Credit: Far Out / Columbia Records

The artist Bob Dylan said “haunted” him

Tue 23 September 2025 17:30, UK

We think we all know the Bob Dylan story by now, but we don’t.

He stormed out the New York City folk scene in the early 1960s, and for the longest time, anything that happened before that was a complete mystery. Dylan treated his backstory like Batman’s nemesis, The Joker: “If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice”. Anyone who asked ‘The Dean of Dylanology’ got a different backstory.

He was always a teenage runaway, but sometimes he was a rail-riding hobo who learned to play folk music from bluesmen he encountered on his itinerant path through life. Sometimes he joined the circus, learning the ways of the carny amongst fellow freaks, outcasts and showmen. Other times, he was a penniless poet forced into playing the guitar for bed and board as he struggled to join a modern culture that he was opposed to.

Turns out, the real truth was that Bob Dylan, or Robert Zimmerman to his mum, was a fairly middle-class Duluth, Minnesota native, the son of loving parents who ran a furniture and appliance store.

What’s more, while Dylan played the role of the folk and blues acolyte, shunning all forms of popular music in favour of something real and pure, he was, at his core, a fan of rock ‘n’ roll. To the extent that when the young Dylan was prompted in his school yearbook to list his aspiration, he wrote “to join Little Richard“. The great dame wasn’t the only rock ‘n’ roller to capture the young Dylan’s imagination, though.

Who were the childhood heroes of Bob Dylan?

When Bob Dylan received the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature, there was one man who he credited with above all else for inspiration: “If I was to go back to the dawning of it all, I guess I’d have to start with Buddy Holly. From the moment I first heard him, I felt akin. I felt related, like he was an older brother”.

This goes against a lot of what Dylan stood for in his early days, when he carried himself both in look and in attitude like a Beat poet who just so happened to play guitar and sing. Yet the truth was that the signs were always there if you knew where to look.

Truly, much of his Highway 61 Revisited era rattles along like the cooler, better-read elder sibling of ‘Rave On’ and we wouldn’t have to wait until Dylan himself was 75 to see just what a shadow Buddy Holly cast on his music. In fact, we can see it in a 1999 interview with Guitar World, where he is talking about one of his late-period masterpieces, the career-rejuvenating Time Out of Mind, and had mentioned Buddy Holly as an inspiration for the record on many occasions.

When asked what the spirit of Buddy Holly brought to the record, Dylan said, “Every place you turned. You walked down a hallway, and you heard Buddy Holly records like ‘That’ll Be the Day’. Then you’d get in the car to go over to the studio, and ‘Rave On’ would be playing. Then you’d walk into this studio and someone’s playing a cassette of ‘It’s So Easy’. And this would happen day after day after day. It was spooky. Buddy Holly’s spirit must have been someplace, hastening this record.”

While others would talk about the spirit of their influences more metaphorically, trust Bob Dylan and his one-of-a-kind mind to make it a very literal gag.