Bob Johnston: the greatest folk-rock producer of all time?
The producer is just as important when making classic rock records as anyone else in the band. Even though the musicians might be able to translate their emotions onto the tape, it’s the producer’s job to make everything sound pristine, turning what would ordinarily be a simple song and making a record that fans will want to play repeatedly. Although the golden age of rock and roll featured massive producers like George Martin and Phil Spector, Bob Johnston deserves to be among that company as well.
While the likes of Spector may have been creating massive walls of sound throughout the 1960s pop scene, Johnston’s approach was born out of the folk tradition. Being the go-to producer for Bob Dylan, Johnston’s unique touch to the artist’s sonic palette was about serving the song from the first second the track plays.
Throughout Dylan’s work, Johnston took the humble folkie from a deliberately sparse musician into one of the titans of rock and roll music. While he may not have produced the immortal ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, Dylan would utilise Johnston for the rest of Highway 61 Revisited, being able to capture the more intimate side of Dylan alongside the ramshackle sounds of his early days like ‘Desolation Row’ and ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’.
Johnston was also on hand to oversee the following albums, steering Dylan through his bouts with country music on Nashville Skyline and exorcising his musical demons across albums like Blonde on Blonde. While Dylan may have played a significant part in getting Johnston’s foot in the door, his other ventures would be even more profitable.
While putting Dylan’s career together, Johnston found a beautiful tune written by a humble folk duo named Simon and Garfunkel called ‘The Sound of Silence’. Although the song had tanked as a single, it was Johnston’s idea to add the lush rock instrumentation behind the track, turning it from a humble folk tune into one of the defining statements of American music in the wake of the assassination of John F Kennedy.
While Johnston had an excellent ear for folk-pop, he could do just as well on the storytelling side of the spectrum. Working with the likes of Leonard Cohen, Johnston’s mantra of serving the song gave him credibility amongst the folk crowd, being able to pull excellent material out of artists from The Byrds to Johnny Cash, the latter of which used Johnston to finetune the sounds of his live album At Folsom Prison.
Even into the next phase of rock history, Johnston had found his calling working with the biggest names in folk music, catching the eye of legends like Pete Seeger and Willie Nelson when finetuning songs for their later output. Although Johnston may have been able to mix songs in a way that no other producer had done before, he also knew no artist was the same when working in the studio. It’s all about the songs and how the artist delivers them, and Johnston was the one who could turn any plaintive folk song into the dramatic sounds of humanity.
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