The Freewheelin’ Edition Part 2

Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia

Slate Podcasts

Music, Music History, Music Commentary

4.8 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

At the movies, A Complete Unknown depicts Bob Dylan as a 1960s “it” boy—played by a 2020s “it” boy, Timothée Chalamet. But the film ends in 1965. What happened in the six decades after that? Dylan not only kept recording. He actually started topping the charts—in the 1970s, the era of Led Zeppelin, not Pete Seeger. And several of his chart-topping albums came decades later, in the 21st century. Bob’s voice got rougher, but loyal audiences kept buying his music. Several of these platinum Dylan LPs are among the most acclaimed in rock history—from Blood on the Tracks to Time Out of Mind. And Dylan stayed an object of fascination through all his changes—as a road warrior, a born-again Christian, a Traveling Wilbury, a JFK conspiracy theorist. Join Chris Molanphy as he walks through Bob Dylan’s career decade by decade, from his ’60s folkie years to his 21st-century revival. With the biopic reviving interest in rock’s poet laureate, there’s never been a better time to get tangled up in Bob. Podcast production by Kevin Bendis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:32.6	Music Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine, about the hits from coast to coast.
0:51.1	I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This
0:55.8	Song Number One series. On our last episode, in the wake of the hit movie A Complete Unknown,
1:03.1	we're taking a spin through the full chart history of Bob Dylan, decade by decade. In the
1:10.0	60s, Dylan was a songwriting jukebox and an
1:13.9	it-boy object of fokey fascination. And in the 70s, he was an album rocker who repeatedly topped
1:22.2	the LP chart. We're now about to enter the 80s, when Dylan is going to take a really unexpected turn into religiosity,
1:33.0	before spending the rest of the 20th century reinventing himself over and over again.
1:41.4	Dylan in the 80s, The Searcher. One night in San Diego in November
1:48.3	1978, while on tour, Bob Dylan picked up a small silver cross and audience member
1:56.0	threw on stage. Dylan had been feeling spiritually empty as his latest tour, his film Reynaldo and
2:04.6	Clara, and several recent albums had garnered poor reviews and box office results. A couple of
2:12.3	nights later, while in Tucson, Arizona, Dylan said he felt the overwhelming presence of Jesus Christ.
2:20.5	A girlfriend who had recently joined an evangelical Christian church in Tarzana, California,
2:28.1	called the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, introduced Dylan to the church.
2:33.8	Dylan, who had been raised Jewish, underwent a three-month
	...

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