Today marks Bob Dylan's 75th birthday, and as the man himself once put it, "I was so much older then / I'm younger than that now." To celebrate, we're taking a dip into our archives to take a tour of his New York life through video, songs, and stories. As mercurial as Dylan has always been, there is one thing we do know: for as long as Dylan has been writing songs, he has been writing to, for and about New York City.

It's the place Bob Dylan set off on his calling, surrounded by the musicians, personalities and culture that would irrevocably shape the rest of his life. It's the one place he has returned to time and again over his career, whenever he was sapped of the hunger, when inspiration seemed harder to find than rooster's teeth. Or as he recollected telling his father in the first volume of his autobiography Chronicles, it was the "capital of the world" for him: "New York City was the magnet—the force that draws objects to it, but take away the magnet and everything will fall apart."

Over the course of his enigmatic career, Dylan's relationship with NYC has defied his own cynical nature; this is the man who once sang, "You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way," a man who has played more than 2,600 shows over the last 17 years on his "Never Ending Tour." It's safe to say that he's someone who is not comfortable sitting still anymore. And yet, the most indelible images of his career almost all come from here: walking with Suze Rotolo down Jones Street on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, sitting in the Chelsea Hotel writing "Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands," telling off an ex-girlfriend on "Positively 4th Street." You can see a lot of those places in the video below:

There are the venues—some still here, some long departed—he frequented during those early years: Gerde’s Folk City, Gaslight Cafe, Town Hall, Cafe Wha?, White Horse Tavern, Cedar Tavern (you can read a great article about Dylan‘s NYC debut at Gerde’s Folk City here). Then there are the locations mentioned in his lyrics, which create an alternative map of the city: Grand Street in "Stuck Inside A Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," Montague Street in "Tangled Up In Blue", and even Red Hook in "Joey." It's not without good reason that there is a Dylan Walking Tour which covers many of those spots, along with his apartment with Rotolo at 161 West Fourth Street and his townhouse at 94 MacDougal Street.

In his earliest songs, you can hear the mix of exuberance and suspicion he initially had for the city, all topped off with an effervescent energy, like a kid who just tried his first Coca Cola. In "Talkin' New York," from his debut album, Dylan's impressions sound surprisingly close to a diary entry: "Thought I’d seen some ups and downs/’Til I come into New York town/People goin’ down to the ground/Buildings goin’ up to the sky." In the original draft of the song, he says he "rode the subway for a couple days" as well. In "Hard Times In New York," he takes a more comical approach to the subject: "From Washington Heights to Harlem on down/There’s a-mighty many people all millin’ all around/They’ll kick you when you’re up and knock you when you’re down."

If Dylan was first inspired (as he claims) to journey to the city to visit a sickly, bed-bound Woody Guthrie in a Brooklyn hospital, then it was another Brooklynite who nurtured him into adulthood. Legendary folk singer Dave Van Ronk (later the inspiration for the Coen Brothers' masterful Inside Llewyn Davis) let Dylan crash on his couch for months, introduced him to the Greenwich Village scene—and Van Ronk's wife even booked gigs for him.

Most importantly, Dylan absorbed elements of Van Ronk's larger-than-life personality, as well as his interpretative skills: "He turned every folk song into a surreal melodrama, a theatrical piece," Dylan wrote of Van Ronk. "Every night I felt like I was sitting at the feet of a timeworn monument...Later, when I would record my first album, half the cuts on it were renditions of songs that Van Ronk did. It's not like I planned that, it just happened. Unconsciously I trusted his stuff more than I did mine." Below, you can hear Dylan and Van Ronk hilariously covering Woody Guthrie's "Car Song."

As Dylan became a fixture around the Village, his sponge-like nature and unquenchable curiosity truly blossomed; he was introduced to the writing of Rimbaud, heard Robert Johnson, and met John Hammond, the Columbia Records producer who would sign Dylan and usher him to stardom. Oddly, perhaps the most important moment was hearing a Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weil number at the Theatre de Lys on Christopher Street (now known as the Lucille Lortel Theatre Foundation), as he described in Chronicles:

In a few year's time, I'd write and sing songs like "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," "Mr. Tambourine Man," "Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," "Who Killed Davey Moore," "Only a Pawn in Their Game," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" and some others like that. If I hadn't gone to the Theatre de Lys and heard the ballad "Pirate Jenny," it might not have dawned on me to write them, that songs like these could be written.

Along with those tunes came protest-anthem "Blowin' In The Wind," a song so culturally huge, it inspired Sam Cooke to write the (somehow) superior, "A Change is Gonna Come." Check out an interview below with Dylan's first manager, Roy Silver—"the only [guy] in the entire Village that wore a suit"—about the song. The interview was recorded, but unused, for the fantastic Martin Scorsese documentary No Direction Home.



Remarkable moments piled up as Dylan matured and became an icon: introducing the Beatles to marijuana at the Delmonico Hotel in 1964; hanging out with Andy Warhol and Nico at the Decker Building in Union Square; recording "Desolation Row" and "Like A Rolling Stone" at Columbia's Studio A in Midtown; and the whisper of escapades on the D Train in "Visions of Johanna."

After his motorcycle crash in 1966, Dylan retreated to Woodstock and shed his thin wild mercury sound. Even so, he was pulled back to NYC over the course of the '70s whenever he got restless: in "Behind the Shades," biographer Clinton Heylin wrote, "Perhaps, he reasoned, he needed 'the New York atmosphere' to write songs." Of course, that also led to confrontations with obsessive fans such as notorious garbage-sifter AJ Weberman.

There were the haunted initial sessions for his mid-period masterpiece Blood on the Tracks back at Columbia Studios in 1974; then while he was recording Desire in the summer of 1975, he hung out at the Bitter End, playing pool with Patti Smith. And when he randomly drove past a beguiling Scarlett Rivera with violin in hand walking through the Lower East Side, it ended up being one of the puzzle pieces that led to the massive Rolling Thunder Revue. Watch a clip of "Tangled Up In Blue" from that tour below:

Even through the wilderness of his '80s period, as he lost his voice to a miasma of Christian songs, terrible production, and worse bandanas, a few gems seeped through: "Later that night I sat at a window overlooking Central Park and wrote the song "Dark Eyes"...New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice," he wrote in Chronicles. He recorded his last exemplary late-period album, Love and Theft, filled with songs truly frozen in times, over the course of two weeks holed up in Midtown. And he snuck in one of his strangest, most empathetic references a few years later in Modern Times, in the opening track "Thunder on the Mountain" (watch the clip below): "I was thinking about Alicia Keys/Couldn't keep from crying/When she was born in Hells Kitchen I was living down the line."

Leave it to Dylan himself to best sum it up. In Chronicles, Dylan described that enduring moment when he first arrived in the city:

The biting wind hit me in the face. At last I was here, in New York City, a city like a web too intricate to understand and I wasn't going to try.

I was there to find singers, the ones I'd heard on record—Dave Van Ronk, Peggy Seeger, Ed McCurdy, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, Josh White, The New Lost City Ramblers, Reverend Gary Davis and a bunch of others—most of all to find Woody Guthrie. New York City, the city that would come to shape my destiny. Modern Gomorrah. I was at the initiation point of square one but in no sense a neophyte.

Check out more of our favorite Dylan pieces below: