Bob Dylan still rocks

LOS ANGELES, United States of America – He was the voice of a generation. Now, he barely talks.

But music icon Bob Dylan — who releases his 35th album this week half a century after his first — is still going strong.

The 71-year-old, who has evolved from a 1960s folk-protest singer into an enigmatic rock legend, is most well-known for early anthems like “The Times they Are a-Changin’,” “Hey Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Like a Rolling Stone.”

But 50 years later, Dylan — who has been on his so-called “Never Ending Tour” since the 1980s — shows no signs of slowing down as he unveils the playfully sinister “Tempest” in Europe on Monday, September 10, and America on Tuesday, September 11.

“A dark and bloody effort that suggests the old man ain’t going quietly” was how The Daily Beast described the album, while Rolling Stone magazine called it the “single darkest record in Dylan’s catalog” and gave it 5 stars.

“There is not a bigger giant in the history of American music. All these years later, he’s still chasing that sound,” President Barack Obama said when awarding Dylan the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in May.

Despite being in his 8th decade, the singer is firing on all cylinders in promoting the new album, creating an Internet buzz with a sophisticated online roll-out, and adding tour dates into November to play his new songs live.

It is all a long way from his humble beginnings as Robert Allen Zimmerman, born in 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota, who taught himself to play the harmonica, guitar and piano.

Captivated by the music of folksinger Woody Guthrie, Zimmerman changed his name to Bob Dylan — reportedly after the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas — and began performing in local nightclubs.

After dropping out of college, he moved to New York in 1960. His first album contained only two original songs, but the 1963 breakthrough “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” featured a slew of his own work including the classic “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

Armed with a harmonica and an acoustic guitar, Dylan confronted social injustice, war and racism, quickly becoming a prominent civil rights campaigner — and recording an astonishing 300 songs in his first 3 years.

In 1965, Dylan’s first British tour was captured in the classic documentary “Don’t Look Back” — the same year he outraged his folk fans by using an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival on Rhode Island.

The following albums, “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Blonde on Blonde,” won rave reviews, but Dylan’s career was interrupted in 1966 when he was badly injured in a motorcycle accident, and his recording output slowed in the 1970s.

By the early 1980s his music was reflecting the performer’s born-again Christianity, although this was tempered in successive albums, with many fans seeing a resurgence of his explosive early-career talent in the 1990s.

Since the turn of millennium, as well as his regular recording output and touring, Dylan has also found time to host a regular radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, and published a well-received book, “Chronicles,” in 2004.

He was the focus of at least two more films, Martin Scorsese’s 2005 “No Direction Home” and “I’m not There” in 2007 starring Christian Bale, Heath Ledger and Cate Blanchett.

Over the years, Dylan has won 11 Grammy awards, as well as one Golden Globe and even an Oscar in 2001, for best original song “Things Have Changed” in the movie “Wonder Boys.”

He is still pushing boundaries, even geographically: last year he toured in China for the first time.

While Dylan is feted by his peers and generations of fans for his songs, his live shows are notoriously patchy — his voice, never the smoothest, has grown rougher over the years, and he rarely sings a tune the same way twice.

But the singer, who has a home in Malibu north of Los Angeles, has said he has no plans to retire anytime soon.

“Critics might be uncomfortable with me (working so much). Maybe they can’t figure it out,” he said in a 2009 interview with Rolling Stone.

“But nobody in my particular audience feels that way about what I do. Anybody with a trade can work as long as they want. A welder, a carpenter, an electrician. They don’t necessarily need to retire.”

Just a few times over the past 40 years has Dyan opened his heart enough to give a glimpse of the man within.

Here is a selection of Bob Dylan quotes (sources: IMDb, BBC, Times of London):

On writing:

• “I’m more of a mathematical singer — I use words the way most people use numbers.”
• “I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.”
• “I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet, and I’ll die like a poet.”
• “I’ve only written 4 songs in my whole life, but I’ve written those 4 songs a million times.”

On the Dylan myth:

• “I’m not concerned about the myth, because I can’t work under the myth. The myth can’t write songs. It’s the blood behind the myth that creates the art.”
• “If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.”
• “People can learn everything about me through my songs, if they know where to look.”

On marriage:

• “Marriage was a failure. Husband and wife was a failure. But mother and father wasn’t a failure.” (sic)

On performing:

• “A lot of performers do what they do because they want the love of another group of people, y’know. I don’t do it for love. I do it because I can do it and I think I’m good at it, that’s all I do it for.”
• “Being on tour is like being in limbo. It’s like going from nowhere to nowhere.”
• “A lot of people can’t stand touring, but to me it’s like breathing. I do it because I’m driven to do it.”
• “I think of myself as a song-and-dance man.”

On health:

• “I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon.” (After recovering from a potentially fatal heart infection in June 1997)
• “Genius? There’s a real fine line between genius and insanity. Anybody will tell you that.”

On the 1960s:

• “I don’t care one bit about the ’60s.”
• “People today are still living off the table scraps of the ’60s. They are still being passed around — the music and the ideas.”

On money:

• “What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.”

On Paul McCartney:

• “I’m in awe of McCartney. He’s about the only one that I am in awe of. He can do it all. And he’s never let up… he’s just so damn effortless.”

On Joni Mitchell:

• “Joni and I go back a long way. Not all the way back, but pretty far. I’ve been in a car with Joni. Joni was driving a Lincoln. Excellent driver. I felt safe.”

– Michael Thurston, Agence France-Presse