Bob Dylan

On July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan walked onstage at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric guitar and a rock band behind him. Part of the crowd booed. The folk movement had crowned him its spokesman, and he had decided he did not want the job. "Like a Rolling Stone," released five days earlier, was already climbing the charts, and the argument about who Dylan was supposed to be has never really ended.

Changing identities is the thread of his life, and his chart is full of Gemini. He was born Robert Zimmerman at 9:05 p.m. on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, according to his birth certificate. His Sun is in Gemini, and Mercury and Venus are in Gemini too. Gemini is the sign of words, versatility and multiple selves, the sign most comfortable being two people at once. Astrologers would expect someone restless, verbal and constantly reinventing himself, and Dylan has been a folk singer, a rock star, a country singer, a born-again Christian songwriter, a crooner of Sinatra standards and a radio host, often within a decade.

Sagittarius rises in his chart, one of the most famous Sagittarius Ascendants in astrology. Sagittarius is the wanderer and the prophet, the sign of the road and of big questions, and it has a reputation for bluntness and for refusing to be pinned down. It fits the man who has been touring almost continuously since 1988 on what fans call the Never Ending Tour, and who has spent decades declining to explain his songs.

He grew up in the mining town of Hibbing, Minnesota, listened to radio stations from far away and left for New York in early 1961, where he sought out his hero Woody Guthrie in the hospital. Within two years he had written "Blowin' in the Wind" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," and he was the most important songwriter in the country. After a motorcycle accident in 1966 he withdrew from public life for years, then came back with a new sound, as he would again and again.

The Sun and the Moon both fall in the sixth house of daily work, the Moon in Taurus with Jupiter beside it. Taurus is steady and stubborn, and in the sixth it finds emotional security in routine labor. For all the mystique, Dylan's career rests on relentless work: dozens of studio albums, thousands of concerts and a working life that has continued into his eighties.

Mercury and Venus fall in the seventh house, which concerns partners and collaborators, and Dylan's art has often been in conversation with others, from Joan Baez and The Band to the traditional songs he has reworked for six decades.

In 2016 he became the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition." He did not attend the ceremony. In 2024 the film A Complete Unknown retold the Newport story for a new generation, and the boos sounded just as loud.