The one Bob Dylan song that Bono couldn’t live without
Like most songwriters of the latter 20th century, Bono has both admired and envied the songwriting abilities of Bob Dylan. Having gripped the zeitgeist of a countercultural generation in the 1960s with his poignant political folk material, he broadened his scope to give rock music a sharp poetic edge for the decades ahead.
As frontman of the Irish rock group U2, Bono became one of the world’s most successful musicians over the 1980s with a unique approach to anthemic pop rock music at a time when synth-pop groups were all the rage. He has fortified his legacy over the past four decades with his ongoing role as a philanthropist and political activist.
In 1984, Bono was given a chance to interview his hero Dylan for the Irish music publication Hot Press before the American legend took to the stage at Slane Castle. Dylan invited the U2 singer to join him on stage later that evening to perform ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’, which ended in disaster as Bono forgot his lines under the pressure of the moment.
In 2020, Bono shared an open letter addressed to Dylan, where he enigmatically professed his love for the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter and recalled their meeting in 1984. “It could be BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND… like I was in Slane Castle, making it up as I went along,” the Irish singer started. “You let me sing beside you. You reminisced about Liam Clancy and Tommy Makem in the West Village, encouraging me, ‘you’ve not just got to make your own song up, you got to make yourself up too’.”
The message continued: “In the scriptures, the apostle John has his view on BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND….. John 3:8 ‘The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit’.”
Back in July, Bono was invited to partake in BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs to discuss the music he couldn’t live without. For one of his eight selections, Bono picked out ‘Every Grain of Sand’ from Dylan’s 1981 album Shot of Love.
“Bob Dylan – we’re on an island – ‘Every Grain of Sand’,” the U2 frontman said, introducing the track. “This very morning, I walked to Picadilly, and there was a Christopher Wren building there, a little church, and you can just sit there. But on my way in, I saw – this is where William Blake was baptised – and I saw on the door, written there on the plaque: ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the Palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.’ This must’ve been in Bob Dyan, in the back of his mind… ‘Every Grain of Sand’.”
The words Bono recited from the wall of St James’s Church in Piccadilly were taken from William Blake’s famous early 1800s poem titled ‘Auguries of Innocence’. In Dylan’s similarly existential lyrics for ‘Every Grain of Sand’, he uses similar imagery of religion and nature to dissect the injustices of the world and the fragility of human existence.
While Dylan has never mentioned Blake’s poetry as a source of inspiration for the 1981 classic, the parallels are tangible and perhaps pervaded Dylan’s psyche from his years of poetic bathing.
“That was an inspired song that came to me,” Dylan wrote in the liner notes for the 1981 compilation, Biograph. “I felt like I was just putting down words that were coming from somewhere else, and I just stuck it out.”
Listen to Bob Dylan’s ‘Every Grain of Sand’ below.
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