This Friday, April 17th, legendary folk singer-songwriter and cultural icon Bob Dylan will be making his return to Chattanooga, performing songs from his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour at Memorial Auditorium.
The entire experience is a cell phone-free one, where attendees will be asked to place their phones in Yondr pouches that will be opened at the end of the event.
Dylan is one of the most influential figures in modern music history and is responsible for classic tracks like “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and "Knockin' on Heaven’s Door,” to name a few, but he is also incredibly influential in the counterculture movement of the sixties that shaped a generation, and in 2016, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his songwriting.
Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941, ultimately moving to New York City in the early sixties, inspired by the Greenwich Village folk scene and folk music pioneers like Woody Guthrie, where he gained attention quickly for his powerful lyrics and unique, rawer vocals. He would go on to shake up the world, at first with his softer love ballads, then with songs like “The Times They Are a-Changin,” which cry out for social change and civil rights advocacy.
His music had a strong message, and it said something about the world that was rapidly changing in a time when that voice was very much needed. In 1965, Dylan pivoted hard, despite backlash from critics at the time, from his classic folk singer-songwriter sound and went electric at the Newport Folk Festival, marking his move into rock 'n' roll and changing the entire landscape of the genre and what rock music could be.
This pivot produced some of the best albums of all time, like Highway 61 Revisited, which features the famous track “Like a Rolling Stone,” and Blonde on Blonde, with hits like “Visions of Johanna” and “I Want You.” Dylan shook up the world, and certainly the folk scene, with this move, and it paid off big time.
I remember sitting in my film and media studies class at the University of Georgia in the spring of 2016, almost ten years ago to the date, listening to Bob Dylan and watching him emote and argue with journalists in a documentary called Don’t Look Back, written and directed by the groundbreaking direct cinema documentarian D.A. Pennebaker in 1967, which focused on Dylan’s concert tour of England in 1965.
In it, it shows an often contentious Dylan either arguing with a TIME reporter or speaking to Joan Baez or Donovan and is largely considered a seminal documentary film that has become a legendary portrait of Dylan during likely the most pivotal moment in his career.
While I had listened to Dylan’s music for over a decade already, it was only then, in watching that documentary, that I fully became aware of how important a fixture he was in not only shaping the counterculture movement and the culture of today but also how influential he was as a folk singer-songwriter in shaping modern music as a whole.
Dylan has won 10 Grammy awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991, before being inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 2001, he won an Oscar for best original song for the film Wonder Boys. He’s also won a Golden Globe, and in 2008, he won the Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for his impact on American culture and modern music. In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In the decades to follow, Dylan would go on to release music that spanned multiple genres, including gospel with his late seventies Christian albums, country, and blues. He is a hard figure to define and one that has notoriously hated labels over the decades, but he is a true icon and pioneer, and his music changed my life and the lives of countless other folks. Don’t think twice about going to see the living legend, Bob Dylan. Snag your tickets today.
Bob Dylan
- Friday, April 17. 8 p.m.
- $78-$308.
- Memorial Auditorium. 399 McCallie Ave. Chattanooga, TN.
- tivolichattanooga.com