The never-ending quest to become Bob Dylan

In 1956, a 15-year-old Jewish kid from the Minnesota Iron Range sat hunched over a radio in the dark, soaking up everything that crackling signal could carry. R&B, gospel, blues, rock and roll — it poured into him like water into dry earth. Robert Zimmerman wasn’t just listening. He was assembling himself.

That kid would eventually rename himself, relocate himself, and reinvent himself so completely that even he would later struggle to remember who he’d been. But the listening never stopped. Seventy years later, that same insatiable appetite for American music remains the engine behind one of the most confounding, infuriating, and genuinely extraordinary careers in the history of popular art.

The mythology begins early, and like all good mythology, it contains a kernel of truth wrapped in layers of fabrication. Zimmerman arrived in New York’s Greenwich Village in the early 1960s claiming to be a runaway drifter, a road-worn wanderer raised on dusty highways and hard luck. In reality he was a middle-class boy from Hibbing whose father ran an appliance store. But the lie pointed toward something real: he understood, instinctively, that becoming Bob Dylan…