The British songwriter Bob Dylan considered “a genius”
There are hardly any other songwriters who can hope to have the same impact as Bob Dylan.
The Beatles may have the credit for being one of the most important rock and roll bands of all time, but right as the British invasion started to kick in, Dylan was already miles ahead of everyone else, telling vivid parables about the way that we all lived our lives. But even though John Lennon and Paul McCartney were paying close attention to what the musical poet could do, it’s not like they were the only British act that got Dylan’s seal of approval, either.
If you look back at a lot of Dylan’s early influences, though, most of them are ripped straight out of American folklore half the time. Woody Guthrie was going to leave a major imprint on him before he had even picked up a guitar, and when rock and roll first came to town, it made a lot more sense for Dylan to want to play with acts like Little Richard instead of trying out his own gravelly voice.
But right as the Fab Four started taking over the American market, the rest of their competition weren’t too far behind. Although The Rolling Stones were far from the most original band in the world, they knew how to get the crowd moving, and even as far back as the early 1960s, there were already subtle hints of the kind of folk-rock that Dylan would start incorporating into his own sound a few years later.
I mean, it’s easy to see a song like The Animals’ ‘House of the Rising Sun’ as a brief test run for what Dylan would be doing on ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, but a lot of the music he liked needed a bit more grit behind it. And while The Kinks could definitely deliver when it came to the harsh buzz of ‘You Really Got Me’, Dylan was far more knocked out by what Ray Davies was doing outside of the brash guitar parts.
Davies was coming from a completely different place than Dylan, but the folk icon knew The Kinks’ frontman had mastered his craft, saying, “I think he’s a genius. Nobody ever asks me about him. I’ve always been a fan of Ray Davies ever since way back when. I’ve always liked him and his brother and that group.” But what makes Davies’ music so interesting might have been how it was the exact opposite of Dylan’s in many respects.
If you look through a lot of Dylan’s best work, it tends to be centred around the harsh realities of life. No one is listening to a song like ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ and hoping for a pick-me-up, so hearing a song like ‘Waterloo Sunset’ around the same time must have been like a ray of light between all of the aggressive rock and roll.
Which rings all the more tragic when you think about the kind of places that Davies was talking about. While he took great pride in writing about the quintessential British life, a lot of the tunes that he wrote were far from reality. He didn’t grow up in the kind of utopia that he seemed to be singing about, but that’s what made it all the more powerful when he did sing. That version of his home was slipping away, but that didn’t mean that it needed to be gone forever, and if he could give it a home in a song, that was the next best thing.
It wasn’t what most people were seeing on the ground there, but Davies’ approach was the kind of artistry that Dylan could notice in a heartbeat. Because as much as songs can feel like reporting whenever they come from Dylan’s pen, any great tune can create an entire world in the span of a few minutes, and Davies was looking to give rose-coloured glasses to anyone growing up like he did.
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