Two: Bleeding Genius (1964-1966)

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 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 second programme focuses on Dylan's explosive rise to fame, then his combative relationship with his stardom. This leads to the 'cool' persona of the mid-sixties, with Dylan rejuvenating rock by transforming the joyfulness of the Fab Four into the anger and alienation that still grounds the genre. Latham considers the infamous decision to 'go electric' at the Newport Folk Festival. Drawing on archives and bootlegs he reveals how Dylan built 'Like A Rolling Stone' on the page and in the studio, looking at the song’s musical structure, its poetic ambiguities and, especially, the line "how does it feel?” In this refrain Dylan realises stardom is a straitjacket; he yearns for a new kind of freedom. In the Dylan Archive there are thousands of fan letters from 1966 - still unopened.

The building anger, irony, and rejection of the kind of political storytelling that propelled his earlier songs are illustrated by the apocalyptic 'Highway 61 Revisited', his furious rewriting of 'A Hard Rain' into the agonised 'It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)'. Excerpts from combative press interviews and his 1966 masterpiece, 'Visions of Johanna' reveal a shattered interior world. There's the chaos, booing, and amphetamine-driven fury of the 1966 tour with Dylan and his band locked in a battle with their audience - then rumours of Bob Dylan’s death following his motorcycle accident in the Catskill mountains.

Producer: Julian May Show less