Inside the very reclusive life of Bob Dylan – world famous but still a total mystery

It’s easy to write about Bob Dylan’s music – and there’s a pile of unauthorised biographies, anthologies, personal interpretations and gushing panegyrics that, if placed in a row, could reach from Britain to Duluth, the Minnesota mining town where the man born Robert Zimmerman took his first steps 83 years ago.

But to write a book about Dylan: The Man is an infinitely more difficult exercise. Because Bob remains, despite seven decades as the guitar-clad Bard of modern songwriting, a person whom the public, from Bobsessives to solitary Greatest Hits download purchasers, know next to nothing about.

Yet, perhaps, could that finally be about to change?

Timothée Chalamet’s turn as a young Dylan – filled with vampyric ambition and an authentically iconoclastic sneer, in the new biopic A Complete Unknown that is out in cinemas now – has won considerable critical acclaim.

The epistles came with an insistence that one scene in the film be fictional, with no parallel at all to Bob’s early journey from the far north of the United States to the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, where he incensed his folk-loving fan base by plugging in his guitar and going electric.

The French-American actor, already riding high from 2023’s Wonka and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune film series reboot, is being widely touted to win his first Oscar for his portrayal of the folk music hero.

But even Chalamet himself has admitted that he didn’t meet Bob while preparing to play the role, relying instead on some written notes sent by the octogenarian.

We, the audience, aren’t told which specific scene in the new movie is entirely made up. But by now we really shouldn’t be surprised… for there has never been anybody in any cultural, scientific, sporting or political sphere over the last century who has been this famous for this long whom we know so little about.

“Rock and roll was never the same again after Dylan’s mid-60s explosion,” says Patrick Humphries, who has written numerous books on the musician.

“Nobody had ever combined such incredibly loud music with an intellectual type of lyric before. And you could argue that nobody has ever done it more successfully since.”

Yet Bob is no Thomas Pynchon or JD Salinger. His self-titled Never Ending Tour has been going strong since 1988. The last time he went into hiding was back in 1967, when a mysterious (again, possibly fictional) motorcycle accident put him out of action for a year, a period which conveniently coincided with the psychedelic era of Sergeant Pepper which, apparently, Bob detested.

Every book or magazine feature that concentrates on Bob: The Man has warm work to do in order to avoid using adverbs like “apparently”, “possibly” and “maybe” within the first few lines, and this feature is no exception. If you want to see Bob play live, then that can be arranged with relative ease.

For any further insight into what makes the man tick, fans got used to clutching at thin air long ago.

Bob Dylan has given a grand total of three interviews this century to British publications and all of them are of a piece in being singularly unenlightening.

It’s a battle the media have been waging since the early 1960s when, on his early tours, Bob would field questions from mostly patrician hacks who, brought up on the charismatic likes of and Bing Crosby, simply couldn’t understand what this young man with hair like a startled tumbleweed was trying to do.

“I’m not going to read Time. I’m not going to read Newsweek. I’m not going to read any of your magazines.

You’ve got too much to lose by printing the truth,” retorted Bob to one journalist at a 1960s press conference recorded by television cameras.

It’s a typical example of Bob’s eloquence, wit and ferocity, unleashed when he found himself expected to answer questions that both he and any contemporary viewer of these archives would consider inane.

It was an attitude The Beatles quickly adopted with their own press conferences; the Fab Four became increasingly tense and embittered towards the end of their touring years in their public interactions with the Fourth Estate.

Thanks to Bob, the era of simpering acquiescence to the media by musicians, exemplified by the home-spun politeness of a young Elvis, was over for good. Bob gave up on giving press conferences after the enigmatic motorcycle crash.

These days, writers and those in the vanguard of a universe of online websites and blogs devoted to Bob tend to know better than to expect any insight.

Academics, aspiring biographers and TV chat show bookers alike know that Bob won’t return their calls, if indeed his number can even be traced in the first place.

Bob’s personal life is no less opaque. In an era where musicians are expected to lure and retain their audience through endless social media posts and pics, nobody knows with absolute certainty if Bob is even married.

His last marriage, to backing singer Carolyn Dennis, lasted for close to a decade. Yet they had been divorced for nine years by the time that investigative journalist Howard Sounes unearthed in 2001 that the nuptials had taken place at all.

A similarly impregnable fog surrounds Bob’s offspring. It’s believed that he has six children; one with Carolyn and five with his first wife Sara Lownds, including a daughter Maria, who Dylan adopted, from Sara’s first marriage.

That partnership ended in divorce in 1977, a breakdown that was cryptically yet unforgettably documented in Bob’s Blood On The Tracks album of 1974, which many Dylan fans consider to be his masterpiece.

And while Bob’s son Jacob has maintained a successful career as a musician, little is known about his siblings and half-siblings, none of whom have ever spoken at length about their father.

Bob’s reluctance to ever explain his lyrics or reveal anything of himself extends to the location of his main domicile. Although it’s strongly believed that he spends much of the year in Malibu, Dylan owns homes all over the world.

When he chooses to part with any of his properties, it invariably makes the headlines, as seen most recently when his 16-bedroom mansion – with an accompanying estate close to Nethy Bridge in Cairngorms National Park, Scotland – was put on the market in 2023 for just over four million pounds.

It’s typical of Dylan that even his most ardent fans only heard about Dylan’s Caledonian residence when he chose to get rid of it.

Bob’s reluctance to embrace public life caused unique controversy when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.

Surely, his fans (as well as the Nobel committee in Sweden) could reasonably expect that even Bob would be happy to comment publicly upon being bestowed with the most prestigious prize of them all?

Not a bit of it. The silence from Bob HQ lasted for weeks after the announcement was made. Academy member Per Wästberg, speaking to Swedish television, called the silence “impolite and arrogant”, going on to say: “He is who he is. We were aware that he can be difficult and that he does not like appearances when he stands alone on the stage.”

For a while, it was thought that Bob would become the first person since Jean Paul Sartre in 1964 to reject the honour.

Eventually, almost a month after the announcement was made, the Nobel Foundation said Dylan had finally called Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, to tell her: “The news about the Nobel Prize left me speechless. I appreciate the honour so much.”

As ever, Bob did it his way.

A Complete Unknown is perhaps the most apt title for a biopic ever made. Because what is certain in the coming year is that, no matter how many garlands and sashes and trophies the movie is nominated for, no matter how much lucre it vacuums up at the box office, no matter how many aspiring songwriters turn to Bob for inspiration in their teenage bedrooms, we won’t know what Bob thinks.

The enigma of Dylan will, as ever, remain inscrutably and fascinatingly intact.

● A Complete Unknown is out in cinemas nationwide now