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Bob Dylan named the only two songs from 1969 he thought were good

Wed 11 June 2025 16:00, UK

One of the best places to start when trying to understand Bob Dylan is Dont Look Back. A brutally revealing glimpse into the kind of person Dylan is, or was back then, Dont Look Back feels as close to unmasking the mystery as you can get—Dylan’s only qualm? That there wasn’t anything in it for him. No, really: “I’d like it a lot more if I got paid for it,” he once said.

Suppose it could be said then that literally anything relating to DA Pennebaker’s documentary reveals Dylan’s true colours, right down to how he felt about it afterwards. And that’s not to even mention the tiffs he entertained with Donovan, or how Joan Baez operated on the sidelines like a supporting character, or even his dismissiveness of journalists (though this one is easier to understand).

That said, the ruthlessness of Dylan’s words and attitudes can’t always be pinned down to ego, as much as we like to push that specific narrative. Has Dylan said some questionable things in the past? Yes. Has his behaviour in situations aligned with someone who’s probably not very nice sometimes? Of course. Should we see those moments as a true reflection of who he is behind the enigma? Debatable.

The point is: we don’t know. And, as weird as it sounds, that’s the fun of it all. There’s no denying how much the singer has an unrelenting knack for rubbing people up the wrong way, even now. But his unpredictable nature also keeps you on tenterhooks, with a kind of intrigue that peers in all the right places. Like listening to a new album while wondering, “I wonder if Bob Dylan would like this?” He probably wouldn’t. But it’s fun to guess anyway.

But none of this is new. In fact, Dylan was arguably more prickly in his early days compared to now, with specific opinions that mattered, especially when it came to new music. Few people in the counterculture scene would have likely listened to anything mainstream or with extensive radio play and admitted to liking it, but, when faced with the question in 1969, Dylan revealed two songs that he didn’t exactly mind.

When asked by Rolling Stone the best songs to come out that year, Dylan named ‘Proud Mary’ by Creedence Clearwater Revival and ‘Small Time Laboring Man’ by George Jones. In the same interview, he discussed Otis Redding, Elvis Presley, and his deep-seated love for Mavis Staples, alongside all the reasons he finds journalism vulturistic, but these two song choices seemed to reveal just that little bit more, beneath the lines of mystification that emanated from not revealing too much about anything.

But perhaps even more revealing than any speculation about how mysterious he is is the fact that he even admitted any of that at all. Anyone could probably guess Dylan would be a Jones fan (even if you’ve only heard that one song). But the fact that most of these suspicions remain neither confirmed nor denied is what keeps us on our toes. Maybe, in the end, it’s not a vague choice to pull back, but a disdain for journalists that keeps Dylan away from revealing too much about himself.

As he put it when asked why he doesn’t like the media: “Why do you think?”