Category Archives: Bob Dylan

It ain’t me babe: Bob Dylan apologises for using a machine to autograph ‘hand-signed’ books

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Musician admits he used an autopen to sign books and artworks due to his vertigo, after fans compared signatures and discovered they were identical

Bob Dylan has issued a rare public statement to apologise for his “error in judgment”, amid controversy over his use of a machine to autograph special copies of his new book that had been advertised as “hand-signed”.

The book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, features the legendary singer-songwriter’s commentary on tracks by other artists and was released in early November, with a limited run of 900 “hand-signed” editions sold for US$599 each. All copies came with a letter of authenticity from publisher Simon & Schuster.

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Ronnie Hawkins, rock’n’roll legend who mentored The Band, dies aged 87

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Arkansas-born showman – known as ‘The Hawk’ – cut his teeth on the South’s tough 50s circuit but settled in Canada where he nurtured local talent

Ronnie Hawkins, the Arkansas-born rock’n’roll legend who mentored the young Canadian and American musicians later known as the Band, has died.

Hawkins, described in tributes as the most important rock’n’roller in Canadian history, died at the age of 87 after an illness, his wife, Wanda, said on Sunday.

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Lord of the bling: Peter Jackson tops Forbes highest paid entertainer list

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Get Back and Lord of the Rings director made an estimated $580m last year, topping annual list that also features Bruce Springsteen, Dwayne Johnson and Kanye West

The Lord of the Rings and Get Back director, Peter Jackson, has topped the Forbes magazine rich list as the highest paid entertainer of 2021.

Jackson made US$580m (A$809m, £428m) last year, primarily through the sale of part of his visual effects business Weta Digital to Unity Software, for $1.6bn. Forbes estimates Jackson personally made about $600m in cash and $375m in stock from the deal, making him the third person in history to become a billionaire from making films, after Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

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Bob Dylan sells entire recorded catalogue to Sony Music Entertainment

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The deal covers all Dylan recordings dating from 1962 to future originals and reissues, and will explore ‘new ways’ to reach future generations

Bob Dylan has sold his entire back catalogue of recorded music to Sony Music Entertainment, as well as the rights to multiple future releases, in a deal rumoured to be worth between $150m and $200m (£111m–£148m), Variety reports.

The deal covers all Dylan recordings dating from 1962, including his self-titled debut album, which celebrates its 60th anniversary in March, and future releases and reissues in Dylan’s celebrated Bootleg Series.

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Bob Dylan accused of sexually abusing a 12-year-old in 1965

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A lawsuit, filed Friday, alleges the Nobel laureate plied a girl with drugs and alcohol and abused her over six weeks in 1965

A new lawsuit alleges that Bob Dylan, the Nobel-winning folk singer-songwriter, plied a 12-year-old girl with drugs and alcohol before sexually abusing her in 1965.

The lawsuit alleges that the Times They Are A-Changin’ singer “befriended and established an emotional connection with the plaintiff”, identified in Manhattan supreme court papers, obtained by the Guardian, only as “JC” and groomed her over the course of six weeks in April and May 1965.

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Bowie, bed-hopping and the blues: the wild times of Dana Gillespie

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She tamed Keith Moon, got laughed into bed by Bob Dylan and went to a young David Bowie’s house for tuna sandwiches – but the blues singer’s 72 albums are what really define her

“No one has understood how deeply rooted in music I am because they got distracted by my tits,” Dana Gillespie complains.

Now 72, the singer and songwriter’s curvaceous figure ensured she regularly appeared in both tabloids and films from the 1960s to 80s but, she says, this was a mere sideline: music was always her mission in life, it’s just that the British refuse to take her seriously. In Austria and Germany – where she has enjoyed hit singles and hosted a long-running radio show – they do. Ditto in India, where she records devotional music with leading Indian musicians. But in Britain she is too often been relegated to “lover of” status for her string of flings with the likes of Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Michael Caine. “I’m Britain’s best-kept secret,” says Gillespie, and she may well be correct.

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Bob Dylan at 80 – a little Minnesota town celebrates its famous son

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Hibbing, the birthplace of the musician, is paying tribute with a year of special events

Bob Dylan’s debut 1962 single began: “I got mixed-up confusion; man, it’s a-killin’ me”. It hasn’t yet – he turns 80 on Monday, and the pre-eminent custodian of American roots music, with its storytelling and protest traditions, is set to be celebrated by a public avalanche of events, programmes and tributes.

The occasion will be marked in his birthplace of Hibbing, Minnesota – where, inspired by the sounds of country and blues music drifting up from the south on AM radio, he wrote in his high-school yearbook that his ambition was to join Little Richard. St Louis county, in which Hibbing sits, has issued a proclamation declaring a “Year of Dylan Celebration”.

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And the brand played on: Bob Dylan at 80

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With a slew of books to mark the songwriter’s birthday due, we look at the industry that has grown up around the man who forced academia to take pop seriously

  • Scroll down for Q&As with the authors of four new Dylan books

“It’s gonna take a hundred years before they understand me!” Bob Dylan once claimed, “they” being the cohorts of fans, critics and Dylanologists who have dogged his tracks ever since Robert Zimmerman, chippy teen of Hibbing, Minnesota, became Bob Dylan, world-famous singer, songwriter, and pop’s most enduring enigma.

“That’s exactly the quote James Joyce made about Ulysses,” points out Sean Latham, professor of English at the University of Tulsa and head of the institute for Bob Dylan Studies recently established there. “Joyce said, ‘I put so many puzzles and enigmas in Ulysses it will take the scholars 100 years to solve them’.”

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‘Record companies have me on a dartboard’: the man making millions buying classic hits

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Hit songs can be a better investment than gold – and by snapping up the rights, Merck Mercuriadis has become the most disruptive force in music

Merck Mercuriadis had a good Christmas. On Christmas Day, the No 1 song in the UK was LadBaby’s Don’t Stop Me Eatin’, a novelty cover version of Journey’s 1981 soft-rock anthem Don’t Stop Believin’. It replaced Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You, which had topped the chart 26 years after its original release. Both songs are unkillable, evergreen hits, which are closing in on 1 billion Spotify streams apiece. Both songs are among the 61,000 owned, in whole or in part, by Mercuriadis’s investment company, Hipgnosis Songs Fund, and epitomise the thesis that has made the 57-year-old Canadian, in less than three years, the most disruptive force in the music business.

Put simply, Hipgnosis raises money from investors and spends it on acquiring the intellectual property rights to popular songs by people like Mark Ronson, Timbaland, Barry Manilow and Blondie. In a fast-growing market, what sets Hipgnosis apart from competitors is its founder’s bona fides as a veteran A&R man, manager and record label CEO. Like an old-school music mogul, Mercuriadis sells his brand by selling himself. Unlike those moguls, he’s a buff, teetotal vegan with spartan tastes. “The only material thing that I really care about is vinyl,” he says. “And Arsenal football club.” He looks rather like a rock-concert security guard: shaven head, burly torso, plain black T-shirt, hawkish gaze. Mark Ronson calls him “the smartest guy in the room”.

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Going for a song: why music legends are lining up to sell their rights

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Stars follow Bob Dylan’s lead as streaming boom and Covid-19 upheaval fuels gold rush in song rights

Bob Dylan just made more than $300m (£227m) doing it, Dolly Parton says she might do the same, while the singer-songwriter David Crosby says he is being forced to do it. Musicians are queuing up for big paydays by selling the publishing rights to their songs, as the streaming boom and industry upheaval wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic redefines the economics of music.

Dylan’s surprise move this week to sell the publishing rights to his 600 songs, from Blowin’ in the Wind to Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, was described by the buyer, Universal Music, as one of the most important deals of all time. 

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Bob Dylan announces first original album in eight years, Rough and Rowdy Ways

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Album news revealed with release of third song from the project, swaggering blues number False Prophet

Bob Dylan has announced his first album of original songwriting in eight years.

Rough and Rowdy Ways will be released on 19 June. It follows three albums of cover versions – Shadows in the Night (2015), Fallen Angels (2016) and triple album Triplicate (2017) – with his previous album of his own songs, Tempest, released in 2012.

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‘I’m just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones’: Bob Dylan continues return to new songs

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Nobel prize-winning songwriter follows 17-minute Murder Most Foul with I Contain Multitudes, referencing everything from Edgar Allan Poe to William Blake and the Rolling Stones

Bob Dylan has continued to release his first original music in eight years, with a song in which he seemingly compares himself to Anne Frank, Indiana Jones, the Rolling Stones and William Blake.

At four and a half minutes, I Contain Multitudes is less lengthy than the song he returned with, Murder Most Foul, a 17-minute long track about the JFK assassination. Like that song, though, I Contain Multitudes is drifting and percussion-free, backed by acoustic, electric and pedal steel guitars.

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Robbie Robertson: ‘I didn’t know anybody who didn’t do drugs’

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Guitarist Robbie Robertson helped to change music history with Bob Dylan’s backing group the Band. He remembers how the ‘brotherhood’ ended in heroin addiction and self-destruction

In 1965 Robbie Robertson was living in the room next to Bob Dylan’s at New York’s Chelsea hotel. This was when Dylan was writing Blonde on Blonde. “The television was on. There was music playing. The phone was ringing. There were people coming and going – and he was writing away on his typewriter. I thought, ‘I don’t even understand how somebody can close off the outside world like that and concentrate. This guy is from another planet,’” Robertson says. But for a while he shared that planet, or came as close to sharing it as any musician did at the time.

Robertson was the lead guitarist of the Band (then known as The Hawks), the five-piece group that backed Dylan when he first went electric: essentially, they supplied the noise that the acoustic-loving crowds booed on tour. But while the collaboration changed the course of music history, it had another, quieter and more personal effect on the Band, shifting the dynamics of what Robertson calls their “brotherhood”, the way the five of them related.

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