The best musical partners Bob Dylan ever had: “Awfully lucky”
In the world of musical lone wolves, there are few who prefer being on their own as much as Bob Dylan.
He had the crux of every single one of his songs worked out in his head before he even set foot in the studio, and there are more than a few times where he would have told anyone who tried to help him on one of his songs to piss off. Anything that he wrote needed to come from the heart before anything else, but Dylan did need some help getting a few of his songs over the line.
Because, really, how was someone supposed to play rock and roll by themselves? The completely solo rock and roll may have sounded like a good idea when Dylan only had an acoustic guitar to work with, but if he was going electric, he needed the right band behind him, and The Hawks were the perfect foil to him any time he tried to reinterpret some of his old classics.
Long before they turned into The Band, Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm were the ones constantly prepared for anything that Dylan threw at them. Given how closely they needed to watch the folk icon every time they played, you’d hardly find a better band name than what they ended up with, but Dylan wasn’t looking to stick with one group for the rest of his life, either.
He was looking for ways to switch things up at every opportunity, and that meant changing the lineup time. That didn’t mean that every musician was bad by any stretch, but there’s a good chance that The Hawks couldn’t have worked on his born-again albums, nor were bands like the Hartbreakers going to sound great playing the more stripped-down songs that turned up on Time Out of Mind.
But few artists tend to get the same kind of thrill that comes with working with a band like the Traveling Wilburys. The thought of having a bunch of different musical legends to work off each other sounded like a match made in heaven, but even with a band that consisted of Tom Petty, George Harrison, and Roy Orbison, Dylan was a little bit reluctant about what the hell he was signing up for at the time.
He isn’t the kind that plays nice with everyone, but the more that they played together, Dylan felt that his fellow Wilburys could write with him better than anyone he had ever worked with, saying, “Outside of writing with the Traveling Wilburys, my shared experience writing a song with other songwriters is not that great.”
Adding, “Of course, unless you find the right person to write with as a partner… you’re awfully lucky if you do, but if you don’t, it’s really more trouble than it’s worth, trying to write something with somebody.”
And a lot of the reason why that approach works was that every other member of the band took the edge off. If Dylan couldn’t figure out a line for a song, he could have easily handed it to Harrison to finish up, and while the former Beatle didn’t know the first thing about American folklore, having Dylan and Petty play off each other on ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’ was like watching some old Western tale come to life in real time.
Not all of their songs needed to be the most earth-shattering piece of prose or anything, and even for a band made up of a bunch of dads performing together, Dylan was free to do one thing that he never got to do all that often: have fun. It wasn’t easy for him to take his foot off the gas for too long, but he knew he could let his guard down when he had the right people with him onstage.
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.