When Bob Dylan met his hero, he stopped idolising people forever
Few artists are as influential as Bob Dylan. In fact, the case could be made that Dylan is the singular most influential musician of all time, elevating folk music into the pantheon of literary greats, having been adorned with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.
Yet, like any great artist, Dylan too had his own influences, and we know with great detail that Dylan had been in great admiration of Woodie Guthrie. Guthrie’s work predated Dylan in critiquing American society and the global fascist values that had saturated the society of the first half of the 21st Century.
Dylan noted, however, that through meeting his hero, he no longer felt that he had to idolise anyone. He once said, “Seeing Woody Guthrie was one of the main reasons I came East. He was an idol to me. A couple of years ago, after I’d gotten to know him, I was going through some very bad changes, and I went to see Woody, like I’d go to somebody to confess to.”
Dylan refused to view his meeting with Guthrie as an opportunity to confess his admiration for him, though. He added, “But I couldn’t confess to him. It was silly. I did go and talk with him—as much as he could talk—and the talking helped. But basically, he wasn’t able to help me at all. I finally realised that. So Woody was my last idol.”
By the time Dylan finally got to meet Guthrie, his health had deteriorated quite severely; he was unable to perform, and even speaking and moving had become a task quite often not worth the effort. Dylan noted meeting Guthrie, “When I met him, he was not functioning with all of his facilities at 100 per cent. I was there more as a servant. I knew all of his songs, and I went there to sing him his songs. He always liked the songs. He’d ask for certain ones — and I knew them all!”
While Dylan ended his idolisation phase after meeting Guthrie, several of Dylan’s own contemporaries still seemed to idolise him and acknowledge his influence. Tom Petty said of Dylan, “He influenced my songwriting, of course. He influenced everybody’s songwriting. There’s no way around it. No one had ever really left the love song before, lyrically. So in that respect, I think he influenced everybody because you suddenly realised you could write about other things.”
Petty also noted the mutual respect between Dylan and another Traveling Wilburys bandmate, George Harrison. He said, “George quoted Bob like people quote Scripture. Bob really adored George, too. George used to hang over the balcony videoing Bob while Bob wasn’t aware of it. Bob would be sitting at the piano playing, and George would tape it and listen to it all night.”
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