Word: rocks
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...first time I heard Bob Dylan," Bruce Springsteen said at the Dylan induction ceremony at the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in 1998, "I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody had kicked open the door to your mind...
...That would have been the summer of 1965; the song, the rock ballad "Like a Rolling Stone." But Springsteen came late to Dylan, as did Martin Scorsese, director of last year's Dylan documentary No Direction Home, who acknowledged that he was ignorant of the singer's folk period and only caught on when Bobby D. went electric. By then, Dylan was already nearing the end of his artistic prime - a five-year stretch from 1961 to '66, when he revolutionized first folk, then rock, infusing his music with astringent, haunting imagery that fully justified critic Richard Goldstein...
...sides of a single: Cozy Cole's"Topsy," Ray Charles'"What'd I Say," the Isley Brothers' "Twist and Shout" and, in the early 50s, Johnny Standley's comedy homily "It's in the Book." But the 1965 "Like a Rolling Stone" was, I believe, the first epic rock ballad issued as a one-side, 6min. single. (Within two years, Richard Harris' "MacArthur Park and the Beatles' "Hey, Jude" went Dylan one minute longer, though not better...
...compelling presence: the voluptuous lips nearly hidden by his harmonica holder, the untelling eyes under a brakeman's cap. He didn't have as much influence on performing styles as Mick Jagger - he was a static figure, while Jagger's stage-sprawling struts set the fashion for rock-band lead singers - but he notarized the dress-down look for pop performers...
...cult 50s was Dylan's home-or, at last, his sleepover when he was a kid. In Chronicles he describes his feeling of kinship with smooth-singing Bobby Vee and Ricky Nelson, with the composer Harold Arlen and the wrestler Gorgeous George. He also played occasionally in rock band and briefly backed Vee in 1959, when the Buddy Holly soundalike singer was booked to fill the dates Holly couldn't make because he'd died in a plane crash in a frosty Iowa cornfield...