Bob Dylan has never had a No. 1 single in a span of 453 songs recorded on 42 albums. His album sales average 1.53 million a year, respectable but certainly modest by 'N Sync standards.
Yet, as Dylan turns 60 Thursday, he is considered, by Time and a wide variety of pundits and historians, to be the most influential musical artist in the latter half of the 20th century.
His songs recycle in uncountable covers, from remakes of the career-triggering Blowin' in the Wind to versions, by four different artists, of To Make You Feel My Love from 1997's Grammy-winning Time Out of Mind. Things Have Changed, from the film Wonder Boys, won an Oscar and Golden Globe this year for best movie song.
Lines that branded Dylan a poet and counterculture valedictorian in the '60s are imprinted on the culture: ''When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose''; ''a hard rain's a-gonna fall''; ''to live outside the law you must be honest.'' Some lyrics -- ''you don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows'' and ''the times they are a-changin' '' -- appear in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.
He has survived radically shifting trends, despite a career-long habit of being out of step with the times. At 20, he sang with the confidence and conviction of a septuagenarian bluesman. He was so much older then. At 60, he's still hitting the road with the restlessness of a teen. In pop culture years, he's ageless.
Dylan's continuing impact is most keenly felt in music's creative community. He's regarded as pop's unrivaled liberator for breaking the three-minute song barrier, ignoring moon-June-spoon lyric formulas and charting a chameleon course -- from folkie to rocker to country crooner to holy roller -- that paved the way for David Bowie, Elvis Costello and Madonna.
He has demonstrated that the nasal intonations of an unconventional voice, often dismissed as a croak or worse, could outshine (or certainly outlast) the most pristine pop songbirds.
Across three generations of musicians, he is exalted, not just as his generation's spokesman, a folk rebel or a pop experimenter, but as a teacher. It's another side of Bob Dylan -- the knotty professor, whose dog-eared back pages contain the blueprints for numberless musical progeny.
''Everybody owes a debt'' to Dylan, says Bruce Springsteen. ''He really did change the face of popular music, particularly in how a singer could sound and what topics you could take on. Everything from hip-hop lyrics to Marvin Gaye to Anarchy in the U.K. can be traced in some fashion back to his breakthroughs.''
Tom Petty, Dylan's frequent collaborator and a bandmate in retro-rock's all-star Traveling Wilburys, says, ''He's very spontaneous and gives musicians a lot of room. Whatever he does, there's always a good, durable song involved that can take many arrangements and interpretations.''
Sundry '60s peers enjoyed parallel ascents but still took cues from the maverick wordsmith.
''I got good grades on all my papers, but it took Dylan to get me to write,'' says Stephen Stills. ''All of a sudden, I was thinking in complete sentences and using my whole vocabulary. Hey, naive rhymes with grieve! He woke me up.''
Billy Joel says he was motivated to join Columbia Records because the label had signed an outlaw folkie with a creaky voice. ''Before Bob, they had Broadway show tunes, Mantovani-type records and Sing Along With Mitch. They had the foresight to sign this guy who didn't sound like anybody and seemed to be from another era.''
Inspired by Dylan's graceful melodies, Joel eventually abandoned hopes of penning Dylanesque prose and detoured into classical music. ''Bob's a consummate wordsmith,'' Joel says. ''Nobody wrote like him. I really stunk at it, because I'm too bloody literal. That's why I don't like words anymore.''
Though Dylan mined Americana, his sway extended beyond U.S. borders. Paul McCartney, who soaked up Dylan's 1962 debut at his parents' home in Liverpool, says The Beatles took cues from his subsequent electric forays. ''He helped us free up artistically,'' he says. ''He had an influence on everyone. Dylan and Chuck Berry belong on the list of America's great poets.''
British glam-rock pioneer David Bowie, who toasted the bard on 1972's Song for Bob Dylan, notes, ''Dylan taught my generation that it was OK to write pop songs about your worst nightmares.''
U2 singer Bono taught himself guitar while listening to Dylan's early folk stylings. ''His voice has been a bee buzzing around my ear since I can remember being conscious,'' Bono says. ''It's an unusual voice, not always soothing, sometimes nagging, but it reminds us of the possibilities for music and its place in the world.''
Shaped by punk rock, the quartet had disregarded its Irish roots until Dylan sent the four excavating. In their first encounter, Dylan queried Bono about Ireland's folk balladeers, then recited Brendan Behan's Banks of the Royal Canal.
''U2 kind of came from outer space, where punk was ground zero and you didn't admit to having roots. Bob scolded me, 'You're sitting on all this stuff. You should check it out.' As we fall over ourselves toward the fast and furious future, Dylan feels like the brakes, reminding us of stuff we might have lost, like our dignity.''
Tangled up in Bob
Dylan crossed the gender line, joining Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell as major forces shaping female singer/songwriters. Stevie Nicks says flatly, ''He's a total mentor.'' ''What I love about Bob is the fact that no one's ever been able to really figure him out,'' says Bonnie Raitt. ''With every reinvention, you never know if it's a genuine shift or just him slyly ducking out of view.''
Until she played his tunes, Sheryl Crow envisioned a future as a side musician, not a songwriter. ''Playing Dylan's songs empowers you,'' she says. ''It bolsters you to say what your spirit needs to say. Even though Dylan has been completely deified, he's taken all the spiritual journeys we plebeians go through. In his search, you can see the patterns of humanity.''
At 15, Aimee Mann, roused by Blood on the Tracks, took a stab at emulating his writing.
''My attempts were horrifying,'' she says. ''The characters were lost and bedraggled street people I knew nothing about. But he was the only great lyricist around, and I wanted to be him.''
''Here's a guy who did bluegrass, folk, country, rhythm and blues,'' says Shawn Colvin. ''No territory was sacred. There's a valuable lesson in that. Bob Dylan took an idiom and made it personal.''
Dylan gospel spread to unlikely corners, imprinting rap and punk as well as country, blues and folk. Billy Gibbons of Texas boogie-band ZZ Top says Dylan's passion for American roots music ''opened our own musical curiosities. Although ZZ Top may well be thought of as something more akin to Howlin' Wolf, Dylan's remarkably insightful word combinations and rhyme stimulated fresh ways of expressing inner feelings in a sort of secret blues language.''
Chuck D of the pioneering rap group Public Enemy cites an early hip-hop street phrase (''I'm chillin' like Bob Dylan'') as evidence of Dylan's clout in urban music. ''He is stenciled on a lot of aspects of my career -- his ability to paint pictures with words, his concerns for society,'' he says. ''He taught me to go against the grain.''
Positively forthright
Ditto for Jim Lindberg of Pennywise, a hot punk outfit that owes some of its fire to Dylan's spark.
''I liked his stripped-down approach from the start,'' he says. ''It doesn't rely on stage theatrics or a disposable message. Dylan's music is meant to appeal to your heart and brain, not your crotch.''
Pop neophytes willing to learn will find priceless instruction in Dylan's songs, Lindberg says.
''People lack the courage to express themselves honestly now,'' he says. ''Standing by your convictions is one thing we've lost since Dylan's generation.''
Billy Joe Armstrong of pop-punk trio Green Day picked up pointers from Dylan's stylish vitriol. ''His lyrics could tear someone apart in four minutes. I wouldn't want to be at the other end of a song like that.''
Ryan Adams of alternative country act Whiskeytown fell under Dylan's spell after finding lyrics his mother had jotted during college. Countering detractors who say Dylan is no master of warblers, he says, ''There is a seductive quality to Dylan's voice, and it changes as scenarios call for different registers, almost the way theater works. Nobody has that voice. Even on our homogenized McDonald's planet, where cheerleaders are icons, anyone can do a Dylan impersonation.''
Young stars, whether weaned on grunge or rap or hair bands, eventually gravitate to the godfather of troubadours. Black Crowes singer Chris Robinson says, ''From very early on, the music Bob made sounded important to me.'' Rising singer/songwriter Pete Yorn says he and his teen peers shared a knee-jerk respect for Dylan that deepened with exposure to his records and shows.
Yorn's CliffsNotes on Dylan: ''His pacing is subtle. There's no fat in his songs. Whether it's his own experience or a story he's telling, he puts it across in a way that moves people.''
When Canadian singer/songwriter Ron Sexsmith first heard Blowin' in the Wind, he envisioned a folkie Jed Clampett. He quickly changed his tune. ''Dylan improvises like a jazz artist,'' he says. ''He wasn't after perfection. He'd record a song and it would never be the same again. I've tried to carry on that tradition.''
Dylan's '60s contemporaries are quick to credit him with revolutionizing all forms of music. He beguiled a young Judy Collins with his Woody Guthrie persona at Gerde's Folk City in 1962. She has covered dozens of his tunes and stole a compositional technique: ''He has a trick of taking an ancient song and setting a new melody to it. He makes you feel as though you already know the song. And he'll use a very simple melody to carry the weight of complicated lyrics.''
Paul Simon, also hatched in the folk scene, praises Dylan's gifts
but chose to steer clear of his trail.
''My reaction was, 'Don't do what he does. He's got it covered.'
You've got to go your own way or you're just in a shadow.''
That shadow is too immense to sidestep, says John Mellencamp, a zealous disciple who was in grade school when his older brother played him a Dylan record.
''Bob put down a huge footprint,'' he says. ''He has brought more beauty into this world than the rest of us combined. He showed us how beautiful sorrow could be and how ridiculous the world looked to him.''
The self-described crank generously insists that Dylan has yet to make a bad record. ''He's never let me down. I love Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams, but I got news for those guys: This young kid beat you.''
©USA Today May 18, 2001