“A pale imitation”: The only Bob Dylan song John Lydon really loved
The unkempt hair, atavistic snarl, and churlish desire to put noses out of joint define John Lydon Bob Dylan as the ultimate punk.
If the punk movement was about going against the grain and making a creative statement that hurled hatchets at the status quo, then Dylan certainly helped to kickstart it a decade before it began in earnest. From obtuse press interviews to singing lines like “I hope that you die” and ‘going electric’ at a festival that was practically Amish, the original vagabond certainly laid down the tenets for the uproar that lay ahead.
As the poet John Cooper Clarke opined when he recently spoke to Far Out: “Without a doubt, he’s a punk. The stuff he did with The Paul Butterfield Blues Band and going electric at Newport Folk Festival, where he got a kind of bad time, but he denies it. He comes off, and someone is interviewing him, and he just denies it. Everyone has been having a go at him for playing a Telecaster, and he just denied the stick ever happened.”
Indeed, his bold “you go your way, and I’ll go mine” attitude shares a decided kinship with the likes of John Lydon. And it perhaps comes as little surprise that it was after the Newport Folk Festival that the Sex Pistols frontman really started taking notice of the little singer from Duluth. “I kinda liked Bob Dylan when he went electric,” he explained when I caught up with him in 2023.
“That’s when it mattered to me,” he continued. Controversially adding, “Before then, really, it was like a pale imitation of something that was Arlo Guthrie-ish. Just a waggon driven by horses kind of music. It wasn’t my scene.”
While this critique of the acoustic years might be harsh, Lydon likes what he likes. Furthermore, he’s no stranger to saying things with an orchestrated design in mind, too. In other words, bashing the more timeless approach of acoustic folk certainly isn’t a statement that will damage the stock price of punk’s shares.
This sentiment also carries through into the Dylan output that he does admire. “I think one of my all-time favourite songs of his was ‘Hurricane’. That was beautiful and magnificent. So, clearly, a man very capable,” he says very uncharacteristically earnestly. It’s a song that is hard not to be earnest about. After all, its fierce, muckraking ways helped to free a wrongfully imprisoned man. That overlap between society and culture is something that Lydon has always strived for in his scathing work, too.
However, shortly after this praise, he then proceeded to just about let his poker face slip enough for a glint to be detected in his eye as he continued, “And as I said, years and years earlier, was it Peter, Paul and Mary? And Bob Dylan did a cover version of it somewhere, ‘The answer my friend is blowing in the wind’. In my younger years, I thought they were talking about farting.”
Aside from his crude, and frankly crap joke, at this point in the interview, I am flummoxed by his odd admission that he thinks ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, one of the most famous songs of all time no less, was originally written by Peter, Paul and Mary and merely covered by Dylan as opposed to the opposite way around.
He surely knows this is not the case, and yet I can’t figure out what he hopes to achieve by this digression of purposeful misinformation. So, I simply let it slide, and he continued to sing me a jingle from a picante advert, politicising it to make a point about how New York claims everything hails from there… including punk.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Bob Dylan Newsletter
All the latest stories about Bob Dylan from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.