[33] Living at the Jewish-centric fraternity Sigma Alpha Mu house, Dylan began to perform at the Ten O'Clock Scholar, a coffeehouse a few blocks from campus, and became involved in the Dinkytown folk music circuit.

[43] From February 1961, Dylan played at clubs around Greenwich Village, befriending and picking up material from folk singers, including Dave Van Ronk, Fred Neil, Odetta, the New Lost City Ramblers and Irish musicians the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem.

Janet Maslin wrote of Freewheelin': These were the songs that established [Dylan] as the voice of his generation—someone who implicitly understood how concerned young Americans felt about nuclear disarmament and the growing Civil Rights Movement: his mixture of moral authority and nonconformity was perhaps the most timely of his attributes.

"Spanish Harlem Incident" and "To Ramona" are passionate love songs, while "Black Crow Blues" and "I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)" suggest the rock and roll soon to dominate Dylan's music.

[92] The first single, "Subterranean Homesick Blues", owed much to Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business";[93] its free-association lyrics described as harking back to the energy of beat poetry and as a forerunner of rap and hip-hop.

[97][100] In 1965, headlining the Newport Folk Festival, Dylan performed his first electric set since high school with a pickup group featuring Mike Bloomfield on guitar and Al Kooper on organ.

[105][106] In the September issue of Sing Out!, Ewan MacColl wrote: "Our traditional songs and ballads are the creations of extraordinarily talented artists working inside disciplines formulated over time ...'But what of Bobby Dylan?'

"Desolation Row", backed by acoustic guitar and understated bass,[113] offers the sole exception, with Dylan alluding to figures in Western culture in a song described by Andy Gill as "an 11-minute epic of entropy, which takes the form of a Fellini-esque parade of grotesques and oddities featuring a huge cast of celebrated characters".

[114] Poet Philip Larkin, who also reviewed jazz for The Daily Telegraph, wrote "I'm afraid I poached Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited (CBS) out of curiosity and found myself well rewarded.

"[115] In support of the album, Dylan was booked for two US concerts with Al Kooper and Harvey Brooks from his studio crew and Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm, former members of Ronnie Hawkins's backing band the Hawks.

[36][a 5] Woody Guthrie died in October 1967, and Dylan made his first live appearance in twenty months at a memorial concert held at Carnegie Hall on January 20, 1968, where he was backed by the Band.

[a 6][180] Running through late 1975 and again through early 1976, the tour featured about one hundred performers and supporters from the Greenwich Village folk scene, among them Ramblin' Jack Elliott, T-Bone Burnett, Joni Mitchell,[181][182] David Mansfield, Roger McGuinn, Mick Ronson, Ronee Blakely, Joan Baez and Scarlet Rivera, whom Dylan discovered walking down the street, her violin case on her back.

Backed by Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, he performed a ragged version of "Ballad of Hollis Brown", a tale of rural poverty, and then said to the worldwide audience: "I hope that some of the money ... maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe ... one or two million, maybe ... and use it to pay the mortgages on some of the farms and, the farmers here, owe to the banks".

Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote: "Historically, Biograph is significant not for what it did for Dylan's career, but for establishing the box set, complete with hits and rarities, as a viable part of rock history.

"[229] The critical and commercial disappointment of that album was swiftly followed by the success of the Traveling Wilburys, a supergroup Dylan co-founded with George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty.

[270] Biographer Clinton Heylin queried the veracity of Dylan's autobiography, noting "Not a single checkable story held water; not one anecdote couldn't be shot full of holes by any half-decent researcher.

The tape was discovered in the archive of music writer Ralph J. Gleason, and the recording carries liner notes by Michael Gray, who says it captures Dylan "from way back when Kennedy was President and the Beatles hadn't yet reached America.

Other events, including tribute bands, discussions and simple singalongs, took place around the world, as reported in The Guardian: "From Moscow to Madrid, Norway to Northampton and Malaysia to his home state of Minnesota, self-confessed 'Bobcats' will gather today to celebrate the 70th birthday of a giant of popular music.

[320] In Rolling Stone, Will Hermes gave Tempest five out of five stars, writing: "Lyrically, Dylan is at the top of his game, joking around, dropping wordplay and allegories that evade pat readings and quoting other folks' words like a freestyle rapper on fire".

"[354] The next volume of Dylan's Bootleg Series revisited his "Born Again" Christian period of 1979 to 1981, described by Rolling Stone as "an intense, wildly controversial time that produced three albums and some of the most confrontational concerts of his long career".

[356]Trouble No More includes a DVD of a film directed by Jennifer Lebeau consisting of live footage of Dylan's gospel performances interspersed with sermons delivered by actor Michael Shannon.

[376] Alexis Petridis wrote: "For all its bleakness, Rough and Rowdy Ways might well be Bob Dylan's most consistently brilliant set of songs in years: the die-hards can spend months unravelling the knottier lyrics, but you don't need a PhD in Dylanology to appreciate its singular quality and power.

[417] In February 2025, Dylan announced that he would undertake a U.S. leg of his Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour, commencing in Tulsa, Oklahoma on March 25, and ending in Williamsport, Pennsylvania on April 22.

It was also announced that Dylan would take part in the Outlaw Music Festival 2025 Tour, appearing alongside Willie Nelson and other artists, beginning on May 13 in Phoenix, Arizona, and finishing on September 19 in Troy, Wisconsin.

[39] Speaking to Jeff Slate of The Wall Street Journal in December 2022, Dylan reaffirmed his religious outlook: "I read the scriptures a lot, meditate and pray, light candles in church.

[448] In June 2007, Dylan received the Prince of Asturias Award in the Arts category; the jury called him "a living myth in the history of popular music and a light for a generation that dreamed of changing the world.

[473] His lyrics have entered the vernacular; Edna Gundersen notes thatLines 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."

Dave Gibbons recalls how he and Alan Moore were inspired by the lines of "Desolation Row" beginning "At midnight, all the agents/ And the superhuman crew...": It was a glimpse, a mere fragment of something; something ominous, paranoid and threatening.

[509] The movie used six actors, Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw, to explore different facets of Dylan's life.

[552] Building on the exhibition in China, a version of Retrospectrum, which includes a new series of paintings, "Deep Focus", drawn from film imagery,[553] opened at the Frost Art Museum in Miami on November 30, 2021.