“I have to give him credit”: The Bob Dylan anthem Pete Townshend called his theme song
Pete Townshend and Bob Dylan should stand on two totally opposite ends of the spectrum. One was a regular at destroying stages and hotel rooms; the other scandalised the world through the mere act of even daring to pick up an electric guitar. Townshend and The Who stood for energy, writing thrashing anthems for their rowdy generation. Dylan has always stood for poetry. But still, ask the guitarist for this ‘anthem’, and he points towards Dylan.
There is something mythical about Bob Dylan that no one will ever be able to adequately explain. On one hand, it feels like a self-made and self-fulfilling prophecy. As Joan Baez sang of it in ‘Diamonds and Rust’, Dylan “burst on the scene already a legend”. When he first emerged in the music world, he told tales about how he’d run off and joined the circus or some other story about a vagabond youth. They were all lies but they worked; people were hooked in and fascinated. They saw Dylan as the new wonder kid, the saviour of the sound, like he was some kind of messiah that other musicians seemed to immediately bow to. The spell he cast then endures today.
It was Martha Wainwright who once said, “All roads led to Bob Dylan,” arguing that artists of all genres seem to find their way back to the folk star. His impact and influence are inescapable due to its breadth, clearly going far enough to even reach the world of The Who as an early example of punk and one of the key bands of the British Invasion.
“Dylan definitely created a new style of writing,” Townshend said to Rolling Stone, gushing about the impact of Dylan and his love for the artist. He sees him as the ultimate artist who helped shape the whole League of Legends, adding, “Dylan was the one who I think got the message across to The Beatles, that you could write songs about subjects other than falling in love.” It was something John Lennon, perhaps most of all, picked up on right away. He quickly ditched the rock tropes of old and focused his expressions into personalised pop songs.”
Even though their music is very different, Townshend also sees a bit of Dylan in his own work. He explained, “When I started to work on ‘My Generation’, I started to work on a Mose Allison/Bob Dylan hybrid of a talking folk song y’know. He sang, ‘People try to put us down’,” adding, “That’s a bit Mose and a bit Dylan. You can take any song of his and find something in it that’s pertinent to today.”
But the Dylan song he loves best, which he declared as his anthem to The New Statesman, was ‘Girl From the North Country’. Plucked from his 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, it couldn’t be further from the heavily rhythmical, full-band songs Townshend makes. Instead, it’s simple, stripped back and focused on nothing but the story at hand. But that’s what he loves about it.
In fact, he loves it potentially more than Dylan himself does. “I had an argument with Bob Dylan about it,” he said. When arguing the merits of the song, the guitarist recalled, “He said a folk singer is just a man with a good memory’, but I have to give him credit for having reminded me of that song.”
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