Another side of Bob Dylan

Although Bob Dylan entered his 65th year a few weeks ago, he has never seemed more current. Great anti-war anthems such as Masters of War and A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, composed at the dawn of the 1960s, are more perfectly attuned to the mood and concerns of the present time than anything being created by contemporary songwriters. Conceived in the era of Kennedy and Khrushchev, these songs could be redirected straight to the present inhabitants of the White House and the Kremlin, with only a change of name on the address labels.

But it would be foolish to assume that all Dylan's powers of perception were used up on the cold war and the civil rights struggle. Only last week the final issues of the broadsheet Guardian carried a correspondence remarking on the presence on his most recent album, released four years ago, of a song titled High Water, inspired by an item from the repertoire of the great early bluesman Charley Patton, who sang of the great Mississippi flood of 1927, when the levees broke and thousands died.

For no particular reason, but to great anticipation, this month seems to have been turned into a worldwide Dylan festival. No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese's four-hour documentary portrait of Dylan between 1961 and 1966, will be transmitted over two nights on BBC television, accompanied by a two-CD soundtrack set containing unreleased material from the years in which he was teaching pop music new ways to think. Published simultaneously, The Bob Dylan Scrapbook 1956-1966 contains rare photographs, memorabilia, handwritten song lyrics and interviews with Dylan and his friends and associates. A paperback edition of Chronicles Vol 1, the first instalment of his widely praised autobiography, will be on the bookstalls.

An exhibition of rare photographs, from which the pictures on this page are taken, opens on Friday at the Sony Ericsson Proud Gallery in London. And in mid-November, by which time Dylan's fans will have had time to absorb and argue over all this new information, he and his band arrive for the British leg of his latest European tour, starting in Nottingham and continuing via Manchester, Glasgow and Birmingham before ending with five nights at Brixton Academy.

"Songs about real events were always topical," Dylan wrote in Chronicles Vol 1, published last year to great acclaim. But he explained how, in the earliest days of his career, he had tried to resist the temptation to concentrate on literal observations of the world around him. Instead he took himself day after day to the New York Public Library, where he became immersed in microfilmed newspaper accounts of the American civil war. "It wasn't like it was a different world," he wrote. "But the same one with more urgency ... After a while you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of human being getting thrown off course.

"Back there, America was put on the cross, died, and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the all-embracing template behind everything that I would write."

Generally speaking, the most literal of his songs are the ones that have aged least well. Instead the Dylan lines that we carry around in our heads are those seeming to contain existential mysteries: "Nobody feels any pain / Tonight as I stand inside the rain" tends to stay with a person, as does "Let's disconnect these cables / Overturn these tables / This place don't make sense to me no more." His most recent compositions, however, use simpler means to convey a weary but timeless wisdom.

The earliest of the photographs are from the time when he was still learning how to write songs. John Cohen, a musician and photographer who was part of the Greenwich Village folk scene, invited Dylan on to the roof of his Third Avenue loft apartment in 1962 and took a picture of the 21-year-old hitching up his corduroy trousers; at around the same time he took a shot of Dylan at the Gaslight, a Village club, flanked by Ralph Rinzler and John Herald, two members of the Greenbriar Boys, a bluegrass revival group.

It was Dylan's association with Joan Baez, however, that helped make him a star. They met on a hootenanny night at Gerde's Folk City in the spring of 1961; he didn't care for her singing and tried to pick up her sister. Two years later, however, they were a couple, the king and queen of folk.

In a picture by John Byrne Cook, they are at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, where they sang Dylan's With God On Our Side as a duet and joined various other singers - including Peter, Paul and Mary and Pete Seeger - for a closing rendition of We Shall Overcome. When Cook photographed Dylan by the pool at Newport a year later, the singer was awaiting the release of an album in which he shocked many admirers by renouncing the role of political activist. "I was so much older then," he sang. "I'm younger than that now."