The “best” album Bob Dylan said most people could never match
Bob Dylan never claimed to be greater than any other rock and roll poet.
Dylan was simply happy to share his experience of life in song whenever he made a record, but there were a handful of moments when he knew that wordsmiths were working well above the usual standard for rock and roll lyrics.
Then again, Dylan was already a game-changer before he was even a decade into his recording career. From the minute people heard The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan back in the day, this wasn’t some average folk singer. This was someone willing to kick down the door of your mind and make you listen to what he had to say, and it was impossible for the rest of the rock and roll crowd not to follow suit when he picked up his electric guitar. But no one makes that great an impact without picking up some imitators.
Compared to the kind of songs Dylan was writing, people like The Byrds were also making a mint doing other versions of his tunes. There were already copycats trying to spout out their feelings about the war like Barry McGuire’s ‘Eve of Destruction’, but that was sloganeering as far as Dylan was concerned. He wanted something a bit more rootsy, and there were still fine artists out there if you knew where to look.
Because while most people took from Dylan’s style, a lot of the people he cribbed from weren’t exactly lyricists. Outside of The Hawks back in the day, many of Dylan’s best friends were poets like Allen Ginsberg, and while it was fun to hear what lyricists were bringing to the table, he knew that no one could hold a candle to what people like John Trudell were doing in the modern age.
Trudell never considered himself a proper singer, but listening to his words, Dylan heard the same kind of conviction that he was hoping to get out of his songs. While he did have some help when putting together his albums of material, his voice always helps put the listener in a time and place whenever they listen, to the point where you can visualise nearly every word that comes out of his mouth.
And while Dylan had been hearing the rumblings of Trudell’s 1992 album AKA Graffiti Man ever since the mid-1980s, he had to admit that there were hardly any other artists who could manage to compete with what he was bringing to the table, saying in 1986, “[This is] the best album of the year. Only people like Lou Reed and John Doe can dream about doing work like this. Most don’t have enough talent.”
But Trudell wasn’t able to get everything off the ground by himself, either.
Although some of the production is drowned out in a traditional 1980s sheen a lot of the time, Jesse Ed Davis is the perfect foil to him across the record. Davis was already killing it as a lead guitarist then, but he never gets in the way of Trudell’s words, either, always hiding in the background and making sure that everything sounds suited to his voice. Then again, it would have been interesting to see what Reed would have done had he been given the opportunity to work with someone like Davis as well.
But you have to remember that Dylan looks at any musician in a much different way than everyone else. He’s always looking out for what the lyrics have to say, and with Trudell as the foundation, he figured that everything else was practically window dressing for his brilliant poetry.
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