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The Bob Dylan album that gave Iggy Pop “hope”

Sat 13 August 2022 22:00, UK

There is a school of thought that Bob Dylan was the first punk. If you get over the proverbial question of ‘what exactly is a punk?’ then you begin to see that there is more than a grain of truth to it. After all, the original vagabond was such an embodiment of you go your way and I’ll go mine that he actually sent folk traditionalists rushing for the exits at Newport Folk Festival quicker than fundamentalists if a priest appeared with a Mohawk, when he ‘plugged in’ and embrace charged particles.

However, that was far from his only proto-punk contribution. If punk decreed that virtuosos’ days were numbered and now art was about having something to say and the individualistic expression of that sentiment, then Dylan was well ahead of any table-smashing dilettantes. He barely cared about how he sounded, and those rough and rowdy ways ensured you damn well listened to what he was saying.

And as for what was coming out, it was the sort of rough and tumble beauty that Serge Gainsbourg was referring to when he said, “Ugliness is in a way superior to beauty because it lasts.” Dylan’s dose of timelessness was a wake-up call in an era when the radio waves were largely crammed with dancefloor tales of wanting to hold your baby’s hand while the world marched aimlessly into yet another war.

Iggy Pop was about to embark on a life of college and clean-cut haircuts when this scruffy poet illuminated an alternative avenue for him. And boy was he quick to race down it like a rat up a cheese bated drainpipe. As Pop would later assert: “I like music that’s more offensive. I like it to sound like nails on a blackboard, get me wild.”

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While Dylan’s melodies might be beautified, there is an undercurrent of that acerbic shock to it. And for Pop, one album, in particular, embodies that. When listing his 12 favourite records, the Stooges frontman heaped praise on Bringing It All Back Home, the first record where Dylan flipped the bird to the near-Amish standards of folk at the time.

The album was and is a masterpiece, but rather comically, it was an apparent shortcoming that offered up a shot of hope to James Osterberg. “I spent the summer of my 18th year studying this and a Stones album,” Pop said of the record. “Great cover, amazing songwriting. The inspiring lack of vocal skills gave me hope.”

As Pop later told Vinyl Writers: “Bob showed me that you can make things differently in rock music, and that was a true revelation. A few months ago I had seen the Beach Boys at the very same place. They had impressed me so much, that I immediately bought the same shirt that they were wearing. But they hadn’t given me any hope that I could ever be like them- I knew that I would never sing as high and clear, let alone understand anything about diminished 9-chords or such stuff.”

Pop concluded that in some ways, this spirit and Dylan’s record is akin to The Great American Novel. As he says, “If you want to be succesful in the American music business, you have to be able to commit yourself to American music in one way or the other. That’s why the Stones record a Blues track every now and then, and put certain songs on their setlist. What else in hell should be so great about the USA, other than this music?”