Bob Dylan’s best songs of the 1960s, according to Lou Reed
During the 1960s, Bob Dylan released nine albums, about four of which could feature in a list of the 20 greatest albums of all time without any legitimate complaints of bias. As for the other five, well, you’d be hard pushed to say any dropped below a solid four stars. He was riding a wave of artistic invention so Promethean that even he still seems largely dumbfounded by it.
In The Mystery of Creativity, Bob Dylan discusses how songwriters can never truly be sure where their songs come from. With that in mind, he proceeds to quote Hoagy Carmichael, the Tin Pan Alley songwriting maestro of the early 1900s, on the matter: “And then it happened, that queer sensation that this melody was bigger than me. Maybe I hadn’t written it all. The recollection of how, when and where it all happened became vague as the lingering strains hung in the rafters in the studio”.
The original vagabond continued: “I wanted to shout back at it, ‘maybe I didn’t write you, but I found you’,” he said before adding: “I know just what he meant”.
This motif crops up with notable recurrence every time Dylan muses over the alchemy of his craft at its ’60s apex. In the early days, he used to look back at his work with wonderment and marvel over how he managed to do it. “I don’t do that anymore,“ he once confessed. “I don’t know how I got to write those songs. Those early songs were almost magically written,” he humbly told CBS.
In truth, the creative haze he was in as he first broke onto the scene is self-evident in his output. He released Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, all within 15 months. But it wasn’t as though hits were just falling out of him. He didn’t just fall into a groove of churning out a tried and tested formula. He was playing around with the form of music, seemingly transforming the humble pop song with each new record.
Was Bob Dylan Lou Reed’s favourite songwriter?
This is something that deeply inspired Lou Reed. In a 1987 interview with Joe Smith, Reed stated: “You don’t want to actually listen to the lyrics of a rock ‘n’ roll record. I mean, for what? It’s not like when you read a book and you come across a great line, it would be great if you got that in a song I thought.”
Adding: “Now, other than Dylan, there’s not much there.“
But the two songs that Reed singled out as Dylan’s finest efforts of the 1960s, when he was revealing his favourite songs of all time, did not just contain great lyrics; they also developed how lyrics could be deployed in a song. While Reed was a huge fan of most of Dylan’s work during the period, he adored ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and ‘It’s Alright Ma’ the most.
In both songs, the content and the form are utterly unique. They unfurl almost like rap songs, and the verses never search or pine for the comfort of a chorus. This allowed Dylan to cram far more into the runtime of a popular song than had ever been attempted before. And yet, he still condensed his messages to the point of abstraction. That also appealed to Reed, who grew up with dyslexia and always appreciated concision and punchiness.
It doesn’t get much punchier than these two gritty epics that plunge into the weird ways of society in a highly singular manner. This is something Reed would soon look to do himself. Their words rippled across the rolling land, ala Jack Kerouac before them, inspiring legions to look at music differently.
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