Conversation: Bob Dylan Turns 70

Bob Dylan performs on stage during his concert at the Shanghai Grand Stage on April 8, 2011 in Shanghai, China. Photo by ChinaFotoPress/ Getty Images
Born Robert Allen Zimmerman in 1941 in Duluth, Minn., Bob Dylan, the American songwriter and performer, marked his 70th birthday on Tuesday.

In an op-ed in Tuesday’s New York Times, David Hajdu, author of “Positively Fourth Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina,” looked at Dylan’s early years, when he was just 14:

“Fourteen is a formative age, especially for people growing up in social contexts framed by pop culture. You’re in the ninth grade, confronting the tyrannies of sex and adulthood, struggling to figure out what kind of adult you’d like to be, and you turn to the cultural products most important in your day as sources of cool—the capital of young life….

“When Robert Zimmerman (the future Bob Dylan) turned 14 as a freshman at Hibbing High School in Minnesota, Elvis Presley was releasing his early records, including ‘Mystery Train,’ and Mr. Dylan discovered a way to channel his gestating creativity and ambition.”
I spoke to Hajdu, who is also music critic for the New Republic and an associate professor of journalism at Columbia University, about Dylan’s career and influence by phone from New York:

Editor’s Note: A transcript will be posted shortly. WKSU’s Folk Alley is celebrating Dylan’s big birthday with a special four-hour stream featuring artists “paying tribute to one of the most prolific and influential songwriters of our time.” Watch Bob Dylan In Performance at the White House from last year. Read
an excerpt from Bob Dylan’s autobiography, “Chronicles: Volume One,” at PBS’ American Masters site. And finally, listen to Jeff Brown’s conversation with historian Sean Wilentz last year about his recent book, “Bob Dylan in America.”