Bob Dylan was the original hippy, and anyone curious about the style and tone of the "younger generation's" thinking in the early 1960's has only to play his albums in chronological order.They move from folk-whimsy to weird humor to harsh social protest during the times of the civil rights marches and the Mississippi summer protests of 63' and 64'. Then in the months after the death of president Kennedy, Dylan switched from the hard commitments of social realism to the more abstract "realities" of neo-protest and disengagement. His style became one of eloquent despair and personal anarchism. His lyrics became increasingly drug-orianted, with double-entendres and dual-meanings that were more and more obvious until his "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35" was banned by radio stations from coast to coast... maybe because of the chorus line saying "everybody must get stoned." By this time he was a folk hero to the "under thirty generation" who seemed to be in total revolt of everything their elders were trying to believe in. By this time, too, Dylan was flying around the country-from one sold out concert to another-in his private jet plane, worth about 500,000 dollars. His rare press conferences were packed with reporters who treated them more like an audience with a wizard than a question and answer session with an accidental public figure. At the same time, Dylans appearance became more and more bizarre. When he began singing in Greenwhich village about 1960 his name was Bob Zimmerman and he looked like a teen-age hobo in the Huck Finn tradition... or like the Nick Adams of the early Hemingway stories. But by 1965 he had changed his name to Dylan and was wearing shoulder-length hair and rubber-tight, pin stripe suits that reflected the colorful and sarcastically bisexual image that was, even then, becoming the universal style of a sub- culture called "Hippies." - Hunter S. Thompson
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