During the 1960s—a juncture in history when music was the meeting place for the ideas of the young and questioning—Bob Dylan stood head and shoulders in influence above all others. In telling the story of his first calendar decade as a recording artist, Decade Of Dissent provides a unique angle on an endlessly fascinating and truly peerless career.
Dylan’s 60s recordings constitute a dizzying run that includes such landmark albums as The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde On Blonde, the so-called ‘Basement Tapes’, and John Wesley Harding, and such classic songs as ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’, ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, ‘Just Like A Woman’, ‘Quinn The Eskimo’, ‘All Along The Watchtower’, and ‘Lay Lady Lay’. They set the template for his genius and encompass the bulk of his greatest work. The career arc they collectively describe saw Dylan effortlessly and repeatedly instigate revolution, by turns reinvigorating folk music, turning protest song mainstream, bringing the intellectualism and social conscience of folk to rock and pop, reasserting roots music over the excesses of psychedelia, and making country music respectable.
Through each of his new identities, Dylan’s dazzling lyrics established him as the poet laureate of the counterculture. All during this time he was engaged in a personal voyage that saw him first embrace the blandishments of fame and then emphatically reject them. His journey during this era from ambitious nobody to cultural icon back to willing background figure makes for one of the most extraordinary narratives in the history of recorded music. It features a fascinating supporting cast of collaborators and peers, from Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield to The Beatles and The Byrds.
Dylan now occupies an unparalleled role as venerated elder statesman of music, but through the twists and turns of his long career he has never quite regained the position he held during his insurrectionary first decade, when he was the most important artist in popular music—and, by extension, one of the most crucial figures in Western society. Drawing on exclusive interviews and packed full of fresh insights, Decade Of Dissent brings to life Dylan and his milieu at the point when he was making music that was not merely aesthetically magnificent but sociologically earthshaking.
