The musician Bob Dylan called too good to understand: “So groundbreaking”
It’s not that easy to truly get what Bob Dylan is going for on his very first records.
He was always trying to push the envelope and make the kinds of records that weren’t heard on the charts all that often, but even by the standards of most folk singers, there were many times when his voice got in the way of him making some of the biggest hits of his career. He was an acquired taste even at the start of his career, but he always identified with people who were a bit too abnormal than what the rest of the world was used to.
After all, isn’t that what rock and roll is all about? The biggest names in the genre were supposed to be retort to what artists like Frank Sinatra had been doing around that time, and when Dylan first fell in love with people like Little Richard, he figured that he would have fit right in if he had the harmonica chops to play in his band. But what Dylan was doing was almost too abstract for most people.
Which is strange to say about someone who only needed an acoustic guitar and his voice during the beginning of his career. A lot of his songs only had a stripped-down approach, but his lyrics were a lot more esoteric than what rock and roll was going to do. Chuck Berry wasn’t going to come out with a song like ‘Masters of War’, and Elvis Presley wasn’t going to write ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, but Dylan was pretty happy with that anyway.
He was one of the more singular members of the rock and roll world when he was making his first rock and roll songs, and a lot of his songs weren’t always as fleshed out as everyone else’s. It wasn’t out of the question for him to record the song one way and play the song live with entirely different lyrics depending on how he felt every single day, which is a lot more akin to what a jazz musician would have done.
The biggest names in jazz were the ones that constantly switched things up every single time they made one of their tunes, and while that was par for the course, Ornette Coleman was a bit more strange than normal. He gravitated towards the “wrong” notes of the scale whenever he made one of his tunes, and while everyone else was a bit more pissed off, Dylan was the one who saw a bit of a kinship with what Coleman did every single time he walked out onstage.
Getting in front of people and challenging people like that took a lot of guts, but Dylan felt that what Coleman was doing was simply too far ahead of his time, saying, “I knew Ornette a little bit, and we did have a few things in common. He faced a lot of adversity, the critics were against him, other jazz players that were jealous.”
Adding, “He was doing something so new, so groundbreaking, they didn’t understand it. It wasn’t unlike the abuse that was thrown at me for doing some of the same kind of things, although with different forms of music.”
And judging by the other rockstars that were looking to Coleman for inspiration, it’s not like Dylan was alone. Lou Reed professed to being a massive fan of what Coleman did, and given that avant-garde approach to everything that he did, it was a lot easier for people to understand what someone like Reed would be going for every single time they went towards music that was a little bit dissonant.
So while Dylan didn’t like the idea of taking the easy route onto the charts, he understood that some of the biggest names in music weren’t always the ones that were at the top of the hit parade. It was about how they used their instruments, and Coleman was the one responsible for showing people what music could be if people thought outside the box.
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