The moment Bob Dylan covered three of his favourite musician’s songs in front of him
Bob Dylan hasn’t always been the easiest person to prize information or enthusiasm out of in interviews, often choosing to keep most of the finer details of his life to himself.
Dylan is known for being more reserved and not forthcoming with his responses, and for this reason, he’ll always be seen as something of an enigma for the rest of his life, and likely for long afterwards. However, when he does choose to reveal that he’s a massive fan of someone or something, he’ll usually do so in an unexpected fashion, taking the individuals who he’s heaping praise on by surprise.
There are, of course, a number of artists who he has repeatedly proclaimed to be among his favourite songwriters of all time, with one of the few things he’s happy to reveal in interviews being lengthy lists of his influences. While a lot of them don’t veer too far from the same storytelling folk style that he’s known for himself, they’re all fascinating individuals with plenty to say through the medium of song, which makes it all the more understandable why someone like Dylan would love them.
During a 2009 interview with the Huffington Post, he chose to list off a number of figures who he considered to be up there with the best and most influential songwriters in the world. Proclaiming that he loved the likes of Jimmy Buffett, Gordon Lightfoot, Randy Newman and John Prine, there were hardly any surprises in his selections, but one certainly stood out for the ways in which he paid his respects to his craft.
Dylan would go on to speak at great length about Warren Zevon and his songwriting mastery, claiming that songs like ‘Lawyers, Guns and Money’, ‘Boom Boom Mancini’ and ‘Join Me in LA’ were among his favourites for how they “straddle the line between heartfelt and primaeval”.
He’d go on to praise the unique approach that Zevon brought to his work. “His musical patterns are all over the place,” Dylan claimed, “probably because he’s classically trained. There might be three separate songs within a Zevon song, but they’re all effortlessly connected. Zevon was a musician’s musician, a tortured one.”
However, while Dylan would admit that he didn’t have much of a relationship with Zevon during his life, he certainly knew his back catalogue inside out, not necessarily just by name, but through an uncanny ability to reproduce his songs without much thought. Towards the end of Zevon’s life, he’d pay Dylan a visit at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, where he was playing on his 2002 tour, where Dylan shocked him with a tribute that he couldn’t have prepared himself for.
With Zevon speaking to Dylan in his dressing room about his incurable cancer diagnosis before the show, Dylan simply offered his condolences before taking to the stage with the parting comment of, “I hope you like what you hear.” Dylan would then go on to play three of Zevon’s songs during the set without so much as even acknowledging them or giving them any fanfare to the crowd, giving renditions of ‘Accidentally Like a Martyr’, ‘Lawyers, Guns and Money’ and ‘Mutineer’.
While Zevon was unable to stay for the entirety of the show, he was clearly taken aback by just how much Dylan appeared to appreciate his work with care. “There are levels past which things no longer connect,” Zevon proclaimed afterwards. “There’s nothing to relate them to; there’s no way to really analyse them. To hear Dylan sing not just one song, but another. It’s a big thrill, but beyond the honour, it’s just so strange, beyond even computing.”
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