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The two music icons Bob Dylan called “relics of the past”

Fri 26 September 2025 17:30, UK

Bob Dylan knew that music was always in a perpetual state of change.

There were bound to be songwriters to come after him that would take music in wild new directions, but while he had the ear of the public, he was going to make sure that he said something worthwhile whenever he recorded one of his next classics. But whereas most artists could appreciate the legends that came before them, Dylan knew that some of the biggest stars of yesteryear had the potential to become absolute has-beens.

Then again, Dylan wasn’t safe from that kind of treatment, either. When looking at all the iconic twists and turns that he went on throughout his career, it’s not like everyone was clamouring for what his born-again Christian phase was going to sound like, and while he did end up picking himself up in the latter half of the 1990s with Time Out of Mind, the post-Wilburys years for him were more than a little bit rough.

But that’s the nature of the beats in many respects. No one was expecting artists like Jerry Lee Lewis to see the same heights as he did once the British invasion came along, and even when that gave way to hard rock, no one was listening to how The Animals were going to sound next to people like Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin.

That’s the main difference between musicians and entertainers, though. Whereas pop stars might like the idea of playing to however many people they can every single night, Dylan was cut from a different cloth. He was happy to have people listening to what he was saying, but he was always looking to write lyrics that would make an epiphany go off in someone’s head as they were listening to tracks like ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ or ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’.

And when looking at the crooners of old, none of them could always say that they had the same approach. It was going to take a lot of stretching to say that Bing Crosby was trying to preach to the public whenever he sang, and even if Nat King Cole had one of the finest voices in the world, there’s a reason why listeners cite Sam Cooke as the reason why soul ended up being more serious after ‘A Change is Gonna Come’.

When Dylan was reminiscing on some of the biggest names in music, he had more than a few harsh criticisms for people like Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, saying in 1989, “[Elvis is] a relic of the past. [Frank] is on the way to becoming a relic. If I was him, I would be retired by now.” But Dylan wasn’t purely making those kinds of snide comments out of spite.

It simply comes down to whether or not a musician knows when their time has come and gone. Any other artist will reach the moment when they have nothing left to say, and while Presley’s final days played like a Greek tragedy of musical mistreatment in some respects, it’s easy to see why he and Sinatra were both considered to be creatively spent in Dylan’s mind.

The whole point of any artist is to keep being adventurous every time a new song comes across their desk, and even if Dylan’s work wasn’t always the most appealing career swerve in history, no one could deny that he was trying something different. Because if there was one thing that he never wanted to be, it was typecast into one specific genre.