Word: songed
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...What a pop singer could look like. Physically not a heroic figure (his song-publishing company was called Dwarf Music), Dylan nonetheless had a 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...
...York Public Library to research the social issues he needed to know and wanted to write about. He hung around the offices of the folk magazine Sing Out! and in Village folk clubs like Cafe Wha? and Gerde's Folk City, hoovering the great American folk-song book and the performing styles of the day. He also got an instant education from his first New York girlfriend Suze Rotolo, a political activist who took Dylan to an evening of Brecht songs in the Village...
...into his own ornery persona. It was as cannily career-minded as it was artistically valid. Dylan mystified and promoted himself, inventing a biography that included being a seven-time runaway and a carny roustabout (he had done nothing of the sort) and putting his own name in his song titles ("Bob Dylan's Blues," "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream"). He knew he had lucked into being the right man at the right time: "America was changing. I had a feeling of destiny and I was riding the changes...
...Dylan, it was all to claim the crown of folkie purist. As he said in the spoken intro to "Bob Dylan's Blues": "Unlike most of the songs nowadays that are bein' written uptown in Tin Pan Alley -- that's where most of the folk songs come from nowadays -- this, this is a song, this wasn't written up there. This was written somewhere down in the United States." In fact, Dylan had kinship to those great songwriters, especially to the kids his age, at exactly this time, who were toiling away up in the Brill Building writing for Phil...
...That was the song that made Dylan famous beyond the Village, and the renown was well earned. Sung in a whisper that sounds like the last breath, the dying words of a shaman, he poses a series of angry rhetorical questions ("How many deaths will it takes till he knows that too many people have died?") with a strangely gentle, enigmatic resolution: "The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind...