Three: Vanishing Acts (1966-1979)

In the week before the Nobel Prize-winner's birthday, Sean Latham, Director of the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies at the University of Tulsa and editor of 'The World of Bob Dylan', continues his series exploring the life, work and influence of one of the most important and elusive artists of modern times.

The third episode covers the period from the motorcycle crash in 1966 through the long running Rolling Thunder Revue that ended a decade later. Latham focuses on Dylan’s growing ability to create characters in song, and traces a sense of crisis that comes to a head in 1979, leading to his religious conversion

He draws heavily on never-before-seen notebooks from the Bob Dylan Archive to look closely at Dylan's creative seclusion in Woodstock, and the Basement experiment - his decision to write in collaboration with others and away from the demands of both celebrity and politics. Dylan invents new kinds of songs, laden with mystery and truth that do not cohere around a fixed sense of self or message. Dylan becomes 'Jokerman' morphing into many different characters: a country gentleman, a gunslinger, a grizzled sailor, a wandering hobo, a caring father, an anxious lover, and a Biblical prophet.

A sense of crisis pervades his masterpiece 'Blood on the Tracks' and Latham looks closely at the development and constant revision of the painterly song 'Tangled Up in Blue', in which the characters Dylan has imagined begin to collapse into chaos. He looks, too, at the strange plastic mask Dylan wore for the Rolling Thunder Revue and the account of his sudden spiritual crisis when a woman threw a cross on stage in 1979

Producer: Julian May Show less