When Bob Dylan told Ian Hunter what he really thought of Mott the Hoople
After a run of successful folk albums clad with provocative political rhetoric, Bob Dylan became worshipped like a preacher. However, the troubadour wasn’t particularly comfortable with this level of societal responsibility. Through the mid-1960s, he “went electric” and began pioneering a form of folk-rock adorned with more abstract, Beat-influenced poetry. This new phase of artistry may have suppressed political expectations, but his messiah status never let up.
“I found myself stuck in Woodstock, vulnerable and with a family to protect,” Dylan wrote in his biography, Chronicles. “If you looked in the press, though, you saw me being portrayed as anything but that. It was surprising how thick the smoke had become. It seems like the world has always needed a scapegoat—someone to lead the charge against the Roman Empire. But America wasn’t the Roman Empire, and someone else would have to step up and volunteer… Now it had blown up in my face and was hanging over me. I wasn’t a preacher performing miracles. It would have driven anybody mad.”
Today, there’s not an area of popular music where Dylan’s influence can’t be felt. Through the domino-falling ripples of musical evolution, his music is heard at the heart of music one could never imagine the living legend to enjoy. Alas, in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, the 81-year-old revealed that he enjoys listening to a wide range of contemporary artists, from Royal Blood to Rag N’ Bone Man.
Even heading as far back as the early 1970s, it’s difficult to imagine Dylan getting down to the glossy, glitzy sight and sound of glam rock. Allegedly, Dylan didn’t take too kindly to David Bowie, the genre’s leading figure. Whether or not this was on a personal or musical level, we can’t be entirely sure. However, according to Mott the Hoople’s frontman Ian Hunter, Dylan was unexpectedly quite the Hoople fan.
In an interview with journalist Harvey Kubernik, Hunter once revealed that, upon meeting Dylan, he thought his hero was mocking the glam group. “It’s no secret that I’ve always acknowledged Bob Dylan as one of my heroes,” Hunter said. “[When] we were introduced, Dylan started jumping up and down saying, ‘Mott the Hoople! Mott the Hoople!’ Here I was talking to Dylan, and I thought he didn’t like Mott the Hoople by the way he was acting. I didn’t need this shit mocking me. But then he turned around and said, ‘No, man. I dig Mott the Hoople!’”
In a later interview feature with Louder Sound, Hunter was tasked with picking out ten tracks that changed his life. Among them was one of his favourite Bob Dylan tracks, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’.
“It could be anything by Bob Dylan really,” he admitted. “I’ve also got down ‘Jokerman’. I couldn’t say what it was that grabbed me about Dylan. It was back when I was still in England. I heard him and… that’s it. I didn’t know what he was talking about, his voice was completely wrong for the time, but for me, it was just like, that’s it, right there.
“I don’t know how I knew, I just knew, and masses of people agreed with me; I don’t know what it was that he had, but he had plenty of it, and I knew straight off; the look of him, everything about him, the voice. Everything.”
Listen to Mott the Hoople’s live cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ from 1969 below.
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