Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan, famous for his antiwar songs during the Vietnam War, will perform in the Communist country for the first time next month, his promoter said Tuesday. Dylan will appear at an 8,250-seat stadium in Ho Chi Minh City on April 10, said Rod Quinton, general manager of Saigon Sound System. Dylan is popular in Vietnam because of his antiwar songs. His 1960s songs "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'" were inspirations for the American civil rights and antiwar movements.

Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan's former girlfriend in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, who appeared walking arm-in-arm with him on the iconic cover of his album "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," has died. She was 67. Rotolo, who played a role in the young Dylan's evolution as a singer-songwriter and later had a career as an artist, died of cancer Friday at home in Greenwich Village, said her son, Luca Bartoccioli. FOR THE RECORD: Suze Rotolo: In the March 1 LATExtra section, a headline on the obituary for Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan's former girlfriend in the early 1960s, said she died in 2010.

In jazz, this is the era of the drummer. On a scene largely defined by the proliferation of creatively ambitious trap set experts, every year seems to bring a new crop of gifted rhythmic explorers. While steeped in jazz history, many of these musicians rove freely across stylistic frontiers, drawing from gospel, funk, folk, Balkan, Cuban and other deep musical wells. Over the next month, three drummer/bandleaders who've forged highly personal group sounds from myriad musical sources perform in the Los Angeles area.

Bob Dylan in America Sean Wilentz Doubleday: 390 pp., $28.95

Every modern American adolescence has its own distinctive soundtrack and, if you grew up in the 1960s, Bob Dylan's voice and music almost surely echo in your ear. "Bob Dylan in America," a new biography of the singer-songwriter by distinguished cultural, political historian Sean Wilentz, gives an enjoyably thorough, convincing explanation why Dylan's new music has gone on finding new audiences ever since he burst upon the New York folk scene of...

Even though Jenny Lewis and Johnathan Rice are one of L.A. indie rock's most doe-eyed couples, their debut album together as Jenny & Johnny emerged from a breakup. They'd split with one of their favorite musicians — Bob Dylan. "We were at this jam session in Laurel Canyon with our friend, [singer] Farmer Dave Scher," Rice said. "We'd played like three Bob Dylan covers, and Dave put down his guitar and said, 'I just can't do this Dylan Fantasy Camp anymore.'" Lewis and Rice each built their solo careers around the sprawling, metaphor-heavy songwriting style that Dylan turned into shorthand for "serious folk artist.

"No one ever seems to go in or out of that building," says Sean Wilentz, pointing out Princeton's Nassau Hall, a campus landmark old enough to have been held by the British during the Revolutionary War. It's appropriate that this eminent American historian ("The Rise of American Democracy," "The Age of Reagan") is talking about spirits from the past and mysteries of the present. His new book, "Bob Dylan in America," (Doubleday) is about how the strains of American music and American history have come together in one man over the course of a nearly 50-year career.

It's a tall order for any musician to one-up Bob Dylan, but John Mellencamp may have pulled it off in February when he and Dylan were invited to perform at the White House as part of a salute to music of the civil rights era. "Bob was nervous," Mellencamp said during a question-answer-performance session Tuesday at the Grammy Museum, which coordinated the White House event. When a few of the 200 members of the museum audience chuckled at the comment, Mellencamp added, "No, he was really nervous.

Jim Marshall, celebrated in music circles for his iconic, attitude-laced images of Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, the Rolling Stones and other '60s rock luminaries as well as equally revered portraits of Johnny Cash, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and myriad folk, country, jazz and blues artists, died Wednesday in New York City. He was 74. Marshall apparently died in his sleep while on a promotional tour for "Match Prints," a new collection of similar shots taken across the decades by Marshall and Timothy White, a longtime devotee who referred to his mentor as "royalty in my line of work."

Bob Dylan's decision to put out a Christmas album this year caught a lot of people by surprise. It wasn't just that the preeminent songwriter of the rock era had chosen to record secular seasonal staples such as "Winter Wonderland" and "Here Comes Santa Claus" for his "Christmas in the Heart" collection. Equally intriguing was that the musician born Robert Zimmerman and raised in a Jewish household also included exceptionally sincere versions of such quintessentially Christian carols as "Hark!