The artist that changed Bob Dylan’s life: “They still hold up”
At the beginning of his career, Bob Dylan especially turned his musical heroes into true idols. For the young musician trying to make things work, first writing songs and then moving to the city, he put certain inspirations on a whole new level. They were his gods, his guiding lights, and still today, when he needed a helping hand to stay on course, he returned to them.
It’s Woody Guthrie who comes to mind first. ‘Song to Woody’, a track he wrote for his idol, was one of the first original Dylan songs the world heard as the singer chose to introduce himself by honouring someone else. “Hey, hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song,” Dylan sings like a proud kid, because he was, really. It was Guthrie’s own brand of folk, and political folk, that lit the fire in him. So, honouring him in this way was incredibly important to young Dylan.
“I said to myself I was going to be Guthrie’s greatest disciple,” Dylan said of these early years, as his ultimate motivation was simply to make his hero proud. He saw Guthrie’s career as a powerful blueprint that, if he followed, he too would not only achieve greatness but also build a worthy and meaningful career.
Guthrie wasn’t his only God, though. Another sat there in that special league that Dylan still worships today. His affection for them has never dropped or loosened despite the changes in his sound, style, and career motivations.
“What records do I listen to? New records? I don’t know, just the old records really,” Dylan told the Bono Vox in 1984. His Gods were born early, as Dylan admitted that he still mostly listens to the same selection of records that first inspired him when he was much younger. “I still listen to those records that I listened to when I was growing up – they really changed my life. They still change my life. They still hold up, you know.”
In particular, he listens to another essential hero in his life; “Robert Johnson,” he said, declaring the blues artist to be a life-changing listen from the very start. While Woody Guthrie makes sense of Dylan’s folk career, Johnson arguably makes sense of the rest. Despite starting out as a blues artist in the most traditional sense, he has come to be deemed “the first ever rock star” due to his rebelliousness and experimentation that would eventually and vitally inform rock and roll.
It mirrors Dylan’s own journey from his beginnings as a more traditional, standard folk artist doing what he was told, into moments like the electric Dylan controversy and the artist’s pivot into rockier numbers with a full band and instrumentation that defied standard practice in his original genre. In that way, he and Johnson were kindred spirits.
In that way, too, Dylan’s rebellious streak was set from the first time he listened to Johnson. He became deeply inspired and enamoured not only by his sound but also by his energy and attitude.
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