The 1963 song Bob Dylan was desperate to write: “I couldn’t help it”
Bob Dylan didn’t have the idea of being thrust into the spotlight and being called the greatest songwriter that anyone had ever heard.
The entire premise of his songs was about writing about the everyman, and even if everyone related to him in a far more natural way than traditional pop singers, you could hear how uncomfortable he was with the fame and attention every single time he gave an interview. He liked not giving a straight answer whenever he was asked about his songs, but he could admit when some songs took time and when some were practically forced out of him.
Because as much as Dylan liked the idea of making the best tunes that he could, he always needed his lyrics to mean something. There are more than a few times where he wasn’t all that groundbreaking in some of his later work, but when he played ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ for the first time, it honestly felt like he was going to change the world. He was asking the hard questions, and everyone else was willing to stand in his corner.
He might have needed a bit more volume to make his point when he went electric, but the message was still the same all the time. He knew that the world had been pulling his country in a thousand different directions, and he didn’t like the idea of everyone going along with what the government was telling them. His songs weren’t meant to be political by nature, but when you listen to a song like ‘Masters of War’, you can clearly tell the kind of people that he was going after in his lyrics.
The 1960s had countless protest songs talking about the issues with the world, but Dylan was looking at war in a more general way. He didn’t want to play the sides all that often, but given the fact that everyone was watching the Vietnam War get blown out of proportion, you can feel Dylan’s anger on behalf of the rest of the world. All these kids were dying half a world away for no reason, and he wasn’t going to sit back and watch, and people got their limbs blown off and were sent back home in body bags.
Those responsible for this kind of carnage needed to be called out, and Dylan said that he was practically aching to get all of the words down on the page when he wrote it, saying in the liner notes of the record, “I’ve never really written anything like that before. I don’t sing songs which hope people will die, but I couldn’t help it with this one. The song is a sort of striking out, a reaction to the last straw, a feeling of what can you do?”
And in doing so, he was setting the standard for what rock and roll protest songs could do. It wasn’t clear that rock and roll was any more than a fashion a few years before, but when you look at what The Beatles would be doing in the late 1960s, they had kept the ball rolling for what Dylan had started. Everyone was pissed off at what Nixon was doing for the US, and whether it was ‘Ohio’ by CSNY or ‘Give Peace a Chance’, anyone with a guitar in their hand wanted to find a way to speak their mind the way they wanted to.
That wasn’t even the last time that Dylan would get up on that soapbox, either. When he started making The Times They Are A-Changin’, ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ was a deeper look at where everyone’s mortality was, considering the death of this innocent black woman at the hands of a racist member of high society only resulted in a slap on the wrist from the justice system.
So while everyone likes to get up in arms about how politics needs to be kept out of music, this is the gold standard for why that’s not true. Musicians have a lot more rules than merely entertaining people, and Dylan wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life being everyone’s dancing monkey if he could write about the greater problems with the world.
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