The artist Bob Dylan would rather hear over himself: “It gives me more of a kick”
Throughout his career, original folk troubadour Bob Dylan has boasted an intriguing count of artists whom he has gifted praise over the years.
Never one to hide his true feelings, once claiming The Rolling Stones were merely a “funk band” without bassist Bill Wyman, but Dylan has expressed a liking toward a surprisingly eclectic scope of contemporary music across his over 60-year output. From guesting on early hip-hop star Kurtis Blow’s Kingdom Blow, co-writing a number with Gene Simmons, and narrating the recent trailer for Machine Gun Kelly’s Lost Americana album, Dylan, whether sincere fandom or a dash of contrarian defiance of expectation, is magnanimous toward the acts he thinks cut the mustard.
In the run-up to 1985’s Empire Burlesque, Dylan spoke to journalist Bill Flanagan and probed on recent comments stating a value of conciseness, despite a lyrical reputation for dense and long-form songwriting styles. “Well, I come out of that folk music/rock & roll structure. So that’s the only kind of structure I really deal with. I don’t consider myself a pop songwriter like Burt Bacharach/Hal David, even Lionel Richie. I think you have to be too relaxed a person, you have to have too much patience (laughs) to do that sort of thing. But I don’t know what I’ve done. I usually think of myself as last”.
Considering his canonical ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was purportedly 20 pages long in the drafting process, Dylan’s embrace of taut songcraft is surprising. Any fan would tell you that much of his earlier works, from ‘Desolation Row’ to ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, comic whirlwind, lyrical reportage often flows like a bursting dam in all its layered and knotty poetry.
With such a unique approach, it’s no surprise that few ever could attempt to mimic his folk-rock pen, nor did Dylan expect anybody to. With such an atypical presence in the music world, Dylan never placed himself among his Billboard peers.
“When I think of songwriters, I don’t really think of myself,” Dylan confessed. “I think of other people. I know I’m doing it, too. But it gives me more of a kick to see somebody else do it. I need to do it. Like that Jonathan Richman. I get a kick out of that. I’d rather listen to that.”
It’s another interesting choice for Dylan. Reaching into the febrile pools of punk’s proto-beginnings, Richman’s influential knack for coaxing The Velvet Underground’s spikiest edge but filtered through his own dewy lyrical lens would stand former band The Modern Lovers as one of the seminal groups that pulled the day’s rock toward the new wave that awaited around the corner. Richman would continue to play small venues across the 1980s, picking up one of the 20th century’s most lauded artists as a private admirer.
“My stuff, I need to do it, I have to do it, I’m inside it all the time,” Dylan surmised, comparing the joy he gleaned from listening to Richman’s pieces over the compulsion he wades through to see out his own work. “So I’ve gotta get out of it. When I hear my old stuff, I just think of how badly it was recorded.”
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