![\"Richard\"](\"http:\/\/richardaseguin.com\/fra\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DSC_0012-2-e1656194445420.jpg\")
<\/a>Richard<\/p><\/div>The 1960s was a very different time where popular musicians didn’t dance. They didn’t have to dress up in outlandish clothes and they didn’t perform in gigantic arenas backed by light shows and multimedia presentations. They stood or sat, played their instruments and sang into a microphone. And almost all of them had something to say. <\/p>\n
I remember when news of a singer named Bob Dylan reached Canada. I was 13 years old. The word everywhere was that he sang about socially important things that people of my generation valued : peace, civil rights and everyone’s belief that young people were really changing the world. Then, in 1965, when nobody really expected it, things really did change.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Alrick<\/p><\/div>Previously, Dylan’s songs had been laid out in front of you – nothing was hidden, nothing was obscure. But a change started to cast its shadow on us with Dylan’s 1965 album \u201cBringing It All Back Home\u201d, which featured some very different and disturbing songs. The lyrics began to be more surreal and non-linear. When I heard \u201cGates of Eden\u201d, featured on the album, it made me wonder where this very new direction in music was leading us. I was a smart 15-year-old but I didn’t understand the song’s juxtaposition of plain English words that flowed into a foreign landscape of four-legged forest clouds, lampposts with folded arms and iron claws, wailing babies, ships with tattooed sails, black Madonna bikers and gray flannel dwarfs, all of this on display outside the gates of Eden, where no sound ever escaped, a place where there were no kings, no sins, no trials. Coming on the heels of Dylan’s previous songs, something as obscure as \u201cGates of Eden\u201d simply did not fit. <\/p>\n
Nobody expected Dylan to release 34 songs, excluding 14 outtakes and singles like \u201cPositively 4th Street\u201d, on three separate albums (\u201cBringing It All Back Home\u201d, \u201cHighway 61 Revisited\u201d and \u201cBlonde On Blonde\u201d, a double album), in a little more than a single year, This unequaled artistic output formed the heart of Dylan’s extraordinary impact on contemporary culture and created a path leading directly to his Nobel prize in Literature, awarded in 2016. <\/p>\n