphones.

Near the end of his life, Steve Jobs was sitting at home with Walter Isaacson, his biographer, and they were listening to Bob Dylan records. He tells Walter something that I think is very important because it will come up repeatedly in the book, and I think it's one of the main takeaways from it. Steve Jobs understood this immediately , and I think Bob Dylan did it on purpose. Steve told Walter, "No one else could be Bob Dylan." So, after Apple released the iTunes store, Steve Jobs was able to meet Bob Dylan and had a two-hour face-to-face conversation.

And there was something that Dylan told him that resonated with Steve's own approach to creating new products. Bob talked about how music came to him. He says that the songs, quote: "The songs just flowed through me. It wasn't like I had to compose them." At the end of the biography of Steve Jobs, written by Walter Isaacson, Steve has a fantastic, basically just conversation about what drove him, why he did what he did in his career, and I think it really sticks with him because he knows he's dying when he says those words.

He talks about how he learned from The Beatles and Bob Dylan, and the importance of always trying something new. He tells you, you know, why he kept—he kept trying to invent new technologies, trying to create new products. He says he learned about it—he says he got the idea from them, meaning The Beatles and Bob Dylan. He says they were constantly evolving , moving forward, perfecting their art. This is what I have always tried to do. Keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says: if you're not busy being born , you're busy dying.

So, the book begins with him signing a contract. He is in New York. This is 1961. So the record company refers him to their in-house PR guy, a guy named Billy. And Billy asks him a bunch of questions. I want to highlight one sentence here because it appears again and again in the book. I think this is very important. Billy asked me who I resembled in the modern music scene. I told him that it wasn't anyone, and it was true . I really didn't see myself as looking like anyone else.

Bob continues : There are other folk singers, there are other folk musicians , but there was no one like me. So, at this point, Bob begins to tell the story of what led up to this period in his life. It's about 2 years from the time he arrived in New York from Minnesota to signing a contract with Columbia Records. And now the craziest part, one of the craziest parts, is the extremely ambitious act that Bob Dylan does to get to New York. He has no money, so he decides to hitchhike.

It's 1,200 miles, about 1,200 miles between Minneapolis and New York. So he hitchhikes from Minneapolis to New York. He leaves Minneapolis with three things: a guitar, a suitcase, and $10. I need to give you some backstory because this is unlike any other autobiography. It is almost indistinguishable. I can't even describe it. This is a very, very exciting read. I hope you enjoy the podcast, of course, and learn something new from it. And I hope this story inspires you. But I would highly recommend that you take this book, for example, for a weekend getaway or a trip, because it is simply incredibly written and it is difficult to describe in words.

So , one of the things that interested me about Bob Dylan, apart from a lot of these biographies, is that Bill Gurley gave a speech called "How to Make Your Dream Come True," where he describes five people who go to great lengths to get their dream jobs. And it was just a phenomenal speech. It seems to be for MBA students at the University of Texas. So, there are quite a few ideas in that speech where Bill talks about Bob Dylan, and I think that given the context of that conversation for the book and understanding Bob, that's very, very valuable.

So I'm going to refer a few times to some of the things Bill Gurley says about Bob Dylan. So, Bill says, " For eight or nine months, Bob studied every folk album he could." This was before he got to New York. He did n't have much money . And back then, you could go into a music store and listen to records in a booth. He did this for hours. This was about two years before he signed with Columbia. Then he started making friends with people who had huge collections, loved folk music, but had money, because Bob was completely penniless.

He didn't have the money to buy folk albums. So he would go to their house and listen to their record collections. When he gets to New York, he does the same thing . He was in these institutions. This is what I just mentioned. He would later perform in some of them , and in general, he played everywhere. He played on the side of the street, in coffee shops, played for one person, for no one, or for a hundred people. It just didn't matter. So, some musicians who played then talk about Bob Dylan later.

They say, "You don't understand how good Bob was at this." He watched us so much and studied us so carefully that he could perform any of our songs just like us. He could copy the tone, the tempo, everything. Bob studied and studied and studied. So, remember what stage of the book we are at now. He's like, "Hey, I have to go back to the Midwest." I'm listening to this guy named Dave Van Ronk. He plays in "Gaslight." I need to find him. I need to meet him.

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This is ramp.com. And now that he's in New York, he just says: I'll take any opportunity that comes my way. And that's why he talks about this. I wanted to play for anyone. I could never sit in a room and play alone. I had to play for people, constantly. You could say I practiced in public, and my whole life became what I practiced. I kept my eyes on Gaslight. How could I do otherwise? And so he describes these small places where he is forced to perform.

He calls them "dens." And that's why I'm trying, essentially, to convince you to buy this book and read it. This is how skillfully this guy uses language. This is simply incredible. I read this book so often, and sometimes you come across sentences you've never read before. These words were never written the way this guy writes them. This is simply incredible. So, he says: " Talent hunters did not come to these dens." They were dark and gloomy, and the atmosphere there was chaotic. On weekends, if you played in all the establishments from dusk to dawn, you could only earn $20.

You had to know a couple of tricks to survive. And one of the best parts of the book is all these other folk musicians, all these real musicians of all sorts of genres, gathered in a few blocks of New York City, and they're all trying to make it . And they, of course, interact with each other, they meet each other. Bob has to sleep on someone's couches, you know, stay in them for a day or two, and sometimes for a month. So one of the best parts of the book is that he meets all these crazy characters, and he just has a knack for describing their personalities.

He just makes these people come alive on the pages. And there are two very important components here. Firstly, they help each other along the way, and secondly, he can compare himself with others. He thinks, " Okay, I was obsessed with this, but I was relatively isolated." "I listen to these records in the booths of music stores, at friends' houses." "I don't really know what I look like against their background?" And that's why it's very, very important. And he returns to the idea that there was only one "I".

And again , I don't think he's saying this out of arrogance or pride. So, he says, "What really set me apart in those days was my repertoire." He was more thorough than the rest of the musicians. My foundation was real folk songs. And then we see that everything is very clear. You either love Bob Dylan or you don't listen to him at all. I either pushed people away, or they came closer to understand what was going on. There was no middle ground. There were a lot of better musicians around, but no one was even close to doing what I was doing.

So when he's not playing, he reads biographies, reads history, and practices. He is engaged in professional research. He just consumes an insane amount of music. Eventually, he meets a guy named Izzy. Izzy owns one of those little places he played at. There is a huge record collection in the back of this establishment. And here Bob writes: "Izzy had a back room." The small room was filled with records and a gramophone. Izzy let me stay there and listen to them. I listened to everything I could. The insanely complex modern world had little interest for me.

He essentially turns off the world and builds his own. Of course? It didn't matter to me . It didn't matter. I wasn't tempted by it. But he was seduced by history. He gets many of his ideas from studying the history of his industry. He also draws ideas from people who write about the war, from biographies, from everyone. One of the most interesting things for me is how he ends up locked in a room. He locks himself in a room. And he just reads biography after biography.

Now, when he reaches the end of the book, remember, he finds himself at the beginning, because it is full of secrets. Now I think it's like a Christopher Nolan movie. And his life changes when he hears Woody Guthrie's music , and then reads Woody Guthrie's autobiography "The Road to Fame," which happens at the very end of the book . But studying history is key, because he takes lines from songs that came out maybe 30 years ago. He took the key, the guitar parts, and wove them into his work.

And that's why Izzy also plays an important role in Bob Dylan's life, because it is in Izzy that he accidentally meets the person he came to New York for—Dave Van Ronk. So, he's sitting in Izzy's place , and this is the moment he seizes the opportunity. He says: “ One winter day, a big, burly guy came in from the street. It was Dave Van Ronk. He was rude, with an indifferent attitude towards everything . My mind was in a state of excitement. "There was nothing between us.

" So Dave is just sitting at the bar, strumming his guitar, and that's when Bob Dylan walks up to him. He says, “I went up and asked him how I could get a job at Gaslight? Who should I know? Van Ronk looked at me curiously, was sharp and grim , asking if I was a cleaner. I told him no, and to dismiss the idea, but I could play him something. And he lets him play. Dave liked what he heard and asked who I was and then said I could come around 8 or 9pm and play a couple of songs during his show.

That's how I met Dave Van Ronk. And then what he had longed for finally happened. Soon I was hired to play in Gaslight. And I like him again, he probably wrote this when he was 60 or 70 years old. He reflects on what it's like to be a young guy in his 20s trying to make it. It was about 10 degrees below zero outside, but I didn't feel the cold. I was heading towards the fantastic lights, without any doubt. Could it be that I was wrong?

Hardly . I had no false hopes. I had come a long way, starting from the very bottom, but now destiny was about to come true. It seemed to me that she was looking directly at me and no one else. And so he talks many times, repeatedly, about this contrast between the cold outside and the fire burning inside him. And now what I'm about to read to you is simply amazing, if you think about it. He is still unknown to anyone, he hasn't recorded his first album, and he doesn't even have his own home.

He is forced to rely on the kindness of others to keep a roof over his head. And here's what he says: “I went to the window and looked out at the street. The air was bitterly cold, but the fire in my soul never went out." Another major theme of the book that comes up again and again is his insatiable thirst for reading, which I simply adore. It's just incredible how much this guy is going to read . He takes ideas from everything he reads and applies them to his work.

And in the book, he has that incredible description that I just mentioned—a long chain of historical figures. So listen to how he describes it. " Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt." Majestic figures, the likes of which the world will never see again. People who relied on their own determination, for better or for worse. Each of them was ready to act alone, indifferent to approval, indifferent to wealth or love. They all controlled the fate of humanity and turned the world into ruins. Coming from a long line of Alexanders and Julius Caesars, Genghis Khans, Charlemagnes, and Napoleons, they divided the world, were unstoppable, and impossible to deal with.

Rough barbarians trampling the earth, carving their ideas into geography itself. So these books that he reads and these musicians that he studies, some of them he meets, and you really see what he values ​​and what he tries to emulate in his own career. So he gives us this incredible description of a musician he really admired—a guy named Roy Orbison. And he realizes, "Hey, there's really no one else like Roy." Roy had no equal. "Which is exactly what Bob Dylan was trying to do in his own career." So Bob Dylan writes: “Roy transcended all genres.

His work mixed all styles, even those that had not yet been invented. With Roy, you never knew whether you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you in suspense. With him, it was all about true passion and drive. He sounded as if he were singing from an Olympic peak , and he spoke seriously. He performed his compositions in three or four octaves, which made you want to drive a car into the abyss. He sang like a professional criminal. His voice could wake the dead. It always made me mutter to myself something like, "God, I don't believe this." His songs had other songs inside them.

He was incredibly serious. There was nothing like it on the radio . I listened and waited for another song, but next to Roy, the entire playlist was just boring, soulless, and listless. And before we get back to that, I want to tell you about AppLovin. One of my favorite quotes is from the book "From Zero to One." In this book, Peter Thiel writes that the most powerful pattern he has observed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, thinking in terms of first principles rather than formulaic formulas.

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Go to vanta.com/founders and you'll get $1,000 off . This is vanta.com/founders . So now he's staying with another friend. This friend has a huge collection of books, and this is again the period before the book was written. It's still him, trying to figure it all out and understand how to succeed. So he says, "I turned off the radio and went into another room, windowless, with a floor-to-ceiling library. The place was permeated with an all-consuming presence of literature. It was impossible not to lose your passion for stupidity." That's a great phrase.

"Everything in the world was there. Books like The General of Athens are a story that sends shivers down your spine. It was written 400 years before Christ and tells the story of how human nature is always the enemy of the higher. It seems that nothing has changed since then . There were novels by Balzac, Hugo and Dickens. I would open a book in the middle, read a few pages, and if I liked it, I would go back to the beginning. I was looking for a part of my education that I never got.

Sometimes I would open a book and see a handwritten note on the front page. Like in Machiavelli's The Prince, it said: "The Spirit of the Hustler." There were endless rows of books. One of the books he read was about Alexander the Great, and he has this description of what he learned from him. Alexander the Great went to Persia. When he conquered Persia, to To keep her in power, he ordered all his soldiers to marry local women. After that, he never had any problems with the local population.

No rebellions or anything like that. Alexander knew how to seize absolute power. I wanted to read all these books. So he reads a bunch of biographies. He reads one about Robert E. Lee and he says, " Robert E. Lee, that's exactly what I was thinking. He almost does my job better than me, because he can write whole life stories in one paragraph. He just makes these characters come alive, you know, in just a few sentences. It's incredible. Robert E. Lee grew up without a father. Despite everything, Lee became a great man.

And not only that, it was because of his word -- and his word alone -- that America was not involved in a guerrilla war that probably would have continued to this day. Books were something special. They really were something special. I read a lot of pages out loud and I liked the sound of the words. I liked the sound of the language. And so he reads and tells us the story of his self-education . And he always connects that to his craft. He says, "Folk singers could sing songs like a whole book, but in just a few verses.

I always went back to the books. I dug through them like an archaeologist. So then he goes back to other biographies that he reads. I read a biography of Thaddeus Stevens. He lived in the early 1800s and he was a pretty extraordinary person. He was from Gettysburg and he had a clubfoot. He grew up poor, made a fortune, and from then on he defended the weak and any other group that couldn't fight back . Stevens had a dark sense of humor, a sharp tongue, and a fierce hatred of the bloated aristocrats of his time.

He wanted to confiscate the lands of the elite, that held slaves. He once called a colleague in the boardroom a creeper . Stevens was hard to forget. He made a big impression on me. He was inspiring. He and Teddy Roosevelt, who Bob Dylan calls perhaps the most powerful president in the history of the United States. I read about Teddy, too. He was a rancher and a crime fighter. He had to be restrained from declaring war on California. He had a serious conflict with J.P. Morgan. There's actually a whole book about it, I did an episode for a book called "The Hour of Destiny," which was about the rivalry, then the partnership, then the rivalry again between Theodore Roosevelt and J.P.

Morgan. It's a fascinating book if you're looking for something to read about that time period. Roosevelt forced him to back down and threatened to throw him in jail. Each of these guys, Stevens or Roosevelt, or even Morgan, could have come out of the pages of a folk song. That's the important part. He takes everything he learns and ties it to his craft, which is what he wants to do. All he wants to do is say, "All I want to do and all I've ever been is just a folk musician." So he starts reading On War by Clausewitz, and he says, " Clausewitz has been called the great philosopher of war." The book was published in 1832, and Clausewitz had been in the army since he was 12.

His armies were made up of highly trained professionals, not young men who had only served a few years or so. His men were hard to replace. Clausewitz talks a lot about maneuvering into positions where the other side sees that there's no chance of fighting and they just lay down their arms. I had a morbid interest in that kind of thing. I always imagined myself dying in some heroic battle, not in bed. I wanted to be a general with my own battalion. So, at this point, it again seems like a strange structure—and I mean that in a good way—in terms of the time frame in this book.

So he has a flashback to when he was in Minnesota, and he's just trying to play every gig he can. I think he's 17 or 18 at the time . He's forming all these bands, and they keep breaking up. And he says, "You know what? I don't care. I'm going to keep going no matter what." And so he says, "I'm going to keep forming these bands because I was determined to play." There was a lot of waiting and waiting, a little recognition, a little support, but sometimes all it takes is a wink or a nod from an unexpected source to break up the boredom of your incomprehensible existence.

What he's talking about there is the importance of words of encouragement. And so he finds the words encouragement from a very unexpected source. This is a very famous professional wrestler at the time who happens to see Bob Dylan perform. Bob Dylan is performing in the lobby, which we'll talk about in a minute. So this is a guy named Magic George. It's very funny. He says, "This happened to me when Magic George, the great wrestler, came to my hometown. So in the mid- 1950s I was performing in the lobby of the Veterans' Home.

I was playing on a makeshift stage in the lobby, and all of a sudden the door opened and Magic George came in . He stormed in, in all his magnificent glory. He had servants and was surrounded by women with roses. He had this great fur coat on. It's very funny. He had this great golden fur coat on. He walked past the makeshift stage and glanced in the direction of the music. He didn't slow down, but he looked right at me. He winked and seemed to say with his lips, "You're bringing it to life." "I've never forgotten that.

It's so important. It was all the recognition and encouragement I needed for years. Sometimes that's all you need. That kind of recognition comes when you're doing something for its own sake and you feel like you've stumbled upon something worthwhile. It's just that no one else has noticed it yet. And here's what's so interesting: a few pages later he's no longer a 17- year-old kid in Minnesota playing in the lobby. He's back in New York, you know? And that was before he signed with Columbia, but he had a very similar experience.

And he writes about it. He " Sometimes you know things have to change, or will change, but you can just feel it. But you don't know it consciously. Little things foreshadow things that are going to happen, but you may not notice them. But then something happens suddenly, and you're in another world. You jump into the unknown. You have an instinctive understanding of it. You become free. You don't have to ask questions, you already know the gist of it. It seems like when it happens, it happens quickly, like magic, but it doesn't.

It's not like there's this big bang and the moment has arrived. It's more measured. It's a contemplative thing. Someone holds up a mirror, unlocks the door, something opens it, you're pushed in, and your head has to be in a different place. Sometimes it takes a certain person to make you realize that. "And that's when he starts talking about this other folk singer who really makes him realize that he has to change his thought patterns. That he had these, essentially, self-limiting beliefs. So they're going to talk about, um, this guy named Mike Seeger.

And he gets into the mentality that he had at the time. He says, "I knew what I was doing, and I wasn't going to back down or give up on anyone. And saying "Mike Seeger," that's where he realized, "Okay, I have to change my thinking patterns." What I had to work on , Mike already had in his genes. It was in his genetic code. Even before he was born, music must have been in his blood. It dawned on me that maybe I should change my internal thought patterns.

That I have to start believing in possibilities that I didn't allow myself to believe in before. That I was narrowing my creativity to a very narrow, controlled scale. That everything has become too familiar, and I may have to disorient myself. "I did everything fast. I thought fast. I ate fast. I talked fast. I walked fast . I even sang my songs fast. I had to slow my mind down if I wanted to be a composer who had something to say. I couldn't put into words exactly what I was looking for, but I started looking for it basically in the New York Public Library.

Think about it. So when he's lost, when he's not practicing, he turns to books. And it's not even about why, but he gets a fascination, and he becomes obsessed with studying the American Civil War. And so he goes to the New York Library, goes into one of the reading rooms, and says, "I started reading articles and newspapers on microfilm from about 1855 to 1865 to see what everyday life was like." I wasn't so much interested in the questions themselves as in the language and rhetoric of the time.

Remember, he's talking about language. He loved the language of books so much that he read them out loud. He talks about reading poetry, philosophy, biographies. Now he reads newspapers. He wants... He basically describes himself as an archaeologist." I dig through history to find useful information for my craft. "That's exactly what you and I are doing right now. And I love this idea of just being obsessed with language. I think I've said this, I don't know, before, but just in case : so many times I think, 'The way this guy puts words together.'" There are sentences in this book that I've never read anywhere else.

"I don't think they could have come from anywhere else but from the pen of Bob Dylan. So he goes back to what he's learning: that human nature is fundamentally unchanging. He says, " It wasn't like it was a different world. It was the same world I live in, but with more urgency. " Then he talks about how things change. You know, we look at Abraham Lincoln. If you ask me who my favorite president is, it's probably Abraham Lincoln. He says, " Yeah, but that's... I want to go back and read how...

How was he perceived before his accomplishments, before the Civil War?" "And so he says, ' Abraham Lincoln comes on the scene in the late 1850s , but he's called a baboon or a giraffe.' " And they make a lot of caricatures of him, so they criticize him. Nobody takes him seriously at that time. It's impossible to imagine him becoming the father figure he is today. You wonder how people united by geography and religious ideals could become such bitter enemies. This all gives off a creepy feeling.

The era I lived in was not like this one, but it was still there in a mysterious and traditional way. Not just a little, but a lot. You could see the complexity of human nature. And then this sentence is so important. It's like why you read all the time. It's like you and I could talk about something today. You might hear the idea in a podcast or book today. You have n't even used it for 10 years. Bob Dylan hits the mark here. He says, "I stuffed my head with as much of this stuff as I could and locked it away in my mind, out of sight.

I left it alone. I figured I could send a truck for it later." She continues to study all these historical figures. She begins to study Beethoven. I learned that Beethoven was a child prodigy who was exploited by his father, and that Beethoven distrusted people his entire life. Even so , he did not stop writing symphonies. He is still studying the greats. So now he's starting to turn back to musicians. He studies Hank Williams. I didn't have to go through what Hank went through to know what he was singing about.

I later learned that Hank died in the back seat of a car on New Year's Day. I clenched my fists. I hoped it wasn't true, but it was . It was like a big tree had fallen. The news of Genk's death struck me to the heart. The silence of space has never seemed so loud. It's just an incredibly beautiful language. When I hear Hank singing, everything around me freezes. Even the slightest whisper seems like sacrilege. I later realized that Genk's recorded songs contained archetypal rules of poetic songwriting.

Remember, Bob Dylan is probably called the greatest songwriter of all time, and he just says, "Hey, I was just studying Hank." These are the rules of Genk. “I realized that in Genk’s recorded songs there were archetypal rules of poetic songwriting. Their architectural forms are like marble columns, they had to be there. You can learn a lot about songwriting structure by listening to his records, and I listened to a lot of them, knowing them by heart. A few years later, the folk and jazz critic from the New York Times reviewed my performance and said, " Dylan breaks every rule of songwriting except one —having something to say." " These rules, whether that critic understood it or not, were the rules of Genk ." And then he concludes this part of his life by simply asking and, in essence, answering: " How do you know you 're on the right path?" Of course?

March was storming in like a lion, and I was asking myself again, "What does it take to get into a recording studio?" To sign a contract with a folk label? Am I getting any closer ? "The future is not something to worry about." It was very close. So for me, the first part, that first sentence, where he says, "Hey, I've been here for a few months." I'm thinking, how do I get into a recording studio? Of course? How do I sign a contract? " This is Bob Dylan from his 20th birthday perspective, right?" And then he finishes that sentence, and to me it's like he's addressing an older Bob Dylan.

It's almost as if he's talking to a younger version of himself because he already knows the outcome. And how does this sentence end? The future is not something to worry about. It was very close. So, this is where he is transported nine years into the future, skips the peak of his fame, and begins this chapter with his father's funeral. The past week has exhausted me. I returned to the city of my childhood in a way I never could have imagined, to see my father off on his final journey .

There would be no way now to say what I could never say before. As a child, the cultural and generational differences were insurmountable. He talks about this complicated relationship he had with his father. The fact that he could greatly admire his father. I think he says later that his father was perhaps worth a hundred like him, but they had a hard time getting along. My father, who spoke directly and frankly, once asked, “Is n’t an artist someone who paints?” When one of my teachers told him that his son had the makings of an artist.

I always seemed to be chasing something, anything, that might lead me somewhere else, to some unknown land downstream. I had no idea of ​​the broken world I lived in. When I left home, it was like Columbus setting out into the deserted Atlantic. I did it and went to the edge of the world, and now I'm back. And this is extremely important, because, in essence, it says that over 10 years ago I left this city in search of my dream. Now I'm on the other side of this dream.

I experienced something that very few people will ever experience. I am the one who had this set of experiences that I had . And now I have returned to where my life began, and I am sending my father on his final journey. And this brings us back to the difficult relationship now that the father is gone. In the short time I was home, everything came back to me—the old way of things. But something else also emerged : my father was the best man in the world, probably worth a hundred like me, but he didn't understand me.

Now we had more in common than ever. I am also a father of three now. There was a lot I wanted to share and tell him about. This part becomes devastating when you read this because you feel like we have so much in common now. I have become older. Now I can understand your point of view. There is so much I want to talk to you about, but the opportunity to talk to my father is lost forever. So this chapter should be about his attempt to make the album "New Morning," but it's actually about the price of fame and how Bob Dylan tries to escape from Bob Dylan himself.

The truth was that I wanted to break out of this endless race. Having children changed my life and separated me from almost everyone and everything going on around me. Apart from my family, nothing really interested me, and I saw everything through different lenses. Even the terrible news of that time, the assassinations of Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X—I saw it not as the execution of leaders, but as the execution of fathers whose families were left wounded. He talks about transformation. People without children don't even understand the changes that occur until they become parents themselves.

Don't see this as the killing of leaders, but rather of parents whose families were left wounded. I didn't belong to anyone then, and I do n't belong to anyone now. I had a wife and children whom I loved more than anything in the world, and I tried to provide for them, to protect them from problems, but the press continued to make me a mouthpiece, a spokesman, or even the conscience of a generation. This is very exciting. His reaction to this. Remember, I...I really think his...how should I put it?

When Steve Jobs says that as he gets older he places more and more importance on people's motivation, and understanding why they do what they do is really important to understand. It's like: I just wrote songs that spoke to me, that went through me. I was doing it for myself. I can't control the reaction of the outside world. And here's Bob Dylan talking about it. He says, “It was funny. All I did was sing songs that were extremely candid and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with the generation whose voice I was supposed to be, and I knew even less about it.

Being true to yourself—that was the point. I was more of a cowboy than a Pied Piper of Hamelin. And again , this is something he would repeat over and over again, as he told Steve Jobs many years later: “I wrote songs for myself. They just passed through me. I didn't even have to invent them. So the idea is to say, “Hey, I’m just trying to be true to myself, and because I’m true to myself, that resonates with other people. But all these interpretations, all this image inflated by the press—that's your business.

"It has nothing to do with me," says Bob Dylan. And what might surprise you about this book—he's one of the greatest artists of all time—is how many times he thought, dreamed of quitting everything, of running away, how the pressure just pushed him to the limit, and he tried to hide. He spent a lot of time, you know, um, in nature. He eventually bought a 63-foot sailing yacht and essentially sailed the Caribbean with just his family, seemingly isolating himself from the rest of the world. But then again , he has this internal monologue, this fantasy about not being Bob Dylan anymore.

And so he says, "I don't know what everyone else dreams about. And I dreamed of a nine- to-five life. A house on a tree-lined street with a white picket fence and pink roses in the backyard. That would be nice. That was my deepest dream. You realize over time that privacy is something you can sell but you can't buy back." And he continues to write music during this time because he enjoys doing it. But he also struggles with the thought, " Hey, maybe I'll never ... If you look at his best work, which was done early in his career.

And he says, "I may never create anything this good again." And the most interesting thing about this period of his life, when he's struggling with all this, is that he says, "I don't even care if I create." So he writes: "The work of the novelist Herman Melville went almost unnoticed after Moby Dick. Critics thought he had crossed a literary line and advised burning Moby Dick. By the time he died, he had been almost forgotten. I assumed that if the critics rejected my work, the same would happen to me.

That the public would forget about me. I owed nothing to anyone . I was not going to plunge into darkness for anyone. My family was my light, and I was going to protect that light at all costs. What did I owe the rest of the world? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. In my real life, I could do what I loved most and what was most important to me." And now he talks about this moment in his life. Little League games, birthday parties, taking kids to school, camping trips, boating, rafting, canoeing, fishing.

It talks a lot about being in nature. Actually, I don't remember if this part is in the podcast, but whenever he has a problem, he just says, "I have to go outside." It's like when I'm too lost in my own thoughts, too attached to my own world, I need to be reminded that I'm just a small part of something much bigger than me. I thought that was really good advice. Once upon a time, I lived on royalties from recordings. This is very exciting. I lived on royalties from my recordings.

Somewhere in the past, I wrote and performed songs that were very original and influential, and I didn't know if I could repeat it, but I didn't care. And that's around the time he starts having all these wonderful random digressions. If you think about the best conversations you've ever had, they're not linear, they don't follow predictable patterns, they go into weird digressions, and you tell crazy stories in a matter of minutes. The book is like a long conversation with Bob Dylan. And around this time, Princeton is going to give him an honorary degree, he decides to accept it and convinces singer David Crosby to go with him.

And his description of his friend just makes me laugh. And he says, "Earlier this week we returned from Princeton, where I was awarded an honorary doctorate." It was a strange adventure. Somehow I convinced David Crosby to come with me. Crosby was a vibrant and unpredictable character. He wore a cloak, didn't get along with many people, and had a wonderful voice. He was a noisy companion. So I had to look up this word, it means noisy and difficult to communicate. And then he tells the story of how he and Crosby came to Princeton.

He says, " We turned off Route 80 and found the university on a hot, cloudless day." Soon the officials led me into a crowded room, dressed me in a robe, and soon I was looking out at a crowd of well-dressed people. When it was my turn to receive my diploma, the speaker introducing me talked about how I had distinguished myself. And this is what the speaker said. " Although he is known by millions, he avoids publicity and organizations, preferring solitude in the circle of his family and isolation from the world." "He remains a true expression of the anxious and concerned consciousness of young America." Bob was just talking about his life.

He says, “You guys are trying to make me the voice of a generation. I just write songs that are close to me. I don't need your labels. I don't want to be responsible for anyone else." And this is the moment that makes you laugh a little when you read it. Because you just went through it, you know, I'm just telling you these notes and highlights, right? It's like it's been going on for quite a while, he's just fighting it and trying to push it away. And here he is sitting on stage, dressed in a robe, looking out at the audience and hearing the host introduce him.

And then he shares with us his inner monologue from that time. He says, " Oh, my God." It was like an electric shock. I shuddered and trembled, trembled ." This is exactly what he spent the entire chapter saying: “I don’t want this. "It makes my life unbearable." "Oh , my God. It was like an electric shock. I shuddered and trembled, but maintained an impassive expression. The troubled conscience of young America." Same thing again. I couldn't believe it. They cheated again. The presenter could say a lot.

He could have emphasized a few things, emphasized something about my music. And he says—this is the funny part. That's probably what made me laugh. He says: I was so angry I wanted to bite myself . And then he ends the story. After I whispered and mumbled something during the ceremony, I was presented with my diploma. We climbed back into the Buick and drove away . It was a strange day. And then, at the very end of the chapter, he really gets to the point of the chapter, right?

Namely: I am creating this album. And he seems to be saying that there are many moments in life when he realizes that he has become too absorbed in his own thoughts. He can only control what he wants to control. You just have to let it go. Just get back to work. Like, there are different periods. He's still writing songs in the first decade of his career, he's still writing songs maybe in the fifth. He is still performing. He does all these things. There will be natural ups and downs in quality.

It's like he won't maintain the best level of his work for five decades. But that doesn't mean you have to stop. I think this is one of the most important things you will take away from this book. And that's why Bob writes about it. I wrote something down. At least these songs won't make headlines. There were no songs with a message, and anyone looking for them would have been disappointed. "When will he go back to his ex?" they asked. Not today. The fact that my records were still selling surprised even me.

But there were some good songs, or maybe not. Who knows? But these were n't the kind of songs that leave a horrible buzz in your head. I knew what these songs were like, and these weren't like that. It's not that I don't have talent. I just didn't feel the power, the full force of the wind. I listened to some of the recordings and they sounded good, but not great. Some critics will call the album sluggish. Well, okay . Others will praise him. I took this as a good sign.

All of this took place in what critics would later call my middle period. Okay, so this is where he's going to make the leap. The next chapter takes place 17 years after the previous story. At this moment he is 46 years old. He is lost . He is broken. And you start reading this chapter, and I didn't think about it when I first read the book, because I only read it for the first time about 5 years ago. I didn't know if he stopped at all, you know?

And I knew he was still performing, but I didn't know if he was writing or what he was doing. And at this point I'm like, "Oh, wait. I think this is the closest he's ever come." There's an alternate history where Bob Dylan, at 46, you know, doesn't perform anymore. No more , I'm done with this . And it was at this point in the book that I think he would finally break down and say, “ Hey, you know what? I had a 26-27 year journey. That's enough.

I'm done. Because this is the closest he's ever come to quitting everything. And he talks about being just locked in his own head. "Always fruitful, but never accurate." Too many distractions that turned my musical path into a jungle of vines. I followed established customs and they didn't work. The windows have been boarded up for years and covered in cobwebs, and it's not like I didn't know . The previous 10 years had left me quite exhausted and professionally devastated. "Many times I've walked up to the stage before a show and found myself thinking I was n't keeping my word." I've shot myself in the foot too many times.

It's nice to be a legend, people are willing to pay to see it, but for most, once is enough. I didn't disappear from the scene completely, but my path narrowed . I had a person I had lost, and I needed to find them. I really tried a few times, really tried to force myself. Nature usually has a cure for everything, and that's where I looked for them. This is what I mentioned earlier. I tried to think it all over, but it was useless. I felt finished, empty, a burnt-out wreck.

There was too much noise in my head and I couldn't get rid of it. I found myself in a bottomless abyss of cultural oblivion. I was on an 18-month tour with Tom Petty. This was supposed to be my last tour. I lost touch with any source of inspiration. What was there in the beginning has disappeared and diminished. Tom was at the peak of success, and I was at the bottom. My own songs became foreign to me. I couldn't wait for the moment when I would retire.

The mirror turned and I was able to see the future. An old actor rummaging through the trash near the theater of former triumphs. And it is here that an old jazz singer saves him. So , during breaks from touring with Tom Petty, he was supposed to play a few shows with the Grateful Dead. He is with them now. They're rehearsing and they say, "Hey, Bob, why do n't we play some of your old songs?" And Bob is like, " Yeah, okay." "I forgot something at the hotel." And he went out, saying, "Oh, I'll be right back." He planned to never come back and literally end his career right then.

He couldn't take it anymore. And the main lesson of this whole chapter is that instead of running away, you need to find a way to get out of your own head . So we continue the story where he just walked out and said, "Hey, I'll be right back." "I forgot something at the hotel." I wasn't planning on coming back . I went outside. Maybe four, five, or six blocks have passed. And then, ahead, I heard the sounds of a jazz band. Walking past the door of a tiny bar.

This is actually very exciting. He stumbles upon a tiny bar where amateurs are trying to play in front of an almost empty hall. Think about what is happening. 27 years ago. This is exactly the type of place where he started his own career. I looked inside and saw musicians playing. There were only a few people inside. It looked like the last stop on a train to nowhere. Something called me to come in, and I did. I got about four feet to the stage and just stopped.

I ordered a gin and tonic and faced the singer. It was an elderly man. They played jazz ballads. The singer wasn't very persistent, but he didn't need to be. He was relaxed, but sang with natural power. Suddenly, without warning, it was as if that guy had opened a window to my soul. It was as if he was saying, "You have to do it this way." Suddenly I understood something faster than ever before. I knew where this power was coming from, and it was n't his voice.

I used to do the same thing , I thought. It was a long time ago, and it happened automatically. No one ever taught me. This technique was so basic, so simple, and I had forgotten it. It was like I forgot how to button my own pants. I wondered if I could still do it and wanted to try. This forces him to return to a place he thought he would never return to. He returns to the rehearsal room where he practices with the Grateful Dead. He says, "I couldn't wait to get started." I wanted to see if I could sing using the same method as that old singer.

At first it was hard, like drilling through a brick wall. All I felt was dust, but then, strangely, something inside me unlocked. At first, all I could make was a hoarse coughing sound, and it erupted from the depths of my being. And this is the most important thing. But it bypassed my brain. Get out of your head . It was hell, but I was conscious. It was a revelation. I played those shows with the Grateful Dead and never had to think twice about it. I had that old jazz singer to thank.

So the idea of taking a break, of freeing your mind, that keeps coming up again and again, seems very beneficial for Bob Dylan's career. And after that he's like, "Okay, I'm going to make great music again." And so he starts writing a bunch of songs for the first time in a long time. Well, for the first time in over 10 years. He just writes, writes, writes. And Bono from U2 is coming to his house for dinner, and he's going to read these lyrics to him. But I have to read Bob Dylan again.

And just a few sentences can tell the whole story. So, he wants to describe to the reader how dinner with Bono goes. One evening, Bono, the singer from U2, came to dinner with some other friends. Spending time with Bono was like having dinner on a train. The feeling of being in motion, heading somewhere. Bono has the soul of an ancient poet, and you have to be careful with him . He can roar so much that the earth trembles. He is also a hidden philosopher. He brought a case of Guinness with him .

We talked about the things you talk about when you spend the winter with someone. Bono says things that can convince anyone. And so, at the end of dinner, Bono asks: " Hey, do you have any new songs?" Do you have any new music? Dylan gets all these compositions that he wrote. Uh, and Bono looks through them, reads them. He says, “Hey, uh, that’s really good. " I have a producer you should work with." And so, Dylan is going to work with a producer recommended by Bono.

They are setting up a studio and are going to record a new album together in this estate in New Orleans. And during that process, there were times when they made great music, but there were other times when Bob Dylan felt lost while making this album. And so I want to read the story that happens, because it goes back to the idea of ​​how he finds ways to get back into the fold. He feels lost, things are not going well. He can stay with this state for a while and say: " Okay, I have to do something about this." And mostly it's movement, doing something different, not just sitting around , right?

"I got up early and roughly dragged my wife out of bed. There were still 2 hours left until dawn. What happened? " she said. "I didn't think anything happened." Within minutes, she had thrown off her loose robe and started making coffee. At dawn we were already riding our Harleys and crossing the Mississippi River, heading towards Highway 90. There was no purpose to going there, it was just a place to go. I felt depressed. I needed to get out of town. Something wasn't right , as if the world had disappeared from your eyes and you had to find it.

I parked my bike near the old water tower. We got off and walked around . It was nice to be alone. I looked at my wife. What I always appreciated most about her was that she was never one of those people who believed that someone else was the key to their happiness—me or anyone else. She always had her own inner happiness. I valued her opinion and trusted her. We stopped for the night and I turned off the engine. It was a wonderful trip. We stayed in a guest cottage.

I lay down, listening to the crickets and the sounds of nature outside the window in the pre-morning darkness. I love the night. Everything grows at night. At night, my imagination becomes available to me. All my prejudices disappear. Sometimes you can look for paradise in the wrong place . That's such an interesting thought. At night, my imagination becomes available to me. All my prejudices disappear. Sometimes you can look for paradise in the wrong place . Sometimes it can be under your feet or in your bed. The next day I woke up.

I felt like I finally understood something. So, they finish the album, and at the end of the chapter, there's a random conversation that I really enjoyed and found really valuable. So he talks to the producer. The producer's name is Danny. And Danny asks, " Hey, what other music do you listen to?" Danny is truly shocked when he hears what Bob Dylan was listening to. This was in the 80s. So I'll read my note first, and then I'll read this passage to you. I think it will be clearer that way.

It says: "Someone else was bound to show up sooner or later. Bob Dylan knows this, because once that ' someone else' was himself." And Danny says, " Okay, you know who you've been listening to lately?" He replies, "I told him—Ice-T. He was surprised, but he shouldn't have been. Ice-T, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Run-DMC." This is Bob Dylan talking about who he listens to, right? "These guys definitely were n't standing around talking nonsense. They were banging drums, tearing things to pieces, throwing horses off cliffs. They were all poets and they understood what was going on." Someone else was bound to appear sooner or later, someone who knew that world, who was born and raised in it, who was all this and more.

He could balance on one leg on a tightrope that stretched across the entire universe, and you would recognize him when he arrived. There was only one like that. He would do it with sharp words and work 18 hours a day. Again, I like this part. I just want to reread my note again. Someone else was bound to show up sooner or later. Bob Dylan knows this because he was once one himself. So, this album is complete. Bob Dylan is getting to the last chapter, you know?

And he really writes like he wants to make sure you're paying attention, okay? You'll have to figure out a lot of things yourself, because we're at the very end of the book. And this is a memory of the times when his father was still alive, even though this is the last chapter of the book. So, it says: " My father had his own way of looking at things. To him, life was hard work. He came from a generation of other values, heroes, and music, and he wasn't sure that the truth would set anyone free.

He was a pragmatist and always had some cryptic advice on his lips. Remember, Robert, anything can happen in life . Even if you don't have everything you want, be grateful for what you don't have and what you don't want." I did everything I could . I had to feel deeply that I was working off my fee. Nothing could convince me that I was actually a songwriter , and that was true, not in the usual sense of the word. So the thing is, this is a throwback.

This was before he signed with a label, before he wrote his first song. We're back to that Bob Dylan, trying to get a contract, trying to fulfill his dream. And we come to one of the turning points in his life, when he first meets Woody Guthrie, going back to the very beginning when he was hitchhiking. He says, "I have to get out of Minnesota. I have to get to Woody Guthrie. I have to find this guy." And here he says, "As for serious songwriting, apart from Woody Guthrie, I haven't seen a soul doing it ." That one song that connected me to “Leads Music,” which is where we started the book and podcast, right?

The one that convinced John Hammond to bring me there was a tribute in words and melody to the man who set the starting point for my personality and destiny—the great Woody Guthrie. "That's a crazy sentence." This is the only person who set the starting point for my personality and destiny—the great Woody Guthrie. I wrote a song thinking about him and used the melody of one of his old songs, never knowing it would be the first of perhaps a thousand songs I would write. My life had never been the same since I first heard Woody on a record player in Minneapolis a few years before.

When I first heard it , it was like a million-megaton bomb went off. “And then he goes back and tells the backstory of why he was so obsessed. This was when he...This is around college time, but I don't think he studied at all . I think he dropped out of school. I don't know if he attended even one class. He says, “I found a local record store. I was looking for folk records. “This is the moment when he would lock himself in the booths where he could listen to music and sit there for hours, listening to the same thing.

Then he says: “Then I walked further down the street and went into a coffee shop. " So, the coffee shop is where a lot of folk musicians started playing." "Okay, that was before he got to New York." I was looking for artists with similar interests. The first guy I met in Minneapolis who was just like me was sitting there. It was John Kerner. "So John, another folk musician, is playing at this coffee shop, okay?" Artists like John and I would go anywhere where people we had n't heard before were playing.

I started to feel like a character from these songs, I even started to think like one of them . I played morning, afternoon, and night. That's all I did. I usually fell asleep with my guitar in my hands. I spent the whole summer like this. "And so this part of the book is again about how badly do you want it ?" How badly do you want to chase your dream and achieve it? We already know what he wants to do. He knows without a doubt: "I'm going to be a folk musician.

I'm going to sing and write songs." And here he is, saying: " At that time, I was making $3-5 every time I played at a coffee shop or a pizzeria." That's what I mean . Again , how badly do you want this? This guy gives concerts in a pizzeria. This is the same man who would later in life sell 125 million records. But first you have to play in the pizzeria. The place I lived in was nothing more than an empty pantry with a sink and a window facing the alley, no closet, and a toilet at the end of the hallway.

I put the mattress on the floor. I met an actress, an inspired theatergoer named Flo. Flo was strange-looking, but she was beautiful in a bizarre way. She had long red hair, dressed in black from head to toe, and had a simple appearance. She was a mystic. She believed in the occult power of trees and things like that. She also took reincarnation very seriously. We often had strange conversations. One day she asked me if I had ever heard of Woody Guthrie. I said, "Sure. I've heard him on all those other records with those two other musicians." Then she asked if I'd ever heard him on his own records.

I couldn't remember . Flo said her brother had some of his records and she was going to take me there to listen to them. That Woody Guthrie was the one I should definitely check out. Something about it sounded important, and I was interested. When the record started playing, I was stunned. I didn't know if I was high or sober. I heard Woody singing a bunch of his own songs all by himself. All those songs made my head spin. I wanted to catch my breath. I couldn't believe it.

He had so much control. He was unlike any other singer I'd ever heard, and neither were his songs. It was as if the record player itself had just picked me up and threw me across the room. A voice in my head said, "So, this is what the game is about." A great curiosity seized me, and I had to find out who Woody Guthrie was. It didn't take long. My friend Dave happened to have Woody's autobiography, Bound for Glory, and he lent it to me. I devoured it from cover to cover like a hurricane, completely concentrating on every word, and the book sounded to me like a radio.

Guthrie writes like a whirlwind, and you stumble over just the sound of his words. Take this book anywhere, open it to any page, and he is already at the center of events. Who is he? He's a smart kid from Oklahoma, an anti-materialist who grew up during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. He migrated west, had a tragic childhood, and had a lot of fire in his life, both figuratively and literally. Woody has a fierce poetic soul. He divides the world into those who work and those who don't, seeks the liberation of humanity, and wants to create a world worth living in.

" To Glory" is an incredible book. I decided here and now to sing only Guthrie songs. It seemed like I had no choice. I told myself that I would become his most outstanding student. I didn't even know if he was still alive. The book makes it seem like he was a character from the distant past, but my friend brought me up to speed. He said he was sick somewhere in the east, and I thought about it. One thing is for sure: Woody Guthrie never saw or heard from me, but it felt as if he was saying, “I’ll be leaving soon, but I’m leaving this matter in your hands.

I know I can count on you. " It's time for me to get out of Minneapolis. New York was where I wanted to be. With only a few rags, a suitcase, and a guitar, I stood on the outskirts of town, hitchhiking east to find Woody Guthrie. Although I could be careless about many things, my mind was orderly and disciplined. New York, the middle of winter 1961. Everything I was doing was going well, and I intended to continue in the same vein. I felt like I was getting close to something important.

And I'll stop there. That's 429 books behind, another 1,000 ahead. And we'll talk again soon.

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