The three songs Bob Dylan thought he could never match again after the 1960s
“Music filters out of me in the crack of dawn,” Bob Dylan once said, “You get a little spacey when you’ve been up all night, so you don’t really have the power to form it. But that’s the sound I’m trying to get.” In the wee small hours of the 1960s, he was writing like a man possessed; quite literally, he thought some of his songs were written by “ghosts”.
Joan Baez recalls masterpieces falling down the back of his piano, just leaving them to rot before she fished them out. Music was coming easy to him—proven by the fact that he released Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, all within 15 months. In fact, all told, from his debut being released in March 1962 through to the close of the decade, he released nine albums, and none of them fell short of at least four stars—about three could easily be classed as the greatest of all time, too.
For one man – and a very young one at that – that’s movement at a mercurial pace, and he was bound to hit the brakes at one point. Unfortunately, he did so while out on a motorbike ride, and the fall prompted him to abscond from the spotlight and reconsider. In the 1970s, he changed tact, took the weight of the world from his shoulders, slowed down and started to write from a more personal perspective rather than skewering the status quo.
In time, he would even admit that he couldn’t return to the creative delirium that seemed to preside over his glory days. In his memoir, he singles out three masterpieces that were borne from an ethereal magic beyond what he could muster once a greater sense of creative sobriety took over: ‘Masters of War‘, ‘Hard Rain’, ‘Gates of Eden’. These were the type of songs that he and Daniel Lanois were aiming for with 1989’s Oh Mercy, and they were the sort of songs he couldn’t provide.
The record turned out to be a triumph all the same, arguably his best since Desire some 13 years earlier, but it was devoid of that headiness that Dylan and only Dylan delivered with such dazzling regularity and strength in the ’60s.
As he mused about the trio of masterpieces that typified his halcyon days, “Those kinds of songs were written under different circumstances, and circumstances never repeat themselves. Not Exactly. I couldn’t get to those kinds of songs for him or anyone else. To do it you have to have power and dominion over the spirits. I had done it once, and once was enough.”
He was almost happy to relinquish the responsibility, as he wrote in the midst of it all at the time, “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” In his memoir, he concludes, “Someone would come along eventually who would have it again – someone who see into things, the truth of things – not metaphorically, either, but really see, like seeing into metal and making it melt, see it for what it was and reveal it for what it was with the hard words and vicious insight.”
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