I'm always amazed when I think about Bob Dylan's output from 1963 to 1966. During this three-year period, he wrote and recorded Freewheelin', The Times They Are A'Changin'; Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bringin' It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. How could this happen? Six albums in three years, two of them in Rolling Stone's all-time top ten, some of the greatest songs ever written, covered by thousands of artists in all styles (one of the greatest jazz performances I've ever heard was the bassist Dave Young's solo version of "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright". If anyone out there knows of a recording, please let me know.) At first glance, this explosion of creativity seems to have come out of nowhere. For example, his first album (released in March of 1962, a full year before Freewheelin's May 1963 release) contained only two original songs and eleven covers of standard folk songs.
His autobiography, Chronicles, Volume One, contains some clues. The first chapters deal with the characters and musicians that he met in his early days in Greenwich Village. He also shows great knowledge of the traditions and artists of folk music. And there are some wild and wonderful descriptions of rock and roll singers: for example, Roy Orbison " sang like a professional criminal." But the most telling sections are about the reading that he was doing in those days. He was playing as much as he could, but making next to nothing. Therefore, he was forced to crash on couches of friends and peers. During his free time, he read their books - everything from the classics to history, modern literature to poetry, medicine to philosophy. He's very honest about how he went about it - starting in the middle and going back to the beginning if he liked the book, and not necessarily finishing everything, for instance, but never stopping the reading itself.
I had a music teacher once who would try to encourage his students to keep slogging away by saying, "You have to take root to fly." It seems like that was what Dylan was doing in those days: taking in the sights, sounds and people of New York; listening deeply to folk, blues and rock and roll; singing and playing at every opportunity; and reading creatively, with great width and depth. The results? The astonishing period from May 1963 to May 1966 described above, and an incomparable recording and performing career of over forty-eight years that continues to this day.