The genre Bob Dylan claimed no one ever liked
In his excellent and exhaustive book Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop, Bob Stanley writes that Bob Dylan “has maybe done more to unbottle the ghosts and magic of old-time music than anyone else in the rock era”.
Whether it was on his wonderful Theme Time Radio Hour series or else, in the equal parts hilarious, confounding, puzzling and ultimately fascinating Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan has proved again and again that when he told David Gates in 1997 that “this is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music”, he really wasn’t lying.
Dylan is always effusive in his praise of his fellow songwriters and the artists that inspire him. Sometimes, the names in the latter category can be both surprising choices and surprise the inspirations themselves to be on the receiving end of his praise. Barry Manilow recalled a time when Dylan approached him at a party and caught him off-guard by saying, “Don’t stop doing what you’re doing, man. We’re all inspired by you”. While elsewhere, Dylan has given his seal of approval to countless contemporary artists by covering their songs on stage, from John Prine and Bruce Springsteen to Leonard Cohen, Gordon Lightfoot, Warren Zevon, Neil Young, The Rolling Stones and Van Morrison, among plenty of others.
He doesn’t just keep to the rock canon, either. In 1986 appeared as a featured vocalist on the pioneering hip-hop album Kingdom Blow by Kurtis Blow, and a little over ten years later, turned up in the music video for Wyclef Jean’s smash-hit ‘Gone Til November’. He’s also heaped praise upon artists from all over the musical map, too. Some you’d expect, like The Staples Singers and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, to some that are more surprising, like Alex Turner and The Strokes or Umm Kulthum, Charles Aznavour, Tracey Chapman, Celeste and Alanis Morissette. He even name-checked Alicia Keys in the lyrics of ‘Thunder on the Mountain’ and Lady Gaga in his most recent radio instalment from 2020.
In 1988, when being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he said that he wouldn’t even have gotten started if it wasn’t for Little Richard, and that’s a claim that can be traced all the way back to his Hibbing High School yearbook, where he wrote that his ambition in life was to “join Little Richard”. Before he went acoustic, Dylan was a rocker and roller at heart. He grew up listening to the late-night radio stations coming out of far-off, distant cities like Shreveport, Louisiana, and Little Rock, Arkansas. Stations that would beam music into his room that would never be heard on the more acceptable, sophisticated daytime programming. While he’d listen to the sounds of Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Carl Perkins, he didn’t have time for Doris Day or Patti Page, and he certainly didn’t care how much that doggie in the window cost.
In a 2003 interview, Dylan remembered his younger days, noting, “We never liked pop music. It never occurred to me that Bing Crosby was on the cutting edge 20 years before I was listening to him. I never heard that Bing Crosby. The Louis Armstrong I heard was the guy who sang ‘Hello, Dolly!’, I never heard him do ‘West End Blues’”.
So often, though, Dylan is the least reliable narrator when it comes to matters of his own life and personal story, but he knows what we want to hear. He might mess around with us in the process of declaring it, that’s what he’s going to tell us, in his way. It doesn’t matter that Dylan’s first public performance was of a song most widely associated the ‘Old Groaner’ himself, Bing Crosby, in ‘Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive’, or that just a few short years after he made this comment, he would directly lift a couple of Bing Crosby’s melodies for songs of his own on Modern Times. and has more recently name-checked Louis Armstrong on his Rough and Rowdy Ways record. So, just maybe, he did like some pop music after all.
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