Bob Dylan: From folk rock king to complicated crooner

Even the honor of the Nobel Prize for Literature bestowed Thursday on Bob Dylan wasn’t enough to prompt rock’s most revered songwriter to upend his modus operandi.

It was a sight even the most devoted Bob Dylan fans likely never thought they’d see: An enormous video screen on the Las Vegas Strip congratulating the 75-year-old songwriter for winning the Nobel Prize mere hours before.

When the Nobel Prize was given to Bob Dylan this week, it seemed to many in the book world like a lost opportunity.

In more than three decades as a reporter, I have been fortunate enough to witness more than my share of history, from elections to wars to most everything in between.

Among all the other groundbreaking aspects of this week’s Desert Trip festival, the concert can now add a Nobel Prize-winning headliner to its pedigree.

Bob Dylan’s well-deserved Nobel Prize for literature on Thursday — turn envious and curmudgeonly if you must, elitist compatriots — makes us want to engage deeply with Elston Gunn and all that followed.

Bob Dylan opened the doors of what was possible in popular music with his 1965 single “Like a Rolling Stone,” a 6-minute epic built on four poetically surrealistic verses linked by the emotionally liberating “How does it feel?”

Bob Dylan has penned thousands of couplets that touch on countless themes.

Princeton University professor Sean Wilentz has never had any trouble seeing Bob Dylan as a crucial literary figure.

One way to appreciate the breadth of Bob Dylan’s work is to start with a pair of often-overlooked curios he issued in the early 1990s.

Well, Shakespeare, he’s in the alley Speaking to some French girl Who says she knows me well He was the kid on the coffee house stage growling out songs from behind a guitar that seemed to weigh more than he did.

Editor’s note: In what was considered a “radical” choice, Bob Dylan was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature on Oct. 13, 2016.

Bob Dylan’s lengthy career is difficult to sum up.

A 36-CD box set featuring every known recording of Bob Dylan’s historic 1966 concert tour will be released Nov. 11, providing a companion piece to last year’s ambitious set documenting his studio recordings from 1965 and 1966.

“Tangled Up in Blue!”

“Do you recognize any of these songs he’s singing?”

Documentary filmmaker D.A.

Want to test your vocal mettle against the Bard of Rock?

The songs collectively known as the Great American Songbook apparently are like those famous potato chips, in that singers who start sampling them quickly discover you can’t stop at just one.

Rare does a performance during the usually inconsequential Billboard Music Awards promise advance drama.

A once-secret trove of songwriting diaries, letters and other documents belonging to Bob Dylan, one of the most notoriously private figures in pop music history, has been acquired by a consortium of institutions in Oklahoma, where the new Bob Dylan Archive will reside near that of his musical idol and mentor, Woody Guthrie.

Editor’s note: In what was considered a “radical” choice, Bob Dylan was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature on Oct. 13, 2016.

There’s a story about Paul McCartney that during the Beatles’ heyday in the 1960s, he once hired an assistant to follow him around and jot down every idea that came into his head, lest he might lose track of any of them.

The latest volume of the Bob Dylan “Bootleg” series of archival releases will explore in depth the high-water-mark albums considered by many music critics and Dylan aficionados to be the holy trinity of his 1960s catalog: “Bringing It All Back Home,” “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Blonde on Blonde,” albums that powerfully reshaped rock music during that creatively explosive decade.