Bruce Springsteen picks the best line Bob Dylan ever wrote: “You were on into that story so intensely”
As Jeremy Allen White prepares to play Bruce Springsteen, Bruce Springsteen has labelled his favourite Bob Dylan, one played by Timothée Chalamet, as he played Bob Dylan. All these biopics are hurting my bloody head.
Scratching what seems to be a never-ending itch for nostalgia porn, we flock to cinemas to watch the latest biopic of a 20th-century musician, whose lifelong story would truthfully be much better told in a documentary format than yet another goddamn over-dramatised 90-minute feature. Moreover, they feel like an unnecessary conduit for conversations that genuinely matter.
For example, it is through, as I outlined, Chalamet playing Bob Dylan and Allen White playing Springsteen, for some parts of culture to engage in the crossover of each musician’s art and asking how their music interplays with one another.
Because long before their iconic songs were leveraged for box office success, artists like Dylan and Springsteen were living in the same orbit. In fact, Springsteen was living in Dylan’s orbit as the New Jersey native cited Dylan as one of his primary influences. An influence he wore boldly on his sleeve, as he sought to similarly tell stories of the everyday American through his music.
But while many Dylan superfans would fiercely claim that his genius in that regard exists more in the deep cuts, it is perhaps his biggest hit of all time that Springsteen regularly cites as the ultimate song of Dylan influence. When asked what one line of his sticks out in his memory, Springsteen unashamedly rattled off the opening line to ‘Like A Rolling Stone’: “Once upon a time you dressed so fine / You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?”
Springsteen explained to Stephen Colbert, “I mean… that was like in the end that you were just you were hooked, you were on into that story so intensely and so quickly, that’s the one that immediately comes to my mind.”
But even when the circumstances aren’t flippant, and Springsteen is asked to express his love for the song, he can do so with profundity, such is the nature of the song and how it has affected his career: “The first time I heard it, it came out of the radio. I didn’t know anything about Dylan’s acoustic music. I was a creature of Top 40, so the first time I really heard him with this song, it just instantly started to change my life.”
He added, “‘Like a Rolling Stone’ feels like a torrent that comes rushing towards you. Floods your soul, floods your mind. Alerts and wakes you up instantaneously to other worlds, other lives. Other ways of being. It’s perhaps one of the most powerful records ever made, and it still means a great deal to me, along with all of Dylan’s work.”
The essence of the song can clearly be seen in Springsteen’s work. From the very first line, it plunges you into a narrative that is both personal and universal, and speaks to the very soul of the listener. The sort of song that can do more for someone in its five-minute runtime than a shitty 90-minute biopic could ever do.
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