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Marc Bolan on the two songs The Beatles and Bob Dylan couldn’t live up to: “Not nearly as good”

Fri 4 October 2024 17:30, UK

Not all artists can be perfect all of the time, even those who are professed to be among the all-time greats. Before you suggest any exceptions – yes, that goes for The Beatles, and it also applies to Bob Dylan.

Some will go through lengthy purple patches where only a handful of songs fail to hit the highs of the rest of their output, while others may have extended periods in the musical wilderness before re-emerging with a classic for the ages. In instances where an artist is lucky enough to endure a career that spans several decades, the sheer volume of output they’re likely to produce is bound to hamper the probability of it all meeting the same level of standard.

While some might be incensed at the suggestion that The Beatles were, in fact, fallible or that Bob Dylan released a handful of sub-par singles, one person who believes that both acts reached a point in their careers where it became impossible to surpass their previously set peaks was Marc Bolan. In a 1975 interview with NME, the former T-Rex frontman discussed the pressures of adhering to quality control when demand for new music reaches an insurmountable level, and how this impacted his work and affects the work of others.

“When you get to that stage, it’s pretty obvious that all the records can’t be as good as each other,” begins Bolan. While he acknowledges the downturn in quality, he is also quick to state that this often isn’t reflected in record sales, stating, “Sometimes, a thing won’t be particularly good, but because an artist is hot, it can still sell millions.”

Bolan then goes on to offer examples of where The Beatles and Bob Dylan were unable to recreate the same level of brilliance as seen on other tracks of theirs, positing: “‘Paperback Writer’ wasn’t as good as ‘Hey Jude’. Likewise, ‘Watching The River Flow’ wasn’t nearly as good as ‘Positively 4th Street’, but that doesn’t mean that they were total bummers.”

While the two songs Bolan puts forward may not be universally cited as the respective pinnacles of each artist’s career, it does pose the interesting question of for how long and how frequently can a recording artist muster up the level of mental and creative fortitude to continually produce material that is considered in line with their best. Not only this, but it asks what level of fame is required for an artist not to experience a slump in record sales due to a downturn in quality.

This may have been a particularly pertinent point at the time of the interview when record companies would often demand artists deliver on the promise of new music at a much faster rate than is expected today. After T-Rex debuted in 1968 (as Tyrannosaurus Rex), they went on to release 11 studio albums in the space of nine years, which, barring certain exceptions, would seem unprecedented by modern standards.

It would be understandable if both The Beatles and Bob Dylan experienced this same level of fatigue that Bolan talks about, as they also experienced similarly demanding schedules when it came to their output, but it’s rarely spoken about in such a candid way. With Bolan, he lays it all out in plain words: “I really was putting out far too many records.”