Bob Dylan - 'After 40 years on the job ...'

'Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair. After 40 years on the job, Bob Dylan still makes all other songwriters sound like scared kittens, and in terms of sheer volume, he's built the largest body of work worth listening to in rock & roll. He's the American song-and-dance man, the sleight-of-hand man, mixing up folk roots, beat poetry, Chuck Berry, Baudelaire, Texas medicine, railroad gin, and his own psychedelic mutations of the blues, singing it all in that intense Book-of-Deuteronomy howl of his. By now, Dylan's failures are as mythic as his successes, but even though he has journeyed through the Valley of Suckdom (and has even rested there for years at a time) he also remains rock's longest-running font of vitality, a mystery tramp with his boot heels wandering all over the map of American music. His career is one rock archetype after another: the arrogant young protest singer in the Huck Finn cap; the mod Chelsea-booted hipster of the mid-'60s, singing the third verse of "I Want You" with all the deadly hip-twitching swing of Chuck Berry's guitar; the grizzled old con man of Love and Theft, croaking biblical blues and Tin Pan Alley valentines out of the side of his mouth while keeping one eye on the exit.'

This wonderful intro to a Biography piece by BOB SHEFFIELD is from http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/bobdylan/biography

I was walking through Adelaide on my hitch-hiking trip across Oz as a very young man, or elderly teenager, when I heard a strange style of singing coming from a shopping mall (the first of those I'd ever seen). I tracked it down to a small very hip little record store where the owner and a couple of raggedy looking people were listening to a record on the turntable in front of them. I joined them and we all nodded in silence as we listened. The times certainly were a-changin' for me. I added Bob Dylan to my list of heroes - Kerouac, Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Alan Watts, Philip Whalen and all. When I reached Sydney I met a whole rack of Dylan would-bes, which taught me another lesson: listen to the man but be true to yourself. Here endeth the lesson ...