The metal frontman Bob Dylan thinks is being “overlooked” by everyone
There’s a beauty to the art of heavy metal. It’s a genre which, to the layman, is riddle with violence and deadly rhetoric. Imagery is completely desecrated with gore and the kind of lyrics that would make Vincent Price run up the stairs quickly so the monsters don’t get him once he turns the downstairs lights on. But, underneath it all, the genre is more generally enriched by a welcoming community of cuddly bands.
But the brand of heavy metal is so strong that it has a habit of not only colouring the public view of the genre but arguably performing an unwelcome shoving of the talent on show within it. Certainly Bob Dylan thinks one of the genre’s most celebrated frontmen is still wildly “overlooked” by the music world.
Bob Dylan has always been known to play by his own rules throughout every part of his career. Although he may have a habit of shifting his musical style every time he suspects that he’s about to become a cliche, Dylan has kept up his habit of working as a musical chameleon at every opportunity, going so far as to make albums that were consciously trying to sound amateur like Self Portrait. Though Dylan may have a gift only a few songwriters have been able to grasp, he thought this hard rocker often gets forgotten in terms of phenomenal songwriters.
When Dylan first emerged on the rock scene, he provided a cultural shock that most of the rock world had yet to see. Compared to the squeaky clean image that The Beatles had to offer on the other side of the Atlantic, Dylan was shaking people up in every single song, talking about the problems that were happening beyond the sockhops of the world on songs like ‘Blowin in The Wind’.
By the time that he went electric, though, Dylan had already started to transcend rock and roll altogether. After leading the way for the cultural revolution at the start of the 1960s, Dylan was making music rebelling against his congregation, not wanting to be the voice of a generation like everyone claimed him to be.
As the ‘Summer of Love’ began, though, another harsher side of rock and roll started to rear its head. Along with artists like The Velvet Underground, the city of Detroit was quickly becoming one of the most dangerous rock and roll towns of all time, boasting artists that were close to stupifying at first glance, like Iggy and the Stooges and the MC5.
While these artists were looking to make a show that was much more than just playing lovely songs for the congregation, a young artist named Vincent Furnier was about to become the rock and roll antichrist. Storming onto the scene at the Toronto Peace Festival, Alice Cooper quickly became one of the most horrifying draws in the music industry, with the frontman being accused of killing chickens onstage and featuring grotesque theatrics whenever he was onstage.
Despite many artists seeing the group as style over substance, Dylan thought that Cooper had an impressive run of songs as well. When asked about the rise of New Wave at the time, Dylan said in 1978, “I’m not interested in [those bands]. I think Alice Cooper is an overlooked songwriter”.
When looking at Cooper’s records, it’s easy to see where the songs stick out. Across albums like Killer and Billion Dollar Babies, Cooper was known to take audiences on a ride in the headphones, working with producer Bob Ezrin to create some of the biggest tracks of his generation like ‘No More Mr Nice Guy’ and ‘School’s Out’.
Even though Cooper appreciated the praise from the songwriting legend, he even admitted that the song often took a back seat to the theatrics whenever the band played live. Regardless of whether the public ignored them in their time, Alice Cooper blazed the trail for what hard rock would be in the years since, spawning legions of imitators willing to scare the concerned parents of the world by toying with what was deemed acceptable.
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