Though he often declined the label of “poet,” Bob Dylan—just awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature—has a history of wearing his curly locks in the sort of romantic dishabille often associated with Byron and Shelley. Early in his career, the strands were combed into artful disarray for a look that resembled folk singer Woody Guthrie, though it’s anyone’s guess as to whom Dylan was actually emulating. And perhaps he just didn’t have the inclination for haircuts as he moved through various genres from folk to blues to gospel, and on to rock. In a notoriously freewheeling 1966 Playboy interview, Dylan was asked to comment on being called “defiantly sloppy.” He dismissed the statement, saying he knew who it came from, and added, “his kids probably listen to my records.”
Then Dylan gave a lesson on hair care that we’d do well to remember as winter approaches: “The thing that most people don’t realize is that it’s warmer to have long hair. Everybody wants to be warm. People with short hair freeze easily. Then they try to hide their coldness, and they get jealous of everybody that’s warm. Then they become either barbers or Congressmen. A lot of prison wardens have short hair. Have you ever noticed that Abraham Lincoln’s hair was much longer than John Wilkes Booth’s?”
True to his words, Dylan has never really bothered to tame his hair. And unlike other musicians, he’s also never been vain about it. To wit, Self Portrait, his 1970 album that naturally included a self-portrait of the artist on the dust jacket, depicted a Cubist version of his face with just a hint of unruly curls.
Here, a look at Dylan’s hair evolution, from the tamer style of his early days in New York, where he arrived in 1961, to the elder-statesman disarray he cultivated in 1975, to a 1987 concert in Paris where he unleashed a wild halo of floating curls.
The post Bob Dylan’s Top 5 Tousled-Hair Moments appeared first on Vogue.
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